Thoughts Unthought

I envision a much younger version of myself hiding behind an ornate folding screen watching and listening to my parents have sex. I don’t really know how to feel about it, but I know for certain these are the two people who conceived me. I can’t see their faces, but my dad’s long, pale body is covering my mom’s slim, tan body, and they’re both panting and sweating, clinging to the bedsheets for dear life. Then, as soon as my dad ejaculates into my mom, he unexpectedly disappears. Instantaneous. No longer there. My mom rolls onto her side, reaches down and grabs a book off the floor and starts reading.

Fast forward eight months and two weeks later.

My mom is lying on her back and panting, but on a different bed and in a different room, and there I am standing in the doorway. She is in labor and a doctor sits on a short stool between her quivering knees. Two women stand next to my mom, one of them holds her hand and the other one places her hand on my mom’s belly and is saying something over and over. My mom tilts her head back and screams one last time. Like my dad, she disappears. Instantaneous. Gone.

The doctor is left holding my blood-smeared, slimy body. The two women walk up to him, take me from his hands and then clean me off. The older woman then holds me in her arms. She whispers something into my ear. The younger woman then kisses the top of my head.

I disappear. Instantaneous. A son.

R.I.P. Toshiba Satellite A10/A15 Series Laptop

Yes, my laptop was officially pronounced dead at 8:10pm PST.

Any suggestions on a replacement?

Adult Vietnamese Adoptees Living In Vietnam

I found this piece while searching for articles on adult Vietnamese adoptees in the media:

The Drive Towards Peace and Meaningfulness

It consists of interviews back in 2005 of seven Vietnamese adoptees who made the move to Vietnam. They discuss their reasons for moving back to the homeland, their experiences so far, their adjustment to the country and what it means to them to return after all these years.

Sometimes I’d fantasized about moving back to Vietnam and living there. But, I’ve tempered that desire somewhat. I’ll explain later. I do have plans to go back to Vietnam this year in order to say that I at least got it off my chest. More on that later, too.

Mommy Issues

Always Her Favorite

One of the lucky ones,

but still one of the ugly ones.

Sat up and burned in my crib.

Mother, unmistakably,

hissed through the bedroom door

that my fire burned the brightest.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Dear Mama

-Tupac Shakur-

Cause when I was low you was there for me

And never left me alone because you cared for me

And I could see you comin’ home after work late

You’re in the kitchen tryin’ to fix us a hot plate

Ya just workin’ with the scraps you was given

And mama made miracles every Thanksgivin’

But now the road got rough, you’re alone

You’re tryin’ to raise two bad kids on your own

And there’s no way I can pay you back

But my plan is to show you that I understand

You are appreciated

I used to have a garrish T-shirt with Malcolm X’s famous words, “By any means necessary”, printed all over it. I bought it after I saw Spike Lee’s movie Malcolm X and wore it out in public to the chagrin of my parents. It was at this time that I really started getting into rap, especially Tupac’s hardknocks poetry, because it was a sign of rebellion toward the White male/female authority figures in my life and a method for me to raise my voice against what I thought was wrong in the world. In spite of this, the more I read about Tupac, the clearer it became to me that underneath his thuggish exterior lived what many people close to him knew was a sweetheart, a person loyal to a fault, a cynical idealist. His relationship to his mother was complicated due to the rough life they had to endure together. Tupac both loved and despised his mother. He recognized her faults and limitations, but grew to appreciate her sacrifices and unconditional love. Tupac knew full well that his twisted roots were entangled in his mother’s own long and conflicted roots, and unless he wanted to take a machete and chop off the whole rooted mess, he had to come to terms with the fact that his father bailed on the family and his mother was left to put the pieces together. There was no getting around the fact that he was his mother’s son.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Unforgiven II

-Metallica-

What I’ve felt, what I’ve known

Sick and tired, I stand alone

Could you be there, ‘cause I’m the one who waits for you

Or are you unforgiven too?

This song is an alternate interpretation of the original, The Unforgiven. The lead singer’s mother died from cancer when he was pretty young, and she was a Christian Scientist who refused treatment because she believed God would cure her. Obviously, I think he felt that his mother should have thought more about her family, in the here and now, rather than some devotion to an unseen entity. For me, it unlocks many conflicting feelings I have whenever I think about who my “birth” mother could have been and what I might have become if I had remained in her care. I probably derived some of my anger as a kid from the fact that I didn’t know whether or not she was taken from me prematurely or she simply took herself out of the picture because of any number of factors. I think I resented not having any clue as to what she may have looked like or how to reconnect with her. It’s funny now, when I think back on it, but whenever I wanted to run to someone to be comforted, I wished she was with me so she could do her motherly duty and wipe away my tears and tell me to buck up and send me back out, with newfound confidence, to deal with the problem. It’s hard for me to state unequivocally that I’m thankful for being born or for being adopted. I’m not yet ready to forgive anyone for causing the type of forlorn pain I’ve had to keep locked inside this Stranger in a Strange Land body of mine. But, then I think, is the woman who bore me influencing my life in some telepathic, voice-from-the-grave sort of way? Or did she take a knife and leave some kind of mark on me in order to quickly locate me in a crowd and whisper in my ear her advice or encouragement? Is this her twisted way of reconnecting with me?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Mother

-John Lennon-

Mother, you had me but I never had you

I wanted you but you didn’t want me

So I got tell you

Goodbye goodbye

I remember borrowing the CD John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band from the library when I was in my early teens. I liked the album cover because it reminded me of those days when I’d go out to the field in back of our house and sit under a tree and pick at the grass and just enjoy the warm sun. No one bothering me or asking me to do chores for them. I had only recently become enamored with The Beatles and I was slowly finding out that each of the members had solo careers after the band broke up. Lennon’s music fascinated me because his voice was like no one else’s and his music was simple, yet it connected with me on a metaphysical level. Also, a stinging sadness permeated his songs that made me listen more intently than usual. Lennon’s father took off early on in his life and his mother basically handed him off to his aunt to raise. In both cases, he never really got to know his parents. Thus, Mother, is a primal scream for them to come back, to make the boy whole, to return things back to the way they should have been. However, in the end, Lennon’s a realist and knows that he has to stand alone and wave goodbye to them. Every time I listen to this song until the end it sends chills up my spine. Because I’ve wanted to yell out what Lennon yells out so many times, but which I’ve learned to keep down deep inside: “Momma don’t go! – Daddy come home!”

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Mother

-Pink Floyd-

Hush now baby, baby don’t you cry

Mama’s gonna make all of your

Nightmares come true

Mama’s gonna put all of her fears into you

Mama’s gonna keep you right here

Under her wing

She won’t let you fly but she might let you sing

Mama will keep baby cozy and warm

…

Of course Mama’s gonna help build the wall

This song has so many political overtones it’s not funny. But, I love it all the more because it’s a double entendre that speaks to many of my private feelings on how my adoptive mother raised me. To keep me in line, she used dire warnings or predictions of doom if I did this or that; her style was to overstate the problem and create a crisis in which you had to react, without thinking all too much about what you were doing, in order to rectify the situation. Sometimes it seemed that my adoptive mother enjoyed it when I got in trouble because it would give her an excuse to swoop in and take command. She was the type of mother who didn’t teach her son how to be himself in the world, so much as how not to get on the wrong side of people or how to avoid confrontation and just let the current carry me wherever it chose. She didn’t teach self-confidence; she taught self-sacrifice.

Can One Poem Subvert a Whole Novel?, Part I

After I finished reading “growing girls” by Jeanne Marie Laskas, a memoir about the acquisition of farm animals and two Chinese daughters, all of whom are overseen by a a self-assured, self-doubting woman who fancies herself to be a mother, I still couldn’t believe that the author included my poem (p.148), Tourist Trap:

Middle-class wives can’t get enough

of these infants. So adoptable, adaptable,
so contractually obligated to fit neatly

into a grateful paradigm. After their husbands hand over

the check that greases the palms of the minister of interior,
who dropkicks the orphans over the border,
these sunburnt women catch them in their gardening hats
and shine them on their aprons,
like so many apples in a bowl.

It wasn’t that I was flattered (possibly due to the fact that I didn’t receive my contributor’s copy for over a year), I was simply curious as to why someone writing about life on a farm with her adopted daughters would even consider putting a poem like Tourist Trap in her book. The poem is a cutting critique of the marginal ethicality of the adoption industry that looks upon the kids as objects to be sold to Western buyers for their fickle enjoyment. The poem is judgmental in its seething anger at the way the adoption process commodifies indigenous children for foreign consumption. I thought Laskas made a big mistake by using it in her book.

What becomes quite evident at the beginning of the book is that the author is an avid collector of farm animals that nobody wants anymore. In fact, disturbingly, the story can be boiled down to the correlation between taking in farm animals and adopting her daughters from China:

pp.42-43

I felt awkward. How do you go about asking a goat to mother a lamb? I placed the lamb next to where baby Greg was nursing. Cleopatra looked, sniffed, looked some more. In an instant she made up her mind. The lamb took a good long drink and the bond was formed.

In a way, it was the most natural thing in the world. Here was a creature that needed a mom, and here was a mom with plenty of mothering to give.

…

I remember thinking that if Anna and Sasha ever complain about having gotten me as a mom, I could send them out to talk to that lamb. “Yeah, you think you’ve got it rough,” that lamb could say. “My mom is a goat.”

However crass and simplistic Laskas characterizes adoption, I continued to give her the benefit of the doubt and tried to find out more about what she thought of being a mother and everything associated with it. Instead of exploring the origins of her maternal instincts and showing some depth (and breadth) of understanding of her role as a mother in American society, all I noticed was a woman so desperate for self-fulfilment that she outfitted her life according to romanticized notions of bucolic ruggedness. Sweetwater Farm is the setting on which all the acreage, farm equipment and animals are kept: all she needed now was to be a mother, and it couldn’t have come soon enough.

Laskas displays an annoying need to measure up to society’s expectations of what motherhood is supposed to be. In fact, she strives for a perfection that she knows is not there waiting for her, but she fumbles toward it anyway. Laskas functions like a mother, but her inner dialogue betrays a slight repulsion toward her charges. There’s something wrong with the chickens, there’s something wrong with the donkey, there’s something wrong with Anna because she went through a tutu phase and there’s something wrong with Sasha because somehow the orphanage delayed her speech development. It seems as though that if her immediate surroundings are not up to her specifications, if things aren’t done by the book, then she faults the actors in her life for not following the script she wrote in her head long before.

Can One Poem Subvert a Whole Novel?, Part II

Laskas’ self-introspection is really an act of self-congratulation. It as if she is using this book to remind her daughters that a great debt of gratitude is owed to her, the one who made the unusual sacrifice to parent children born to two different mothers whom she denigrates as “ghost mothers”:

p.121

I don’t want to apologize to my girls for taking them out of China, a homeland that was not, in the end, a home. I don’t want them to grow up apologizing for leaving, as if that crowded country gave them any choice. A lot of people seem to want to romanticize this situation, dressing their girls in Chinese silks and taking them to the mall for professional photographs to hand out. Maybe that’s good. I don’t know. Maybe that’s better than just walking around as a woman who finds herself awakening in fits and starts with a stubborn rage. How dare you leave these girls to fend for themselves, even for a second. How dare you! What is the matter with you people? Discipline keeps me from going any further. Discipline and a duty to protect that runs so deep I know it in my toes.

Her drive to be a mother to these girls is meant to counteract any “White guilt” she claims she doesn’t have because she’s preoccupied with more important things, like being a mother to two girls whose first mothers Laskas shoved out of the picture frame. Her daughter’s ethnicity and racial identity are unforgiveably foreign and Laskas makes no apologies for supplanting their history with her own.

pp.146-147

My girls. Girls with a history that really only begins with me. Girls taken away. Girls left behind but girls taken away.

And, I ask, what says “White privilege” more than being able to pay a lot of money to take children out of a foreign country, bad-mouthing that same country that allowed these people to extricate the children, and then intentionally erasing any memories or tangential connection between these children and the countries they were born into. Laskas’ anger at her daughters’ abandonment may be well deserved, but it is, in the end, self-serving:

p.4

Anna was adopted from an orphanage in China. … I stopped thinking about her birth-mother the same day they drove us by the spot on the street in Kunshan where Anna was found when she was just a few days old. I just couldn’t bear to think about that ghost-woman anymore. What good would it do to keep worrying about her and hating her for what she did? “I was born in China,” Anna will say. “And then you came to get me.” That’s right. That’s the story. I don’t know when to fill in the details.

pp.50-51

I wonder what these monsters had done to this child.

…

Ten million people live in Guangzhou and yet it’s only China’s fifth-largest city. We rode back to the hotel in the bus and I held Anna and smelled her hair and Sasha was still clinging to Alex. I was sick of all those ten million people.

…

…What was wrong with her? What was wrong with my baby? Was the treatment she received at the orphanage so poor that she was somehow shell-shocked? Had she ever been loved at all? Had she ever been held? Had she ever played with a toy?

This act of laying claiming over bodies of Asian descent and speaking for them, as if they will never have a voice in how they want to express their adopted selves or a choice in how they will conduct their own lives, is glaring when Laskas attempts to confront the righteous anger shown by adult adoptees on the Transracial Abductees website:

p.158

I hope by the time I am the mother of young adults, of women with wild thoughts all their own, I hope by then I have turned into a mother with more skills and more depth than this. Mothers grow, or at least they can. Mothers can grow, too.

Right now I can’t imagine my Care Bear girls growing up to be young women with Kim So Yung’s anger. I can’t imagine who I’ll be in the face of daughters who find themselves mired in that sort of mud. I certainly can’t imagine myself heroic and tolerant, applauding a mom cheering on her children for growing into fully independent, free-thinking adults.

I can’t imagine any of it because I can’t see past my nose. My story is all immediate foreground, the business of motherhood yanking me this way and that, over and over again until I flop into bed each night. The backdrop is a simple sketch I drew long ago and have little time or need to revisit. I adopted my girls because I was a mom in need of children, and they were children in need of a mom. My story is about family and fulfillment. It really isn’t any more complicated than that.

That motherly concern about the mental health of the creators and participants in this adult adoptee forum fails to veil her contempt for their act of defiance in the face of institutional inertia, especially in the case of Kim So Yung. Laskas actually takes a swipe at Yung by alluding to how the last part of her Korean name resembles the English phrase, “so young,” and thus implying that Yung’s personality has not yet matured and so her opinion should not be taken seriously. Not surprisingly, Laskas fears that her daughters may exhibit the same defiance and rejection of the system that their mother exploited in order to procure them. As is evident in the excerpt above, Laskas admits that the critical viewpoint she found on the Transracial Abductees website astonishes her because she cannot look past her own nose. She is wholly unprepared for those feelings of loss and confusion that so many adult adoptees confront and deal with every day, and so many times on their own. This fact doesn’t truly bother her because she has constructed a virtual island called Sweetwater Farm in rural Pennsylvania where she exercises control over her daughters’ identity – for now.

Can One Poem Subvert A Whole Novel?, Part III

Reading “growing girls” provided me with a chance to open myself up to literature produced by an adoptive parent. I didn’t go into this thinking that Laskas’ memoir is representative of all adoptive parents. That would be ridiculous. As ridiculous as it is for Laskas to believe that the contributors at Transracial Abductees represent all adult adoptees.

The impression I got from the book is that Anna and Sascha are supposedly the fateful outcome of Laskas’ desire to rescue unwanted animals and to offer them a chance at a better life. These helpless bodies have become the accoutrements of the good life, they represent the good works that preachers encourage their God-fearing congregation to take on. But once the saving is done, Laskas shows a penchant for emotional paralysis when these living beings require more than just love. She finds that motherhood is not really about standing over her brood with a watering can and waiting for them to grow into beautiful petunias. It’s actual work and she expresses a lot of doubt about whether or not she has the skills to play mommy to so many animals, plus be all she can be to her two girls who didn’t come from her womb and don’t carry her genes. Which is something I can sympathize with, because I can only imagine that many first-time mothers (even veteran mothers) are insecure and worried about how they will raise their children to be happy and healthy human beings.

But, I can’t abide by the attitude Laskas takes toward Anna and Sasha’s mothers. It’s as if she is sending a postcard to her daughters’ Chinese mothers apologizing for not writing because she is busy being the kind of mother they chose not to be to their own children. It’s as if she is telling them that she has taken on the challenge of cleaning up their mess and that it’s okay for them to slip away now, barely detectable, like dust in the wind.

Laskas ends the memoir with a newspaper article about a dog in Kenya that serendipitously found a plastic bag in a bush containing an infant. It had been abandoned by its mother. The dog took it to its den and took care of it before authorities were notified of the baby’s existence. The baby was named “Angel” and the dog was named “Mkombozi”, “Savior”. Guess which one Jeanne Marie Laskas identifies with?

Now that I think of it, I’m actually glad that Laskas had my poem published in her book. Because when her daughters finally open their mother’s book, and they turn to page 148, she will have a lot to answer for.

No More Angels For You

Jenny Na asked a very good, and devastating, question in her article about the continued adopting out of Korean children: Why does South Korea keep exporting babies?

Substitue “South Korea” with any other country whose name has been in the adoption headlines and an important, radical, theme pops up, a theme that should give pause to both those who make their living off the institution of adoption and those who feel queasy about its business model.

By supporting intercountry adoption, the South Korean government has quietly condoned the social discrimination that often robs these underprivileged and disempowered young women of the confidence and desire to raise their own children. Furthermore, the government benefits financially not only from the profits of the intercountry adoption industry, but also by the billions of dollars it saves by not providing for the basic social welfare of its citizens.

…

The loss of culture, language and family is something adoptees will never be able to fully reclaim. For birth mothers and families, there can be no replacement for the loss of a child.

With these statements Na puts forth two convincing points for what I believe is the beginning of an argument that critical adoptees should use to counteract the reactionary attitudes that are pervasive in the adoption discussion:

1) adoption is disruption, and

2) the “giving” governments both make money and save money in social service programs by facilitating the relinquishing of its children to overseas citizens.

Both claims expose the scandalous nature of how intercountry adoption has been practiced and is still practiced today.

Adoption IS Disruption

As soon as a child is abandoned, forced into being given up, relinquished, orphaned or simply bought, and then placed for adoption, the child’s bonds to his first parents will be irrevocably severed. If this separation is done as an infant, the child will not remember a thing about his first moments in the world, nor in whose arms he was laid. He will be shipped off to fulfill another person’s dream. The feeling confusion and disconnection will be even more severe in older children who have developed a more extensive memory. The extent to and speed at which an adoptee’s self-identity divides between native-ness and adopted-ness depends on the individual’s personality and circumstances, but should be expected nonetheless. The point is, there is no turning back once the child is taken away from his natural parents and then placed in an unnatural environment; his status in the eyes of both communities, birth and adopted, has just been disrupted.

Making Money Off Adoptees’ Backs

It’s so true: If it weren’t for the babies and young children available for adoption, there would be no adoption industry.

We should ask, then, would it be so callous, or off the mark, to speculate about the large amounts of money being made to facilitate the adoption of children? Let’s even exclude the factors involved in paying kickbacks or finder’s fees to, or bribing, government officials, orphanage personnel or lawyers in order to fuel the engine of international adoption.

Instead, let’s contemplate the accumulating income and entrenched careerism that have taken hold in the “receiving” countries due to the increased demand and limited supply of adoptable children. Let’s think about the profits made from the countless books and magazine articles written about adoption and adoptees, the many culture camps and disciplinary ranches that have opened, the multiple adoption agencies and private lawyers who are in business to “create a family” for deserving cherubs, and the many psychotherapists and social workers who put in overtime to address a whole host of pathologies attributed to adoptees, as well as the stress and exhaustion felt by APs. Let’s not forget the (cruelly) ironic phenomenon of motherland tours, adoptee gatherings, conferences and reunions launched partly on the initiative of APs and adoption agencies to further promote the practice of adoption. Imagine the mounds of tourist dollars propping up the economies of birth countries each year. You have the older adoptees who are coming to reclaim a part of themselves that they felt had always been missing and newly minted adoptive parents ferrying out infants and children who will, one day, have the privilege of living up to the status as “the chosen ones” and having their disposable incomes sucked out of their pockets by the very people who were powerless to keep them in the country of their birth in the first place.

Is this what it has all come down to?

Leave poor, return rich, and let’s all just call it water under the bridge?

What Is Adoption For?

In the most idealistic terms, adoption should exist to pair a child, who has no family to speak of, with parents who selflessly open up their family to take in that child. One would hope that adoption is not meant for someone to make a quick buck; one would hope that it is not some sick joke to isolate and create anxiety and distrust in a child who will carry these black marks to his grave; one would hope that it is not an end in itself. And, yet, how many of us can look someone in the eye and say that this is not what adoption has become?

Primetime Orphan – Albert Ingalls

Man, I’m So White

If I could, I’d just eat chicken nuggets and baloney sandwiches each and every day. And, maybe an apple here and there. )