Lucky Girl

People just love to tell adoptees how lucky we are, and even if they don’t spell out the starvation, prostitution, and early death that they are convinced would have been our fates had we not been “rescued,” it’s usually there in the undercurrents.

But something happened tonight that is giving me pause, that is making me think just a little bit harder about my near-automatic reaction to the “you’re so lucky” claim. 

To My Recent Visitors

To the adoptive parents who are visiting here from the Adoption Parenting Yahoo list — and my, there are a lot of you, aren’t there?:

I am not sure exactly what it was about my previous, relatively content-free post that attracted you all here — especially since it contained an appeal to my fellow adoptees, not adoptive parents, but whatevs.   I’ll add it to the list of things that I’ll never know (which is ridiculously long already).

However, a recent commenter has made it clear that I need to spell out the following requests:

…. do NOT tell me that I am “truly a lucky person”. If you don’t know what’s wrong with that statement, spoken to an adoptee in the context of adoption, then all I can say is that the road before you is very long indeed.

… do NOT tell me that I shouldn’t “waste my life in sorrow”. Don’t imply that I was doing so before, and don’t instruct me not to in the future.  I try very hard not to go around to adoptive parent blogs out there and hand out unsolicited condescension “advice,” so please extend me the same courtesy.

… do NOT tell me how my life has turned out. What I write here represents a very small sliver of my life — good, bad, or otherwise — and you have no idea what the whole pie looks like.  I, on the other hand, live it every day.  I’m the only one who gets to decide whether it’s “good”… or anything else.

…. DO think before you comment. A little critical thinking goes a long way.  It also helps to read more than a single post on someone’s blog before you let your itchy little fingers have a go at the comment box.

Thanks.

New and Improved

It took them a few days, although perhaps that was because they were too busy visiting this post several dozen times to actually do anything about it.

But at any rate, somehow they got the message because Spence-Chapin finally changed their Facebook profile pic:

Is the Spence-Chapin Logo Racist?

(or, “How NOT to Market Kids from Asia”)

So here is the profile picture for the Spence-Chapin adoption agency on Facebook:

Is anyone else getting a bad vibe (and by “bad,” I mean RACIST) from the so-called “coolie hat” on the kid on the right?

Maybe the folks at Spence-Chapin are somehow unaware that many Asian-Americans find these hats offensive.  Sarah Kwak, writing about a different picture, explains:

…the conical straw hat, also known as a “coolie” hat (the term “coolie” should really explain it all), has long been a symbol of anti-Asian racism, especially in the U.S. They were featured in political cartoons from the 19th century and then during World War II, and recently, in those controversial Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts that were ultimately pulled from shelves. The hat carries with it a history that includes the transcontinental railroad, Japanese American internment camps, and a long history of forbidding Asians from immigrating to the United States.

The fact that Spence-Chapin is an adoption agency actively facilitating international adoptions from China, Korea, and Thailand only makes things worse.  Is this a subtle attempt to reinforce the idea that parents in sending countries are poor and uneducated menial laborers unworthy of keeping their own children?  Or is it an unconscious reflection of the stereotype that no matter how “American” we are, we belong in the rice paddies of Asia rather than among all-American amber waves of grain?  Or is it just… stupidity?

Moreover, how can we expect white adoptive parents to be allies to people of color when the organizations in charge of educating these parents are themselves perpetuating racist stereotypes?

Way to get it wrong, Spence-Chapin.  Marketing FAIL.

Forever Young (and Other Rants)

***Did you read the post title?  You have been warned…***

Front Page?

At this very moment, a story about adult adoptees is currently on the front page of the New York Times web page.

It almost makes up for all that Relative Choices crap from 2 years ago.

Almost.

*******************************

The article highlights a study that supposedly says many of the things that adult adoptees have been saying for years — much longer than *I’ve* been saying them, or even thinking of them.   I was heartened to see a few fellow KAD-bloggers mentioned, and overall thought that the article itself was pretty decent.

I expect that I’ll have more to say about this later, so stay tuned.

Good Luck, Ken

I have no idea who Ken Hill is, except that he is an adult domestic adoptee who is looking for his biological parents.  He writes:

-Searching for biological parents
-Male Adoptee:
-Born May 2nd, 1970 at Virginia Mason in Seattle.
-Weighed 4lbs, 9oz
-Father was Senior in High School, ASB President, skilled in logic and debate.
-Mother was Junior in High School, skilled in painting and played guitar.
-Ancestry: German, Scottish, Irish, Czech

Reporting on Ken’s quest to find his biological family through Facebook and the Internet, Margie Boule writes in The Oregonian:

He grew up happy and comfortable with the knowledge he’d been adopted at birth.

But now he wants to meet his biological family. And the state of Washington makes that difficult.

Adoptees, Ken says, can’t view their original birth records. The state will allow adoptees to pay $500 and get a court-appointed intermediary to look up the information and contact the biological parents. “But the intermediary might say your biological parents don’t want to know you.”

Ken believes adoptees have a right to know who they really are. “When the state withholds it, they’re discriminating. And there’s something just wrong about having to pay $500 to the state, with no guarantee you will get the information you so want. It’s not a hard amount to save up, but it’s the principle behind it. It could be $20 or it could be $1,000. I shouldn’t have to pay it.”

Ken says he’s “a working-class guy that lives paycheck to paycheck” and can’t afford private detectives.

So he decided to take his search online, in hopes it goes viral. “I’m asking people to spread it around. Human interaction is the key element in this thing. The Internet is just the technological vehicle.”

If you have any information that could help Ken, please contact him at:

http://multimancer.livejournal.com/58120.html

http://www.facebook.com/multimancer

kennethghill at gmail . com

Vote Often and Early… for Dawn!

UPDATE:  Thanks everyone for voting for Dawn; she won the “Best Adoption Blog” prize and I am so happy!  I’d like to give a special thanks to anyone who came here from Resist Racism and clicked just because I said to.

So there’s this little “Best Blog” contest going on at some parenting web site called “The Bump”… you may have heard of it?  Anyway, one of my favorite adoptive parent bloggers Dawn of This Woman’s Work is one of the contenders, and I’d like to encourage anyone who still reads here (yes, all three of you!) to go on over and give her a vote — no registration required.

In her post about why she wants to win this contest, Dawn writes:

• Because I’m tired of the same old cultural ideas about adoption getting play ALL THE DANG TIME.
• Because adoption may be a miracle for the adoptive parents but it’s a whole lot more complicated for our kids, for our kids’ first parents and for the communities/countries that lose those kids.
• Because if I won the $1000 grand prize I’d donate it to Ethica, who “advocates for national and international improvement of adoption practices, offering support, education and advocacy to all persons affected by adoption.” (per their mission statement)

As of this writing, another blog is currently in the lead.  And if that blog wins, the $1000 grand prize will be used to….  fund the blogger’s adoption of a girl from South Korea. Who will be re-named Lily. **sigh**

Obviously folks can make their own choices, but I would rather support the important work of Ethica and a progressive adoptive parent ally than yet another adoption from the world’s 14th largest economy.  If you agree, please go and vote for Dawn!

Jenna writes eloquently on her own blog about why she nominated Dawn and why Dawn deserves to win:

Promoting change is as easy as sharing your story, honestly and openly. Promoting change is as easy as helping people learn about themselves by learning about yourself in a public forum. Promoting change doesn’t have to be big and scary. Promoting change starts here and now.

It is my opinion that Dawn’s blog embodies what the adoption blogosphere should be working toward: honestly accepting the challenges that face us and working toward ethical goals. We’ll all make mistakes along the way but we can do it.

Yes, we can.

p.s. Apparently the contest folks said it’s okay to hit refresh and vote a bunch of times, so please vote often until the contest ends at 11.59 pm Eastern on Monday!

(In case you’re wondering, Jessica, the comments are closed to encourage people to go and vote.)

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What I Think About When I Think About Love

Let’s try this again…

Sometimes, at 3 am, I can’t help but wonder how I can know what love is, what love means, what it means to love and be loved… because the first act of “love” that I ever knew was to be placed at the side of a road, outside tall black iron gates and brick walls, never (?) to see my family again.

How can I trust that people will say what they mean, that they will do what they say, that their definition of love is the same as mine?  I wonder if we are calling different things by the same name, if “love” suddenly means “dirt” and “lily” suddenly means “ocean” and oh yes, ocean, that’s what will separate us, because I never want to see you again… because