My Adoption Story
This was my senior capstone at American University. The concept for this project is to share my adoption challenges through storytelling. In completing this journal, I investigate how being adopted has formed my outlook on life.
Final
The leather journal is 5x6 inches, whereas the booklets are 4x6 inches. The corsage was given to me when I became a U.S. citizen. On the first page, the middle character, Xuǎn, is my middle name. It is a verb that means “to choose.” That meaning brought much comfort to my parents, believing that I was chosen for them. This project includes physical items that were collected during the adoption process.
Inspiration
After picking my concept, I immediately thought of doing a hand-crafted book. The physical style of this project is meant to mimic a travel journal or scrapbook. By using a hand-crafted style, I hope to emphasize the importance of how my story is made up of multiple pieces, and I want to encourage my viewers to interact with the pages. I hope to show my vulnerability with this project.
Progress
In completing this journal, I investigate how being adopted has formed my outlook on life. I started by making lists of physical materials and personal feelings that relate to my adoption story. Comprising the materials wasn’t as difficult as anticipated because my parents happened to have a whole file on my adoption. The challenging part was finding the right physical materials to represent my feelings that I had at that time. My initial layout for my story started out chaotic, with not much organization. But, after discussing my concept with others, I got the idea to set up my story in Chapters. I started to write my story by sectioning off the years that corresponded with different stages of my life.
Another big challenge I faced was fitting my story on the 60 pages that the journal provided. The journal has 3 booklets inside, each with 20 pages, that are secured to the journal by a string. I had to figure out the placement of my narrative with the layout of the booklets, along with any physical items. My Chinese passport, for example, took a lot of planning because I had to write my story so that the pages corresponded to my passport (which was placed between pages 10 and 11).
It took a very long time to complete sketch drafts because I had to figure out how everything would fit together. Once I finally finished the layouts, I moved into the final journal pages. While my parents thought my art desk was messy, I saw it as organized chaos.
