Kiana Kishiyana Explores Adoptee Identity as an SSHRC Storytellers Challenge Finalist

(The following is an excerpt from the McGill Reporter. Article by Katherine Gombay.)

Kiana Kishiyama remembers feeling scared when, at the start of her first undergraduate class in beginner’s Mandarin, her teacher looked at her and said, “You need to speak to me after class.”

“And I’m like, what, I’m in trouble already?”

It turned out that the teacher believed that Kishiyama, who was adopted from China by a Canadian couple, was just being modest about her language skills.

After hearing Kishiyama speak a single phrase in Mandarin, the teacher quickly changed her mind.

“It was like I had to prove my lack of language proficiency. I was a bit irked,” said Kishiyama, with a laugh.

Adoptee identity and language of origin

This was just one of the experiences that led Kishiyama, one of the two McGill finalists in the 2025 SSHRC Storyteller Challenge, toward a master’s program in the Faculty of Education. Her research looks at how the process of learning their languages of origin can play into the construction of a sense of identity for international adoptees. SSHRC stands for Social Science and Humanities Research Council, a federally funded body.

“What some of the of the participants in my study mentioned is that learning their language of origin has helped them imagine a self that they could have been,” said Kishiyama, who took classes in both Japanese and Mandarin as a child. (Her adoptive father is of Japanese ancestry.)

“It’s like, they’re speaking a language that they could have actually grown up speaking and learning about a culture that they could have grown up in, the culture of birth family members they are biologically connected to. I know that some people have thought about it as a sort of healing process.”