Beth: Chapter 3
Disjointed
Mixed media: acrylic, ink, vellum, thread
Marigny Jian DeBlanc
By Xavier (they/them)
Adoptee, 27
Nanchang Project Volunteer
From Unknown, Jiangxi; Living in Lekwungen and WSANEC Territory, Victoria, B.C., Canada
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This story is deeply personal. It is a reflection of my journey—painful, messy, and sometimes raw, yet slightly fictionalized. All names have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved with one exception: the titular character who is referred to by my original adoption name. I have chosen to share this story because I believe in the power of truth to heal and connect us and because I wish to illustrate the reality of growing up in a difficult adoptive home.
You may encounter moments of grief, trauma, and abuse within these pages. For some, these moments may be difficult to read. Please know that I include trigger warnings where appropriate, and I encourage you to take care of yourself as you engage with this story– if you so choose.
While my experiences have shaped much of my life, this is also a story of survival, resilience, and the ongoing journey toward wholeness. It is meant to offer solidarity and hope to those who may feel isolated or broken in their experiences as adoptees.
You are not alone.
If you or someone you know needs support, please consider reaching out to a trusted friend, counselor, or helpline. I have included links below and will continue to with each chapter as they are released.
Thank you for reading and holding space for this story.
With gratitude,
Xavier Huang
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Beth: A Love Story
Chapter 3
TW: Suicidal ideation
If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, call or text 988. Available in the US and Canada.
The air in Lucy's bedroom is stale and all of the blinds are shut tight. Beth cannot remember the last time the blinds were up; she has no memory of sunlight in this space.
Lucy is propped up in bed watching videos on her laptop. Voices crackle through the weak speakers like disjointed sounds over the phone. Beth often feels at odds with her adoptive mother but regularly seeks her out anyways. It is not strange to her that Lucy has been in bed all day and will stay this way until tomorrow when she begins her night shifts again. Nor is it strange to her that Lucy rarely appears with them in public. What is strange to her are the times she sees Lucy out of bed, dressed, and puttering around the house with a smile. Most of the time when Lucy is at home, she is in bed. This is where she eats, sleeps, and passes the time between her night shifts as a nurse. The only moments she emerges from her cave-like space are on the rare days when she feels happy, but more often when Eric is screaming, and she can hear Beth and her sisters crying for help.
Whenever Eric rages while she is home, she trudges out of her room and stands in between him and the girls. She tells him to stop. To calm down. ‘You're a maniac, an animal, what's wrong with you?’ In return he projects all of his rage onto her, transferring his anger into cruel words or violence. He calls her a pig, a worthless piece of shit, he says she is fat and lazy and that he hates her. Sometimes Lucy cries when he says these things, other times she hangs her head dejectedly and shuffles back into her bedroom having provided enough distraction to allow the girls to escape. Beth frequently feels guilty at her relief that Lucy is there to take the brunt of Eric's rage. She pities Lucy for the things that Eric says, but she does not intervene. Although she has tried to defend Lucy in the past, neither Lucy nor Eric appreciated her interjection and it only escalated the conflict until Eric had her by the front of her shirt and was throwing her into the wall while Lucy screamed at both of them to stop, stop, for gods sake, stop already!
Now, Beth tiptoes into Lucy's room and settles herself on the end of the bed. A mommy vlogger is talking through the laptop screen, proudly outlining the daily routine of her and her four kids. Crumbs crunch under Beth as she slips beneath the duvet and she feels the press of cold sheets against her back. Lucy loves to watch video diaries of other families. Beth wonders if it is because her real family is such a disappointment. 'I bet a camera would keep Eric on his best behaviour' she thinks to herself and nearly laughs at the thought of a camera recording his red face as he screams obscenities at them.
Lucy ignores Beth for the first ten minutes that she sits there, and Beth waits anxiously to be acknowledged.
Realizing that Beth has no intention of leaving, Lucy finally closes her laptop with a sigh. ‘What do you want?’ Lucy’s voice is low and brittle. She sounds exhausted– as she always does. Tired and beaten down by this home, this life, and the children she chose to bring from China. 'Why did she adopt us,' Beth wonders for the millionth time, 'she should have left me at the orphanage where I belonged.'
‘I want to talk,’ Beth says.
Lucy sighs, and opens her laptop again.‘I have nothing to say to you.’
Beth lays down at the foot of Lucy's bed and feels hot tears prick her eyes. There is a lump in her throat, and she breathes slowly, trying to hide the fact that she is crying. Even though Lucy ignores her, Beth basks in the company of her adoptive mother. She thinks of a memory from a time when she was young, when Lucy lay with her tucked against her side, tracing her eyelids and face, telling her how dear she was, that she had the softest skin and a sweet smile. Recently, she tried to climb into bed next to Lucy, to trace her mother's tired face and feel that closeness and care, but Lucy had pushed her away. ‘Don't touch me, it freaks me out,’ she said. Then, she rolled over showing Beth her back.
After a while of lying there, breathing and staring at the ceiling, Lucy’s voice breaks the silence. ‘Can you go away please? You're always so needy, I just want to be alone.’
Tears begin to drip from both corners of Beth's eyes, and she presses the heels of her hands into her face until she sees stars.
‘I just want to be near you,’ she murmurs, hands still pressed to her face.
‘I know,’ says Lucy, and she pauses to shift the blankets between them. ‘It's a bit annoying though, creepy even, the way you lurk. You're always just hanging around and I don't know what you want from me.’
In her mind Beth says, ‘I want you to love me,’ but she knows that this will be met with scorn and more annoyance. Instead, she forces a manic smile and says, ‘Oh, you know, I just like company.’
‘Well, you've had company, so can you go now?’ Lucy blows out an exasperated breath and Beth rolls off the mattress but does not leave. She stands at the end of the bed shifting her weight from one foot to the other, staring at the woman who is studiously ignoring her. She knows that Lucy wants her to leave, but she still hopes to be asked to stay. She wants Lucy to see that in this cold, brutal home, someone cares. Or maybe she just wants Lucy to care about her.
‘You're still here,’ Lucy intones, and Beth drops her head.
‘I'm going, I'm going,’ she says and walks out of the room.
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Beth finds it strangely hilarious that her adoptive parents dislike her, and the humour cushions the depth of hurt beneath this truth. Sometimes at school she will talk about them flippantly, as though the entire situation is a witty understanding, a mature joke in which cruelties are said but not meant. She talks about their threats to send her back to the orphanage as if it is all a massive gag even though this is one of the reasons she cries at night.
She takes the steps up the stairs, being careful to avoid the places she knows the wood creaks the most. It has become her habit to see how quietly she can move through the house, to make no noise when she walks. Sometimes she imagines she is sneaking out, getting ready to flee into the night and disappear forever. Most of the time, she walks quietly so that Eric will not notice her. His moods are unpredictable. She is just as likely to earn his wrath from reminding him of her existence as she is from doing something wrong like forgetting a dirty dish in her room or saying something he does not like. She suspects that most of his rage comes from remembering that she exists at all. She can see it in his expression when he is deeply contemplating something and suddenly, she appears. There is always a split second during which she can see that he does not know her, is shocked and surprised to have a Chinese child in his home. And then the recognition comes and the rage, the insult of her being. She does not know why he chose to adopt three children when he finds her existence so offensive. So, she walks quietly and quickly, as if she could will herself to become a ghost.
After leaving Lucy's room, Beth does not go back to her bedroom but instead turns right at the top of the stairs. She wishes for company so aggressively her entire body aches. She thinks she might die–or dissolve into the walls, or turn into a stone that erodes with time. At the end of the hall, a white door is slightly ajar, and she can hear the tapping of a keyboard from within. She walks down the hallway to her older sister's bedroom, pushes the door open and enters with a huge grin.
Helen looks up and glares at her from above the top of her computer. She is sitting in bed with her legs crossed, tapping away either writing or playing video games with her friends. Helen's small grey cat is curled up at the foot of her bed, and she stretches and yawns when Beth enters the room.
‘Go away,’ Helen says immediately and Beth's smile widens. Helen is moody and can be violent when she is particularly annoyed, but in general Beth thinks Helen likes her. Helen used to read books to Beth, fantasy stories, Greek tragedies, comedies, and the like. But Beth gets too carried away when she listens to tales, and she has a tendency to act out the scenes. Like most members of the household, Helen’s patience is thin, and Beth’s erratic movements always annoy her; whenever Beth begins to get excited, Helen throws down whatever book she was reading and kicks her out of the room.
She lies down on the floor and feels the cream-coloured carpet rub against her face. She listens to her sister, to the sound of clicking, and her quiet breath. She wonders how Helen survives in this house, if she feels as tortured as Beth does. She wonders what Helen would say if she told her that she was dying, every day, slowly; that this house was killing her. She wonders if Helen wishes she had stayed at the orphanage, too, or if it's different for her because she is not a disappointment, she is not needy, she is not pathetic like her little sister.
Time stretches around them, Beth lying on the ground trying to make conversation as Helen continues to ignore her. Finally, Beth sits up and throws one of her socks at Helen. Without saying anything, Helen stands and grabs Beth by the ankles. She shrieks softly as Helen drags her out of the room and then firmly closes the door behind her. A moment later, the door opens again and Beth’s sock flies into the hallway.
Outside Helen's bedroom, she lies on the floor, holding her breath, and listens in case Eric heard them. To the right is her other sister's bedroom, but she dares not disturb her. Celeste hates her, Beth knows she does, and Celeste would not deign to endure her presence for even a second.
Once in their first year of high school, Celeste raged at her and when Eric and Lucy laughed saying it was normal sibling rivalry, Celeste had told them, ‘even if we weren't siblings, I would still hate her, that's how despicable she is.’ At the time, Beth had been shocked and had wondered what she had done to make Celeste feel this way. Now, she understands that this is the natural state of the world. Some people are welcome, and some people are not.
She is not welcome.
By the time Beth gets back to her bedroom she is drained. She has homework to do but climbs into bed and stares at the ceiling instead. She cries on and off and hates herself for feeling sad. In her mind she builds a stone wall around herself to keep out others. ‘I am alone, and I don't need anyone else,’ she thinks to herself. ‘One day I will run away for good, or I will not be here at all; I won't bother anyone anymore’. She feels the tears hot against her skin and decides she cannot study after all; she will fail whatever test she has because that is who she is: a failure and a disappointment. She turns off the lights and in moments falls into a deep slumber. In the morning, Eric tells her she was crying in her sleep again. With annoyance, he notes that her sobs woke him up.
To access licensed US mental health professionals who identify as adoptees and work with adoptees/adoptive families visit growbeyondwords.com/adoptee-therapist-directory.
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Disjointed
Mixed media: acrylic, ink, vellum, thread
Marigny Jian DeBlancBuilt from layered materials—acrylic, vellum, ink, and thread—Disjointed conveys fragmentation through both form and texture. Deep reds, blues, and grays dominate the palette, evoking a space that is at once intimate and oppressive. Faint outlines drift across the surface, flickering between presence and erasure. The stitched elements introduce a tactile tension, hinting at attempts to hold together what is coming apart. DeBlanc’s composition resists clarity, embracing disorientation as a visual language of rupture.
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Marigny Jian DeBlanc (she/her) is an adoptee and mixed media artist from Wuzhou, Guangxi and currently based in New Orleans. For DeBlanc, art was a first language—a way to navigate and make sense of a new world shaped by transition and complexity. Through her interdisciplinary practice, Marigny explores the tension between the known and the unknowable using art to explore reflection and reconciliation.
Marigny is the artist and illustrator of Book 1, Chapter 3; and Book 2, Chapter 10 of Beth. To learn more about Marigny and the other artists of Beth, read about them here!
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Xavier (they/them) is an adoptee from Jiangxi who now lives on the unceded territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ nations (colonially known as Victoria, B.C., Canada). X is a prolific writer and enjoys creative non-fiction, fantasy, and fiction writing. Through their work they explore their identity as an adoptee, parse their lived experience, and explore what it means to be human. They joined the Nanchang Project in 2023 and cherish the community they have discovered amongst the volunteers and adoptee community generally.
The views expressed in blog posts reflect those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the shared views of The Nanchang Project as a whole.
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