Growing up, my parents always told the story of a special girl. Strangely enough, her story doesn’t start the day she was born; rather it begins 14 days later in the poverty-stricken slums of China. Winter is just beginning to thaw into spring, and there she sat, a defenseless newborn, alone on a bridge with no guardian in sight.

Luckily, she was found, yet she spent the next eight months in an orphanage, waiting day after day and night after night for a place to call home.

Thousands of miles away, one American family had been trying to adopt a Chinese daughter for over a year now. By some divine force looking over both of them, the orphan girl was adopted into this family, and their lives were forever changed.

That girl was me.

My adoption is why I believe in some degree of fate, destiny, or whatever force you want to call it. So many things had to be lined up just right for me to end up with the family I did — my birth, the orphanage I was brought to and the timeline of the adoption process. It is incredulous to think about, and sometimes I sit back in awe at how lucky I am to be here.

Had I never been adopted by my family, I could still be a broken orphan wondering if I’d ever know what home felt like.

Even if I never became an orphan, there’s no guarantee that my life would have been easy. I come from the poor province of Anhui in eastern China, and there’s no doubt that poverty leads to challenging lives. Because I am an Asian-American citizen, doors have been opened for me that never would have existed had I grown up in China. I make sure to remind myself of this often.

Still, it hasn’t always been easy. The superficial problems with being adopted are my lack of medical history. Without any knowledge of my family tree, I am unaware of any genetic predispositions I may have to diseases. I don’t know my risk of getting certain types of cancer, for example, and the problem will only become more apparent with age. I try to stick to the present, however, and focus on the what-if’s and maybe’s down the line.

Emotionally, being adopted caused some challenges. My parents had never kept my adoption a secret, so I was aware of it from a young age. I was too young, however, to fully understand what adoption meant and the insinuations behind the word.

At times, I felt lost and confused. I can still remember the first time I realized I was different. It was during elementary school, most likely the first or second grade, and my mother came to the annual Thanksgiving feast.

As I watched all of my other friends hold hands with their mothers, I felt a twinge of sadness. It wasn’t until this moment, however, that I connected my difference in physical appearance to my mother and the word “adopted” that I understood what it meant. My mother wasn’t really my mother, or so I thought.

I never voiced this fear until later in life, but it followed me throughout childhood and adolescence. I used to worry that my aunts and uncles liked my sister better simply because she was the biological child of my parents. “You’re really your father’s daughter,” they would say, and I’d sit in the background, deflated, because I knew they would never say that to me.

I shared no genes with my parents or anyone in my family for that matter, and I felt isolated. Abandonment is a common fear that adopted kids feel, no matter how young the adoption occurred, and I was no exception to this rule.

I knew my mother was adopted, too, but it was still different to me. She was a Caucasian girl adopted by a Caucasian family — people would never question her relation to her parents. I’m Chinese and being Chinese means the stereotypical Asian qualities. I’m short and slight with brown hair and brown eyes.

My eyes have the characteristic slant to them, and my nose bridge is less pronounced.

These differences led to a fear of being dissociated from my family, and it still troubles me to this day. When we’re out as a family, I wonder if people assume I’m my sister’s friend tagging along with her family. I wonder how many people have falsely assumed that my parents, the people who took care of me and treated me as their blood daughter in every way possible, were just a nanny watching over someone else’s child.

I won’t lie and say that I’m fully comfortable with being adopted. There will always be the nagging thought in the back of my head that says I’m not a true part of this family. There will always be the fear of abandonment or fear of the unknown.

I’m not naive enough to think everything will get better with time or that the mystery of my past will ever be uncovered. However, I take comfort in knowing that the family I’m in now, my family, will always treat me as such.

I may have had a different, lonely beginning, but our ends will be together.