Inevitability
It’s pounding at my door
screaming for more
In a world that owes you nothing
you give everything, everything

And 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’ve always been troubled by the statistics and studies of adoptee morbidity, suicide, depression, substance abuse, etc.; especially for adoptees in completely homogenous environments such as the Scandinavian countries where adoptees stick out much more obviously and where entry into the national social structure is quite limited for racial and ethnic reasons.

One study I found states:

International adoptees had clearly increased risks for suicide attempt (risk ratio 4.5 [95% confidence interval 3.7–5.5]) and suicide death (3.6 [2.6–5.2]) after adjustments for sex, age and socio-economic factors. National adoptees had lower risks than international adoptees, but had increased risks compared to non-adoptees (suicide attempt, 2.8 [2.2–3.5]; suicide death, 2.5 [1.8–3.3]). Biological parents’ morbidity explained approximately one third of the increased risk for national adoptees. Female international adoptees’ risk for suicide attempt was elevated to an even greater extent than in male international adoptees, when compared to the general population.

Another reads:

Adoptees have an increased all-cause mortality compared to the general population. All major specific causes of death contributed, and the highest excess is seen for alcohol-related deaths.

And another:

Adoptees in Sweden have a high risk for severe mental health problems and social maladjustment in adolescence and young adulthood. We advise professionals to give appropriate consideration to the high risk of suicide in patients who are intercountry adoptees.

The adoptive culture wants us to be “grateful”; I think adopters should be grateful we don’t off ourselves in greater numbers.

How do we cope? How do we keep it together?

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.

The idea that France in any way has managed to integrate its minorities is ludicrous, as seen by the suburban riots of a few years back, as well as the rise of the right-wing National Front and their success in the recent elections. I remember when I lived in Paris how they would set up their tables and yell at us “nègres” and “bougnoules” to “go back to where we came from”.

This local identification with the receiving country explains, then, how some of us who return are rejected wholesale by this same class for not measuring up to its view of itself; for criticizing this collusion between trafficker and purchaser; for being critical of the myriad other ways in which the local kowtowers define themselves by those who oppress them. We become the abject to be feared and rejected.

So I want to know: Is there really any soul searching going on in Korea? Taiwan? Guatemala? Russia? Lebanon? Spain? Etc.? How do we as adoptees fit in inadvertently or otherwise to the grand charade of the emigrant narrative by simply “rising to the top”? On the flip side, what hope is there for those who resist this in any way? Can adoptive parents really remove themselves from this differential of power and its consequences?

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….

I’m in the middle of making an independent documentary about how transracial adoption has impacted my life, my identity and what it means to be British-Chinese. I’d also been asked to participate in an online project Between East and West. About two days ago I got a very strange email. Basically, the sender was either a member of the family that adopted me or a representative of the family that adopted me. I severed all contact with this family thirty years ago. To cut a long story short ‘they’ were warning  me off. It was a picture (which is now no longer on the site) of myself, my adoptive parent’s natural son and my sister also adopted and the woman who ran the orphanage in Hong Kong. Publishing this picture was a contravention of their right to privacy. Mea culpa, yes should have sought permission, had I remembered that, that particular photograph had been included in the ones for the site. It was taken down. No point in getting into an argument over a photograph. I then get another email warning me that although it’s perfectly fine to have your own opinions;  should I say anything publicly that ‘they’ take exception to i.e. ‘their’ recollection differs to mine, ‘they’ feel that I am including ‘them’ in my own personal opinions, or ‘they’ simply don’t like what I say, ‘they’ will in effect do everything ‘they’ can to shut me down. The icing on the cake was that my personal opinion might damage their reputation. In short ‘they’ were threatening me with legal action, in my opinion. ‘They” were trying to bully me, in my opinion.

Initially I thought wtf!  How the hell do I continue with my documentary or how the hell do I continue with anything else. But once I’d had some time to consider the situation dispassionately—actually they have it’s done me a huge favour. It’s made me literally think outside the box and I am richer for it. It gives a whole new nuance and challenge to the work that I am and will do whether dramatic or factual. In fact I have a couple of ideas brewing all concentrated on the aftermath the fallout of transracial adoption.

So I have to be careful in what I say viz my own personal situation so be it. But then that does not stop me for allowing or facilitating other people to express what’s happened to them does it?

What have other people’s experiences of adoptive families been in this respect—especially when the adoptee has decided to move away from the adoptive environment?

I can’t begin to convey how much I love her, how proud I am of her and how inadequate I feel in some ways in raising her. The questions are harder than I thought—my heart aches and really I just plain want to punch the daylights out of some people with the questions they ask me while she is standing right next to me. I understand that the overall opinion on here about transracial adoption is that it leaves a child feeling alone among many other things. I guess I just want to know what I can do to give her the best life—to allow her to feel intensely proud of her ethnic background, of who she is? I am crying as I type this because the thought of her feeling alone, the thought of her wishing she looked different or not feeling like she has an ethnic identity because of us adopting her kills me.

I sought this site out because of too many sleepless nights pondering all of this and because of all the long talks my hubby and I have of needing to really think about relocating to a city that has a more diverse population of African-Americans (we are in an area of majority Latino and white, with something like seven percent African-American). I wonder all the time if she will grow up feeling isolated here. I would love to hear any thoughts you have on what I can do to make her transracial experience less painful and help her grow up proud of who she is. Any resources (books, videos, blogs, etc.) you can point me to—especially from African-American adoptees who were raised in white families? Thanks for your time. I am really looking forward to reading your thoughts.