"When encouraging and welcoming other adoptees to tell their stories, I imagine that she might give them similar advice to that which she once received: tell a story that only you can write — it has to come from you."
When 10-year-old Téa Tamburo was preparing to apply to middle school, the University of Chicago Laboratory schools, her mom gave her the following advice: Write an essay that only you can write. It has to come from you. This reflects lessons that she has learned from her parents about how important it is to be herself and to be true to her own identity.
Being adopted at 9-months-old from Yiyang, Hunan province, China and growing up in Chicago, Illinois, Téa has certainly written a life story born of her unique experience as a Chinese adoptee. Given the Chinese name银一君(Yin Yi Jun) by the orphanage director in Yiyang, Téa shared that her English name is coincidentally the female version of her father’s name, Theodore, and that she carries over a part of her Chinese name, Yin, as her English middle name. She attended a private, religious elementary school before going to the Laboratory Schools, where she was distinctly aware that she was one of few Asian girls in her grade. In middle and high school, her own story of adoption and its relation to the One Child Policy’s overlook of women’s reproductive rights and women’s reproductive autonomy and the rights of the children involved inspired her to take up advocacy work in gender equality for issues like the gender wage gap and menstrual health. Her advocacy work has intersected with and developed into a passion for finance and economics, which she plans to study next year at Case Western Reserve University. In the male-dominated fields of finance and economics, Téa feels it is important to have representation for women and for Asian women in particular.
Not only does Téa tell her own story, but she also has created a platform that helps fellow Chinese adoptees tell their stories. When she was in eighth grade, a heritage trip to Changsha, Yiyang and Guangzhou sparked an interest in connecting with the girls she was adopted with. Seeing the photos from her adoption, she felt connected to people that she didn’t even really know, so when she returned to the states, she sent letters — she was sure to clarify they were “old-fashioned printed letters” — to the addresses her mom had saved from thirteen years prior. She heard back from eight of them and keeps up the connection to this day. This newly found connection, finding girls from her same orphanage and hearing each other’s vastly different stories, led her to create Girls Adoption Connect, a platform that shares spotlights of adoptee stories and posts about adoptee experiences, in 2020. Founding and running Girls Adoption Connect has led Téa to think about how multi-faceted adoption is and, in particular, how important it is to shed light on this diversity given that the American lens on adoption is quite singular.
During our brief talk, I found that Téa is a soft-spoken, composed and thoughtful individual; I can see she uses these strengths as a leader within the Chinese adoptee community. When encouraging and welcoming other adoptees to tell their stories, I imagine that she might give them similar advice to that which she once received: tell a story that only you can write — it has to come from you.
Humans of CCI profiled on Facebook in 2023.