Ep 60 Navigating the spaces of ethnicity and family as a transnational adoptee

The Artsy Raven Podcast about Writing and Art with host JF Garrard

Jenny Heijun Wills shares her childhood experience growing up as a transnational adoptee, how the media chooses to represent Asian cultures and why she writes.

As a transnational adoptee, Jenny Heijun Wills has spent her life navigating the spaces of race and ethnicity. As a pan-polyam individual, she occupies a liminality between family—adopted, biological, chosen—and “community;” heteronormativity and queerness; commitment and a constellation of love. As a person who self-harms to cope with mental illness, she moves between the desire to be beautiful and the urge to make herself ugly, longing for visibility while daily wishing her body would disappear. And as a parent with a lifelong eating disorder, her love language is to feed, but she finds it near-impossible to consume anything herself. These facets of Jenny’s personhood have served as both the anchors she has clung to, in the time before self-discovery and understanding, and the harsh parameters of what others now imagine she can be.

At time 21:00 she reads from latest book, Everything and Nothing at All.

Link to Jenny’s page on Penguin Random House: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/authors/2184152/jenny-heijun-wills

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