Getting Started 3+3

Hello! I hope this blog will be of interest to people in the adoption community. Ultimately it is really to exercise my brain a little bit while I am taking classes, preparing and thinking about our future placement. I have already been participating on some adoption boards and reading lots of adoption blogs. This has helped me learn incredibly valuable things and also helped me to discharge the nervous mental energy that I find building up during the adoption process.

I also want to use this blog to practice my writing skills. During my academic years I became fluent in a very ornate and formal style, so that I now have to force myself to use contractions. Nowadays I mostly write business memos and IMs. I really want to get back to communicating in a more natural, fluid and expressive style.

To get started out, here are three Asian thingies about myself and three adoption links I recommend.

1. I am an Angry Asian. Asian-Americans can basically be divided into Angry Asians and Mellow Asians. I received some pretty awful treatment from white people (and a few black and Hispanic people) when growing up. Partly because of this treatment I have a chip on my shoulder about a lot of things. Since I live in a very diverse place and have a small, "with-it" circle of friends, my racial issues rarely come up in day-to-day life, but are much more apparent when I communicate on the internet. Mellow Asians mostly grew up in places like Hawaii and don't feel the need to spend much time worrying about racial issues. The lucky bastards!

2. I don't usually call myself an Asian-American or a Japanese-American. I don't mind at all if other people call me that, or call themselves that. I will occasionally use the term, but only to distinguish myself from Asians who are not Americans. I just don't like the implication that I am only 50% American. When white people start calling themselves an unwieldy hyphenated name like Caucasian-American, that's when I will change my attitude.

3. I am a very untypical Japanese-American (there I go breaking the rule!). I have deep roots in America but not on the Japanese side. On my mother's side, our ancestors came over from England to Virginia in the 17^th century. My father is a full Japanese citizen (he and my mother divorced when I was fairly young). Therefore, no one in my family had any connection to the concentration camps. My biological Japanese grandfather died on a battleship in the Pacific fighting against the American fleet; my maternal grandfather served in the army in West Virginia but was never sent overseas.

1. Soul Of Adoption is my favorite adoption forum. When I first started out, I began looking through Adoption.com. This is the board with the most traffic on the web. I lurked and found a lot of great posts, but something about the site was bothering me. I realized they had kicked off anyone who mentioned gay adoption. There were different complaints about too much censorship; plus, Adoption.com is part of a media venture and includes commercial links. Soulofadoption.com is less-trafficked, but still very busy, and designed to be inclusive of everyone. There are also many adoptees and parents of origin who post on there, and they present a very broad spectrum of experiences and beliefs about adoption. Two of my favorite boards there are the African-American and the Debate board. The African-American board is a combined board for African-American parents and parents of African-American children.

2. American Family is a blog I discovered very recently. The family is like my parents: Asian dad, white mom (although I hope they don't get divorced like mine!). They have a hapa child and are in the middle of adopting a girl from China. I look forward to reading about their progress.

3. My favorite foster care adoption blog is Big Mama Hollers. This woman has 39 children, wow! Her writing skills are so great that she actually explains how she can pull it all off. She is really that one in a million mother. She recently had some major surgery and her family is going through some tough emotional times, but I'm sure they will pull through.