Taking Off for a Couple Months

Yes, I’m prying myself away from the keyboard for a while, so I can face the Devil’s Tower of books that is currently taunting me to climb it.

Hopefully, by the end of December I will have reached the summit, prepared to come down and write like the demon spawn I’ve always aspired to be.

I’ll have a full book report ready for you next year!

Songstress

I don’t know about you, but I’m hooked on Feist’s song in the iPod nano commercial – “1, 2, 3, 4”. There’s just something about her voice.

I’ve gotten this feeling before when I first heard Emm Gryner, Aimee Mann and Macy Gray.

It’s that feeling that makes me want to slip away from everyone’s view, become invisible, just so I can take all the time in the world to savor the melody of eons. Each of these musician’s songwriting is pretty unique and their lyrics betray an unmistakeable poetic presence.

So, I went to the Amazon.com website and searched for Feist’s albums. I clicked on some of the song samples from her two albums, “Let It Die” and “The Reminder”, and confirmed my attraction to her music.

Two Interesting Papers on International Adoption

Currently reading and analyzing these two papers on international adoption. As you can tell, the authors are tackling what few in the adoption industry want to see or hear.

THE CHINESE BABY TRADE: International Adoption and the Commodification of Baby Girls. Ward, Katherine B., 04/01/07.

Chinese Laundering: How the Intercountry Adoption System Legitimizes and Incentivizes the Practices of Buying, Trafficking, Kidnapping, and Stealing Children. Smolin, David M., 2005.

December Boys

Hey, Daniel Radcliffe shows some range! Check out the synopsis:

In the late 1960s four orphans, the December Boys, leave their orphanage for a holiday by the sea on the South Australian coast. When rumor gets out that two of the seaside residents are looking to adopt one of the orphans, friendships are tested and new alliances are made. In the end each boy learns something about himself and his place in the world.

Who Doesn’t Love A Silky Smoothe Asian Woman?

…this is the story of a married silkworm smuggler, Herve Joncour, in 19th Century France who travels to Japan to collect his clandestine cargo. While there he spots a beautiful Japanese woman, the concubine of a local baron, with whom he becomes obsessed. Without speaking the same language, they communicate through letters until war intervenes. Their unrequited love persists however, and Herve’s wife Helene begins to suspect.

If you’re jonesing for yet another period piece involving a love story between a White guy and an Asian concubine, then look no further than the newest installment: Silk!

Look how demure she is! Look how masculine he is!

He can’t do that, can he, take both a wife and a mistress?! Well, of course he can, mon frere!! He’s French (White), she’s Japanese (Colored), what’s there not to love?! It’s a match made in the Caucasian Imagination.

Something In My Character

Last night for almost four hours I watched grown men pound on each other inside “the octagon” until one of them “submits”. Yes, I’m referring to the UFC, Ultimate Fighting Championship, series on Spike TV. I’m fascinated by this blood sport because it takes one of our worst fears (getting beat up) and turns it into a competitive enterprise wherein you’re allowed, and blatantly encouraged, to realize and project your ultimate fear upon another person. Your opponent becomes the iconic strawman on whom every transgression and crime is lumped.

The thing that makes it so attractive to me is that it’s never certain who the victor may be. It’s a total 50-50 situation at the beginning. It’s only when the match starts that I notice the convergence of hundreds of tiny mental and physical factors inherent in the fighters, as well as the unseen force of circumstance, which serve to favor one guy over another, for whatever reason.

Another thing that keeps me watching these fights is the very noticeable fact that no matter how exhaustive these fellows train, once they get on the mat and face their opponent, adrenaline and automatic survival instincts kick in and pretty much decide who the winner will be. But, pure luck cannot be discounted. One guy may be dominating the other, connecting on the majority of his strikes or succeeding on takedown after takedown, but one slip in concentration or technique could leave open the slim possibility that that same guy could be knocked out with one devastating punch or get caught in a leg-lock around the neck that forces him to submit.

It’s both a game of chance and skill, however brutal it may be. Very much like life.

War Profiteering During the Vietnam War

The following is an intriguing article published in April 1966 in Michigan State University’s student organ, Ramparts (“The University on the Make”). It recounts how the university administration decided that to make a quick buck it could help the U.S. government set up the Diem regime in South Vietnam. Eventually, the CIA created a front department within the university to carry out its own program. From there, it was all downhill…

Stanley K. Scheinbaum starts the article off with:

During the summer of 1958, I cut my vacation short and rushed off to San Francisco to meet the four leading police figures of South Vietnam. Among them they controlled the Saigon police, the national police and the VBI, South Vietnam’s equivalent of the FBI.

Within an hour of their arrival the youngest, a nephew of Ngo Dinh Diem, conspiratorially drew me aside and informed me that one of the others was going to kill the eldest of the group. The story he told possessed plot and counter-plot. In essence, Michigan State University was being used to invite these men to the United States under the auspices of its foreign aid contract in Vietnam. The dirty deed was to be done prophylactically in the States, uncluttered by any complicating factors in Saigon.

At a time when relations between Diem and the U.S. were already strained, the whole story might have been a trick to embarrass Washington. Or else my informant’s facts could have been straight, and failure to take action would have been equally embarrassing. The upshot was some nocturnal maneuvers and a cross-country flight designed to separate the quartet by forcibly hospitalizing the supposed target on the pretext he showed signs of T.B.

Nothing ever came of the episode. The intended target lived long enough to be executed by Diem’s successors for having assassinated a variety of political prisoners himself.

Un-Precious Cargo

Betty Tisdale didn’t really want to talk to me as soon as I told her I wasn’t one of her “babies”, and that I was adopted about eight months prior to Operation Babylift. A similar scenario occurred when I was talking to one of the former flight attendants who had been on board the Pan Am flight out of Saigon, carrying hundreds of Vietnamese babies and children. She recounted her vivid memories of the chaotic airlift of babies out of the same country in which I was born and from which I was taken eight months before that spectacular death-defying operation. She had come to Seattle for the first national conference put on by Vietnamese Adoptee Network to check on her “kids” and see how they’ve been doing ever since she left them with their caretakers all those years ago. Once again, as soon as I told her I had never been on any of those last flights out of Thanh Son Nhut airport, the conversation came to an awkward standstill.

These encounters were to be my startling introduction to the cottage industry of “Operation Babylift”:

World Airways to Host Flight to Vietnam, Commemorating 30th Anniversary of ‘Operation Babylift”

World Airways is commemorating its historic “Operation Babylift” airlift of 57 Vietnamese orphans from Saigon 30 years ago with a special flight that will return 20 former orphans for a visit to their homeland. The commemorative flight, “Operation Babylift — Homeward Bound,” will depart from Atlanta on June 12, 2005, stopping at the company’s former headquarters city, Oakland, Calif., before heading on for a two-day visit in Ho Chi Minh City. The guests will tour the city and will be honored at a special banquet in the Unification Palace.

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Press Release from the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum

March 29, 6:00 p.m.—Lana Noone, Operation Vietnam Babylift, a humanitarian effort that took place April 1975, when over 2,600 babies, toddlers and children under 10years old were evacuated from Vietnam to the United States, Canada and several European countries. Noone, the mother of two such children, one died in May of 1975 from illness, has pledged to do what she can to help the world remember Babylift. The 30th Anniversary of Operation Babylift is April 2005.

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Precious Cargo documentary

“The children were adopted by loving families and grew up like other American children – only they knew they were different.

“Twenty-five years later, eight adoptees return to Vietnam in search of their history and identity.”

A seemingly impenetrable myth has been weaved around this momentous historical event. The height of drama is reached when you’re told the following story: The North Vietnamese communists were within weeks of closing in on Saigon, chaos reigned, people were clamoring for escape from a country that was rapidly unraveling underneath them, rumors circulated that the godless communists would slaughter the young ones in orphanages, especially the Amerasians, and the caretakers of these orphanages impressed on the American government not to abandon the truly innocent, and devised an ingenious plan to airlift thousands of these babies to safer confines. Thus, Operation Babylift was born. Approximately over 2,000 babies and young children were flown out of South Vietnam, most of whom ended up in the U.S. It was such a singular feel-good event that, to this day, Americans consider it “the one good thing that came out of the war.”

With yet another documentary being released, Operation Babylift: The Lost Children of Vietnam, the stage is set for the same actors and actresses to don their old costumes and play their roles again.

My skepticism of people’s accounts and scripted feelings about this momentous event coincides with my reading and learning of the facts about the War in general. In particular, what the facts are saying to me is that the reasons for America becoming involved in the affairs of Vietnam since the end of WWII are not so clear-cut or as morally sound as our political leaders and military institutions would have us believe. I also have not jumped on the bandwagon to commemorate Operation Babylift because I feel it has turned into a closed loop system of mourning, remembrance, gratitude and redemption to the exclusion of those individuals who were adopted before the rushed exodus in 1975, which includes me.

Is this a case of sour grapes, you may ask. Not at all. I begrudge none of my fellow adoptees’ their own stories or their own feelings about Operation Babylift, nor how they go about presenting and memorializing the event. This is something each of them are going to have to come to terms with on their own time.

What I believe needs to happen, though, is that a more critical and methodical examination of Operation Babylift has to take place in order to add a balanced perspective to the discussion of not only this extraordinary event, but also the war and its aftermath. Instead of it being presented as an isolated, unilateral humanitarian gesture, it needs to be seen within the context of Vietnamese and American political relations, the Cold War, and the cause and effect of armed conflict in general. Such an examination would be even more meaningful if those “lost children” could openly express how they feel about Operation Babylift, how much they actually know about it and how they have come to terms with it in the context of their adoption stories that had been handed down to them by their adoptive parents. For me, it would be even more interesting to hear from those Babylift adoptees who grew up in countries other than the U.S., like Canada, France and Australia.

Unfortunately, as far as I’m aware, no adult Vietnamese adoptee has done this. The big question is Why?

P.S. The Adoption History Project has a couple items of interest regarding Operation Babylift:

• A scathing article by Gloria Emerson, “Operation Babylift,” The New Republic, April 26, 1975, 8-10.
• Statement on the Immorality of Bringing South Vietnamese Orphans to the United States, April 4, 1975.
• Agency for International Development, Operation Babylift Report, 1975.

Never Can Get Past It

Back in college, while I was talking with some friends after lunch, a young black woman started flirting with me, saying she liked the way my calves looked. Being the nitwit I was back then, her advances completely went over my head simply because I couldn’t fathom a black woman being attracted to me.

After grad school, I had a part time job at a UPS warehouse to supplement my main income for a while. There was a real cute black woman there to whom I had to give some paperwork each night before I finished my shift. One night, I actually got up the nerve to ask her out. But, she smiled and told me that she already had a boyfriend. She added that she was really impressed that I came up to her and asked her out and that I was sweet for doing so.

These memories bubbled up when I read Lisa Marie’s (A Birth Project) post of a preview of a movie called Akira’s Hip Hop Shop. Judging from the short montage that I watched, the movie explores timeless, uniquely American, racial taboos between different races, albeit now with a relatively new twist: a black female with an Asian male.

Due to this country’s long blistering history of white supremacy, when the terms “multiracial”, “biracial” or “mixed” are bandied about in public, people generally assume you are talking about the intermingling of “white” and “non-white”. This commonly held assumption betrays an unconscious bias toward the socially/politically/economically imposed dominance of one race over another. One historical reason such a pervasive attitude exists is due to the continuing fallout from the brutalities and excesses of old-style Western colonialism that is very much expressed in the new-style postcolonialism (just one stark example is the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq and its continuing occupation of it).

This fallout I mentioned before expresses itself in our most intimate relationships, injecting the private into the public and vice versa. No matter how much we want to discount race or ethnicity as the determining factor in whom we find attractive and with whom we choose to mate, American history, the justice system, immigration, politics and racism all combine to both determine whom we date and marry and whom we judge to be suitable couples.

In the case of the “Black female” and “Asian male” in American society, I can list several racial characteristics attributed to them in under a minute, none of them flattering, because I am one among millions of American citizens who have absorbed, been taught and encouraged to disseminate and normalize their degredation. Ask anyone on the street what they think of when they hear the words “Black female” and “Asian male” and it shouldn’t surprise you that they will certainly bring forth two centuries worth of demeaning and hateful language to describe these two sets of human beings.

In fact, it’s safe to say that in today’s atmosphere of hypermedia, where both essential and non-essential information compete for our attention, both “Black females” and “Asian males” are two of the most maligned groups who have the monumental task of preserving any shred of self-respect, and beating back all the prejudice, discrimination and insults hurled at them throughout their lifetimes.

Am I being an alarmist? Am I being overly sensitive? Am I simply seeing things?

Well, I can’t wait until other people watch Akira’s Hip Hop Shop and hopefully come away examining their own thoughts on the subject.

**P.S. Another worthwhile film to watch, if you’re interested in the topic of adoption and multiracial issues, is Catfish and Black Bean Sauce.

Children as Commodities

Just read this post from 3 Generations of Adoption:

The Marketing of Adoption

He echoes many of my sentiments and criticisms about the “adoption industry”.

The following quote resonated with me because of my previous experience working at a non-profit adoption agency:

Adoption cannot be treated with money as the motive. Adoption needs attention after the placement, far more than the placement itself. You cannot market people. It’s a form of slavery.