Viet-American film

A new film wave

Charlie Nguyen also aspires to tell more cinematic stories
about Vietnam… But he acknowledges that living in the States causes a cultural
barrier, or distance, for him.

“When I try to write, or just to get comfortable with the
material, it seems like it’s never enough,” the Buena Park resident said. “I’m
always looking from the outside in, versus someone who’s been immersed in
it.”

It’s inspiring to read these accounts because they remind me that I have to work on my own poetry manuscript and get it out into the fickle public. So many of us adult Viet adoptees who write, paint, perform, design, etc. still have so much to contribute to our culture and the general discussion as to what it means to be born over there and to grow up here.

"We’ll Fight; You Shop!"

Stuck on a filing cabinet next to my desk at work there is a leaflet that has the image of the prototypical American soldier wearing the G.I. flak jacket and helmet with a stern stare aimed at the viewer.

The message is not only striking due to the clever appropriation of unmistakeable patriotic symbols and colors, but also the command for all Americans to continue on with their lives, as if nothing tragic and momentous had happened on 9/11, and to have faith that our military will protect us from terrorists (terrorist = Muslim, as taught to us by Team Bush).

In fact, with just a couple words – WE’LL FIGHT; YOU SHOP! – the purveyors of this counter-intelligence succinctly capture the cynical and arrogant attitude that our government has held towards us ever since those terrorist attacks occurred. During this great Global War On Terror that the Bush Administration likes to trot out whenever it deems it necessary to put fear into the gullible and induce hate in the faithful, it talks of sacrifice asked both of our troops and our fellow citizens in only the shallowest of terms.

“Sacrifice” is yet another word emptied of its meaning and given back to us like a red-white-and-blue pinwheel we’re supposed to stick in our yards for posterity.

The Bush Administration enjoys comparing this Global War On Terror with those great campaigns of yore at the end of WWII. But, such a comparison could not be further from the truth (and, I should dare say, actually sullies the lives and true sacrifices of those American Navy, Air Force, Army and Marine vets who fought in WWII).

• No draft has been instituted so that all families, no matter which social class they are in, will bear the brunt of sending their members into the armed forces to fight the enemy.
• We’re not being asked to ration food or fuel.
• We’re not being asked to recycle raw materials en masse.
• We’re not being asked to get up off our couches and volunteer to work on public projects in the name of defending the homeland and securing our borders.
• We’re not being asked to populate and reinvigorate our farmland in order to produce enough quality food for our troops.

No, we’ve simply been told to do what we’ve always been doing before that horrible day in September. Which was what exactly?

There’s a great song by Creedence Clearwater Revival called “Don’t Look Now (It Ain’t You Or Me)”. The lyrics are below, and, in my opinion, reflect our current shameful situation of looking the other way while other people pay for our sins.

Who will take the coal from the mine?
Who will take the salt from the earth?
Who’ll take a leaf and grow it to a tree?
Don’t Look Now, it ain’t you or me.

Who will work the field with his hands?
Who will put his back to the plough?
Who’ll take the mountain and give it to the sea?
Don’t Look Now, it ain’t you or me.

CHORUS:

Don’t Look Now, someone’s done your starvin’;
Don’t Look Now, someone’s done your prayin’ too.

Who will make the shoes for your feet?
Who will make the clothes that you wear?
Who’ll take the promise that you don’t have to keep?
Don’t Look Now, it ain’t you or me.

CHORUS

Who will take the coal from the mines?
Who will take the salt from the earth?
Who’ll take the promise that you don’t have to keep?
Don’t Look Now, it ain’t you or me.

Replacement Children

“Disruption”.

Ever heard of this term?

It’s a seldom used option made available by many adoption agencies for clueless adoptive parents, who dove head first into their von Trapp wet dream without checking first to see whether or not there was even water in the pool.

“Disruption”, in the adoption industry, basically means the adoptive parents no longer want the child they adopted and wish to move the child out of their house and cut all ties to this little person. Unbelievably, they are wishing to turn back time and collect a “do over”.

To be righteously unfair about it, disruption is antiseptic for the parents and messy for the children they chose to adopt.

What set me on this warpath, is when I was reading iBastard’s post about a post he read on the blog Just Enjoy Him who, in turn, read what can only be described as a classified ad on the A Child’s Waiting website, pushing for the re-adoption of a girl named Chloe whose adoptive parents supposedly felt she complicated their idyllic vision of a “happy” family.

The following account I’m about to give should not be taken as an attempt to discredit adoptive parents cart blanche, but as one more puzzle piece to be added to that growing puzzle of adoption.

Chloe’s situation reminds me of my last year working as a post-placement coordinator at a non-profit adoption agency. The social service wing of the agency was thrown in the middle of a distressing disruption case involving an adolescent girl originally from India. The adoptive family accused the agency of deceiving them into adopting a girl who had a whole host of mental and psychological problems that seemed to stem from her biological family’s dysfunction. Finally, after four years of living with them, the girl’s adoptive parents apparently had had enough of her acting out and, after refusing more respite and more counseling, decided to pack up her essentials and have the adoptive father accompany her on a plane back to India and leave her in the care of the orphanage she was adopted from!

You can only imagine the shit-storm that followed this brazen act of child abandonment.

The director of the orphanage was confused by this turn of events when the adoptive father handed his “daughter” back to her and then became furious with the adoption agency for allowing this to happen.

Meanwhile, this girl, whose mental maturity was far below her actual age, probably didn’t know what hit her and she ended up living in an environment that for all intents and purposes was foreign to her, especially since she had become acclimated to a very different way of life. So, the orphanage couldn’t keep her and it was decided that she be sent back to live with her older sister’s family. Of course, this is a recipe for disaster and, eventually a huge, blistering pie made up of resentment, anger, sadness and disorientation was set on the window sill to cool.

And, this is not even the sad, frustrating part of the story.

Because of the girl’s unsuccessful assimilation back into her birth family and birth country, the agency and the orphanage director decided that this girl is to be brought back to the U.S. so that they can somehow rectify her torn-and-frayed childhood. It falls on the shoulders of the director of the social work wing of the agency to set up and coordinate this girl’s re-entry and re-re-assimilation into American life.

Suffice it to say, none of the adoptive families who remained close to the agency and were big donors would touch this girl with a 10 ft. pole due to their extensive rumor-mongering about her difficult life with her former adoptive family. Schooling was out of the question because her experience as a student was almost non-existent because of her behavioral problems and eroding family ties. So, the agency, without much recourse, decided to put her up in a group home where she would be supervised all day and could be driven back and forth to her part-time job at a grocery store. However, when I finally left the agency, as I remember clearly, even that sparse arrangement was slowly falling apart.

Who the hell knows what this girl is doing now and how she is coping on her own without the benefit of parental concern and guidance. The few times I talked to her it seemed like her thoughts were elsewhere and that she was resolved to the uncertainty of her life.

When the subject of adoption becomes unavoidable for me in polite conversation or when I voluntarily offer up this biographical curiosity about me to others, it has become common for people to relate how they were thinking of adoption once or that someone close to them adopted a child. Usually unconsciously, a voice deep down inside of me comes very close to tripping past my lips to loudly warn people within earshot: “Don’t do it!!”

It sounds like blasphemy.

But, I think of adoptees like Chloe or the Indian girl or other kids I was aware of while working at the agency whose adoptions were “disrupted”, and I can’t help but wish that this practice of dis-placing kids from an unknown present and re-placing them in an unknown future would cease.

For the sake of the children. How ironic.

Adoption Ethics & Accountability

Coming up none too soon is this worthwhile conference on adoption:

The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute and Ethica, Inc. are co-sponsoring an exciting and timely conference, Adoption Ethics and Accountability, on October 15-16, 2007, in Washington, D.C. This is the second conference hosted by the Adoption Institute that focuses on critical ethical issues in the field today.

Thanks to Linh Song of Ethica, Inc. (and also Mam Non) for alerting me to this event.

Live

In the past two weeks I’ve gone to two great concerts. I got to see Rush for the first time in my life and Symphony X on Friday.

Also, saw a relatively new metal band (one of two that opened for Symphony X) whose lead singer is an intense, svelt, blonde woman with a dark angelic voice. The band’s name is Echoes of Eternity.

I figure that I might as well get my fill of loud, heavy, breath-taking music before my eardrums deteriorate and all I’m left with are memories of tunes floating haphazard in my brain.

Things You Cannot Say Aloud You Say Within

No Resemblance

when you look at your mother
you can see that you have her nose and her ears.
when you look at your father
you can see that you have his eyes and his chin.

but when I look at my mother,
I don’t see my mother.
I see a woman I love like a mother.

and when I look at my father,
I don’t see my father.
I see a man I love like a father.

my grandmother loved telling us stories
about this and that relative who had long since passed.
she pointed to the photos in the album and said,
these are your great-great-grandparents;
these are your great-aunts and uncles;
this was my father, your great-grandfather.
and, I would nod and smile politely.

people would pause for a second
when I arrived on their doorstep
and told them what my name is
and that I was there to pick up their daughters
for our first date.

I was always the quiet surprise in a plain brown wrapper
who spoke like everyone else despite others’ insistence
that I had the power to conjure up that dead language
that lie dormant in ancestral memories somewhere unclaimed.

there is a bridge I will never cross.
there are documents I can never erase.
there is a difference,and that difference is me.

Boxes

Sume does it again…a wonderful rumination on what it means to be adopted. She brings up a curious phenomenon between adoptees and their adoptive parents. That is, adoptees, if they desire to know their own lives before they were conscious of the fact that their parents didn’t give birth to them, will perpetually be playing catch up because their adoptive parents will hold memories and, quite possibly, documents that could potentially change the life course of their adopted children if they disclosed this information to them.

And, there’s the rub: that word “if“. Because that’s where the turning point lies, when the adoptive parents, who have the information that the adoptee has no idea about and yet is dying to have, DECIDE to hand it over. It’s their decision. This is where I sympathize with Sume knowing that she feels like she is being held captive in a sort of cage of ignorance that is not of her own making.

The more I think about it, though, there are multiple layers of information suppression that go into the making of an “adoptee”. You not only have the adoptive parents, but also ministries of social welfare, adoption agencies (or private brokers!), privacy laws supported by certain groups and then enacted by the states, orphanage personnel, and finally birthparents and/or relatives who know the most about the adopted individual. Separately, they all hold pieces of information that could enlighten an adopted person’s sense of Self. Or, unfortunately, such information could destroy a person’s self-identity.

However, after all is said and done, it is up to the adoptee to interpret the information she is given and to put it into context. At some point in an adoptee’s life, her parents not only must let go of her physical being to become a part of the larger community, but also release all that they know about the adoption to her in order for her to be free to sort it out on her own time.

Not to be too glib about it, but I could compare adoptees’ lives to that old birthday trick when someone gives the gift-receiver a big box and inside that box is a smaller box, and so on and so on, until the last box contains something unexpected and, hopefully, well worth the effort of opening up each of those boxes with a quick breath of anticipation.

The most important thing is that, in the end, the person knows that what is in that box belongs to them and no one else.

"Petunia" responds

So, a blogger calling herself “petunia” responded to my recent post about my brief examination of the pejoratives “bitter adoptee” and “angry adoptee”. She is of the opinion that there are indeed so-called bitter and angry individuals who insist on denigrating the institution of adoption because their own experience as adopted persons turned out less than stellar.

If you read her blog, you’ll find that she herself was adopted (from Colombia) and is currently an adoptive mother, too.

Below you’ll find “petunia”’s complete response from the “Comments” section of my blog:

There is a big difference with being curious about your origins and your biological family and letting the actual fact you are adopted turn you bitter and angry. I’m not trying to say all adoptees are happy people… there are enough biological children that are unhappy. But when an adoptee has not had the best life sometimes they like to blame adoption and they get pretty radical about how everyone should be against adoption. They say angry and mean things… THAT is a bitter angry adoptee. It has nothing to do with curiosity or wanting to change adoption practices so they are better and more ethical – I’m all for that.

“petunia” was obviously referring to this part of my post:

On a practical level, terms such as “bitter” and “angry” confuse our sense of loyalty to ourselves and our relatives. Many of us hesitate to satisfy our natural curiosity about our origins due to the fear of being classified as one of those “thankless” and “ungrateful” war babies who were given a second chance at life. The public says that we are Americans (or Australians, British, Norwegian, etc.) now, so just get used to the fact.

Now, I’ve re-read this part of my post several times, and I’ve come to the conclusion that “petunia” didn’t understand the message I was trying to convey possibly because she believed I was conflating inherent human behavior (curiosity about one’s origins) and personally biased identity construction (the “bitter angry adoptee”).

As a matter of fact, her comment betrays a tone of animosity toward adoptees who would dare criticize the very practice that afforded them another chance at becoming part of a family and supposedly a productive member of society.

However, the biggest mistake she makes is equating the circumstances of adopted children to bio children by stating that bio children can be just as unhappy about their family situations as adopted children, which is self-evident. But, what’s missing from this assertion is the fact that adoptive parents and adopted children do not share the same bloodline and adopted children will always be reminded of the very people who gave birth to them. I contend that with this knowledge in mind adopted children have a tougher hill to climb in order to achieve a solid sense of Self.

Thus, in my original post, I was attempting to point out that the off-putting characterizations of “angry” and “bitter” have a chilling effect over an adoptee’s endeavor (and right) to puzzle the pieces of his former life together in order to understand his place within both his adoptive family and birth family. In the course of this exploration, the adoptee could feel angry and bitter about the losses incurred due to the practice of adoption. This type of reaction, in my opinion, is completely normal and – God forbid – healthy. What people like “petunia” need to do is not be so dismissive of these emotions, which are part of a process that most adoptees go through in order to reconcile their past and present lives.

In Other (Racist) News…

It’s still about race in Jena, La.

Jena, a community of 4,000, is about 85 percent white. While the black community gathered at a church to respond, others didn’t see the significance. Soohen interviewed Jena town librarian Barbara Murphy, who reflected: “The nooses? I don’t even know why they were there, what they were supposed to mean. There’s pranks all the time, of one type or another, going on. And it just didn’t seem to be racist to me.” Tensions rose.

This article should be become a staple in cultural competence courses offered by adoption agencies who take the time to educate their prospective adoptive parents – mostly Caucasian – about race consciousness and identity development in the U.S.

The above excerpt typifies the willful ignorance awarded to the members of White privilege who dutifully ignore the past lessons of the struggle for civil rights and the current struggle for those same rights for (virtually the same) minority populations. It also gives much credence to many transracial adult adoptees’ stories/accounts/biographies of the racism and discrimination they’ve had to face in their majority Caucasian communities.

As reported in the above article, the ongoing phenomenon of racial bigotry has a direct effect on how people of color are treated by their fellow citizens and how they are continually denied equal justice under the law.

Pound Vick

So, as I usually do during my morning routine just before leaving for work, I tune into Air America. I enjoy listening to The Young Turks first (because I’m usually up by 5:00 or 5:30AM), then I usually catch the first half hour of The Stephanie Miller Show.

Today, while listening to The Stephanie Miller Show, her fill-in, Elayne Boosler, talked about the indictment of Michael Vick, the Atlanta Falcons starting quarterback, and three other men for animal cruelty. Apparently, Vick owned a dog kennel that bred pitbulls for dogfighting matches.

However, any American will tell you that a crime like this one is not an aberration in this country. I remember watching reports about dogfighting on TV news shows and reading about it in the newspaper back in the late 80’s when the media whipped up a frenzy against pit bulls because gangs were using them to attack people.

What’s sickening, though, are the reports of the indictment that describe how many of the dogs were murdered if they lost a match or were incapable of fighting. Shooting, drowning, electrocution.

My gut reaction to this alleged cruelty to the dogs is to take the perpetrators out in the middle of the street, strip them naked and beat them with clubs or chain link until they’re paralyzed, and then force feed them the dogs’ carcasses.

But, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show has a pretty good suggestion for punishment, too.