Never say never

One of the most beautiful blog posts I’ve read in a long time.

 

Simply Not Done

Người Việt owes us an explanation

Wrote a little something about how the media treats international adoption in Misplaced Baggage.

Specifically, I addressed how Người Việt2 Online passed up a great opportunity to inform the public about the myriad issues surrounding adoptions from Vietnam with its 4-part series on the topic back in December 2007 and January 2008.

Instead, yet again, it did a wonderful job of pandering to the all-important ‘customer’ within the adoption industry and ignoring everyone else.

So, after Người Việt2 Online published the last article, four of us adult Vietnamese adoptees wrote a letter to the editor. I’ll paste it below just to give you a taste of how much we were (and are) not amused:

To the Editor of Nguoi Viet2 Online:

When we saw that Nguoi Viet2 was featuring a 4-part series on adoption from Vietnam, we were more than a little intrigued because of our background as adult Vietnamese adoptees. We are just a few of many members of the first generation of Vietnamese adoptees who were flown out of the country to join families around the world during and at the end of the Vietnam War.  So, it was with much anticipation that we wanted to read what a Vietnamese-American publication had to say about adoption from Vietnam. Unfortunately, the articles fell far short of any wide-ranging examination of both the history and continued practice of adoption from Vietnam.

Nguoi Viet2 had an extraordinary opportunity to inform the public about issues surrounding international adoption, specifically from the point of view of birth parents, adoptive parents and the adoptees themselves. The series on adoption could have sparked lively and constructive debate about the social, economic and political factors that drive international adoption between Vietnam and the United States, as well as the far-reaching consequences felt by birth families, adoptive families and society at large.

Apparently, Nguoi Viet2 has simply allowed an easy-to-use guide for prospective adoptive parents to be published. As superficial as the content is, it is even more disturbing that the overall message of the series is that Vietnamese children are commodities on the store shelves waiting for American consumers to pick out and purchase. It is regrettable that the author sought no comment or opinion from Vietnamese government officials in charge of adoptions, birth parents or their relatives, social workers or officials from child welfare agencies, or even any adult Vietnamese adoptees. For if she had, a more complex and comprehensive picture of the process and its effects on everyone involved could have painted. The series could have gone beyond the traditionally narrow focus of “orphan” and “savior”.

Although the series mentioned allegations of official corruption and the selling of infants on the black market, which forced the Vietnamese and American governments to briefly halt adoptions from Vietnam a few years ago, the articles appear to treat these crimes as nuisances by highlighting the prospective adoptive parents’ anxiety and anguish as they were forced to put their adoption plans on hold. To seemingly sweep these charges under the rug and forget about them is an offense to journalism.

Perhaps when Nguoi Viet2 chooses to report on adoption again, the editor will keep in mind that its audience will be comprised of many diverse members from the adoption community, and they will expect to be informed rather than ignored.

Thank you for your time.

The Adoption Show promo

Thanks be to Gershom!

UPDATE: Got word that the podcast will be posted on May 25!!

The Adoption Show

Are they ready for me? Am I ready for it?

[my right knee starts bouncing up and down uncontrollably just thinking about tomorrow]

My Ego: Tell them already, you numbskull!

My Nerves: All right, all right…

Tomorrow at 5:30pm PST I’ll be talking with the venerable Gershom (Without A Tribe) on The Adoption Show about the ubiquitous topic [irreversibly?] tainting the modern adoption industry…baby buying & selling, international trafficking of these babies and questionable (or non-existent) paper trails that serve to essentially erase the children’s histories and please the adoption gods. We will mainly discuss ongoing stories and recent developments in Cambodia, Guatemala and Vietnam.

With more and more of us adult adoptees empowering and asserting ourselves, and either with or without an invitation, we’ll insert ourselves into the debate and start talking back. 

Anyway, the podcast will be recorded, edited for length and then finally posted on The Adoption Show website. I’ll let you know when it is up there.

Corruption in Adoption (Or How to Ignore the Elephant in the Room)

Back in the fall of 2005, the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle presented an exhibit featuring international adoption from Asia, called “Asian & Pacific Islander Adoptees: A Journey through Identity”. I was contracted to provide text for several theme panels that were to be hung in the major installations. At the beginning, I asked the exhibit coordinator if I could address the subject of corruption that had become a hot button topic, due to the premature ending of adoptions from Cambodia. He told me it shouldn’t be problem since it’s an important issue related to adoption and that the exhibit should display a critical bent as well. So, I went ahead wrote it along with the other panels.

Guess which of the panels never made into the exhibit? 

Well, three years later and in light of the recent back-and-forth between Vietnam and the U.S., I’m going to finally publish what I had written and expected to be in the museum exhibit on Asian adoptees. I never did get an explanation as to the curious absence of the panel about corruption in adoption, but it didn’t take much deduction to figure it out because the exhibit was light in substance and heavy in sentimentality.

So, without further ado, I give you…  

Corruption In International Adoption from Asia

In the past four years, Cambodia and Vietnam have become embroiled in accusations of child trafficking as it concerns the adoption of children overseas. It is a classic case of a few unscrupulous people taking advantage of the high level of poverty in the general population and lax government enforcement of adoption laws. The breakdown occurred when legal standards of verifying whether or not a child is unmistakably an orphan were not followed. The following accounts of corruption have raised fundamental questions of the ethics and nature of international adoption.

Cambodia

In late 2003 and in the summer of 2004, the director of Seattle International Adoptions Inc., Lynn Devin, and her sister, Lauryn Galindo, an adoption facilitator, plead guilty to charges of falsely representing adopted Cambodian children as orphans to U.S. immigration authorities and other financial improprieties. 

According to charging documents obtained by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (December 17, 2003), “special agents from the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation Division found that Galindo and Devin misled U.S. immigration authorities into believing the children were orphans and issuing them visas, according to charging documents.”

To be more specific:

In May 1998, Galindo told the adoptive parents to give the birth mother $100 and to donate $3,500 to the Kampong Speu orphanage that housed the child. That same day, Lynn Devin spoke from Seattle with the adoptive parent who was in Cambodia, according to court records. The adoptive mother told Devin she had been surprised to have met the parents and siblings of the adoptive child. Devin reassured the adoptive mother that Galindo had told her about their meeting and that it would be best for her to go ahead and bring the adoptive child to the United States.

The next day, Galindo allegedly completed an immigration form for the child falsely representing that the adoptive child had no parents, the court documents say.

In Cambodia itself, the human rights group LICADHO (Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights) sounded the alarm on a child abduction racket  involving four women and a man in September 2001. This organization “had received 12 children, 10 of them aged between 10 days and two years. The agency is also looking after a three-year-old boy and a girl aged six. (as reported in Phnom Penh Daily, September 9)”

In response to the disturbing evidence of children being taken from or sold by their birth parents for the purpose of adoption, the former INS suspended the processing of petitions for orphans in Cambodia as of December 21, 2001. The Cambodian government is in the process of strengthening its adoption laws in line with the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption….. (and …) standardizing (its) child welfare measures that will curtail the exploitation of children.

Vietnam

Possibly as a direct result from the Cambodia episode, an article in a Vietnamese publication called the World Security Newspaper (December 27, 2001) accused the adoption agency International Mission of Hope (IMH) of coercing birth parents to give up their children to be adopted by foreigners. 

In letters signed by two Vietnamese birth mothers, they accused the Cau Giay orphanage of putting their children up for adoption without their consent. This orphanage was established and supported by IMH.  After further investigation by IMH representatives, however, it was found that these two women had been coerced into signing letters by a man claiming to be a liaison between the orphanage and the U.S. Embassy. He promised the women that the U.S. Embassy would pay them $500 if they reported that their children were unlawfully put up for adoption by the orphanage. One of the women finally signed an affidavit in the presence of IMH representatives and Vietnamese police authorities stating that she had been tricked into accusing the orphanage of child trafficking. The other woman also signed an affidavit later on stating the same scam had been perpetrated on her.

Despite these findings, the damage had already been done. According to IMH, “[T]he letters were used as supporting evidence in nine NOIDs [Notices of Intent to Deny] issued to IMH families between the date of December 27th and January 5th 2002.”

Cherie Clark, the director of IMH, was forced to close its adoption program in Vietnam.

The current state of adoptions from Vietnam is explained by Maura Harty, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs:

“In July 2002 the Government of Vietnam…imposed a number of new requirements on international adoptions including the requirement that there be a bilateral agreement between Vietnam and other countries regarding international adoptions before such adoptions can take place.

“It is general U.S. government policy not to sign bilateral treaties when a multilateral instrument that covers the issue exists…[T]he federal government is not authorized to negotiate international treaties and thus make new commitments on behalf of the States. We were very hopeful that an MOU (memorandum of understanding) would enable us to meet the goal we all share, which is to help Vietnamese children who need permanent family placements now.”

P.S. Anh Ðào Kolbe had several of her photos exhibited at the museum, which she took during her trip to Vietnam. You can view her entire portfolio online here.

To us….

For the past month, I’ve been blogging with a couple extraordinary people at Misplaced Baggage. Out of mutual trust and respect, we have come to realize how enriching this experience has been to each of our lives. If there were a radio station that I actually listened to, then I would dedicate the following songs to us, as well as to those who have become our regular readers and supporters. I feel honored to just be mentioned in the same company as you guys. Cheers.

Was wir alleine nicht schaffen…

by Xavier Nadoo

refrain:
Was wir alleine nicht schaffen
Das schaffen wir dann zusammen
Dazu brauchen wir keinerlei Waffen
Unsere Waffe nennt sich unser Verstand
Und was wir alleine nicht schaffen
Das schaffen wir dann zusammen
Nur wir müssen geduldig sein
Dann dauert es nicht mehr lang

What we cannot do alone
We’ll accomplish together
We need no weapons at all
Our weapon is our unity*
And what we cannot do alone
We’ll accomplish together
We only have to be patient
Then it won’t be long

* The German word “Verstand” doesn’t directly tranlsate into English as “unity”, but for all intents and purposes this is what the lyric is trying to convey.

This World Can’t Tear Us Apart

by Trivium

refrain:
All the pain in this world won’t stop us now
For we have each other
All the hate in this world can’t tear us apart
This love is forever

No place like Shermer, Illinois

The Breakfast Club

Originally uploaded by KevMinh

Dear Mr. Vernon: We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But, we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us: in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But, what we found out is that each one of us is: a brain . . .

And an athlete . . .

And a basket case . . .

A princess . . .

And a criminal.

Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, The Breakfast Club.

As long as we’re being honest…

Is it the eyes? Is it the hair? Is it the brownish skin tone? I’ve been called ‘Chinese’ before, but was never mistaken for Korean - until now.

Look, I appreciate when bloggers extend to other bloggers well-deserved kudos. But, please make sure you read beyond just one post before making assumptions that will come back to bite you in the ass.

Unless life is playing a huge freakin’ joke on me, according to several official sources my Vietnamese mother gave birth to me in Việt Nam in the district of Gia Ðịnh near Sài Gòn. Plus, someone, I don’t know who exactly, gave me the Vietnamese name Nguyên Ðúc Mînh. Thus, all signs pretty much point to the Indochinese peninsula rather than the Korean peninsula. 

With that said, I will graciously accept anyone’s (past and future) admiration for my writing and will extend to them my well wishes for their own blogging endeavors.

Just don’t call me Shirley.

a lot of people

a lot of people don’t care about a lot of things, and a lot of things don’t get done because a lot of people cannot be depended on.

a lot of money floats in and out of people’s hands to acquire a lot of things and to do a lot of things to the detriment of a lot of people who don’t usually have a lot of things going for them.

a lot of bombs and missiles are dreamed up by a lot of people who test these weapons on a lot of empty fields contaminated with a lot of holes filled with purple fluid that will never wash away.

a lot of us have been digging a lot of graves prematurely in empty lots where a lot of other people’s bones have been laid to rest in order to escape a lot of things that we don’t like about ourselves.

it’s a lot to behold.

but there’s still a lot of laughter to be had and a lot of forgiveness to bestow before last call, when we don’t have to go home, but we can’t stay here.

Fellow adult Vietnamese adoptee has a story to show on YouTube

A fellow adult Vietnamese adoptee gave Ethnically Incorrect Daughter an exclusive video of his month-long visit to Vietnam.

Take a gander.