This Dad Realized He’s Been Raising His Adopted, College-Bound Son In The Wrong Culture His Entire Life

Last time we checked in with Reddit’s TIFU (Today I F*cked Up) we brought you the story of a guy who’s been pooping wrong his whole life. While that was fairly embarrassing, yes, this one is a monumental, irreversible screwup seventeen years in the making.

Why don’t I just let him tell it:

About seventeen years ago my wife and I adopted a baby from an Asian American family. While we knew very little details, basically what happened with them is that we learned they were too young for children. I made very little inquiries as (they seemed embarrassed/I didn’t want to pry). I was just excited to have a son and couldn’t have cared less about the parent’s history, besides their current and future well being. So as long as they were healthy and willing to gift me with their child, I really did not go too much into their histories. This was my major f*ck up.

Around about eight months we start to feel a little bit of guilt about not raising him in his on ethnic culture and given that we live in an area with a major Chinese population, it would be very easy to introduce him to his roots. So for the next seventeen years we do everything we can to honor his ethnicity. We send him to Chinese language courses and by five he’s fluent in Mandarin and English, he gets an “adopted” by a Chinese aunt and uncle (they taught him cultural things and celebrate certain holidays and take him for dim sum every couple of weeks). We’ve been taking him to China every two years since he was eight. We weren’t trying to force him to take up his culture as an “other” in our family, but we didn’t want to rob him of it or completely whitewash him either. We try and be PC as possible and we thought we were doing the right thing.

Anyway we are filling out his college apps/financial aid applications and doing that whole thing. I go to my home office and go through some files and find his old adoption records. I’m not really paying much attention to them and then his biological parents surnames pop out and basically punch me in the face. His parent’s last names were PARK AND KIM. F*CK. F*CK. F*CK.

For those of you that do not know, those are Korean last names. My son is not Chinese. Not even a little bit.

The OP went on to say that they just assumed their baby was Chinese because they live in an area on the west coast where there happens to be a dense population of Chinese immigrants, and also because they apparently never learned that “assume” makes an ASS out of U and ME. He also stated that now that he knows his son is Korean, he can definitely see the resemblance when comparing his features to the features of pictures of Korean men.

Which begs the question: if his son is obviously Korean and has strong Korean features, wouldn’t one of his Mandarin instructors or Chinese “aunt and uncle” or, hell, ANYONE they’ve met while traveling in China say to the parents, “That’s a f*cking Korean kid you’ve got there.” Has this kid been living as the Asian equivalent of The Jerk his entire life? I’m so confused.

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