K-pop and the Un-Serious Science of Finding Community as an Adoptee
By KC Lin (she/her)
Adoptee, 25
Nanchang Project Volunteer
From Hanchuan, Hubei; Living in Indianapolis, IN, USA
“We’ve all found the community in different ways. It’s not linear. I honestly don’t remember how I stumbled into the Nanchang Project, but I do remember that something moved me to ask if I could find some part in it. I didn’t know any other way into the [Chinese international adoption] community, or even what being a part of that meant.”
This sentiment framed the rest of Jenna’s and my conversation. From K-pop to the concept of a ‘Fourth Culture,’ Jenna and I found kinship and familiarity in each other’s company, creating a little pocket of community in a Zoom room, one of us in Canada, and the other in the U.S.
Our paths to the Nanchang Project (and the Chinese adoption community as a whole) were different, and our roles within are as well, Jenna on the Web team, and myself on the Blog team. But Jenna’s technical contributions to the Web team aren’t what has kept her engaged; rather, it is the sense that the work itself exists within a community of adoptees. The work is meaningful because it is embedded in relationships, and the value of those relationships has become clearer over time.
“I’ve been working with you [Jenna] since the beginning of the blog, and this relationship that we now have -- I really love.”
Here at the end of 2025, Jenna and I have worked together for nearly two years. When you work with someone for that amount of time, small parts of your lives and personalities naturally seep into your work with each other.
While sharing a preview of an upcoming blog publication with me, Jenna unintentionally revealed her stellar musical taste. Suddenly, the sweet sound of TXT Yeonjun’s Boyfriend was knocking around my head. At my, and our other team members’ requests, Jenna now plays a different K-pop song with every preview she sends.
(And in case you’re wondering, we’ve since been treated to Our Summer (TXT), Love Language (TXT), like JENNIE (JENNIE), butterflies (JVKE ft. TAEHYUN of TXT & Kim Chaewon of LE SSERAFIM), I AM (IVE), Hitori no Yoru (TXT), and Wishlist (TXT).)
When I visited a friend in Los Angeles this year, I spent hours in Koreatown, taking in billboards, browsing K-pop stores, and looking for things to share with Jenna. I happily mailed off some TXT merch to her in Canada. Sharing these experiences, even from afar, has become a meaningful part of the community I’ve experienced through NCPT. It runs alongside the work I share with Jenna and everyone else.
Talking about K-pop naturally led us into a discussion about the concept of a ‘Fourth Culture’ (which isn’t really a term I’ve seen anywhere, but it’s how I think about this unique space we occupy as transnational, transracial adoptees). We talked about First Culture, Second Culture, and then Third Culture, which usually refers to kids raised between two cultures (usually their parents’ or grandparents’ culture and the dominant Western culture around them). But Third Culture has never really described what I’ve experienced.
Fourth Culture makes more sense: it’s the space we live in as adoptees, shaped by heritage, upbringing, and the unique perspective of being between worlds, where Asian and Western influences blend with personal interpretation and community experience. Something that really colors this experience is that there’s so much less uniformity to being Fourth Culture. It feels like we are so many iterations away from our heritage that we’re not quite sure where to begin, how to begin, or even how to relate. It’s also colored by the fact that we often don’t have a primary reference for connecting to our ethnic heritage. So much of being Fourth Culture is rooted in uncertainty and this clumsy-but-beautiful navigation – or more like stumbling – into a community, where we then all proceed to stumble together.
In this space, music, media, and shared experiences become ways to explore, affirm, and inhabit our identities. They let us recognize ourselves and each other, and see how our experiences, though different, overlap and resonate. That recognition naturally loops back to the work we do with NCPT. The organization’s primary work of helping adoptees and birth families reconnect through DNA testing, document translation, and search posters is critical, but it’s not always the starting point or ending point for adoptees. Even if it is, that process without community is hard to imagine.
The other part of NCPT is where the act of community is centered and shaped. I do this work through the Blog, Jenna through the website, and others through their respective teams. Through this work we find community, not just in service to adoptees, but in the act of being part of NCPT itself. Showing up, contributing, and being present are ways we inhabit the space and sustain it, and it’s in that participation – through shared laughter, advice, and small celebrations of each other – that support and belonging take root.
Toward the end of our conversation, we talked lightly about the future, not as a list of projects but as a sense of posture and alignment. We shared hope that NCPT continues to build work shaped by adoptees themselves and supported by the relationships we build. We discussed the possibility of structure and stability over time – not to formalize the community, but as a way to support it and sustain it. What stayed with me afterward wasn’t urgency or ambition, but the quiet understanding that belonging often arrives unexpectedly. At NCPT, it’s built through moments like these – collaborating on a project, playing K-pop in the back of a video, letting your voice be heard in the Zoom room – where you see that other people want to know you as much as you want to know them.
Be in the room. If you’ve landed here on the Nanchang Project Blog, then you’re already standing in the doorway. This is how the community we first stumble into becomes one we can recognize, nurture, and call our own.
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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