Corny & Crass

Today’s adoptive parents both scare and humor me. There’s such a push to normalize and publicize international adoption, especially their own prerogative to adopt from overseas, that they end up looking like a bunch of clueless hicks dressing up their hogs for show at the state fair. The thing that makes their attempts at celebrating their children’s adoption and acknowledging their birth culture/country comi-tragic is that they only seem to be listening to their own inner-circle advice and recycling their own stereotypes about the children’s birth culture.

For instance, check out the following messages on t-shirts being sold at Cafe Press to those parents of Vietnamese adoptees:

“Yes, I’m bilingual. I can cry in both English and Vietnamese.”

“I’m not fat. I’m expecting a child from Vietnam.”

“Our Family MADE IN THE USA With American & Vietnamese Parts”

“Please don’t tell my mommy & daddy, but they don’t look a thing like me!”

and my personal favorite:

I don’t deny that it’s complicated and confusing to raise a child who doesn’t look like you and was born in a different country than you were. But, what makes these parents feel that they can ignore the thousands of us, ADULT adoptees, who have gone through so much crap in our lives (and possibly still sifting through it), which, honestly, their kids are going to experience soon enough, as well as our histories, experiences, triumphs and failures? Are we truly invisible to them or are the parents willfully ignorant of how we can help prepare them for some major issues that will confront their children head on as they grow into young adults?

My suspicion of their general silence, which is borne out in my infrequent conversations with both adoptive parents and other people curious about adoption, is that the process of adoption and the emotional (as well as financial) toll it takes on its participants is such that adoptive parents and prospective adoptive parents immediately circle the wagons when their fantasy of building a family and raising a child of a different country and race is invaded by the marauders of reality and sobriety.

As you can see by the messages on the t-shirts, there’s an attempt to have it both ways: Recognize the child’s essential racial and ethnic differences, but flatten those differences as much as possible to give the impression that “love conquers all” and the adopting family has always been one cohesive unit. Also, if you look through all the t-shirts being offered (I suggest looking through each country-specific t-shirt collection, in order to catch my drift), there’s an overwhelming theme being trumpeted that I don’t think the creators of the pithy phrases consciously intended: “He’s my child now!! Mine, mine, mine! He belongs to ME and no one can tell me otherwise!” In other words, the process of adoption has been reduced to a financial transaction wherein a fee has been given in order to acquire another human being for the sole pleasure and vanity of another (much older) human being.

Another suspicion I have as to why adoptive parents are hesitant about consulting adult adoptees, or otherwise hostile to the very idea, is that there’s still an overwhelming sense that adult adoptees are perpetual children who are too immature to speak for themselves and too invested in their own “bitter” identities to objectively examine and comment on the subject of adoption. But, I have to admit that I hold virtually the same, albeit reverse, opinion of (prospective) adoptive parents: I see many of them as overly self-involved, willfully ignorant exploiters of human misery.

Hence, the impasse many of us adult adoptees are experiencing once we start to understand how the adoption industry functions and see how the culture of adoption is spreading.

To-Read List

I’ve a lot of books at home and my wife is getting on my case about reading at least half of them before I buy even more books just to lovingly stow them away for later years. So, I’ve come up with a list of books on my shelves that I want to read to the exclusion of all my other books; books that focus on a topic that has consumed me up to this point.

It will be no surprise to anyone who’s read my blog the past couple months that all the books I’m listing are about the Vietnam War. What can I say? It’s something I’ll probably never get over.

P.S. The following list does not reflect the order in which I’m reading these books or any hierarchy of worth.

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• The Pentagon Papers: The Secret History of the Vietnam War

• America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam 1950-1975, Herring, George C.

• Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, FitzGerald, Frances.

• South Vietnam: Nation Under Stress, Scigliano, Robert.

• The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War, Gaiduk, Ilya V.

• Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, Lam, Andrew.

• The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family, Elliott, Duong Van Mai.

• Buddha’s Child: My Fight to Save Vietnam, Nguyen Cao Ky with Marvin J. Wolf.

• Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides, Appy, Christian G.

• Ao Dai: My War, My Country, My Vietnam, Xuan Phuong and Daniele Mazingarbe.

• Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected Writings, 1920-1966, Edited and with an Introduction by Bernard B. Fall.

• The Vietnamese Revolution: Fundamental Problems Essential Tasks, Le Duan.

• Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Elsberg, Daniel.

Vietnamese Pride

When we speak of “Viet pride” what do we mean and what connotations are we envisioning and wish to pass on to the public?

Unwarranted Fetishization

Harlow Monkey wrote a post about a photo exhibit called “Daddy and I”, and vietK broke down both her post and the photo exhibit into enlightened and revealing bite-sized morsels.

I left a comment on vietK’s blog and I’m just going to re-publish it here. Please read Harlow Monkey’s post and then vietK’s post before digesting my comment. Otherwise, what I wrote will probably seem out of left field:

Your point about how the media is training society to view any relationship between men and young kids as predatory and sexualized brings to the fore one of the main problems with journalism and the media today. That is, they take singular, sensationalistic and extremely tragic events and broad-brush a large group under the guise of community awareness, but in actuality they are inflaming and/or creating superficial prejudices.

Your point about race was very striking. I didn’t think about re-imagining the photos with white fathers and their white daughters. But, now that I’m very race-conscious, I was a little embarrassed that I came very close to lumping these photos with other Asiaphilic images I’ve become accustomed to. As you stated, I wouldn’t have thought twice about these images if the father and daughter were of the same race or if the daughter was biracial.

Hell, the photographer’s statement is pretty much setting us up to air our built-in Westernized stereotypes and prejudices without truly thinking about it.

A Speech That Will Live In Infamy

On August 22nd, President Bush gave a speech before a chapter of the VFW in Kansas City, equating the situation in Iraq with the war against the Japanese in WWII, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

With his comments, Mr. Bush tried something that few leading politicians of either party have tried in a generation: Reopening the national argument over the Vietnam War, a conflict that ended more than three decades ago but has remained an emotional national touchstone.

And he was giving rare political voice to the views of those who — like many in the hall today — believe that the American pullout from Vietnam was a mistake, and who reject the popular view among Baby Boomers that America should never have sent troops there in the first place.

Funny how the speech focused on three conflagrations with Asian countries.

Anyway, his insistence that the tragic aftershocks of the American military withdrawal from Vietnam could have been averted if American forces had stayed and tried to prop up the South Vietnamese indefinitely is truly a crime against historical perspective and the victims of that war. He was counting on the fact that many Americans, especially young ones, are still ignorant of the reasons we became entangled in Vietnam (and Southeast Asia, in general), and the impact and consequences of American policy, which the Vietnamese bore the brunt of. The Iraq War is starting to echo the Vietnam War in its searing frustration and lost cause aspect. The government is simply using different meat to push through the same old meat grinder

Some Vietnamese had some choice words for President Bush:

“With regard to the American war in Vietnam, everyone knows that we fought to defend our country and that this was a righteous war of the Vietnamese people,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Le Dung said. “And we all know that the war caused tremendous suffering and losses to the Vietnamese people.”

…

“Let the Iraqis determine their fate by themselves,” Thang said. “They don’t need American troops there.”

…

“The price we, the Vietnamese people on both sides, paid during the war was due to the fact that the Americans went into Vietnam in the first place,” Ninh said.

Incongruities

“…it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.”

An editorial in The New York Times brings to the fore the cognitive dissonance displayed by our government in its prosecution of the continuing occupation of Iraq.

Written by four non-commissioned officers in the Army.

I’m no billionaire’s son

Chao-Vietnam picked up on an interesting story of a very wealthy American woman who is searching for a boy, now a man, whom she tried to adopt from Da Nang at the end of the war.

A program called “Thanh Nhien” was chosen to search for this “boy” and has probably whittled down the prospects to one person who still remains missing, even though his sister came in contact with him in 2000 many years after she and her brother had left their Vietnamese adoptive family.

No motive is given for the American woman’s desire to search for this person who could have been her adopted son all these years later.

Toleration in Moderation

It continually amazes me the bunk that people believe in which colors their thoughts and actions in the real world.

Take for instance Norway’s princess Maertha Louise. In Yahoo! News I read an article about the opening of a school for people who wish to “get in contact with (their) angels”, which was created by the princess. According to the article, people who want to attend the school will have to shell out 12,000 kroner per semester (approximately $2,100) and be subjected to alternative therapies and the like for three years.

In these days, tolerance is taken for granted in democratic societies where the national character inevitably changes in each generation. Most reasonable people take the principled stance that not everyone is going to think or believe or act like them and that it’s unlawful (perhaps even inhuman) to force another person to think like they do or act like they do against their better judgment or self-interest.

However, I believe there are boundaries of rationality, reason and good taste that we should not cross. And, the “angel” school crossed those boundaries. Luckily, again according to the article, many Norwegians believe the princess and her school are plain nuts.

To me, wondering if angels exist is like wondering if a child’s imaginary friend is real. Believers in angels will tell you that they exist even though no one else can see them and, likewise, children will insist that they can see their imaginary friends even though no one else can.

I guess, some people never grow up.

Quiet-tude

You’ve probably seen me before: at a party, in the classroom, at a wedding, at a family reunion. I’m one of those guys who usually keeps to himself, sits or stands in the same place without making much of an attempt to mingle, looks uncomfortable among a group of people and leaves with no explanation.

You’ve probably told me that I should talk more, that I’m too quiet and that I should come out of my shell more often.

You’re probably one of those people who enjoys the company of others, just can’t be alone with your own thoughts. You crave interaction with others, no matter who they are, so long as you get to hear your own voice.

You’re one of those people who always has an opinion and who can expound on everything and nothing. Your head acts like a satellite dish, turning this way and that, continuously searching for the best reception.

You have no problem expressing your most private feelings and revealing your friends’ most entrusted secrets.

You talk as if no one can hear you; you talk as if everyone should stop everything at once and listen; you talk as if everything is self-explanatory.

So, I have nothing to say to you since you seem to know everything.

I have nothing to say to you since you seem quite content with the company you keep.

Don’t worry about me.

I’m just another promise you decided not to keep.

Perverse Reunions

When is soon too soon for an international adoptee to go back to the country of his birth and confront the people and the circumstances behind his adoption? When does an adoptee decide that it’s time to puzzle together the pieces of his life pre-adoption and consider the possibility of a reunion with his birthparents and/or relatives?

The biggest, and most problematic, question, though, is should adoptive parents bow to the demands and/or wishes of their adopted child to go back to their country of origin and possibly meet the people who conceived him, even though the child is too young to understand the repercussions of his desires?

While working as a post-placement coordinator at a nonprofit adoption agency a few years back, my main task was to read adoptive parents’ reports they were required to send to their children’s respective countries of birth. Occasionally, the parents would report about their children’s desire to see the people who “made” them, especially if the children were having a difficult time acclimating to their new families or were in the midst of an identity crisis.

From my perspective, many new adoptive parents instinctively panic when this topic is broached because it immediately casts doubt on their own parenting skills and initial wisdom in adopting, as well as their cherished need for the adoption to be a “success”. Some parents will see their children’s desire to search and find the other half of themselves as a permanent fissure that will always taint their relationship with them no matter how many times they’ve acknowledged this to be an important phase of adoption. Other parents will see this as an opportunity to strengthen the bond with their children even more because they recognize every human’s need to know where (and from whom) they came from in order to establish their own particular space within whichever community they find themselves.

But, back to the problem I stated at the start of this post: When is it inappropriate for adoptive parents to take their adopted children back to the source of their children’s beginnings?

A couple years ago, as part of Vietnamese Adoptee Network, I got to know two single women who chose to adopt a child from Vietnam, a boy and a girl respectively. I would schedule playdates, lunches or dinners with them, mainly because I enjoyed playing with their kids. The kids were all around cute, intelligent, witty and rambunctious. The mothers were very independent-minded, smart and ambitious. At the time, they were great company. Our relationship, as I look back on it, was more of a service I was offering and the mothers were willing to accept for the sake of their children’s adjustment to being an adoptee. However, I never talked about adoption with their kids because 1) they were too young (not that they didn’t understand they were adopted from a country named “Vietnam”; good or bad, their mothers energetically fostered a self-awareness in their children about this fact); 2) I wanted to play the big brother role and be someone they could look up to, rather than a 30-something headcase who was still struggling with the intricacies and absurdities of his own adoption.

But, as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. Cracks in the façade of mutual appreciation and selflessness appeared and I could no longer see any benefit in me hanging around, acting as if I were an ideal adult version of their children.

The mother who adopted the girl still kept in touch with her birth family by letter and had collected a small cache of photos, each showing her parents, siblings, cousins, etc. Some of the photos were on display around the house just like any other family portrait and her daughter could name each family member. This archive of photos and mementos that the adoptive mother was developing for her child to one day look back on and cherish was not only an amazing feat, but also a touching memorial to her daughter’s loss of her original family and homeland. But, before we get too maudlin about this extraordinary gift to her daughter, I have to tell you that I slowly developed severe reservations about the metaphorical crisscrossing of wires that could have been happening in her daughter’s mind. As she grows older, I can only imagine that this young girl, either in her private thoughts or in explicit conversations with people around her, will have a difficult time coming to terms with her two Selves: the affluent one that lives in the U.S. with a woman she freely calls “mother” and the one that, for reasons unbeknownst to her, was not allowed to stay with the two people who conceived her, along with the siblings whom those two people chose to keep in Vietnam. Think about it. How would you feel if you were in her situation being aware of these two competing facts and having to make sense of the reasons why you are here instead of there?

The situation with the mother who adopted the boy really touched a raw nerve in me when I received a letter from her a couple years ago. For New Year’s, this mother enjoyed sending a short letter to her friends and family along with photos regaling us with her and her son’s accomplishments and the milestones they achieved in their bonding process. However, this last letter I received from her described their visit to Vietnam and their trip to the orphanage from which she “found” her son. The thing that especially upset me was the photo of the boy standing in front of his birthmother, her arms draped over his shoulders, both lacking any perceptible expression on their faces, as if they were asking themselves and the people looking on, “Now what?”

When I read her letter and looked at the photos, a facetious voice suddenly popped into my head: “Look, here’s the person who gave birth to you (and gave you away because the family’s too poor to feed another mouth) and here’s the orphanage she placed you in. This is the country I was telling you about when I read to you during all those bedtimes. See all these people who resemble you! Now, you’re not a stranger anymore. Well, son, say goodbye, it’s time to go back home to the U.S.!”

Think of the hurtful message their visit sent to the birthparents:

“Hey, just visiting the old stomping grounds, and, oh, by the way, here’s your son, the one you gave up for adoption! Isn’t he swell? We’re only here for a couple of days, and we’ve got another temple to see and a plane to catch tomorrow back to the ol’ US of A. So, say your Hi’s and Goodbye’s!”

In fact, the above examples bring my generation and the newer generation of Vietnamese adoptees in stark contrast. Because the War was so unforgiving toward thousands of families in Vietnam, the bonds between us and our parents were, in most cases, permanently severed and we were, therefore, truly orphaned. The circumstances surrounding today’s adoptees from Vietnam are not as brutal, but they are no less unfortunate. Even so, today’s adoptees will have a better chance of reconnecting, if not with their birth parents, then at least their birth relatives, if they so choose (and vice versa). And, if I’m not mistaken, nowadays adoptive parents are given much more information about their children’s health and birth families.

Because of these fortuitous circumstances, I believe today’s adoptive parents need to consider long and hard the real, hardcore consequences of sharing information about their children’s birth family with their adopted children. Some pointed questions I would have liked to have asked those two mothers to consider are:

• What if any one of the child’s relatives emigrates to the U.S. in the future and asks to see the child? What if this relative asks to live them or even asks for some kind of assistance?

• What if one of the parents dies? If the child knows about his/her parents and is old enough to travel to Vietnam, what obligation does he/she have to pay his/her respects to the person who gave them life? How would an adoptive parent deal with feelings of guilt or remorse that the child might feel by not being with his/her birth parents in their last moments on earth?

• If the adoptive parents are currently communicating with the birth parents and/or relatives, will they allow their adopted children to continue this communication and, if they do allow it, how closely and for how long should they monitor this activity?

I’m sure you could come up with many more questions that adoptive parents should ask themselves before involving their adopted children in that other half of their life, which ultimately belongs to them, but if handled without forethought could cause a lot of pain and confusion for both the children and themselves, as well as the birth parents/relatives.