Traffic

I’m just waiting for the traffic to slow down a bit before I try to cross the street.

[Edited 2/2 to add: Well, the odometer just rolled over on 10k but things do seem to be slowing down, so hopefully we will be back to regular programming soon. Thanks for bearing with me through my fifteen minutes of fame notoriety.]

“Where Are All The White Babies?”

These, apparently, were the words spoken by a mother shopping for a doll for her daughter at an FAO Schwarz Newborn Adoption Center. All of the white doll-babies available for sale adoption had already been sold adopted, leaving only cribs full of less desirable waiting minority doll-babies.

This is according to a story that aired on This American Life, which you can listen to here (click on “full episode” and fast forward to 41 minutes in).

Also, be sure and read this post (“Out of the Cabbage Patch and Into the Fire“) by Chris at Ingrata, in which he writes:

Ostensibly a story about prejudice toward racial minorities and people with disabilities with only a slight nod toward the adoption industry’s commidification of children (a supervisor instructs staff never to mention the word”sell” in its “adoption interview” before it collects the “adoption fee”), the storyteller, in this case a sales associate (“nurse”) recounts her experience of customer reactions when all the white babies sell out, leaving row upon row of minority babies lying unadopted in their “incubators.”

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A couple of things struck me about this story. According to the narrator, it seemed that more often than not it was the parents (the child’s parents, not the 7-year-old prospective adoptive “mommy”) who were insisting on white babies. What kinds of messages were these parents sending to their children about the relative value of different races? Does the insatiable desire for healthy white infants (and the resultant devaluation of anything else as “less than”) begin at home?

Also, after the white babies were all sold out, guess which babies were the next highest in demand? That’s right, the Asian babies — the “honorary” whites, the “next best thing” to being white. (See Jae Ran’s post explaining why in fact Asians are not “the other white meat”.) After that? The Latino/a (“Hispanic”) babies. Part of the “horror” of this story is that not only were the Black babies the last to be sold, but the display-only defective special needs baby (whose fingers melted together in a manufacturing error) was sold first. (I’m not sure who is supposed to be more insulted here.)

As Chris writes in his post, the entire Newborn Adoption Center scenario is “callously accurate” in its depiction of the adoption industry. He points out that babies are viewed as commodities to be bought and sold. Birth certificates are falsified to perpetuate the “as-if born to” myth. The whole concept is targeted and marketed to little girls, reinforcing the gender stereotype that they are the Future Nurturers of America.

I would add that the same hierarchy of race that exists in the “Newborn Adoption Centers” exists for real, living, breathing, children who are emphatically not dolls. The adoptive “parents” appear to be overwhelmingly white. The high cost of adoption precludes people who want to be parents and who might be good parents (including prospective parents of color) from adopting. Issues of class intersect with issues of race. And nobody is talking about first parents, or why these babies are “available” for adoption in the first place.

Hmm.

Seems like the only things missing are the race-based differential prices adoption fees, and perhaps a baby-dump Safe Haven receptacle next door.

But give the toy companies and retailers time, and I’m sure they’ll come up with those things soon enough.

Just like we did in real life.

Hat tip to Chris at Ingrata.

Korean Language Materials Review – Textbooks

(This post is exactly what the title says, and probably won’t interest that many people. But if you’re trying to learn Korean and are looking for a textbook, I hope it’s at least a little helpful.)

For a long time I was looking for the perfect Korean textbook, thinking that if I just had the right book then the whole process of learning Korean would be easier. Obviously this perfect book does not exist, and I eventually stopped looking. But not before buying several of the books available at the time, a few of which I am reviewing here:

Gratitude

I said this before in one of my responses to comments, but I want to say it again in an actual post:

Thank you to everyone who took the time to comment so kindly on my last post. Thank you to those who de-lurked and shared a little bit about yourselves. Thank you to those who offered support and solidarity. Thanks especially to my fellow adoptees who commented.

And honestly, I do know that other bloggers have suffered and put up with much worse treatment. But what can I say, except that I’m incredibly sensitive, and have been ever since I was a little kid. (Of course, maybe a grown adult who is so sensitive that she teared up while watching Ratatouille really shouldn’t be blogging in the first place, but we’ll save that question for another day.)

This is the kind of community that I didn’t dare to hope for when I started blogging. And that I am so very glad to have found.

For this, I am grateful.

Awww, Sang-Shil, Why So Gloomy?

Brief but angry rant ahead. Please don’t read it if you can’t handle it. You have been warned.

I have been blogging for two full months now, and if you haven’t figured it out yet, here’s a news flash for you:

Righting a Civil Wrong

I believe that an adoptee’s access to her or his original, unaltered, unfalsified birth certificate is a fundamental civil right. Period.

So in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (observed) and to spread awareness about open records, I have added one of Gershom’s fancy shnazzy protest banners to my sidebar, and will keep it there until July 22nd, 2008.

Check out these links for more information on the protest and on open records in general:

Bastard Nation

The Daily Bastardette

Nullius Filius (www.adopteerights.net)

Report by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute: “For the Records: Restoring a Right to Adult Adoptees“

Ethica’s position on open records

Check Out This Book Review: Growing Girls

I haven’t read the book Growing Girls, by Jeanne Marie Laskas, and I’ll be perfectly honest and say that I’m not sure how far up it is on my list.

But not only did Kev Minh over at Borrowed Notes read it, he wrote a fascinating 3-part review of it. (One of his poems was also published in the book, interestingly enough.)

Check out his review Can One Poem Subvert a Whole Novel?: (I’ve excerpted a few paragraphs below.)

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.

…

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.

So whether you’ve read the book or not, check out Kev’s review, and be sure to read all three parts!

Speaking My Heritage

The first time I ever took a formal Korean class was my junior year in college.

The idea for the class was actually initiated by students, who circulated a petition urging the university to offer it and also recruited the pastor from the local Korean church to be the instructor. So not only was this a brand-new class that had never been offered before, but the instructor was someone who had never taught Korean at the college level. And because the Korean language program at the school was so nascent there was only one level offered: Beginner. Which was perfect for me, or so I thought, since I was nothing if not an absolute beginner.

When I showed up to class, the room was filled with Korean faces, a handful of whom I vaguely recognized from my brief stint with the Korean Student Association. A few students were talking to each other in Korean, and I assumed that they had been recruited by the instructor to help with the class, kind of like Teaching Assistants. But no; it turned out they were there to…. learn Korean.

Linguists call these people heritage speakers, folks who have grown up in Korean families and can understand the language, and sometimes even speak at intermediate levels. However, they usually can’t write in Hangul or speak fluently, and there are usually gaps somewhere in their knowledge of Korean. Some of the heritage speakers in that first class “joked” that they were there for an easy A, but others swore up and down that their Korean really wasn’t as good as it seemed.

“I can only talk to my grandmother [in Korean] at the level of a six-year-old,” one guy complained to me, clearly expecting sympathy.

I nodded, but didn’t say anything. I couldn’t help thinking of my own grandmother — really, my entire family — who only speaks English. As far as I was concerned, this guy was at least six years ahead of me on the first day of class; more if he was being modest. And we were going to be learning the same material?

To be fair, as the program grew in the years that followed, placement tests and classes designed specifically for heritage speakers were added. Actual Korean professors with university-level teaching experience were hired. Textbooks were changed, and audio recordings were made for listening to outside of class. And so I do think that taking that course today would be a very different experience than it was twelve years ago.

But during that first semester, my only semester of Korean at that school, it was tough. I was one of only three non-speakers in a sea of heritage speakers, and of those three non-speakers, I was the one who struggled the most. I wondered more than once why I was even there, and if it really was too late to “teach an old dog new tricks,” as the saying goes — old, of course, being 20. For a variety of reasons, I didn’t learn very much.

Several years later, I decided to try again. I signed up for another beginning Korean class, this time with LB, and at a different school with a more established Korean language program. Although I still remembered the Hangul characters and a few basic phrases from my first attempt, I was more than happy to start at the beginning. My difficulties with pronunciation that I wrote about previously notwithstanding, it was a nice feeling not to be behind on the first day of class.

And for a few short weeks, until the rest of the class caught up with me, I almost felt like a heritage speaker.

The Sad “Success” of Daniel Kim

Last year I took a course in human development that focused specifically on college students. Two other classmates and I gave a group presentation called “Psychological Disturbance During the College Years.” It was fairly brief, but we talked about prevalence and statistics of mental illness in college, trends in what kinds of problems students were facing, and what those diagnoses looked like. One of the things we learned was that according to a 2004 survey of 47,000 college students conducted by the American College Health Association,

• 94% felt overwhelmed at least once in the past year
• 63% had felt hopeless
• 45% have been so depressed that they had difficulty functioning
• 10% seriously considered suicide

(As reported in College of the Overwhelmed: The Campus Mental Health Crisis and What to Do About It)

Within that last 10%, many fewer students actually go on to kill themselves, but when they do it is (horribly enough) called a “successful” suicide.

Unfortunately, last month a Korean-American student at Virginia Tech named Daniel Kim was one of those so-called “successes”:

At Va. Tech, Near Silence for a Student’s Anguished Cry

After April, after the shootings at Virginia Tech, this sort of thing should not happen anymore. So everyone thought. But Dan Kim, a 21-year-old Virginia Tech senior from Reston, shot himself in the head last month while he sat in his car in a Target parking lot in Christiansburg, Va. The suicide came after at least one and possibly two students at other colleges had contacted Virginia Tech to say their friend had bought a gun and was talking about killing himself.

“Daniel has been acting very suicidal recently, purchasing a $200 pistol and claiming he’ll go through with it,” wrote Shaun Pribush, a senior at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., in an e-mail to Virginia Tech’s health center. “We are very concerned for his safety. . . . please forward this to who can give him the best care.”

Read the rest of the article here.

I am so saddened by this that I barely know what to write. Do I write about:

… the mental health CRISIS on our college campuses?

… how nobody seemed to notice that Daniel had stopped attending classes three months earlier?

… how certain aspects of this story recall the case of Elizabeth Shin at MIT?

… the complexities of mental health issues in communities of color, particularly Asian communities?

… Daniel’s apparent struggle with his racial/ethnic identity?

… the racism and slurs that Daniel faced in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting last April?

… how Daniel’s “case” was conveniently pawned off on the local police, rather than being handled by university staff presumably trained in dealing with college students and their problems?

State universities are big bureaucracies, and student services are frequently underfunded and/or understaffed. And all universities have to be careful in the information that they share with a student’s parents. But in this case, aside from not reaching out to Daniel’s parents, it doesn’t seem like anyone at the university reached out to Daniel.

If a student is a danger to him/herself or others, doesn’t this trump everything else? Isn’t this always the dividing line not only in issues of confidentiality, but also in terms of priority and importance? If so, then why was this determination left to be made by officers of the law, rather than qualified mental health professionals?

I can’t help wondering if Virginia Tech officials, still reeling from the tragedy of last April, were more concerned with the “or others,” and less with a student of color named Daniel Kim. After all, aren’t Asians the successful ones, the model minority that beats the odds?

If only people knew just how “successful” Daniel Kim would be.

Hat tip to resist racism.

Still More Thoughts on Umma and Appa

Okay, I can understand if you’ve had enough of this topic; feel free to skip, mark as read, whatever. I never thought I’d write three posts in a row about the same thing. But if you’re still interested, here are just a few more thoughts. My next post will be about something completely different, I promise.

When I wrote the post entitled Who’s Your Appa, I intentionally focused on the people with the most power in the so-called triad: adoptive parents. I wanted adoptive parents to think about the messages they might send if this is how they introduced themselves and framed themselves, and how they might be interpreted by adoptees. But what if adopted children are the ones initiating this practice?

I actually did consider (briefly) the scenario that children might begin or want to call their parents by the Korean words for Mom and Dad, whether due to actual memories of those words from Korea, or after learning them in America. And in my mind it made things much more complex — so complex that I wasn’t sure what I thought about it. Courtney’s thoughtful comments on that post helped my thinking in that regard, because who in good conscience could tell a 2-year old with night terrors, “No, your Umma is in Korea; you have to call me Mommy”? I mean, I strongly believe that language is both a powerful shaper and a telling indicator of our beliefs and attitudes, but even I’m not that heartless!

But what about older children? If an older child who is better able to understand what adoption is and the notion of Korean parents starts or asks to call her parents umma/appa, I would be curious at what the underlying motivations were. Is there a hint of loss or grief? Is she trying to create in the U.S. what she knows she lost in Korea? Is she indicating anger at her (bad) Korean parents for relinquishing her, by reassigning those terms to her (good) adoptive parents? Or… does she simply want to practice her Korean? Because yes, in some cases, with some children, it may actually be that simple. But not always.

Especially in this terrain, I certainly don’t want to get prescriptive. I guess I would just want to emphasize the ability of adoptive parents to think about and see the bigger picture, things that kids usually can’t do. I read a beautiful post the other day written by Coco, an American first mom who is in an open adoption with the daughter she relinquished. In this post, she wrote eloquently about the work that her daughter’s adoptive parents did to lay the foundation for their relationship in later years, work that took place when their daughter was too young to fully understand the nuances and complexities of adoption. While clearly international adoption is different in many ways from domestic open adoption, I wonder if a similar dynamic might be at work.

Adoptive parents are the ones who lay the initial groundwork for what and how their children think about their Korean parents, and about adoption in general. Whether or not adoptees ever search (or are ever searched for), and whether or not a real-life relationship ever develops, adoptees have thoughts, feelings, and opinions about their Korean parents starting from a very early age. Children pick up on cues such as tone and language to be sure, but also on the things that aren’t said. The things that aren’t questioned, or that are allowed to slide.

Most adoptive parents know they shouldn’t “talk trash” about their children’s Korean parents, but I wonder, how many are told that they might need to actively defend them? That this kind of defense might involve reconstructing the frame to keep them in the picture, and keep the door open for future connections and future relationships? And that this defense might even need to be from inadvertent encroachments made by adopted kids themselves, kids who are older but have not yet developed the capacity for abstract and complex thought?

True, this door can certainly be kept open in other ways as well, and reserving the words umma and appa for Korean parents by itself is certainly not sufficient. And as Courtney’s comments reminded me, language, along with actions and reactions, all need to be age-appropriate and context-sensitive. But they can, and should, still exist within the bigger picture, a picture that adoptive parents have the unique opportunity to shape.

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One last thing: I had originally wanted to link to a post that Ji In wrote on cultural appropriation almost two years ago, but I never did. I have added this link to my previous post titled Cultural Appropriation and Adoption where I had originally envisioned it, and am including it here as well:

http://twicetherice.wordpress.com/2006/02/14/get-your-own-cultural-identity/