Adoptee: Lily Selvaggi
Date of adoption: Jun-01
Place of adoption: Guigang City SWI, Guangxi Province
Lily Selvaggi
I haven't really thought much about my Chinese history, maybe because I don't need to think about it in my present-day life, but also because it's never really been that accessible. But thinking about it, it would be really cool to hear other people's stories in similar situations, to show that, yeah, they do exist, they are out there, you can meet them.
Lily lives just outside Dallas, where she plays volleyball, does volunteer work with her parents and hangs out with friends.
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Lily Selvaggi's interview
Mar 28, 2019Lily Selvaggi Transcript
Mar 28, 2019
Tina Fletcher
Adoptive mom. Tina is also an adoptee.
Feb 12, 2019
My name is Tina Fletcher. I am an adoptee. My family is full of adopted people. Each unique, we hang together on our cord, a mismatched necklace, clearly not born to the clan that took us in.
My husband is clearly not an adoptee; one of many Italian-Irish children who all share a nose, or hairline, or maybe even a way of looking at the world. Together we made a daughter, who like her dad, shares a nose with one cousin, hair texture with another, and passionate temperament with a third. But my husband and I decided we weren’t done, and added another unique gem to our family cord, the tie that binds; our daughter from Asia.
Adopting Lily from China was both a move to confront social injustice and to extend my family culture of adoption. We knew a lot of the factors around adoption; the middle school years of being curious about the biological roots, the pregnant years of wondering what gene pool lies within, and even the stranger than strange times of meeting up with unsuspecting birth family. So we thought we were all set. But not really. Nothing follows a pattern that closely.
My husband is clearly not an adoptee; one of many Italian-Irish children who all share a nose, or hairline, or maybe even a way of looking at the world. Together we made a daughter, who like her dad, shares a nose with one cousin, hair texture with another, and passionate temperament with a third. But my husband and I decided we weren’t done, and added another unique gem to our family cord, the tie that binds; our daughter from Asia.
Adopting Lily from China was both a move to confront social injustice and to extend my family culture of adoption. We knew a lot of the factors around adoption; the middle school years of being curious about the biological roots, the pregnant years of wondering what gene pool lies within, and even the stranger than strange times of meeting up with unsuspecting birth family. So we thought we were all set. But not really. Nothing follows a pattern that closely.
Tina Fletcher's interview
Mar 28, 2019Tina Fletcher's transcript
Mar 28, 2019