Forever Young (and Other Rants)

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

An Open Letter

Rant ahead.  Standard warnings apply.

Dear Adoptive Parents, Social Workers, and Anyone Else Who Organizes Adoption-Related Events:

When adult adoptees offer to give of their time, sit on your panel, share their insights and experiences, write you long and extensive emails, give you feedback, or do anything else that helps YOU, please keep in mind just that — that we are

How to Eff Up Your Adoptee (1950’s style)

There is a large used book store only a block and a half from the hotel, and I can usually spend hours there combing through the books on all four levels. Psychology, education, science, business, textbooks — all of these sections have been fair game for me when I’ve come here in the past.

On this visit, however, I headed straight to the basement where the family and childcare books are located. I doubted that they’d have any books on adoption that I would actually want to read, but figured it was worth a look anyway. Incidentally, I found not just one, but two copies of

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Protected: Korean Adoptees: The Next Generation

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Beeswax: Not Yours, Inc.

Since I’ve been in Korea I have met many other adoptees, and on several occasions we have quickly fallen into deep, emotional, and intensely personal conversations about adoption. In these conversations, we will frequently talk about searching (or not), including what we’ve done so far or have been able to find out (or not). I am always interested in hearing people’s stories if they want to tell them, and have had no problem reciprocating by sharing my own story. I have even been able to connect with a couple of other adoptees who came through my orphanage.

The other night, however, I was approached by a (white) adoptive parent who

Better Than What?

Speaking about her 11-year old daughter Megan, adoptive mother Peggy Cox said in a recent interview:

“I think she (Megan) knows how much better her life is here than back in China,” Cox said. “She’s a very bright kid.”

I hope Megan is bright enough to understand

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What I Don’t Know

What I don’t know about my own life could fill a book.

I don’t know which city or town I was actually born in; only the one in which I was found.

I don’t know my real month or day of birth; only the year.

I have no idea if one (or both) of my Korean parents physically placed me at the gate of the orphanage, or if it was someone else.

If it was someone else, I don’t know if either of my Korean parents knew about or had any say in the decision.

I have no idea if my Korean parents are alive or not.

I’m not completely sure that they are (were?) both actually Korean.

I know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the reason(s) why I was placed for adoption.

I know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about my medical history.

I don’t know what to believe or who to trust. Do I trust the nuns at the orphanage who say that they don’t have any more information about me? Do I trust the adoption agencies in Korea and the U.S. when they send me the contents of my adoption file?

I don’t know if anyone is out there looking for me.

Reading blogs written by U.S. first moms gives me some small hope that I have a family in Korea that still remembers me, that thinks about me, that grieves for me even after all these years. But I can’t know this for sure until I find them.

When it comes to my adoption and my life before coming to the U.S., it seems that all I know is what I don’t know.

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

But here’s one thing I do know.

I know that I will never “get over” being adopted and having this huge hole chopped out of my life. This doesn’t mean that I won’t ever forgive, or find peace, or whatever euphemistic phrase you want to throw at me.

It means that I will never, ever forget what it is like to walk around with the feeling of not being entirely complete, trying to live my life as if that incompleteness didn’t matter.

Because for me, it does matter.

It matters so much more than I can ever hope to write here.

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.