Angry Asian Woman Writes About Adoption Thursday March 23rd 2006, 12:19 pm
I read the
New York Times article about Chinese adoption today. I was casually reading along this fairly generic “let’s check in and see how they’re doing in America” article until I stopped at this comment made by an adoptive mother:
“With an African-American child we had no guarantee that the mother or a social worker wouldn’t come and take the child away,” McKenzie’s mother, Maree Forbes, said. “With the children from China, we felt safe that there wouldn’t be anyone to come back to get them.”
Rage is a small word for a big feeling.
Talk about entitlement. Talk about privilege. Talk about TOTAL ignorance as many of my Korean friends have discovered their birth parents had been searching for them for years. (In Jane Jeong Trenka’s excellent memoir, The Language of Blood, her birth mother haunted the agency until she could get Jane’s contact information in America.)
“We felt safe that there wouldn’t be anyone to come back to get them”
Many adoptive parents choose international adoption because by the time the child enters an orphanage or agency, his or her birth parents most likely have relinquished their parental rights.
Sadly, I’ve heard this kind of comment before. Adopted parents feel “safe,” and “secure” without the “threat” of birth parents being close by. In fact, one friend adopted from Korea and “joked” that he was nervous his adopted son would take one look at me and not want to go back to him.
Clearly, Maree Forbes is rejecting the options of domestic open adoptions. In going to China, I’m sure she felt that she and her husband could build their family “safely,” without letters, phone calls or meetings to disturb them. (Which again, isn’t always the case, given that many Korean birthmothers were tricked into giving up their children, or children were taken away against their will. Many have tried to find their children, only to be stopped by social stigma or agency policy.)
Implicit in her statement is a race and class privilege. First, she mentions African American women, as if they are the only birth mothers to change their minds. She criticizes domestic adoption because it doesn’t offer a “guarantee,” or some kind of no-return receipt of a child’s proof of purchase.
Second, her comment about that there wouldn’t be anyone to come back and get her children assumes that a third-world mother would never dare to challenge her position as a first-world one.
Does she think birth parents don’t care or never wish they could reunite someday? This is not true. Read I Wish for You a Beautiful Life. Those Korean birthmothers wrote loving letters to their babies and it was clearly agonizing to make the decision to give them up for adoption. Many expressed hope that one day they could see their sons and daughters.
Maybe the adoptive mother meant the Chinese toss away their girls. Read Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son by Kay Johnson and you’ll know the one-child policy is far more complicated than that.
“She’s mine, all mine” is what I hear. But she’s not. And even though many adoptive parents encourage cultural activities, and even friendships with other adopted children, how many can actually take on the bigger issues of identity exploration, racial challenges, loss, grief, anger, resentment, confusion and rejection an adoptee may experience as she grows up?
I knew a woman who tried to read Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adopted Parents Knew and said it was too difficult to finish. She hoped it was an exaggeration and proceeded to adopt from Guatemala.
Another woman I know, who, instead of becoming pregnant on her own, is adopting from South America because she didn’t want to get fat and unattractive while her friends went out and stayed thin.
So, in other words, she is paying to have a woman of the third world birth a baby so she can retain her lifestyle and gain a child from the exotic “other America.” Revolting. The worst thing about it is that this woman didn’t understand why her statement was so repugnant.
These kinds of comments are so illustrative of the attitudes of ownership, privilege and superiority so many white adoptive parents reek of.
More and more, science is showing that womb environment is crucial to development. That the first six months is essential to attachment. Babies can recognize faces. Mothers can distinguish their babies’ scent only hours after delivery. These realities of the mother-baby bond and the imprint of experience in the baby’s country of origin cannot be wiped away by an upper-class upbringing in white America.
Studies have shown that adoption can be traumatic. Yes, there are pre-adoption risk factors for many babies in their country of origin, from abuse, neglect, abandonment, institutional care and other elements that can deeply affect these children’s growth and outcome.
But I would posit that it is also traumatic for a child to be taken away from his or her parents, family, culture, food and environment and be transplanted, without choice, into a soil not particularly open to him or her.
Not only do many of us deal with loss and grief on some level every day, but we also have grown up as minorities, been teased and persecuted by peers, have struggled with our white parents about claiming our identity, have experienced white men’s fetishizing of us, have had Asian groups rejecting us for not being “Asian” enough, and countless other fairly traumatizing experiences.
Poor us, you might be saying. Get over it. Other people have experienced worse. Well, of course. I am in no way stating that adoption is the worst thing that could happen to a person. But let’s not dress up international adoption when it often smacks of real problems and real issues.
I am not completely against all types of adoption. But I think international adoption and transracial adoption should be the very last option. Social programs, birth control and right for abortion, sex education, encouragement of domestic adoption, programs that support single mothers—all of these need to be fought for in exporting countries and implemented. (And we in the U.S. need to stop exporting African American babies to Canada and Europe and work on the above programs domestically too!)
We need better screening of families in the U.S., Canada and Europe who want to adopt internationally. Quality training and education is clearly needed and I salute those I know who are working hard in education, social work, pyschology, creative arts and other areas to combat the attitudes and policies so prevalent in today’s cultural arena.
A lot of times I can just fume in private. But today, I needed to write. There’s a lot more to discuss and explore, but that can wait for another day.
