A Word for Seki

Listen – It takes practice, patience, time. You must stop what you’re doing, what you were in a hurry to do, what you thought you needed to do at that moment, and pay attention to the way your breath skips over your teeth, how energetically a puppy sniffs a flower, the difference between a pigeon’s wings and a seagull’s wings. You will find that people and things will try to speak to you all at once. That’s okay. That’s how the world is. Just remember to listen to what your heart says and follow it.

5 Questions

Question #1: Can an organization started by adult adoptees to serve the interests of adult adoptees survive if it’s “open to anyone and everyone”?

Question #2: Can an organization started by adult adoptees to serve the interests of adult adoptees survive if its sole source of funding is adoption agencies/adoptive parents?

Question #3: Can an organization started by adult adoptees to serve the interests of adult adoptees survive if one of its goals is to “champion” transracial adoption? Or is the point of championing transracial adoption to swell the ranks of adult adoptees in order replenish the organization’s coffers and perpetuate its existence?

Question #4: Can an organization started by adult adoptees to serve the interests of adult adoptees “provide resources” if it has no resources to offer because it neglects its target audience: adult adoptees?

Question #5: Can an organization started by adult adoptees to serve the interests of adult adoptees survive if its members are not encouraged to be honest and candid with each other out of fear of losing the “support” of adoptive parents and adoption agencies?

The EID on NPR and NYT

If you haven’t already, check out the two insightful posts below by Sumeia Williams:

I Am Not A Bridge

Reclaiming Ownership of My History

She’ll also be on NPR/Talk of the Nation today at 3:00-3:40 PM EST!

Thi Phuong Anh – Vietnamese Adoptee from Norway

I grew up in Norway and was raised well, with family-values and music as the foundation. But deep inside I have always been a frightened little girl. I have struggled with anxiety and a feeling of not being safe all my life. I’ve been told that this may very well be the “scars” left from Vietnam. And it would perhaps make sense that the incident when I was found helpless on the street did actually change me more than I will ever know. I have worked so hard to try to figure out who I really am, but I don’t feel that I have found the right answers yet. One word to describe myself ? Restless…

A Long, Long Way Back and Forward

As a way to pass the time, and to get ready for a major shift in my own blogging focus next month, I’ve become acquainted with many more blogs written by adult adoptees. I’m still in awe with this act of self-expression and its growing power in the adoption debate(s).

A testament to that fact is a post by Heart, Mind and Seoul that brought me back to my (unspoken) thoughts as a child about the possible reasons I had been “given up” and “taken in”. It’s only this past year that I’ve had to be convinced that my adoption is my story and that I have every right to know it (as far as that’s possible) and to own it.

Part of the fear I had of thinking about why my first family couldn’t parent me was knowing that I had to be open to any and all possibilities, not just the romanticized notions that I had conjured up in my head. I have spent a lifetime both consoling and torturing myself with the myriad of scenarios that led to my relinquishment. And what I’m finally realizing now is that no one, no matter how well intentioned, can tell me the exact truth about my circumstances except my Korean family. People may speculate and they can do so out of love and concern – but I’m at the point in my own journey now where for my own health – I can only acknowledge what I know for sure to be true about my adoption. And right now that means admitting that I don’t know, and that I may never know. Being honest about that has helped me regain some of the control and the freedom that I felt I had lost in my earlier years – control and freedom that I had lost to worrying that I was somehow to blame.

Somehow it feels wrong that it’s only now in my 30’s that I’m coming head to head with the feelings and the exasperating unknowns of my own adoption. It’s also somewhat sad that I still don’t know how to fully claim it as mine.

What Was Not Published

My comment to the Janowitz post:

When I first saw the word “Mongolian”, I thought to myself, “Janowitz can’t seriously be using that word to describe her daughter’s features!” It’s just as demeaning as the word “Oriental”.

As I read further, Janowitz managed to be even more extreme with her steamrolling attempt to flatten the differences between her and her adopted daughter. It’s one thing to acknowledge universal experiences in parenting, but it’s another to belittle and disqualify her daughter’s birthparents in order to assert maternal supremacy over her child. Janowitz shows recklessness with this attitude.

Having been adopted myself, I know firsthand the pitfalls of unconditional gratitude toward decisions my adoptive parents made without my knowledge or consent. So, when I read Janowitz’s insinuation that her daughter should express gratitude for not being left in China to work “in a factory for 14 hours a day with only limited bathroom breaks”, I literally cringed. It’s bad enough to feel, as an adoptee, that you continually have to seek others’ approval in order not to be rejected or abandoned, but to shift the responsibility of emotional and physical survival squarely onto an adopted child’s shoulders is inexcusable.

As Willow grows older and perhaps comes across this post by her mother, I hope she sits her mother down and has a long, serious talk about how dismissive she was of her daughter’s unique history as a transracial adoptee.

Fairness Doctrine

Tama Janowitz is apparently raising a “Mongolian” daughter named ‘Willow’ along with six poodles and a husband in Brooklyn.

What am I talking about and who is Tama Janowitz, you ask?

Well, today in the NYT’s “Relative Choices” blog she had her first post published and, boy, is it insulting in so many ways.

Not only does she characterize her daughter’s ethnicity as “Mongolian”, but she disqualifies her daughter’s birthparents by elevating herself to sainthood and nominating herself as Willow’s “real mother”. I guess, to paraphrase her attitude, Janowitz was the only the person who gave a shit about this little girl and she better realize that this is the only shot she’ll get to live a “normal” life.

How would you take, for instance, this pithy remark that Janowitz apparently is fond of saying to her daughter: “Well, you know, if you were still in China you would be working in a factory for 14 hours a day with only limited bathroom breaks!”

It’s no wonder that she alludes to the anthology Outsiders Within as a book “in which many Midwestern Asian adoptees now entering their 30s and 40s complain bitterly about being treated as if they did not come from a different cultural background.”

The real freakin’ scandal, though, is that the person pulling the strings behind this blog is cherry-picking comments that, en masse, tilt heavily toward placid, ‘gee-willickers’ statements by APs that applaud Janowitz’s piece [don't take my word for it, read all 100+ comments and judge for yourself]. By Harlow Monkey’s most recent estimate, comments from 13 adult adoptees and/or adoptive parents critical of Janowitz’s post have been passed up for more agreeable fare. I’ve submitted my own comment this evening and reasonably suspect that it, too, will be passed over for more gleeful parental pulp.

I know this is the Opinion section of the NYT’s website, but in order to fully inform its readers about a serious subject, such as adoption, wouldn’t it not only be necessary, but also admirable, to include everyone’s constructive comments, no matter from which side they swing? Isn’t that the point of a newspaper?

There’s more that’s rankling me about Janowitz’s post, but it’s not fit for polite company.

So, I’ll leave you with the outstanding thoughts on this outrage by these fellow adult adoptee bloggers:

Harlow’s Monkey

Twice The Rice

A Birth Project

readingwritingliving

resist racism

According to Addie

Heart, Mind and Seoul

Racialicious

Sun Yung Shin

Outside In…And Back Again

In A New York Minute

Ever since the NYT set up the blog “Relative Choices” on its website and invited a select group of affected people to post about their various experiences with/about/on adoption, I’ve been anticipating reading two bloggers in particular: Huong Sutliff and Sumeia Williams, both adopted from Vietnam.

Yeah, I’m ethnocentric when it comes to this stuff. Sue me.

Anyway, the obvious comes to the fore when you read their bios placed to the right side of the posts. There’s quite an age difference between them, as well as a perceptible gap in historical circumstances that brought about their being adopted into American families.

Now, just to be clear, I’m not about to expound on their personal feelings or thoughts about their own experiences of being adopted from Vietnam. It’s not my place to do so.

However, both of their initial posts seem to be speaking to each other in curious ways.

Huong, being from the second generation of Vietnamese adoptees, is inspired to move forward and to look ahead to what is awaiting her. To me, the way in which she described her demeanor and inner thoughts while meeting her adoptive parents for the first time at the orphanage gates bespoke a sweet and shy apprehension as to what lay ahead for her in the U.S. There is nothing in Huong’s post as to who her first parents were, what information about them she or her adoptive parents may have been given when they left the orphanage or how exactly she ended up at that orphanage. It seems as though she breathed a great sigh of relief when her adoptive mother and she hugged, like she was telling herself, “Everything’s gonna be alright now.” It made me even more curious to know what memories she has of living at the orphanage and how she’s incorporated them into her adoption story. But, we’ll just have to wait; she’s got time.

Sumeia, on the other hand, demonstrates vividly when an adult adoptee innately knows and feels that she may have very little time left to uncover those precious artifacts that could turn out to be important pieces of her life’s puzzle. She deftly explains the exasperation and injustice of having to negotiate with her adoptive father to provide her with real knowledge about her origins. Sumeia is looking back at Vietnam in order to recover a large chunk of her identity, to place her rightful claim on it, even if it doesn’t lead anywhere, even if it doesn’t turn out to be that cathartic key that will unlock the vault containing every valuable piece of information about her parents and the reasons she was placed for adoption. Her post embodies so many adoptees’ wishes to simply know who gave birth to them and why they were placed for adoption. Sumeia intimates that she reached a point in her life where feelings of longing to know her past in Vietnam and the act of repossessing that right to know converged into a plea to her father to give her what was owed to her. And, her struggle in prying the seemingly air-tight lid off her past is not over, not by a long shot.

I’m reminded of the recurring line/theme in the film ‘Magnolia’: “And the Book says, we may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.”

I can safely say that most of us adoptees go through phases of recognition of the curious spaces we take up in our adoptive families. We see the family photos, we go through the obligatory family tree exercise in elementary school and we endure some of the same jokes, made at our expense, about the mismatch in physical features or skin tone compared to our relatives (“Hey, don’t we look so much alike? He’s got my freckles! Har-har.”) Eventually, many of us just get tired of swimming against the current, so we buy ourselves a surfboard and just ride the waves and try to hang with the ‘in’ crowd. But, there comes a point when you’ve nearly drowned too many times or get pissed off with the other surfers always pushing your head under water, and you take your board and head to shore. You reach the beach and sit down and watch the sun slowly set. Alone. That’s when the questions come. That’s when the tears burn. That’s when you know it’s time to go back and find out for yourself who you are, besides just being adopted.

I feel we have a lot to learn from both Huong and Sumeia. They seem to be on very different trajectories, but they’re not exactly straight lines; they may curve, bend and arc, and come back around to where they’ve always wanted to be.

But to paraphrase, and re-interpret, a quote Sumeia took from Bryan Thao Worra and put in her post, the story of our lives before adoption swept us off our feet could either be based on solid ground or quicksand. It’s up to us, when the timing’s right, to break out the pick axes and the shovels, and start chipping away or digging. Who knows what we’ll find.

I like the sound of this

Chinese Astrology

Compatability

[excerpt]
“The Ox and the Rooster make a nearly perfect pair, whether their relationship is romantic or platonic. They’re quite similar in temperament and values and their differences are complementary. Both the Ox and the Rooster are rather conservative in their approach to life: Both prefer practical, tried-and-true methods to anything risky; the Rooster’s perfectionism meshes well with the Ox’s penchant for doing things right the first time. All these qualities lend themselves especially well to work and career, and as business associates, these two make a strong and practical team. The sturdy Ox can serve as the backbone of the business and the Rooster’s keen eye and innate resourcefulness can move things forward toward success.”

Dashboard Confessional – Thick As Thieves

It’s time for me to start including domestic adoptees when I think and talk about adoption. This video goes a long way in doing so.

Saw it while perusing Mia’s Saving Grace blog.