Shannon Parris, of Ross Township, stands for a portrait through a window the University of Pittsburgh where she went to undergraduate school, Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025, in Oakland. Parris remembers grappling with her “otherness” as a Korean adoptee as a young woman. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/Pittsburgh’s Public Source)
Born in Korea but adopted into white America, I was “the Asian” who couldn’t hang with “real Asians.” Eventually I realized that neither race, nor upbringing should be allowed to define me.
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I was in fourth grade when I realized I’m not white.
Before that, I had gone to school with kids who had known me since preschool or kindergarten. To them, I was just Shannon, so to me, I was just Shannon.
I didn’t know I was different until I started going to a new school in the Moon Area School District in fourth grade. There, I wasn’t Shannon. There, I was Asian. There, I was Other.
I don’t have many memories from elementary school, at least not many that I recall often. But I do remember being asked where I’m from — where I’m really from — every day for years.
I don’t remember why I didn’t answer the question; I just didn’t. In hindsight, maybe it was because I had selective mutism, an anxiety disorder that kept me from speaking in certain situations, despite having the ability to speak in other settings.
I think it felt wrong to answer, or maybe it felt wrong to be asked. It was clear that it was the only thing my peers saw about me. From then on, I knew I was different. I knew I didn’t belong. In a way, this prepared me for what was to come — years of overt racism and microaggressions and a path to identity and belonging that has little to do with my race after all.
Was I exotic or a ‘banana’?
I was born in Busan, South Korea, adopted as an infant and raised in Moon, a predominantly white suburb west of Pittsburgh. In high school, my classmates spoke in mock Asian accents, called me “the Asian,” and told me to go back to my own country. When I went to the University of Pittsburgh, the boys there told me they had “yellow fever” or an “Asian fetish” and liked that I’m “exotic.” That is, when they actually spoke to me and not just near me, assuming I couldn’t understand them.
It’s not that there were no other Asian kids around me; there just weren’t enough to allow us to be people — or they traveled in packs, but those Asians were real Asians, and I was a “banana,” yellow on the outside, white on the inside. I didn’t belong with them either.
Eventually, I was in on the joke and leaned into the “positive” stereotypes. It’s nice to be seen as desirable and smart and good at math, right? And who cares about people thinking I’m a bad driver — I don’t like to drive anyway, and this way, people would drive me around!
I grappled for many years with my identity and lack of belonging. Eventually, I learned about racism and sexism and embraced having an intersectional identity, one with multiple simultaneous marginalizations. I understood how these things affected other people’s perceptions of me and, more importantly, how they interfered with my perception of myself.
I accepted that though I may sometimes feel white, I am not white. Other people don’t see me as white. Other people don’t treat me like I’m white. I have never walked into a room full of strangers who think I’m supposed to be there, who think I’m one of them. For most of my life, the predominant feeling I’ve carried everywhere I’ve gone is: I’m not supposed to be here.
When an orphan becomes a mom
Over time, I also accepted that the reason I had never felt like I belonged anywhere was because of what I look like. My adoption and associated trauma could help me make sense of my bouts of depression, my people-pleasing and codependent tendencies, and my relationships — so many of them traumatic and confusing and wrong.
I worked hard to understand these things, to reconcile them into my identity, to be okay. Then, when I was pregnant with my twins, I was struck by the fact that my body was growing my first genetic relatives — the first ones I would know, at least. They would be (and are) the first people I’ve ever seen who look like me — really look like me in a familial way.
My daughters were born right before the pandemic shutdowns and subsequent violence and hateful rhetoric against Asian Americans that followed. Once my husband and I felt safe taking them out to the park in a COVID sense, I was still scared in an Asian sense. As I read about unprovoked attacks across the country, I hated taking my children out by myself because I feared that these tiny people whom I saw as precious and perfect were being looked at with disdain or even violence.
Now that my kids are older, they’re developing their own sense of their (and our) identities, and we’re having conversations about our Koreanness — conversations that I’ve never really had with anyone else.
The world is making progress, too: I never had a doll that looked like me when I was a kid, and they have several. There was never a popular Asian character I could dress as for Halloween, but this year we dressed up as the three female leads from the hit Netflix movie “KPop Demon Hunters.” I cried watching the movie — during the closing song, “What It Sounds Like,” a song about self-acceptance and belonging — for all the parts of me that ever struggled with not knowing where I belong, for these perfect little girls who belong to me.
They belong to me, but where do I belong?
Finding belonging – in myself, then others
When I realized that I’m neurodivergent and was eventually diagnosed with autism, ADHD and OCD, I realized that what people see when they look at me matters so much less than what they don’t — that in trying to find belonging, I’ve been solving for the wrong thing my whole life. What I’ve really needed is to know who I am. Belonging comes after that. Belonging with others comes after you belong to yourself.
As a Korean adoptee, it has been difficult to find where I belong, especially in a city like Pittsburgh where few people look like me. I know three Korean adoptees here, and one of them is my brother. Otherwise, looking like me isn’t an indication that someone will get me or that we’ll get along or have anything in common.
Instead, I have found belonging among nonprofit workers and self-employed folks, and I’ve learned that there are a lot of people that exist at the intersection between the two like I do. I don’t know if it’s because small business owners are six times more likely to have ADHD than the general population. Perhaps it’s because autistic and ADHD brains may be more sensitive to justice than neurotypical ones and therefore find their ways to the sector that’s working toward that. Either way, I’ve found my people — and my purpose — through the work that I do with these extraordinary people.
It feels meaningful and important for me to surround myself not with those who look like me but with people whose brains work like mine, who work like me, and who feel the way I do about what we’re supposed to be doing with our time on this planet.
In recognizing the ways in which our shared identities bond us, I wonder if this is what it’s like for BIPOC people whose outsides match their insides. I have complicated feelings about this, but I identify more with my disability status than my race. And now that I’m a parent, I can see how I identify with my generation, too.
The millennials who exist at the intersection of nonprofit work, creativity and self-employment and who are neurodivergent and deeply feeling — these are my people. I’ve been seeking them out now that I know what to call them, and though I don’t necessarily have a purpose for doing so, it feels like there’s a reason: belonging.
Neurodivergent millennials were raised by the generation that was supposed to be seen and not heard, and they raised us the only way they knew how. We’ve been white-knuckling it through life, and now that the world feels like it’s falling apart, we’re facing the demands of our lives and careers and children and aging parents, and we have to figure out how to be okay if we’re going to make it.
I think that we will. We’re transitional characters breaking the cycles of our lineages and charting new paths for our children. We don’t shove down our feelings or hope that time will heal all wounds. We feel our feelings and try to show up as our full selves and show the world what it means to be fully human when life is full of heartache and disappointment and sadness and loss.
We are a generation trying to find ourselves, and when we find each other, I realize that I can belong just as I am. It turns out I can belong to Pittsburgh because I can belong to me.
Shannon Parris, of Ross Township, is a multiply-neurodivergent nonprofit and small business consultant, coach and disability advocate on a mission to reshape how we work, lead, and belong — because most workplaces weren’t built for everyone to succeed. She can be reached through her website shannonparris.com.
This article first appeared on Pittsburgh’s Public Source and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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