It's been a busy time at my internship; my supervisors have scheduled a meeting with staff for all the interns to present their findings on their research project tomorrow. I've spent the last few weeks reading relentlessly to learn as much about cyber as I possibly could, interviewing the cybersecurity field's experts and practitioners, and drafting an outline for my policy paper. It's something writ in terms of grand strategy and the big picture. I feel that happens in Washington a lot, because everything is so work- and policy-oriented. That's what we see in the news. That's what we analyze when the White House publishes a press release, or when I read one of my daily email news briefings.

This blog post is not about that.

A couple weeks ago, I listened to an episode of This American Life. Normally, the radio show features two or three stories centered around a main theme, but this episode in particular told the story of Abdi, a Somali refugee living in Kenya, and how he was fortunate enough to win a lottery. Some lotteries hand out cash prizes. Others, like Abdi's, give out visas to the United States.

Every year, the Department of Homeland Security hands out up to 50,000 visas to applicants from countries with low immigration rates via the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program (DV program). The criterion for selecting applications from countries with "historically low immigration rates" ensures that the vast majority of applicants are people from countries with absymal GDP per capita and low standards of living. Without the DV program, many of these applicants can only dream of the fortune that the United States represents to them. Even then, the chance of getting a lottery ticket are abysmal. In 2015, 14.4 million people applied for a chance to become a green card holder. Out of 9.4 million qualified entries, about 125,000 visa lottery tickets were issued. From there, applicants must provide evidence of vaccinations, educational background, lack of arrest record, among other qualifications, to actually receive a green card. As evidenced by the high numbers of lottery winners versus actual visa holders, over half of the winners never end up getting a visa due to eligibility, financial, or other issues.

This American Life recorded the lengthy and extraordinary journey Abdi took after he won a lottery ticket. It's worthy of any Hollywood movie: thrills, chills, shocking plot twists, and maybe a happy ending. Just maybe.

[For those of you who prefer to read, here is the transcript.]

Listening through the entire podcast made me smile, frown, snort, and even tear up a bit. Above all, it made me recognize how lucky I am to be American.

I am an American by pure chance. As mentioned in my (quite brief) biography, I was adopted by a Taiwanese-American couple. Before Adrienne Ou was my legal name, I was 楊純嫥, or Yang Chun-zhuan.

A scan from my Taiwanese passport, with a name I didn't know I even had until I was sixteen.

When my parents decided to adopt, my father wanted a son. It's not a surprise - the Chinese society is patriarchal, as with most societies from ancient civilization lasting through the present day. Because of the one child policy in China, for decades many couples quietly discarded female children, as only male children would be able to carry on the family name. This has led to a massive gender gap in China, where, "by 2020, sociologists expect an 'extra' 35 million Chinese men - males for whom there are simply no available female partners. That's slightly more than the population of Canada." Even separated by an ocean, in his adopted land of hopes and dreams, my father also wanted a son to carry on his name. When I came out a girl, my parents had already opted to adopt from the woman carrying me. The question now was whether they would keep me, or wait until an adoption opened up for a son.

I am grateful every day that my parents decided to keep me. Sometimes I feel like the wistful grandmother from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: "Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living." Even though I know the process for adoption is a long one, and my parents definitely factored in the idea of waiting on yet another list for a son to potentially come around - they were already older, it was 1994 and they were born at the end of the Chinese Civil War at 1947 and 1948, respectively - they still opted to raise me. To love me. To give me a life that wouldn't have existed.

I marvel at the life I inevitably would have missed if my birth mother had decided on abortion. I decide not to pursue this line of thought, for the mental pitfalls of this thought are treacherous and pointless.

I wonder what life would have been like if I had never been adopted, and raised in an orphanage. Maybe I would bounce around foster care. Maybe some other couple would see my chubby cheeks and decide to adopt me. But that line of thought is unproductive and is based entirely on counterfactuals.

What I do know is this: as my father took me through U.S. customs, he told the lady at the desk that I was the girl they had just adopted. The lady took one look at me, and told my father, "No, she's your daughter." Since then, my father has told himself, "she's my daughter." I had entirely ceased to be that girl I adopted to him. I was simply his daughter.

People often ask me, "Have you ever wanted to meet your real parents?" It's a question made in innocence and good intention, so I let the biting sting of them not considering my parents to be "real parents" slide. If being real parents just meant that someone contributed fifty percent of their DNA to make me a zygote, which turned into a blastocyst, and finally into a fetus, then I don't want real parents. I don't want to know what they look like or what their voices sound like. Because if those are real parents, then I don't know what these well-meaning people call my mother and my father, and I don't care to ask them either. They're not just the people who adopted me, they're my parents. If you ask me, raising a child to become a functioning adult is a hell of a time lot harder than making one.

And so, twenty-one years and four months after I was born, and twenty years and eight months after my parents whisked me away to a comfortable life in the United States, I sat listening to Abdi's story of trials and tribulations to become an American, and I thought about the odd twists and turns of fate that allowed me to become an American at what was essentially birth.

I don't have to remember the moment I became an American, and that's what makes me so lucky. And every day, I am so grateful to this country, for being a land where social ambition can be met with reward, as my parents learned. More than that, every day I am grateful for my parents, not just for doing the important parent things such as listen to me complain about DC's metro system, support me financially as I attempt to achieve my career dreams, or send me scans of my Taiwanese passport for a blog post I'm writing, but also for the small decisions. Like keeping the girl. It's such a monumental decision, but it's a small moment in my life - like a delicate twist of a satin ribbon. But it's one that changed the course of the spool rolling off to heaven knows where.

Life is full of the big and small things, and it's what makes it so ultimately rewarding.