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.
