Where are you really from?
(In progress)

Joanne Roby, who had always wanted a daughter, had a place in the back of her mind where the idea of adoption lived and when her sons Matt and Keith were 7 and 3 she knew in her bones that the time had come. “It was just a time where I thought, this is the time, I can't even explain it and I need to do this,” said Joanne. “I know she's somewhere out there.”

As an airplane carrying 20 babies from South Korea neared its final destination at John F. Kennedy airport on October 30, 1985, Joanne Roby, who was 30 at the time, with her husband, Steven Roby, who was 31, grew increasingly restless. "That was mind numbing, that whole experience,” recalled Joanne. “Your adrenaline and everything, it was exciting, it was."

She and a handful of other parents began to roam the airport, hoping to catch a glimpse of the airplane landing and the deboarding of the newly adopted children being carried inside to the waiting arms of their expectant parents. As Joanne made her way back to rejoin her husband, she saw that the other parents had begun to be united with their children and Joanne’s mind raced, wondering where her baby was. “I went looking everywhere,” said Joanne. “I couldn’t find her, and came and I said, ‘where is she? Where is she?’”

The energy in the airport was palpable and there was a cacophony of chatter and crying babies. Unbeknownst to Joanne, Steven was already holding their new four-month-old daughter, Larissa Roby, who was considerably smaller than their two biological sons, Matt and Keith were when they were born.

“I had to tell her, I said Joanne, I have her right here,” said Steven. Like the completion of a circuit, Steven’s connection to Larissa occurred as she was placed in his arms. “When they handed her to me, I knew it was her,” said Steven. “I don't know how, it was just automatic.

Joanne and Steven began the adoption process in the spring of 1985 and by that summer they were informed that a child had been chosen for them. They traveled to Bucks County, PA to meet with Mary Louise Hartenstein, a social worker who was working with the adoption agency, Love the Children, where they received their first photos of Larissa.

“When the baby is born, that bond is so strong and protective, and when I first saw that picture, I felt exactly like with my boys. Exactly,” said Joanne. “We showed everybody her picture, all the family. It’s like a sonogram but it’s real.”

While Joanne felt an instantaneous familial fusion with her daughter upon seeing her photo, that kinship was not complete until the drive home from the airport when stopped at a rest stop.

“We stopped at some rest stop and this really gnarly old truck driver, he came over and said, ‘what you got there?’ We just pulled the blanket back, and he thought she was so cute,” said Joanne. “And she looked up at me and smiled, like, I know you. It was weird, it was like, she did, and she was only four months old, but I really felt that. You don't know when you're going to connect, exactly. For me it was in that restaurant when she just looked at me. That was it.”

Larissa Roby, now Larissa Roby Creedon, grew up in rural Marcy, NY in a predominantly white school district. Despite being one of only a few nonwhite students, and the only Asian student until about the sixth grade, she had an ordinary childhood, unencumbered by any belittling experiences or disorienting dissonance that had left other Korean adoptees like her feeling alienated and marginalized as children coming of age.

The memory of this event has been lost to time for Creedon, but as her mother recounts the story, she was two-years-old, and as they were driving through a parking lot, they passed an Asian couple. Creedon unbuckled her seatbelt, stood up, staring at the couple and proclaimed, ‘Like same! Like same!’ On another occasion, at the dentist’s office, Creedon stood up and sat beside an Asian family in the waiting room. When the family rose to exit, another woman exhorted her to catch up to her family, to which her mother, Joanne responded, that Larissa was in fact her daughter.

These childhood experiences, despite Creedon having no memory of them, may have been signaling an inner desire she was unaware of that would materialize in her adult years, to build a bridge to some of the people who helped bring her into the world she now knows, half a world away.

In 2016, Creedon traveled with her husband to Seoul, South Korea, where she met her foster mother. Having only fostered six other children, she remembered Creedon, and while her role was that of interim caregiver until the right family was chosen to give her a life, the maternal quality of her foster mother’s affection towards her, was palpable.

“I could feel her love that she had for me," said Creedon.

When Creedon became pregnant with her first child in 2017, she was struck by the excitement of beginning a generation of her own blood relatives.

"When I did get pregnant, it just brought up other emotions like the excitement of having a blood relative because I don't have that,” said Creedon. “And then just going through and thinking about what my birth mother went through being pregnant. Now this is a start of my family tree. To have something look like me was really cool."