After that last depressingly serious post, I'd like to lighten things up with another highly frivolous complaint about the way my dad is making the house smell. Tonight it's durian. He and my husband are waving plates of it around. This is a fruit that smells kind of a like rotten fruity armpit. It's a taste I've never acquired. I notice on the Wikipedia entry it's called the "King of Fruits" but I think of it more as the Antichrist of Fruits.
Please don't read the articles I'm linking to unless you are ready to read about horrific sexual abuse and exploitation. I happened across this article in Charlotte, on the way home to Atlanta from DC, when I was looking for something to read in a restaurant and picked up the free local weekly.
I normally wouldn't write about it in this blog, but I've just been thinking about the story ever since. There are a lot of things I don't like about the original article, especially the way that the new race hierarchy in the new South (black/white/Mexican) is just swept under the table when it should be dragged out into the open and subjected to a harsh floodlight. There's also way too much of a lurid, yellow journalism tone. But I'm also glad the story is out there. These women and children should not be invisible and disposable. I'm glad the pimps in this case got life sentences and their evil mother got a stiff sentence as well.
In fact "pimp" is way too nice of a word nowadays. It's gotten such positive mainstream connotations from shows like "Pimp My Ride". I don't believe in fighting losing linguistic battles, however. The word "pimp" is going to keep on turning into a synonym for "flashy" "smooth" or "promote". I just think there should be a new word to describe people like the Howards, both sons and mother. "Rapist slavemasters" sounds so much appropriate than "pimp".
Maybe I'm getting more sensitive. My husband can't even read stories or watch documentaries about child abuse, but I can usually detach myself enough to consider the cases logically and sociologically. But this story is really bothering me. I'm still thinking about how I can help women and children recover from this kind of abuse. Maybe finding and donating to an effective local survivor organization?
Again, I'm serious about not reading the links below unless you think you're ready.
Tracy's World: Inside the wicked web of a Charlotte pimp (BY TARA SERVATIUS Published 05.10.06)
It's A Family Ho-Down: Warrant charges mom and sons ran prostitution ring (BY TARA SERVATIUS Published 03.30.05)
Pimps Slapped! Men get life for prostituting young girls (BY TARA SERVATIUS Published 01.24.07)
I'm back from the antiwar protest. It was a huge turnout; the Mall was absolutely packed. We heard several speakers. My favorite was the mayor of Salt Lake City. The man was on fire.
I don't remember exactly who said it, but one of the veteran representatives giving speeches noted that Bush did not use the word "veteran" once during his State of the Union address, which shows you where his presidential priorities are. He would prefer to ignore them entirely, nevermind the looming VA budget crisis. My stepfather is a Vietnam vet, member of Veterans Against the Iraq War and has Hep C as a result of his service as a medic. The VA is his health insurance. He's currently non-symptomatic, thank goodness, but veteran healthcare is obviously a big issue for our family.
I notice my house is now smelling a little unusual. My dad started making his own kimchi because he says the stuff at the Korean supermarket is too expensive, and he's been cooking mackerel inside, in the George Foreman toaster oven. I like mackerel too, but we only ever grill it outside because it's kind of whiffy... oh well. His operation has been moved from Monday to Friday and will now involve an overnight hospital stay. There's bad news: he also has some work that needs to be done on his tendons. But on the other hand, there's more cartilage than they thought, so his range of ankle motion after the surgery will be increased.
On Friday the satellite television people came to install the Japanese network. As usual, they screwed up and installed a bunch of Chinese networks instead. It's tempting to blame ethnocentrism, but they probably screw up just as much dealing with non-international channels. The Japanese network is on a completely differently satellite which they need a different dish for, so they'll have to come back and do it next week.
We're settling in now to watch Rome and Battlestar Galactica.
I don't have time for a long post on this, but I'd like to point people to a great article on Clarkston's refugee community and a soccer team:
Refugees Find Hostility and Hope on Soccer Field
[...]
The Fugees are indeed all refugees, from the most troubled corners — Afghanistan, Bosnia, Burundi, Congo, Gambia, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia, Somalia and Sudan. Some have endured unimaginable hardship to get here: squalor in refugee camps, separation from siblings and parents. One saw his father killed in their home.
The Fugees, 9 to 17 years old, play on three teams divided by age. Their story is about children with miserable pasts trying to make good with strangers in a very different and sometimes hostile place. But as a season with the youngest of the three teams revealed, it is also a story about the challenges facing resettled refugees in this country. More than 900,000 have been admitted to the United States since 1993, and their presence seems to bring out the best in some people and the worst in others.
Universal buys soccer story: Studio ponies up $3 millionOdds are that the movie will turn out to be a horrible piece of mush, especially if they replace the Jordanian coach with someone more ethnically audience-friendly... hey, I have to say it, I'm a cynic. But who knows, maybe it will get made and end up being great. And even if it isn't, it'll do some good to have a big-budget, child-friendly, positive story about immigrants.
[...]
The article detailed the unlikely success story of the Fugees, a team of refugees from global hotspots including Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Burundi, Congo, Liberia, Somalia and Sudan. Placed by resettlement agencies, the kids were banned from playing on a grassy field in the local town park.
Part of the pic deal calls for Universal to pay $500,000 to build a soccer field for the kids. Part of the money will fund a foundation to benefit the team, and the dealmakers cut their fees so more of the coin would go to the teens.
The core of the story is the determined, Jordan-born female coach who recognized the need in these displaced kids and created a team for them. She also became active in helping their families find work and break through bureaucratic red tape as they tried to assimilate.
(pictured: natto)
My dad has decided to "sponsor" me, using his frequent flyer miles to get me a free ticket to DC in the morning so I don't have to take the train tonight. Whew!
Today I finally found Tomato on the third day of searching. It's a Japanese specialty grocery store in Norcross. The reason I kept missing it before is that it's hidden inside a large, industrial-looking sushi restaurant. No idea why it's called Tomato. There are tons of Asian grocery stores around Atlanta, including a Korean one in Gwinnett about the size of an aircraft hangar, but none of them have natto. For that, we must go to Tomato.
The Georgia Stealth Buddhist (Hank Johnson) reappears!
From Blog for Democracy:ATL Rally To Oppose Escalation In Iraq
Support our Brave Troops and their Families by Rallying to Oppose President Bush's Escalation in Iraq
What: Rally / Press Conference to Support a Sensible Policy on Iraq
When: Friday, January 26 at 10:00 a.m.
Where: Georgia State Capitol Steps (facing Washington Street)
Who: U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, Rev. Joseph Lowery, State Rep. Tyrone Brooks, State Rep. Stephanie Stuckey Benfield, State Senator Nan Orrock, State Rep. Roberta Abdul-Salaam and other members of the Georgia Legislature.
Why: Any decision to escalate the war in Iraq will have a profound impact on Georgia, on our National Guard and Reserves, and on Americans from across the country.
Contact person for more info: Rep. Stephanie Stuckey Benfield (D-Atlanta). Contact her at 512 Coverdell Office Building, Atlanta, GA 30334; by phone at 404-656-7859 or by e-mail at stuckey@mindspring.com
I like how Barack Obama's candidacy has brought a lot of multiracial issues up into the public consciousness. But it's frustrating to read how the unending "but is he really black" pieces keep rehashing the same points.
On Salon.com recently was a piece by Debra Dickerson, called "Colorblind", that basically says "Obama isn't really 'black'". Dickerson herself is African-American/black. I don't think she presents her main point as clearly as she could. That's because she relies too much on the word "black" for two meanings, racially black and ethnically African-American (as in, tracing descendence from slaves brought over from West Africa with a residence of at least 150 years in America). Saying "he's black but he's not really black" just muddies the waters. Aside from that terminology failure, I think she makes some good points.
We know a great deal about black people. We know next to nothing about immigrants of African descent (woe be unto blacks when the latter groups find their voice and start saying all kinds of things we don't want said). That rank-and-file black voters might not bother to make this distinction as long as Obama acts black and does us proud makes them no less complicit in this shell game we're playing because everybody wins.
I started a part-time teaching gig last week at the University of California at Berkeley, and part of the paperwork (which included a form on which you had to pledge allegiance to the state of California, an entity I had not thought needed my vassalage) was a form that asked what my ethnicity was. You had to identify yourself as white, black, Asian or Latino. I think there were a few others, though I can't remember. I'm half-Japanese, so I looked for a mixed-race box, but there wasn't one. I asked the woman who was doing the paperwork if I could put down that I was half-white and half-Asian, but she said, "No, you just have to choose one." Even though I knew I was probably bumming out some U.C. diversity honcho, I put an X in the box marked "white."
Why did I choose "white"? It was a matter of intellectual honesty. This takes a bit of explaining.
The truth is, I don't think of myself as either white or Asian. In fact, I don't think of myself in racial terms at all. If asked, I of course identify myself as what I am -- mixed-race, or Eurasian, or half-Japanese. I try to work the Scottish part of the mix in as well, because I like trumpeting my weird mongrel gene pool. But although I know I am a person of mixed race, that fact plays only the most minor role in my sense of myself. I am a mixed-race person, not a "mixed-race person."
What's the difference? People whose race or ethnicity defines their identity, or at least makes up a major part of it, are what I think of as quotation-mark people. They are not only mixed-race, they are "mixed-race." Those whose race or ethnicity has little or nothing to do with their identity, with their sense of themselves, are non-quotation-mark people. They may recognize themselves as black or Latino or Asian, be whatever race or ethnicity they are to the core, and proudly affirm they are such, but they aren't "black" or "Latino" or "Asian."
For me, my racial background has never meant anything one way or the other. There are no doubt many specific reasons for this, including my parents' unconcern about race, not having had any kind of a Japanese upbringing (whatever that means), growing up in Berkeley in the '60s, and so on. The bottom line is that no one ever really paid any attention to my race, so I didn't either. If I do think about it, it's with a smug, slightly juvenile sense of satisfaction that I'm different from just about everybody else and in a "cool" way. Beyond that, though, my racial background is meaningless. It plays no role in my sense of myself.
What this adds up to for me is that when I am forced against my will to make a reductive choice, as I was at U.C., the most honest thing is to choose white. I do that not because I see whiteness as a positive identification, or as my identity, but for precisely the opposite reason: because whiteness is the marker of racial invisibility in America. White, in other words, means no race, not the master race. I don't "feel" either Japanese or white. To feel either would involve some bad-faith reduction of my identity. But if forced to choose, I choose white, because that category, inaccurate as it is, reflects the fact that my racial background does not form my identity.
A lot of my favorite bloggers are participating in Blog for Choice day. I'd like to talk a little bit about the other side of choice. Forced abortions. There are two American instances of this that I have read about. One is coercive practices in the cult of Scientology. Now, if you follow that link it might seem to be too horrible to be true. I've had an amateur interest in Scientology criticism for a while now, and I believe that many of the accounts of coerced abortions found on that webpage are basically credible. The second involves cases of forced abortions in the U.S. territory of Saipan in the South Pacific. Corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff represented the territory with the help of Tom DeLay; many sweatshops there use low-paid Chinese immigrant labor to make clothing. To keep the women at maximum sewing efficiency, they were coerced into unsafe abortions.
From Democracy Now!
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the issue of forced abortion, which is astounding given Tom DeLay's stand on abortion. Can you talk about that?
BRIAN ROSS: Well, it's completely counter to anything that DeLay or most Republicans seem to espouse, that was, on that island there were forced abortions. And the workers there who are all young women, who often had to pay to get these jobs, knew the rules. And they were barred from having boyfriends and certainly barred from having children if they became pregnant. They knew where to go, and there were a few essential back-alley abortion mills on the island. And that's where these young Chinese women went in order to keep their jobs. And that was the deal. That's part of the situation that was essentially endorsed by DeLay when he fought the laws. The laws were established essentially exempting Saipan, although it is a U.S. territory, from U.S. labor laws.
AMY GOODMAN: So, of course, the clothing that is made there says "Made in the U.S.A."
I touched on Japanese-Brazilians in a previous post entitled "Some Japanese are Insufferable Ethnobigots". I'm fascinated with their situation, and that of other Latin-American descendants of the Japanese diaspora. Their history is noble but tragic. In fact, they can be considered among immigration history's worst losers. Their ancestors rolled the dice and, economically speaking, came up with snake eyes. If they had stuck it out in Japan, their descendants would probably be enjoying one of the highest standards of living in the world. Instead, they're now Brazilians and Peruvians.
I've never been to Brazil, but I once visited Peru in the waning days of the Alberto Fujimori presidency. It has terrible problems of poverty, much worse than Mexico. The Japanese-Peruvians were better off than most Peruvians. This is because they have the right to get work visas in Japan. On the streets of Peru there are tons of right-hand drive microvans, some still with Japanese lettering on the side. Japanese-Peruvians buy them used in Japan and bring them over, or Japanese charities donate them to Peru.
I have certain Japanese citizenry rights through my father. My husband asked me recently what I could do in Japan (not that we have the slightest intention of emigrating there). I could get a work visa and with my teaching experience, probably find decent employment as an English tutor or teacher. But other returning ethnic Japanese, the nikkeijin, wouldn't be so qualified. If all they spoke was Portuguese or Spanish, they'd more likely get the jobs cleaning squid in a fishery. They'd save up their money and send it home to their family. The "regular" Japanese would look askance at them.
Japan is in a difficult position due to their aging population. They need a labor base to support their senior citizens. Recently, they've begun letting more Nikkeijin back in. But they refuse to abandon their ideal of a homogenous nation. It has got to change. I'm sure it will change. I tend to criticize Japan pretty harshly in this blog, but I also believe they have the power to change. I get totally disgusted with English commentators who wax poetic about the undying traditions of an immortal and unchanging Japan. Stereotypical garbage! That type of commentary is better suited to describing wax fruit. In fact, there are very few countries that have changed more than Japan has in the last 200 years.
You may also notice in this blog that I consider myself a patriotic American. This country offers me a home in a way that Japan never will... at least probably not in my lifetime. To be quite honest, when I think about the way my life could have gone, and being raised as a hapa in Japan instead of America, I feel like getting down on my knees and kissing the red Georgia clay.
This partly explains my strong sense of empathy for the Latin-American nikkeijin. My feelings about them are not all wrapped up in pity, though. I also feel a sense of envy. They know more about many things than I ever will. I have spent a lot of my life learning Latin-American Spanish, and for several years, I thought I would spend the rest of my life studying Mexican literature. One of the things that fascinated me about Latin-American culture was the parallel approach to immigration and race, the sense that "Latin" histories and "Anglo" histories were like a braid, sometimes converging and sometimes diverging in both suffering and achievements. In studying the history of Latin America, I was able to better understand U.S. history and my own place within it.
As a kind of example, many Mexicans I've talked to share a similar approach to thinking about the history of their colonization. It's a view rooted in cynicism, empathy and pragmatism... much like my feelings towards the returning nikkeijin. It goes something like this. "If the Anglos had colonized Mexico instead of the Spanish, today we'd be just as rich as the United States. The Anglos had the Protestant work ethic down cold. But then again, I might not have been born. Because the Anglos killed all the indigenous people or put them into reservations. The conquistadors were too lazy. They need the indigenous people to do all the heavy lifting for them, to pretend like they were real nobles as if they were back in Spain, so they didn't separate them away or kill all of them. So due to their laziness, I'm poor, I have to work harder than the Anglos do today, but at least I'm alive."
Economically speaking, Mexicans are losers in the global game. As the famous saying goes, "Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!"
I had one professor in a class in Mexico City who was a dedicated neoliberal. He actually spent much of the class talking about how Mexico should be more like Japan. He said that in the 1950s, their situations weren't too far apart, but Japan surged ahead and left Mexico treading water. I thought his approach was boneheaded and stopped going to his class; I was only paying a nominal fee to audit these courses during the summer, so my grade didn't matter.
The hypothetical question "what if I had been raised in Japan?" has had a huge effect on my development as a human being. I don't know why it's so important. I'm still trying to figure out why it's so important to me. Sometimes I feel like a winner, but I also feel more in tune with the losers, and I get pretty angry with the whole game.
Japan Mulls Importing Foreign Workers - Saturday January 20, 2007 6:31 PM - By JOSEPH COLEMAN - Associated Press Writer
OIZUMI, Japan (AP) - At the Brazil Plaza shopping center, Carlos Watanabe thinks back on 12 lonely years as a factory worker in Japan - and can't find a single thing to praise except the cold mug of Kirin lager in his hand.
He and his bar mates, all Japanese-Brazilian, have plenty of work and steady incomes, but they also have many complaints about their adopted home: that they're isolated, looked down upon, cold-shouldered by City Hall.
"I want to go back to Brazil every day, but I don't go because I don't have the money," says Watanabe, 28. "Sometimes I think I should go home, sometimes stay here, sometimes just go to another country."
[...]
The prospect of a shrinking, rapidly aging population is spurring a debate about whether Japan - so insular that it once barred foreigners from its shores for two centuries - should open up to more foreign workers.
Japan's 2 million registered foreigners, 1.57 percent of the population, are at a record high but minuscule compared with the United States' 12 percent.
For the government to increase those numbers would be groundbreaking in a nation conditioned to see itself as racially homogeneous and culturally unique, and to equate "foreign" with crime and social disorder.
"I think we are entering an age of revolutionary change," said Hidenori Sakanaka, director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute and a vocal proponent of accepting more outsiders. "Our views on how the nation should be and our views on foreigners need to change in order to maintain our society."
[...]
At the bar at Brazil Plaza on a Saturday afternoon, Watanabe and friends were in a heated debate about whether they could live on Brazil's minimum wage.
Opinion was divided between those like Naruishi who feel they're making it in Japan, and those like Watanabe who long for their homeland.
Naruishi started out in Japan 13 years ago making tofu and now works in car sales. "Live in Brazil? No," he said. "The salaries there are too low."
But all agreed on one point: Japan is a tough society to break into.
"The Japanese don't like foreigners," said Cleber Parra, 30, who concedes he shares the blame because he doesn't speak much Japanese. "We're noisy and lazy - they don't like that."
The group moved onto another bar in the afternoon and evening, then gathered at around 11 p.m. at a club where a live band played "forra," a type of Brazilian country music.
After hours of shimmying on the packed dance floor, they spilled into the dark, quiet streets of Oizumi, laughing and chatting. A police car on the watch silently circled the block, red lights flashing.
I had a rough week at work, but everything I needed to get done I finally got done. Now comes the next big stage: my dad's operation. He gets in on Monday, has a pre-op on Tuesday and then the actual ankle fusion surgery next Monday. All today I've been working on getting his room and his medical devices ready.
It's been tough trying to forecast the next two months of recuperation. He has a very different kind of lifestyle. Some parts of it are fairly normal for a Japanese person of his age. For example, he needs a wireless internet connection and a fancy automatic tea kettle in order to really be comfortable. We skip breakfast or make a fried egg sandwich; he's going to need fish soup and natto first thing in the morning. Other areas are just really eccentric by any planetary cultural standard.
We had our second homestudy visit this week. We talked about the process and focused on what schools we were thinking about. I've done a lot of research so I know what's out there, but it's impossible to make a firm prediction about what we're going to do, since the range of possible children is so wide.
One thing the worker was very carefully to discuss with me was the effect of a possible pregnancy. I explained again that if I became pregnant, I would call the agency right away. If they didn't have a match for me within a week or so, we would have to put our application on hold. What I'd want to avoid at all costs is a situation where a child is placed with us and we only have a few months before I give birth. That's too confusing for the child; they'd need more stability than that. Eight to nine months seems doable to me, though. Of course this is assuming I can get pregnant, which we don't know for sure yet, although signs point to yes.
From the agency's point of view, their top priority is to avoid having us accept a match, but then backing out of it. So my timeline works for all parties involved. The worker is going to make sure to talk about this timeline in the homestudy.
While she works on our homestudy, our next step is putting a "lifebook" together. This isn't a lifebook in the usual sense of the word. It's actually a black and white PowerPoint presentation describing our family.
Let me preface by saying that I really love Tolkien and all things Lord of the Rings.
I also enjoy reading critiques of Lord of the Rings. There's a lot of creepy racial undertones to his mythology; dark evil always lurks in the East and South, for example. But my favorite Tolkien critique is by genius British writer Michael Moorcock. It's an essay called "Epic Pooh" that takes a class-based approach and accuses Tolkien of smug Toryism. According to Moorcock, the hobbits are based on a wrongheaded ideal of lower-middle-class English rural life as seen from an urban upper-middle-class perspective. The book containing the essay is recently back in print with some additional writing by a few of my favorite urban fantasy writers.
I just happened to run across an incredibly entertaining exegesis of Lord of the Rings. It was featured on a site called "The Fighting 44s." I was chewing a piece of plum-flavored chewing gum (a special brand my father brings from Japan on visits) and I almost spit it out when I read about the Korean elves. Then I almost swallowed it and choked when I read who the Numenoreans were supposed to be.
In an interesting revelation, we learned in The Silmarillion that when elves are pushed over the edge, when they get angry and suffer intense pain and/or humiliation, they turn into orcs. Why, just the other day, I mistook a Korean for Chinese, and I witnessed a monstrous transformation: his face contorted like a devil-worshipping epileptic, and he started foaming at the mouth. I swear I heard him scream something like, "Che irumeun GORGUL imnida!!!" at which point he proceeded to eat a chubby little mainland Chinese kid in a bone stew. Time will tell if this glorious race disappears into the West with needless plastic surgery and questionable adoption practices.
From "Lord of the Chings" by Dialectic the Stealth MC
I'm superbusy at work, so I don't have time to give this piece the full angry rant it deserves.
Geisha grrrls
The author of a new book about gender in Japan sets aside Western stereotypes and talks about how ordinary women are fueling a feminist revolution that's transforming the country.
I read the above book review article at Salon.com while filled with disgust. There was a short period when I hoped the blurb might be true: that the author really does attack and expose stereotypes. Instead, she just confirms them.
"You can find a woman who works as a vice president at Canon and also really likes playing the shamisen, which is one of the traditional geisha arts..."
Again, Japanese tradition always has to be represented by the geisha. Nevermind that throughout their long history, the vast majority of Japanese women have been peasant farmers.
I left a comment at Salon.com. Given my previous posts on the subject here at my blog - Memoirs of a Ho Ho Ho and Memoirs of a Ho Ho Ho (Revisited) - it should be quite easy to tell which comment is mine. I suspect that my salon.com comment will soon be followed with lots of angry protestations and denials.
The author of the book doesn't get a pass because she's black, either, just as I wouldn't give an Asian woman author a pass for perpetuating stereotypes about black women. She should know better. I guess putting "geisha" in the title of any book about Japan makes it much more marketable.
There's nothing much adoption-related going on right now. We were supposed to have the second homestudy visit last week, but it was postponed to next week due to the worker falling sick with a cold.
Saturday morning, my husband and I went to Scott Antique Market, which is held once a month in a large exhibit hall. The stuff there is fairly high end, so we go there more to look than to buy. There's a regular dealer there who sells items from Turkmenistan.
Most Americans have only heard about Turkmenistan due to the recent death of its extremely crazy supreme dictator. This is a guy who named a month of the year after his mother and erected a giant gold statue of himself that rotates every 24 hours. The Turkmen people are also known as great jewelers. Many other Central Asian peoples also have great jewelry traditions, but the Turkmen style is my personal favorite.
Turkmen work is usually in silver with some gold washes for contrast. It incorporates stones such as carnelian and lapis lazuli, or else colored glass. The designs strike a balance between simplicity (basic geometric shapes, repeated and transformed, very limited color palette) and sophistication (borders, dots and ropes and chains tying the shapes together). Here is a Turkmen website with lots more pictures of this amazing stuff. Turkmen jewelry is also featured as part of a permanent exhibit at Fernbank Museum in Decatur, Georgia. The picture to the left is of a headdress that the dealer ("Nuristan") kindly let me photograph.
I didn't bother asking how much the headdress cost. I did buy two very small pendants, each of which cost $40.00, which is quite a cheap price. I'm planning on making them into matching necklaces for my mother and me. The photo to the right isn't very good and doesn't really show the nice gold wash on the left pendant.
Driving back from the market, we saw a Lady Liberty muppet attacking a taxi:
The rest of the day was very relaxing. I tried to finish reading American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America by Chris Hedges. The chapter on conversion narratives was very good, but the book wasn't coming together and really felt more like a series of articles I'd already read before. My snapping point was the chapter on creationism. Even though it's not Chris Hedges' fault, I read something so stupid there that I just could not continue reading. It's a young earth creationist who works for the "Creation Museum" using the Bible to argue that Tyrannosaurus Rex was a vegetarian... or, actually, a fruitarian.
"People say, 'Wait a minute -- but T. rex has those incredibly shap teeth.' And indeed, T. rex had six-inch serrated fangs -- perfectly designed for ripping and tearing into watermelons and cantaloupes and cabbages and all kinds of fruit.
"You see, you think of a watermelon as soft. But in order to get to the soft stuff on the inside, you have to cut through the hard outer exterior. But not T. rex. He was quite ready to eat it off the vine."
I ran across a New York Times article today profiling the new Swedish immigration minister. Her name is Nyamko Sabuni and her parents were originally from Congo. Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali in The Netherlands, she takes a very firm assimilationist stance.
As an opposition politician, Ms. Sabuni proposed banning the veil for girls under the age of 15. She proposed that schoolgirls undergo compulsory medical examinations to check for evidence of genital mutilation. She denounced what she called the “honor culture” of some immigrant groups, proposed outlawing arranged marriages and called for an end to state financing of religious schools.
Even as furious immigrant and minority groups demand that she be removed from her post, Ms. Sabuni, 37, insists that she is not as extreme as people make her out to be. Given that Sweden is governed by a coalition in which parliamentary votes cannot always be counted on, it is unlikely, anyway, that most of her ideas could plausibly translate into actual law. Nonetheless, she stands by her basic premise: that immigrants must try harder to fit in to their adopted country.
I went to my favorite Mexican restaurant today for a quick lunch of tortilla soup. The waiter was a little bit cheeky and called me "chinita" but I don't take offense at that term, since it's very common and usually harmless. I picked up a copy of the free weekly Mundo Hispánico, which covers local and world news for the Hispanic community in Atlanta and Georgia. The more serious local articles (as opposed to sports and celebrity gossip) mostly focused on legal issues such as the proposed highly unconstitutional anti-immigrant-tenant law in Cherokee County.
There was also a fascinating article on fostering children of Latin American origin. Georgia has seen a huge influx of immigrants, mostly Mexican (and specifically from the more indigenous, rural south of Mexico) and Central American, although there's now a growing population of Brazilians to the northwest of Atlanta. They are very new arrivals. They are an extremely diverse bunch, but a large subgroup is undocumented. Many are settling in the counties surrounding urban Atlanta, such as Rockdale and Gwinnett. They will be totally changing the face of Atlanta when the next, fully English-speaking generation integrates more into our schools and job markets. For now, due to lack of English skills and unfamiliarity with the U.S., they are extremely vulnerable to criminals and corrupt officials such as fake notarios. I have frequently wondered whether their children are overrepresented or underrepresented in the foster care system.
The article doesn't address that issue, but it does underline the growing need for Hispanic foster families. I've translated it below. Pardon the clunkiness. I didn't have time to do a good job, so I just fed it through a translation engine then went back over it and corrected the worst errors. There is no direct word for "foster" so I'm just providing very literal translations of foster-related words such as "albergar" and "temporal". The original article is here at the Mundo Hispánico website.
Cultural differences, the great challenge of American families who lodge Latin children
In search of Hispanic homes that offer love
The amount of minors of Latin American origin in the care of the state increased in Georgia in the last few years
By Maria Patricia Castro
01/04/2007
The number of Hispanic minors under custody of the state, in the county of Gwinnett, increased in the last few years. But the lack of Hispanic families who offer to lodge them forces most of these little ones to reside in American homes, in which the language and the traditions are very different.
“In the first six months of 2006 we received 469 new children, 30 percent of whom were Hispanic”, assured Lisa C. Lariscy, Director of the Department of Family and Children Services of Gwinnett county. “This increase of Hispanic children in our programs is a phenomenon that happens in many counties of Georgia”, she added.
|
Here's another long, meandering post sparked by a short conversation. There's no adoption content at all.
As background, I've mentioned this before, but I don't speak Japanese. I took a private lesson during a stay in Japan when I was a teenager, but didn't get too far past that. I just didn't have the motivation. I felt bad for being monolingual. I had a fleeting affair with the German language but it beat me into submission before I could get past the neuter gender. Then Spanish warmly welcomed me. After I started seriously studying Spanish, I gave up the guilt.
Linguists note that the Chinese are supercharged language keepers compared to the Japanese. The Chinese diaspora has touched almost every continent. Somehow they manage, very frequently, to keep their language to the second and even third generation. I have many examples to contrast with the Chinese. Living in Florida, I knew tons of kids whose parents came from Cuba or other Spanish-speaking countries, and all of them complained about speaking miserable Spanish. Mexican-Americans in border states hang on to fluency longer, but not by much. I have a good friend who's Palestinian-American, and he too spoke what he called "kitchen Arabic". He now speaks standard Arabic fluently, but it cost him many years of really hard work.
Japan had a diaspora concentrated in the 19th to early 20th century in which immigrants ended up in places like Brazil, Hawaii and Peru. The second generation everywhere had low rates of language retention. What this all means is that by not speaking Japanese, I'm actually being more authentically Japanese-American!
I work with a Japanese-American woman. I'll call her K. Both her parents emigrated from Japan and run a restaurant together here in Atlanta. A time came up when I needed some Japanese translation. Rude people occasionally tsk-tsk me for not speaking "my own" language, so I'm so sensitive I would never ask another Japanese-American if they spoke Japanese. Instead, I asked K, "So you don't speak Japanese, do you?" She said, "No, I don't. I just understand a few words and sentences." We commiserated a little bit about those supercharged Chinese, and that was all.
Just tonight I had another conversation with K. She's now working part-time because she's starting a college degree. As an elective, she's taking Japanese. But she's just been dropped from the class. The teacher told her that as a "heritage speaker" she doesn’t belong there.
Now, this might make sense if there was a class for Japanese heritage speakers. Maybe it exists in Hawaii, but sure as hell not in Atlanta! As an occasional language teacher, I understand the need for these classes. For Spanish it's especially crucial. An English speaker foreign to Spanish comprehends the big cognate words before they understand the small, everyday ones; for a heritage speaker, the small ones are often already packed in the mental toolcase, but the confidence to put the big cognates together is lacking. There's a serious lack of Spanish classes for heritage speakers. Reversing the stand of those Monolingualism or Death! English-only activists, I'm much more concerned about the state of Spanish-language education in our country. Anyway, given how lacking these heritage classes are in Spanish, of course there's none for Japanese here.
K was given another choice, which was to take the next level up in Japanese. She was completely unprepared for that level, and her writing skills in particular would be far behind. She couldn't do it; she would have been lost. She told me indignantly that there were several people in the class who had lived in Japan, which she has never done, and that they obviouslyspoke Japanese better than she did. They weren't Japanese-American, and they were allowed to stay.
I had the sneaking suspicion of racism. Then I had an even sneakier suspicion.
"Is the teacher Japanese?"
"Yes! I think she's prejudiced against Japanese-Americans!"
We commiserated. I believed her, and said she should think about writing a letter of protest, but how likely is it that someone at the university would believe her and act on it?
Some people reading this may have trouble understanding why a teacher would do something like that. I can’t call it racism so I'll use the word "ethnobigotry" instead. The idea is that Japaneseness is next to godliness. You have to be ever vigilant to maintain your Japaneseness and that of your children. If you "fall" from a state of being Japanese, you might turn into a pitiable thing lower than if you were never Japanese to begin with. Obviously not all Japanese think this way, but it's not an uncommon idea.
Any person of immigrant heritage will have some degree of conflict when interacting with related people whose families didn't leave. I think it's unrealistic for anyone, be they Irish-American or Cuban-American or whatever, to return to their ancestral country and expect to be welcomed with open arms as if they'd never left. But we're not talking about K demanding to be treated like a Japanese person. She just wanted a chance to learn Japanese like any other regular student of any other race or cultural background, and the teacher is screwing her over.
I found an interesting essay on a related subject. It covers prejudice not against Japanese-Americans but against Japanese-Brazilians. It's called "Media Images, Immigrant Reality: Ethnic Prejudice and Tradition in Japanese Media Representations of Japanese-Brazilian Return Migrants" by Takeyuki “Gaku” Tsuda and is available here in PDF or here in Googlefied HTML.
Among the many expressions of disparagement directed toward the first generation nikkeijin (the original Japanese emigrants), the following statement by an older Tokyo resident was quite representative:The Japanese do not perceive the nikkeijin well. They are seen as people who were from Japanese rural villages and were poor. They were the type of low level people who couldn't survive in Japan, so they had to discard Japan and go abroad. They are seen as nihonjin shikkaku (not worthy of being Japanese)--people who didn't have much ability.
A middle-aged housewife in Oizumi-town in Gunma-prefecture was even more explicit:The nikkeijin are low level people. They were Japanese social dropouts who were poor and uneducated. These were people who had nothing in Japan, so said to themselves, 'regardless of how horrible things are overseas, they can't be worse than my life in Japan.' Therefore, they abandoned their own country and fled abroad.
Here's a very personal, family-related post with a light adoption focus (or dark humor adoption focus, depending on how you look at it).
My mother was over at my house last night; we had a fresh baked trout and watched Inside Man. She, my husband and I talked a little bit about how much I resemble my father. He'd asked her recently, "How did my genes so throughly defeat yours?" My mother and father are almost polar opposites personality-wise.
My mother is a social genius. She can ask anyone the most personal questions in such a charming and self-deprecating way that they end up telling her their life story in just a few minutes. She's way too independent to work in a social services or psychological setting, but her gifts have still helped her in running her own business, since she can instantly recall the faces, families, birthdays, pets and significant life events of any of her clients. My father happens to be a misanthrope and professional conversation-killer. When people asked him "How are you doing?" he used to like to reply with "I'm dying". Then when they offered their shocked condolences, he would say, "but aren't we all dying... every day?" He has no love of humanity, or even mammals for that matter, although he does seem to appreciate plant life and small invertebrates.
I'd like to resemble my mother more in social areas, but realistically, I only received about 25% of her social intelligence and extroverted nature. I think I'm fairly average... I enjoy meeting new people, but get tired very quickly of small talk and would rather stay home with my husband than go to most social situations. Another area where I'm in the middle is fear of heights. I hate peering over cliff ledges, but I've been out hiking in mountains a few times and mostly loved it. My father has no fear of heights whatsoever. My mother, past about ten feet up, gets faintness, dry sweats and electric tingling pain in her feet.
As my mother, my husband and I were talking last night, I noted that my father almost never talks about his adoptive parents. In fact, I know slightly more about his biological parents than I do about his adoptive. My mother countered with the fact that he has a very strong sense of loyalty to the place where he grew up and also to his clan. I remember his constant refrain when I was a child that he was the first person in his clan to go to college, and that meant as the next generation I was obligated to get a graduate degree so I could beat his own bachelor's degree. I have an MBA now, but he says it doesn't really count. I honestly have to agree with him -- as long anyone has solid studying discipline and the most basic grasp of pre-calculus math, business degrees are pretty easy to get. Nevermind, I'm sure I'll have another more interesting master's degree at some point within the next five years.
I'd known for a long while that my dad used to dangle me over the edges of balconies when I was a baby. My mother told me it was only one of a series of differences in childrearing philosophies that contributed to their eventual divorce. He argued that holding me over the edges of buildings would innoculate me against a future fear of heights. She very strongly disagreed. All I can say is that while I have a strong relationship with my father, I'm glad he was never close to being my primary parental caregiver.
When I heard about the Michael Jackson scandal (the one a few years ago where he dangled one of his kids over the hotel balcony) I felt a little bit embarassed. Hey! That was me!
My mother, in reminding me of my dad's feelings of clan loyalty, mentioned the underlying reason he wanted to cure me of a fear of heights by holding me over the edges of balconies: because the clan were roofers.
This is another piece of the puzzle coming together. Now if I only knew their names. A long time ago I asked him, for a grade school project, to do a family tree for me, adoptive and biological. It took a lot of nudging, and I think he refused to write anyone's names in English characters. The piece of paper was lost long ago. Maybe when he's staying with us for his recuperation period, I can get him to draw me another one.
Last month I posted about a $4.3 million federal fine for Georgia DFCS. This is probably related to a large lawsuit against Fulton and Dekalb counties (these are the two urban Atlanta counties). I've read about this Kenny A vs. Perdue lawsuit before. The successful lawsuit has had the good effect of drawing attention to serious problems and forcing better solutions, but there are some negative aspects as well.
Lisa at Sunshine Girl on a Rainy Day gives a very thoughtful analysis of the $11.3 million lawsuit, including a breakdown of all the areas where the state is at fault. She stresses that the state, by stalling the case for three years, spent a lot of money fighting reforms that would have been cheaper to implement without stalling. I noticed that one of her sources that she uses for this article is Jim Wooten, AJC editorialist, who in my opinion is a raving nincompoop*. But her piece simply incorporates a second-party quote from his editorial, and nothing of his incoherent social services reform philosophy.
I've always wondered when I read about these lawsuits... who gets the money? Does it go towards foster parent recruitment? Lessening the casework for social workers? Client family support and therapy? Services for foster kids? Nope, it goes to lawyers and more lawsuits.
The lawsuit was originally filed 'on behalf of' nine foster children who had received physical and/or psychological harm. How much of that money was given to them?
None, that I can see. I read the Consent Decree on childrensrights.org and it looks like all they're planning to do for those children is monitor their future placements.
Griftdrift (Southern Politics Blog)
One day, I will tell you all my thoughts on Jim Wooten. Like many things in the south, they are filled with darkness and loathing but will probably be proceeded by the phrase "bless his heart".
Hang in there if you're an adoption-oriented reader. This post is long but it gets to adoption at the very end.
As I touched on in my last post, when it comes to cultural and racial identity, I believe in showing people respect by calling them what they want to be called. Of course, this depends on reasonable knowledge of what they want to be called. It also depends on common sense... I mean, there's no way I'm going to refer to someone as a "Vampire-American," even if they ask very nicely.
I use both "black" and "African-American" as group names. Although the boundary is a bit vague, it's my understanding that black is more of a racial word and African-American is more of a cultural and ethnic word. And then of course there's "Black" with a capital B which has a much stronger meaning (power, pride) than the more neutral "black" with a lower case b. There are many black people in America whose status as African-Americans is dubious. One example: Haitian-Americans. Another more ambiguous example: Ethiopian-Americans. And then there are white South Africans and Northern Africans like Moroccans; non-black people from Africa almost never make the attempt to claim the word African-American because it tends to really irritate existing African-Americans, plus they already have other ethnic descriptors.
I think we'll have to wait a generation to see if African-American turns into a word able to encompass Haitian- and Ethopian-Americans, and if they want to claim it. For this reason I try to only use African-American to describe people 1) who specifically call themselves African-American or 2) whose families have lived in the United States for several generations.
It's also my understanding that multiracial African-Americans with some white ancestry prefer to simply classify themselves as black, or sometimes as "biracial" if they have one white parent, and that this is often a reaction of solidarity against institutionalized racism pitting light-skinned against dark-skinned. It's an issue that I'm very interested in, and one of the reasons is that my 5-year-old niece is black/biracial and her mother, my sister-in-law, is white. Her father is not around but her father's family are a very important influence in her life. In fact, I'm a little worried she may start to have uncomfortable feelings about being light-skinned, because I heard her say on a recent visit that she needs more sun to get a tan because she's not dark like her cousins. She's going to have to work through some racial identity issues as she grows up, and I really hope she can do it successfully, from a position of strength and pride.
One new word I've heard for biracial black/white is "Halfrican". Just looking at the printed word, I have bad feelings. The word "half" generally has negative connotations when it comes to race, because it can be read as the opposite of "whole". People who are only "half" sound incomplete. That's why I like "mixed" or "multi" or "bi" terminology much better. I've never heard black/biracial people call themselves "Halfrican" in a positive way. When people of other backgrounds call them that, it sounds like a nasty insult.
This is a meandering introduction to a very racist thing that someone said about Barack Obama on a radio show. The remarks are offensive to all intelligent human beings, and specifically offensive towards African-Americans AND multiracial people. Of course I'm not African-American but I feel directly insulted as a multiracial person, since they attack my own right to self-identify.
Melanie Morgan co-host on "Halfrican" Obama
On the December 4 broadcast of San Francisco radio station KSFO's Sussman, Morgan & Vic, in speaking to a co-host -- apparently Brian Sussman -- co-host Melanie Morgan referred to Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) as an, "as you call, 'Halfrican.' "
....
From the December 4 edition of KSFO's Sussman, Morgan & Vic:
MORGAN: Senator Obama, who is, as you call, a 'Halfrican' --
SUSSMAN: Halfrican and, again, his father was -- his father was from Kenya, his mother's white. OK, now, I have nothing with mixed -- nothing against mixed-race people [atlasien: yeah, right] but, my point is, when this guy stands in front of a black audience, pretending like he was born and raised in the hood, and he can identify with their problems, he doesn't allow -- he is not, in my opinion -- 'cause my opinion is your average white guy -- he is not allowed to wear the African-American badge because his family are not the descendants of slaves, OK? He can't identify with the discrimination and the slavery and all of that that's gone into these black families for generations; he's a kid who was raised with a silver spoon in his mouth in a white family in Hawaii, OK? You wanna call me names for saying this? Go right ahead. I'm just telling you what the guy is.
MORGAN: Well --
TOM BENNER (aka "Officer Vic," KSFO morning traffic reporter): And you're not making this up. I mean, it's documented, for goodness sake. You can look it up.
SUSSMAN: I'm not making this up, so I just -- I get offended and I know I have many black friends [atlasien: yeah, right] who get offended when he stands in front of that black audience talking like he's from the hood, born and raised, and I can -- can identify with all of their issues. He can't!
MORGAN: Well, and guess what? It's working. It's working big-time.
America's label game misses diversity of race
Obama was born in Hawaii and moved with his mother and Indonesian stepfather to Jakarta after his parents divorced. How does he define himself?
African-American.
"The reason that I've always been comfortable with that description is not a denial of my mother's side of the family," he told the New York Times.
"Rather, it's just a belief that the term African-American is by definition a hybrid term. African-Americans are a hybrid people. We're mingled with African culture and Native American culture and European culture."
He added: "If I was arrested for armed robbery and my mug shot was on the television screen, people wouldn't be debating if I was African-American or not. I'd be a black man going to jail. Now if that's true when bad things are happening, there's no reason why I shouldn't be proud of being a black man when good things are happening, too."
From Spocko's Brain
--Now I know that Sussman has a whole patter about why he feels he can use this term (I get the impression that he has adopted children of mixed races, but I'm not sure) he clearly has a strong story to explain why he can say things like this whereas Morgan can't. But as my friend pointed out to me,So what if he can? That's still a slur and racist, and *he's* not black. Hell, that would be derogatory if a black person said it about another black person, kind of like how it's derogatory for a black person to call another black person an "oreo," (black on the outside, white on the inside) or for a Native person to call another Native person an "apple" (red on the outside, white on the inside) . It's derogatory because it says negative things about *both* groups he's talking about, and he doesn't get to make that call, black adopted kids or not.
And always remember folks this commercially supported broadcast radio is brought to you by The Walt Disney Company! And ABC Radio! Advertisers should know what they are funding so they can make their own decision if they want to support this "Hot Talk".
I've been outside my "racial environment" for 99.99% of my life. In any country I've ever lived in or visited, I stick out like a sore thumb. Most non-Asians in American assume I'm full Asian, then do a little double-take once they look at me closely. Sometimes they decide to do the obnoxious Asian country guessing game thing. In Asian countries, it's obvious what I am. Oddly enough, African-Americans (but only native Georgians) sometimes assume I'm Hispanic. I chalk it down to the fact that Hispanics and now Brazilians are relative newcomers to our state.
I can think of a few other hapas I've known. The first was a girl in Florida who was in my circle of college friends. Her father was in the military and her mother met him stationed in Japan. We got along but never clicked as friends. She eventually moved to California, and I moved to New York and then Atlanta. The second was a guy I met in a concert line in New York. His father was Chinese and his mother was white. I would never have known he wasn't white if he hadn’t told me. He had sandy hair, and his features were almost completely white. The third is a guy in Atlanta who's married to a close friend of my husband's. Like me, he's half-Japanese, looks much more Asian than white and speaks Spanish he learned in Mexico. He's interesting but has extremely weird conversational habits; his life, very unlike mine, totally revolves around skateboarding and Honda tuning.
There are only two places I'm aware of with people that look like me. There's a large group (Uighurs and some related) in the far northwest of China. Then there's a medium-sized group in Hawaii. I went on a weeklong visit to Hawaii about five years ago. At times I was surrounded by people who looked like me. It was amazing but terrifying. It was almost like a voice in my head going "Welcome home. This isn't home. Welcome home. This isn't home". Coming from a Florida background, I know how unfriendly tourist economies can be. That's the kind of treatment I was expecting. But from the body language other Hawaiians showed towards me, it was clear they didn't think of me as a tourist. I can't exactly explain it in physical terms. They didn't throw their arms around me, or even take much notice of me. Maybe it was in the way that they didn't take notice of me. I wasn't anyone special at all. Of course, this only lasted until I opened my mouth and they heard my very un-Hawaiian accent.
My visit to Hawaii was very disconcerting because it made me realize how much I was used to "sticking out": people assuming I'm a foreigner, asking me "where are you from" and refusing to take "Florida" for an answer, asking to touch my hair, at the most extreme even taking trophy photographs of me. Part of this is in my blood. Both my parents have a very high tolerance for being noticed, stared at or pointed out. My father spent a lot of his professional life in Africa. He and my mother have both traveled all over the world. They're used to being foreigners, and I was raised to believe that being foreign was nothing out of the ordinary. Still, both of them have hometown origins where the people looked more or less like them. I would have liked to have had that at some point. It's too late now; I really have no strong desire to move to Hawaii, although I'd love another visit.
I learned early on a great way to feel comfortable: just find a group that has a lots of different kinds of people. In any crowd that's all white or all Asian or all black I start to feel a bit nervous. When the crowd mixes up more, I relax. The same goes for foreign countries. I once had a fantastic summer living in Mexico City where I socialized with Mexicans from really diverse backgrounds as well as foreign students from Russia, Japan and Colombia. I've been very lucky to live a cosmopolitan life. I've had a lot of privileges that people coming from homogenous rural or isolated areas don't have.
I only learned I was "hapa" a few years ago. It's a Hawaiian word that's turning into a word for all mixed Asians. I love the word as much I hated the only other word I knew to describe me, "Eurasian". It sounds too much like "hey… yer Asian!" and it privileges "European" as if that were the standard to be deviated from. The only thing "hapa" sounds like to me is "happy". I've told my husband that I'm now a hapa, but haven’t told anyone else I know in real life. It just doesn't come up in normal conversation. "Haven’t seen you in a while, what's up? By the way, I've got a new name for my racial identity."
Maybe I should send them hapa cards!
I've had a nasty week with this persistent head cold, but it's finally starting to clear. My dad is currently staying with us, although he's leaving tomorrow and won't be back until the end of the month when his ankle surgery is scheduled.
This week we've gotten a lot of things organized for his six-week recuperation period. For example, the handyman installed a shower bar yesterday. I found a kind of flipper he should be able to use for swimming after the ankle fusion; he'd been worried about that, since he has a very active lifestyle (as opposed to his daughter, the internet potato) which includes lots of biking and swimming. He has threatened ritual suicide if I put a TV in his room but I know he's just kidding. I've bought a small TV for him and added the NHK channel to our DISH package so he can watch stuff like this controversial (BOUNCE WITH ME! BOUNCE WITH ME!) video. Actually, I know he really likes watching sumo wrestling.
In major adoption blog news, American Family just got their Chinese expedited referral, and Ahauna has been matched! Congratulations.
Over the break, two articles on adoption in Japan came out. I'm excerpting a long Japan Times article below. It confirms my prior research (see this long post from last month) that there are many children growing up in institutions due to domestic anti-adoption attitudes.
It's also very interesting to see what the Japanese conception of American adoption is like. I don't think that our adoption processes are nearly as child-centered as the ISSJ representative states. I do think that the ISSJ is trying to push the "we're not as child-centered as we should be" line to raise awareness of adoption in Japan, and it sounds like a good strategy to me. If invoking national shame will get a few more adoptive parents to even consider the possibility of adopting an older child from a children's home, then great.
Cultural attitudes spell few adoptions By SETSUKO KAMIYA
Couples looking to start a family naturally want their own children. But amid the recent debate over whether to legalize surrogate births in Japan, one question has largely been overlooked: What about adoption?
Without a doubt, there are many children without parents who need loving families, but adoption of unrelated children is rare in Japan, partly because of doubts that placing them in an unfamiliar home environment is better than raising them in a public welfare facility.
Temporary foster care, in which families agree to care for a child for a few weeks or even several years without becoming the legal parents, is not common either.
Child welfare specialists argue there must be a change in the mind-set of parents -- a desire to act in the best interests of children -- if adoption is to take root.
....
Adoption is less common in Japan than in some Western countries. In 2004, family courts recognized only 322 adoptions of children under 6, according to official statistics. There were also 998 children over age 6 adopted the same year.
By contrast, in 2004, 5,360 children in England and Wales found new families. In Germany the figure was 5,064. And as many as 1.6 million children under 18 found new homes in the United States.
Many factors can affect adoption rates, including legal differences and cultural notions of family. But a big reason for the small number in Japan is that there are few children considered good candidates for would-be parents.
"Most couples want healthy babies and they want to raise them as if they were their own, but we tell them their chances are slim," said Harumi Takahashi at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health, which deals with adoptions and foster parenting.
Currently, some 30,000 children under 18 are living in welfare facilities around the country. They may have suffered abuse; their parents may be too ill or financially unable to care for them; their parents may be in prison or may have simply given them up. Some children are placed in foster care temporarily and eventually reunited with their parents.
But of course, not all the children waiting for permanent homes are "desirable": many are older, some have disabilities.
Another limiting factor is the reluctance of many biological parents to give up their parental rights even though they cannot raise their children, said Takahashi. With the exception of orphans, the biological parents must give their consent for adoption to be possible.
As of the end of March, only 29 children were under the care of registered foster parents who were expected to complete adoption procedures in Tokyo. About 120 couples are on a waiting list, Takahashi said.
Adoption of kids from overseas is meanwhile practically unheard of in Japan. In the United States, by contrast, 13 percent of adopted children were born in another country. In Germany, such children make up nearly a third of the total.
Cultural norms about what constitutes a family also play a big part. "(When) Westerners say they want to adopt a child, it is because they are blessed with such capability and want to do so for the sake of the child," said Kuniko Omori, general director of International Social Service Japan, a welfare organization headquartered in Geneva that offers advice for people seeking to adopt internationally.
Age or disability hardly matters to adoptive parents in the West, Omori said. "In the mind-set of many Japanese, there is still the sense that they want to adopt the child to carry on the family line."
....
"In Japan, I lived in the countryside in a town north of Mount Fuji for five years when I was nine. My grandmother couldn't afford to care for Sumiko-chan and me, so we moved to Tokyo to live with our new parents who adopted us. I missed the fresh air and view of the mountain. That was the best place for a boy to be. But that was a long time ago."
When Dad said "adopted," I glanced over at my brothers. They wore masks of nonchalance.
"Mom, the rice is finished!" Dad yelled from his seat. As Mom stood at the table, spooning out the thick rice porridge using a wooden rice paddle, I saw her look at Dad before asking if he was okay.
Dad quickly nodded his head, cleared his throat, and lifted the lid. His eyes closed just as a puff of steam blurred his features for a second. "When I moved to Tokyo, my name became Ichiro Shimura. No longer was I called James Furiya. My new parents were civil servants of the Japanese military. They could not have me using my American name.
My brothers and I leaned into the table, our bowls of porridge in hand and our heads drawn together so we could eat and listen at the same time. Mom handed Dad a bowl before starting on her own.
Shifting his attention to his porridge, he said, "The rice needs a little salt." Mom reached across the table for the shaker, sprinkled it generously into the rice mixture, and then gave it a couple of stirs.
"If you were adopted, didn't that make you part of their family?" Keven interrupted.
"No, it was different in Japan at that time than it is here and now. Adoption was the same thing as being a servant," he explained matter-of-factly, responding to my brother's question in English. It was a fact of life that if a family couldn't afford to support a child, or if the home situation changed, orphanages or well-off families were a place to send them.
"One of my responsibilities was washing all the corridors of the house," my father continued. "First with water, then dry it with a towel, and afterward rub it with okara, the leftover soybean fiber after it's made into tofu. I wrapped it up in a cloth and used as a cleaner. Then I followed with linseed oil. If you didn't rub the oil into the wood well enough, the wood felt sticky. I had to rub the wood for a long time. It was a big house, too." Dad made fast swiping motions with his hands as if scrubbing an invisible surface. Maybe he was trying to protect himself, or maybe us, by continuing with these details in English rather than his more articulate Japanese. But he didn't realize how the details told in his choppy English actually made the story more shocking.
"Sometimes I had no time to eat breakfast, just enough to clean up the house and go to school." Dad pushed rice into his mouth.
"One morning I used too much oil and needed to rub it in longer. I thought I was finished. When my stepfather inspected it, he got very angry at me. I was on my hands and knees, and he yelled at me, 'Still feels sticky, keep rubbing!' He pushed his stocking foot on the floor, then kicked me hard.
"It was early morning and I was already tired and hungry, but I rubbed down the corridors again. I was late getting to school, so my teacher made me stay late that afternoon. This made me late getting home. Boy, my stepfather was angry. As a punishment, he made me sit like this for two hours." Dad put down his rice bowl and chopsticks and got down on his hands and knees on the floor. He sat on his calves and ankles, the traditional way Japanese women typically do.
Standing up shakily, he said, "I can't do this now. Too painful. My legs go numb. But at the time, if I moved, my stepfather hit me on the head with a bamboo stick." He slapped his hands together, then quickly cowered and covered his head as if deflecting imaginary blows. Angrily Dad hissed, "Still, to this day, I hate that man."
My eyes turned down, I stirred and blew on the half-eaten rice porridge, even though it was already cooled, for something to do. Then, holding the bowl to my mouth, I scraped heaps of rice in with my chopsticks. These simple, normal motions felt exaggerated and awkward. The silence blared in my ears and remained after our rice bowls were empty.
Not an entirely accurate characterization of adoption.
"If you were adopted, didn't that make you part of their family?" Keven interrupted.
"No, it was different in Japan at that time than it is here and now. Adoption was the same thing as being a servant," he explained matter-of-factly, responding to my brother's question in English. It was a fact of life that if a family couldn't afford to support a child, or if the home situation changed, orphanages or well-off families were a place to send them.
While this might have been true for Ms. Kuriya's father, the typical circumstance for a male being adopted into a family (often that of his wife) is the lack of a male heir.
My father-in-law, roughly the same age as Ms. Kuriya's, was adopted by a family whose son had died as a young boy. Far from being a servant, my giri otou-san was adopted to replace the son so that the family name and family business would continue.
I suspect that Ms. Kuriya's father's circumstance may have been influenced by the fact that his new "family" may not even have considered him a "real" Japanese, as he was born and live in America until he was nine years old.
To this day, many Japanese treat Japanese who have lived abroad for extended periods of time, as, at best, something exotic. Stories of returned ex-pat Japanese children being driven to violence or suicide because of bullying at school are not uncommon.
-- nandemosan
Foster Care System Perspectives Blogs on Adoption from the Foster Care System Blogs on Adoption and African-Americans Blogs on Adoption and Asian-Americans Asian Links Other Adoption Resources and/or Blogs Adoption Forums Adoption Reform Local Stuff Some Favorites: Politics, Feminism, Race and Culture, Humor, Misc.
"Rising to the defense of their country, by the thousands they came - these young Japanese American soldiers from Hawaii, the states, America's concentration camps - to fight in Europe and the Pacific during World War II. Looked upon with suspicion, set apart and deprived of their constitutional rights, they nevertheless remained steadfast and served with indomitable spirit and uncommon valor, for theirs was a fight to prove loyalty. This legacy will serve as a sobering reminder that never again shall any group be denied liberty and the rights of citizenship." - Go For Broke Monument, Los Angeles, CaliforniaOther Colors: "The first anti-miscegenation law, barring marriage between whites and blacks, was passed in Maryland in 1661. By the nineteenth century, such laws had been enacted in most states. In 1880, California passed a law prohibiting the issuing of licenses for marriage between any white persona and a 'Negro, mulatto, or Mongolian.' ... Aimed at the Chinese, the law was supported by the likes of John F. Miller, who said in 1878, 'Were the Chinese to amalgamate at all with our people... the result of that amalgamation would be…a mongrel of the most detestable that has ever afflicted the earth.' In 1909, California specifically added the Japanese to the list."
[np / cb / so]
