Let’s forget about falafel, and kimchee, and dumplings, etc.; let’s forget about lamps, and dragons, and carpets and I don’t know what else; all the other superficial aspects that the “West” sees as “culture” from abroad. What instead have you learned from the culture of your place of birth that contradicts what we now refer to as “adoption”?
Ben Harper, in Fly One Time, sings:
Inevitability
It’s pounding at my door
screaming for more
In a world that owes you nothing
you give everything, everythingAnd now I’m caught in between
What I can’t leave behind
and what I may never find
So fly one time
Fly one time
Depending on my mood, I can either hear in these lyrics a call to rise above one’s circumstance and put the pain of life behind oneself. Or else I hear something completely different, much darker.
I stumbled across this article in Asia One, which was discussing the appointment of Fleur Pellerin as a minister in the new French government. The article states concerning the Korean-born Frenchwoman:
Newspapers in Seoul on Friday splashed frontpages with her picture and carried stories about her life while the ruling New Frontier Party expressed hope her appointment will help cement friendly ties between Seoul and Paris.
The article sums up so much about the relationship between our source countries and the First World in terms of “making it” and what it means to “do good” by your place of origin. Here the place of birth is reclaiming and acclaiming someone it let go in the first place: the class of the local comprador finds common ground with the class of the adopter.
This was in the search phrase list today. This comes on the heels of a post over at The Adopted Ones, as well as our own item on search phrases. Add to this the list of so-called “disrupted adoptions”, and their celebration (yes, celebration) in the mainstream media.
I want to expand on this, and get the opinion of adoptees here. What does this question reveal, especially in terms of it never being asked/stated about biological children (“Oh, him? He’s a failed biological child.”)? Why should we not be able to ask the question in reverse: “They are failures as adoptive parents”?
What does it mean that the idea of our “failure” is built-in to the adoption process itself? How does this thought process transfer through to the relationship of adopted child to adoptive family?
Expand/tangent as you see fit….
Fellow adoptees: What advice do you have [in terms of language learning, culture shock, etc.] for those who decide to go back for a visit, travel back for an extended stay, or make the decision to definitively return to their place of birth?
I randomly came across your blog tonight and can’t stop reading. I am a white adoptive mom to my African-American three-year-old daughter. I already feel some ridicule just by saying that and in a crazy way feel I need to give you a synopsis to justify her adoption but am trying to just stick to the point. Since her first days in our family, I have cried over, prayed over, and worried over the issue of race/ethnicity and wondered if this was the right thing for her. At the time of her adoption, she had no family willing to raise her and we were the only family on the foster care/adoption list who would be willing to adopt an African-American child. We live in California—not in small town—this blew me away.
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My question to you relates to your comment[s] above about foster care [in the previous question]. Would you please elaborate on what you mean by a shift in focus regarding foster care? I should also add that my husband was raised in a foster home for 8 years (ages 6 through 14). He says he always wished that his foster family had adopted him. They were very good to him, and his relationship with his biological family was very difficult, frought with substance abuse problems and other serious issues. When he left his foster family to move back in with his family of origin, he lasted one year there before running away. He was then homeless as a teenager, and went through hell. He has been on his own since he was 15. That’s my husband’s experience, and it’s one of the main reasons we decided to become licensed as fost-adopt parents.
A parent recently asked this on one of my other projects. Personally, I’m all for domestic foster care. I think the question is really about where do the scales tip when balancing race with foster to adopt scenarios?
I am a well-educated Caucasian parent of three young biological children. I would like to have one more child, but for various reasons, I should not (and will not) go through another pregnancy. My husband and I have started thinking about becoming a fostadopt family. Through those classes – we have just started the process – I have been introduced to the idea of transracial adoption. I stumbled upon your blog via Google. I’m intrigued by the threads I have read regarding transracial adoption here. I have a lot to think about. My question is how much your experiences as a transracial adoptee may have been changed for the better with a more supportive family environment? It’s pure speculation, and perhaps a futile exercise. Regardless, I am curious. As a potential adoptive parent bringing a child out of foster care, I don’t care what the child looks like (race), although I understand that superficial looks (race) has a strong impact on sense of self for all of us. I’m very interested in your thoughts. Thank you.
Transracial adoptees, how do you feel about domestic transracial adoption through foster care?
This question is a follow-up to the one asking about the orphanage-bestowed name, and its importance; I’d like to expand on this a little bit if I may.
In local culture, the question to ask after someone is min aya bayt?—from which house? In this way a [family] name is closely tied to place, and in fact many family names reflect a place name as their basis: Masri, Traboulsi, Sidaoui, etc.
As we discussed in the other item, the connection that is found in a name is radically undone by an adoption agency which often ascribes a willfully connectionless moniker or even number to a child such that the reverse is true—the child is unable to trace back to originating place, house, family.
Because of this, I notice in the adoptee world various attempts at renaming oneself—either in using one’s true name, one’s bogus bureaucratic name, or else a name that reflects the mix of the above in some way.
We currently live in Portugal (we are US citizens) and have been researching adopting in Portugal. There are orphanages here and the children receive placement with Nationals first if there is availability. I came across your website and found it very different from the majority of the blogs/websites and the view point very interesting. We want one more child (we have two boys) and since we are unable to have them we have turned to adoption. My husband is concerned the adopted child would never feel part of our family, but I think it is the family who sets the tone and they would be our family. As a network of adoptees I am asking you to consider the options and your view on when you feel adoption is appropriate and/or it is always going to fail?
I am currently working with a group locally that does research for returning adoptees to Lebanon, similar to such organizations in other source countries. We are going through my collected bogus paperwork, bogus passport, and bogus references and one by one crossing out the information contained in them as being useful or not (mostly not). We are making full connection inquiries, meaning, everyone within the process is being tracked down for any kind of information they might have (or not; mostly not). For the million times I’ve gone through this on my own, it is somehow exponentially more painful when it becomes official in some sense, and is thus the “last ditch effort” before calling it quits.
Several months ago I was at a wedding and met some extended family for the first time and some I haven’t seen for many many years. I felt really silly referring to them as my “aunt” or “second cousin” or even “brother”. I mean, aren’t those titles really for the adopted child, to acclimate them into their adoptive family. For a child’s benefit? And also the adoptive parents’ when the child is young?
As adults, I think we all know: I am adopted. They aren’t really my “family”. They are people who raised me and who I was raised with. I’m actually ok referring to my immediate adoptive family as my family, but really have to desire to vehemently defend this title to others like I did when I was a kid.
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