This feature originally appeared in the Fall edition of the Cal Sports Quarterly. The Cal Athletics flagship magazine features long-form sports journalism at its finest and provides in-depth coverage of the scholar-athlete experience in Berkeley. Printed copies are mailed four times a year to Bear Backers who give annually at the Bear Club level (currently $600 or more). For more information on how you can receive a printed version of the Cal Sports Quarterly at home, send an email to calbearbackers@berkeley.edu or call (510) 642-2427.


On June 5, 1995, in the sprawling city of Wuhan, China – east of Shanghai and on the banks of the Yangtze and Han rivers – a mother gave birth to a baby girl with dark eyes and jet black hair. Her name would be written as "Ren" on official documents – the Chinese word for "person." The generic designation would be her only identity for six months while she slipped into the Chinese adoption system, awaiting a home and a family.
 
Several decades earlier, Susan – the middle child of three sisters – was born into a quintessentially Irish family in Kilcullen, Ireland. How their lives intersected, and ultimately blossomed reflects the fulfilled promise of the American dream. It's a promise that field hockey senior Emily Catan is grateful for every day.
 
Susan Patterson enjoyed a relatively normal Irish country upbringing in Kilcullen, just an hour south of Dublin in Kildare County. Free time included riding horses around the family's large property, learning to bake Irish soda bread, and taking holidays to the island's west coast.
 
As is common with Irish youth, when Susan was old enough she left home for what's known as the "J1" – a summer of travel, work and new experiences abroad. She traveled to the United States and got a job at T's Pub on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, only planning to stay for the summer until her visa was up.
 
Her plans changed changed when a young Italian American guy by the name of Andrew Catan walked into the pub. They were immediately smitten, and what was supposed to be a summer stay in Boston turned into a decade living in Beantown. Andrew and Susan married, and eventually decided to move to the up-and-coming Silicon Valley area of California to pursue new job opportunities.
 
They settled in the Bay Area ready to start a family, but found out they were unable to have children of their own, so they worked with an adoption agency to adopt a Chinese baby. Nearly a year after they began the adoption process, they made the journey across the Pacific Ocean to an agency in Wuhan, where they picked up a "person" – a six-month-old baby girl who they would name Emily.
 
At first, she fussed. She cried on the way to the airport. She cried on the 12-hour plane ride home. And when they put her into the brand new, beautiful, expensive crib they bought in preparation for their new bundle of joy, she didn't just cry – she wailed.
 
"Why is this baby so distraught?" they wondered.
 
"What have we gotten ourselves into?" they asked themselves.
 
A doctor helped solve the problem.
 
"The doctor said I had flashbulb memories of being in the orphanage in a crib, crying and not being attended to," Emily Catan said. "In the beginning, they had to figure out all these things that they wouldn't have expected, because babies do know that they're looking at someone who isn't their mother."
 
While Catan knew seemingly from the start that she looked different from her parents, it was harder for others to grasp the physical differences.
 
"My mom used to tell me stories that in preschool when little kids would say, 'Your mommy's here,' when an Asian woman walked in, I'd say, 'No, my mommy doesn't look like that,'" Catan recalled. "Visually, looking at my parents, they're white and I'm not."
 
Catan has not returned to China since her adoption date, and she doesn't speak any Chinese languages, but her physical identity is one she grapples with often. When she applied to colleges, she faced questions on how to identify her race on her applications.
 
"Where my parents are from is not where I'm from biologically, so I didn't know what to put. Today, with race and everything being such a sociological construct, do I have to put "Asian" if I don't connect with that culture?" Catan said. "I will ask for the fork, not for the chopsticks because that is just who I am, there's no other way to put it."
 
The visual differences are the only actual disconnect she has ever felt between her parents and their own cultural backgrounds.
 
"They never mentioned anything about me being adopted or anything until I asked, but it was very organic and natural, the process of me finding who I am as a person," she said. "I forget that I am Asian because I feel so connected to my family's side and heritage and everything that it doesn't even hit me that I look different."
 
Her childhood in Mountain View was about as average as most children in the Bay Area. Catan played sports, and – like many teenagers would – freaked out excitedly when her mom got her special tickets to a Justin Bieber concert. Family meals often consisted of pasta – a nod to her dad's Italian heritage. Of course, there were Irish traditions sprinkled throughout – freshly baked Irish soda bread at home and Irish dancing lessons. Catan got into field hockey at the encouragement of her mom because the sport is widely played internationally.
 
Summertime in the Catan household meant a month-long visit to Ireland, which has contributed to Catan identifying as an Irish American. She and her mom would travel back to Kildare County to visit with her grandmother, aunts and cousins. Like her mother's childhood, Catan's time in Ireland was also full of horseback riding and road trips around the countryside.
 
"Memories of my mom's family are so vivid in my mind," Catan said. "I can remember summers there so clearly, like what their neighbors look like and everything."
 
It's those summers in the Irish countryside and the time spent with her parents in Mountain View that truly helped define her.
 
"I get my stubbornness and impatience from my dad, but I get the real caring side and Irish spirit from my mom," she said. "My mom came here and didn't have any kind of clue of what she was doing but ended up living here and did well and lives the American dream. I think that's one thing she's always taught me to not quit on something and do what makes me happy and what I'm passionate about."
 
Though it might not look like it from the outside, Catan knows in her heart that she's exactly where she belongs.
 
 "Once you hear my story, you realize who I actually am because of my parents," she said. "I am incredibly lucky to be adopted by such great people. They've saved up their lives to give me the best opportunity and expose me to so many things. If they had picked someone else that day, I could be anywhere else. I might not even be alive. I wouldn't have known to be here on scholarship to play field hockey at Cal. That could not have gone better for me.
 
"In my mom's process of fulfilling her dreams she got me and gave me anything I could have asked for," she added.