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.

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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.

Unwed Moms Brave Stigma, Lower Incomes

I just wanted to share this article about Ae Ran Won, the shelter in Korea for single mothers and their children.  (As an aside, I’m not all that crazy about the term “unwed”. I know that “single” encompasses a broader range of situations, but at least it focuses on what people are, rather than on what they are not.)

Anyway, Ae Ran Won was the shelter that I mentioned visiting in this post.  I’m guessing that it has changed a lot over the years, based both on things I’ve read in the media and from anecdotes I’ve heard.  Here’s an excerpt from an article* mentioning Ae Ran Won that appeared over 20 years ago:

“According to the questionnaire that we distribute at the orientation interview, 90 per cent want to keep the babies,” says Kim Yong Sook, the director of Ae Ran Won.  But after counseling, “maybe 10 per cent will keep them.”

“We suggest that it’s not a good idea to keep the baby without the biological father,” explains Kim Yong Sook, “and if the unwed mother and biological father are too young or weak financially, we suggest that they give the baby up for adoption.”

Now here’s a quote from today’s article:

“If the government wants to deal with the country’s low birth rate and help single mothers raise their children, they should first support single mothers, then adoptive parents,” Han [current director of Ae Ran Won] said. “Adoption is not the best solution for children born out of wedlock.”

That’s quite a shift, and obviously one that I’m glad to see.  The graph accompanying the article is interesting to me also, particularly that sharp drop from 2004 to 2005.  Does anyone know anything that happened in this time frame that would account for such a dramatic decline?

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Aeranwon trains, shelters, counsels women with nowhere else to go

She might not have much money, but she still has her son.

Despite deeply embedded prejudice against unwed mothers in Korea, Kim, 36, decided to keep her child after she broke up with her boyfriend.

She didn’t want to have an abortion and she didn’t want to have her child adopted.

“I’ve met mothers who gave up their children for adoption and they said they suffered from a sense of guilt later in life,” said Kim, who only wanted her family name used in this article.

Born in Hapcheon, South Gyeongsang, Kim was raised by her grandmother from the age of two after her parents divorced.

She has not seen her biological mother since middle school and she said she wishes her mother had been there for her while she was growing up.

To make a living, Kim makes ceramics and natural soap, and she recently took a course on natural and organic cosmetics.

“I never have enough money but I felt that it would be better for my son if I raised him,” she said.

Read the rest of the article here.

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*  Rothschild, Matthew.  “Babies for sale: South Koreans make them, Americans buy them”.  The Progressive, Vol. 52., January 1988.  pp. 18-23

Hat-tip to K@W.

Sponsor the Moms

Several years ago, we used to sponsor (not “adopt”) a child by donating $20 a month that was designated for things like food and clothes.  In return, we received a picture and health report of the child, and obviously the warm fuzzy feeling that we were doing something good.  The program allowed us to request either a girl or a boy and also specify a certain country, and of course I chose a girl from Korea.

I’m embarrassed to say that this program was run by the agency that I was adopted through — clearly this was before

Return Policies: A Second Chance At Forever

Jade formerly-Poeteray now has a new home, according to this article in the JoongAng Daily:

The nine-year-old has been adopted by an expatriate family in Hong Kong and currently lives a normal life, an official at the Hong Kong Social Welfare Department said Saturday.

Of course, I’m curious at just how “normal” a life she can have after everything that she’s been through.  Hopefully her new family realizes that what looks like normal on the outside can be anything but on the inside.

I’m wishing Jade the best, and hope that her new Forever Family is just that: Forever.

Tim Wise on White Privilege and the ‘08 Election

Hat tip to Susan at ReadingWritingLiving.

White Privilege, White Entitlement and the 2008 Election

by Tim Wise

For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

But don’t stop there… read the rest of the article here.

Equal Marriage in California!

Some things are just plain civil rights — including racial equality, adoptees’ right to their original birth certificates, and the right to marry.

Vienna Teng is an Asian-American singer-songwriter, and wrote this song when her home city of San Francisco first started performing same-sex marriages in February of 2004.

It seemed like a great way to celebrate the recent news from California, so here’s a video from YouTube (my first embedded video!) and the lyrics:

City Hall

lyrics and music by Vienna Teng

me and my baby on a february holiday
’cause we got the news
yeah, we got the news
500 miles and we’re gonna make it all the way
we’ve got nothing to lose
we’ve got nothing to lose

it’s been 10 years waiting
but it’s better late than the never
we’ve been told before
we can’t wait one minute more

oh, me and my baby driving down
to a hilly seaside town in the rainfall
oh, me and my baby stand in line
you’ve never seen a sight so fine
as the love that’s gonna shine
at city hall

me and my baby’ve been through
a lot of good and bad
learned to kiss the sky
made our mommas cry
I’ve seen a lot of friends
after giving it all they had
lay down and die
lay down and die

10 years into it
here’s our window
at the vegas drive-thru chapel
it ain’t too much
for ‘em all to handle

oh, me and my baby driving down
to a hilly seaside town in the rainfall
oh, me and my baby stand in line
you’ve never seen a sight so fine
as the love that’s gonna shine
at city hall

outside, they’re handing out
donuts and pizza pies
for the folks in pairs in the folding chairs
my baby’s lookin’ so damned pretty
with those anxious eyes
rain-speckled hair
and my ring to wear

10 years waiting for this moment of fate
when we say the words and sign our names
if they take it away again someday
this beautiful thing won’t change

oh, me and my baby driving down
to a hilly seaside town in the rainfall
oh, me and my baby stand in line
you’ve never seen a sight so fine
as the love that’s gonna shine

oh, me and my baby driving down
to a hilly seaside town in the rainfall
oh, me and my baby stand in line
you’ve never seen a sight so fine
as the love that’s gonna shine
at city hall

Two down… forty-eight to go.

This just in: Jennifer at Mixed Race America wrote a great post about the history of California’s marriage laws, including interracial marriage laws — check it out!

Operation Identity and Adopting From Vietnam

From the Ethica web site via Borrowed Notes:

Operation Identity: Cooperating to Protect the Identity of Vietnamese Orphans

Trish Maskew, President of Ethica, recently returned from Vietnam. While in Hanoi, she met with the U.S. Embassy staff, who revealed something that is terribly shocking and upon which Ethica feels compelled to act. U.S. Embassy staff revealed that approximately 85% of the children being placed for adoption now are reportedly abandoned. 85%! The Embassy strongly believes that most of these “abandonments” are in fact staged abandonments. And indeed, the history of the past 10-15 years lends credence to that belief.

The importance of identifying information to adopted persons cannot be overstated. Every adopted person, no matter who they are or who they were born to should know their origins if at all possible. When adoptees for generations have discussed their pain about the lack of info, and their longing for more, there can be no doubt that for the children this is one of the most important things about any adoption. Indeed in the last 15 years there has been a huge push to open adoptions to address the harm that secrecy causes. And yet, in Vietnam evidence suggests that someone is depriving them of this most essential of life’s information. Who is doing it? We don’t know; there are several possibilities discussed in more depth below. It is our sincere hope that no agency or agency contractor is doing so intentionally, and we believe that not all, or even most, agencies are. But these questions must be answered.

Some, who want to wish away the red flags here, are going to say things like, “well all the children in China are abandoned.” Yes, for very specific legal reasons that do not, and have never, applied to Vietnam. Some will say, “erasing their identities is better than their staying in orphanages.” For some adopted persons that might be true, but the problem is that this practice might develop for one truly troublesome reason–to avoid scrutiny about how children come into care. It can be used to cover up abuses like the purchase of children and abduction, and while this is the worst case scenario that we all hope is not happening, it is not one that officials are willing to ignore.

This is not the time for wishful thinking. Simply put, Vietnam adoptions are at risk and there is no practice that will so quickly close a country to adoption as this one. This very practice was the death knell for Cambodia. Virtually every child there had no identifying information. And the investigations that broke through the veil of secrecy showed that the information was available, and it wasn’t good.

People often say, when discussing adoption abuses, that the government should close down the unethical people, not the country. This is a stance almost all can agree on in principle. But when a practice develops that creates a black hole from which the government can’t get the information to do that, they may determine that there is no choice but to close the country to all adoptions because of the serious abuses that might be happening. If we want to prevent that from happening, the Vietnamese adoption community must work together now to promote transparency.

Ethica is launching a project to encourage transparency in Vietnam adoptions. Called “Operation Identity: Cooperating to Preserve the Identity of Vietnamese Orphans,” the goal is to make known the actual numbers of abandonments and to draw attention to the very real effects these practices can have on children, and the secondary effect it could have on the future of Vietnamese adoptions.

All emphasis is mine. You can read the rest of the news release here.

EDITED TO ADD: This was just a repost of the Ethica news release, because I think that this is incredibly important and wanted to make sure that people were aware of the situation. I have a LOT of thoughts on this but they aren’t coming together in a coherent fashion right now. So for commentary, please see:

• My right to know at Harlow’s Monkey
• Operation Identity at Borrowed Notes
• Operation Identity at Ethnically Incorrect Daughter

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.

Article: The Baby I Turned Away (Salon)

I’m glad that the author and her husband rejected this referral rather than, say, adopting the child and trying to “return” her seven years later.

Although I’m curious how she would react if her “own” child turned out to have similar disabilities or potential for mental retardation, I’m glad that the author is now pregnant and wish her and her husband the best.

And I am scared that if I wait too long that this might someday be me.

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The baby I turned away

I was desperate to adopt a girl from India — until I discovered she might have developmental problems. Will I ever stop thinking about the child I rejected?

By Jessica Berger Gross

Jan. 03, 2008 | My husband, Neil, and I had just sat down to lunch when we got the call. We’d spent the morning reading books about infertility and assisted reproductive technology, and we were drained, exhausted from months of waiting on a stalled international adoption list and overwhelmed by the question of whether to pursue infertility treatments.

“You won’t believe this,” said Neil. “We have a referral, if we want it.”

If we want it? Of course we wanted it. There was nothing we wanted more.

We’d started trying to get pregnant three years before. It took six months to conceive my first pregnancy, which I miscarried in the first trimester. I gave up my morning latte and the occasional glass of wine, took up acupuncture, practiced restorative yoga, went on vacation, charted my temperature and cervical mucous, peed on ovulation sticks and had lots of sex. Nothing worked.

I desperately wanted to be pregnant. I fantasized about breast-feeding, about walking around my neighborhood with our baby tucked into a cotton sling across my shoulder. So I kept trying, at least for a while: two rounds of the infertility drug Clomid (known for its unpleasant side effects) and artificial insemination. I hated every minute.

Adoption seemed the perfect alternative. I needed a baby, and there were babies out there who needed mothers. I didn’t think I could handle an open private adoption, entailing ongoing contact with my child’s birth mother. Domestic adoption, through the foster care system, usually involved older children with troubled pasts and ties to family. With international adoption, babies are relinquished by their birth parents and live their first months in orphanages, or in what our Boston social worker called “nurseries.” She handed us a list of possible countries: Guatemala, China, Russia, Ethiopia, India.

India.

We made the decision immediately. India fascinated us; it was a place that, truthfully, we’d already romanticized. I’d practiced yoga for a decade, and Neil and I were both interested in Eastern philosophy. Since marrying, we’d talked about spending a year in India. Now I imagined traveling there to meet our daughter. I traded in my daydreams about pregnancy and childbirth for a new fantasy: flying into Mumbai and taking an overnight train to the orphanage, dressed in an Indian blouse and worn leather sandals; the moment in the orphanage when my eyes would lock with my child’s and, together with Neil, we’d become a family.