Encounter with a Transracial Adoptee

My first encounter with a "TRA" was at the age of 15. I was in an all-girls academic boarding program in a small town in the mountains of a certain Southern state. Our program had regular mandatory mixers with a neighboring military boarding school. Things like "mandatory mixers" didn't sit well with me, so I left the program after one year, thank goodness. After my experience there, I turned totally anti-single-sex education.

In our program, there were plenty of outrageous rumors about the military school. One girl had it, on good authority, that the boys were regularly having sex with each other in the locker room and that one guy had traded his virginity for a Rolex! Nevertheless, we sometimes had phone calls and highly supervised group dates with them. There wasn't much else to do.

After one mixer, I started phone calling with one of the boys. I'll call him C. C immediately stuck out from the rest because he was Asian. He was good-looking, a little bit shorter than me, muscular, quiet, with a slightly nervous way of carrying himself. He told me he was a Korean adoptee in a military family. He liked his parents but his dad was very, very strict.

We got to meet in person again, briefly, and we held hands and he gave me a homemade brownie. I wanted to get to know him better. I was a bit dubious that anything actually romantic would develop. We had so little in common, and our conversations often had a strained politeness to them. At 15, I felt like I already knew who I was and generally where I wanted to go, and if he tried to talk about that those kinds of topics, he came across as painfully confused and just... weird. I only had a tiny vocabulary to talk about Asian identity issues. Looking back, I really had no idea where he was coming from. "He's Asian, like me, I guess he had to face a lot of the same stuff..." and that's where my ability to understand hit a brick wall. Perhaps I could have understood if he'd communicated better, but I think he was still searching for any vocabulary at all.

C sent me a strange letter. I already knew he had a medical problem with alcohol; if he drank it at all, there was some kind of organ reaction that would happen and he'd have to go to the hospital. He started the letter saying that he drank some alcohol and had to go to the hospital, and then went further into the details of the night. His cousin was wearing a sexy dress and had started hitting on him and he sort of made out with her but not really. Then he felt funny so he drank some alcohol. What the hell was he trying to tell me? Why was he acting like an idiot? I felt insulted. I stopped taking his phone calls; I don't think he tried very hard to keep in contact, either. I wrote him off as another one of those messed-up military school boys. That was that. I hope he's in a better place now, more than 15 years later.