Jenny Heijun Wills

This is an interesting memoir about cross-racial, cross-cultural, and cross-national adoption.

Heijun Wills was adopted from Korea by a white family in small-town Ontario, Canada. This memoir is her story of reconnecting with her birth parents and their families. It is the story she learns about why/how she ended up in an orphanage, her struggles with being part of a cross-racial adoption and growing up in a very white place, and her struggles with managing her new familial relationships.

She learned her story was not nearly so simple as she was raised to believe (or as her adoptive parents were led to believe). And she learns her birth family had issues, and in fact her birth parents got back together after she came back into their lives. She has two Korean sisters, one of whom she develops a strong sister/friend relationship with--and who helps her understand that the life she might have lived was not better or worse than the one she did live--it was just different, with some things better but some things definitely worse. Each is a bit jealous of what the other had while growing up.… (mehr)