Link Post: The Many Ways that Asian Adoptees are Vulnerable

This is so sad. But these are such important stories to hear. I'll let the links and quotes speak for themselves.

From girl4708:

Screening for Woody Allen

Today I’ve got no insights, revelations, or provocations. Today I am merely asking questions. The question I mainly want to ask is: How do we screen out Woody Allen? There are a few of us molested Korean adoptees who have come out of the shadows to speak about the traumatic consequences of latent yellow fever combined with the ability to adopt yellow.

Do these men KNOW they have yellow fever when they adopt? Is that why they choose Asian countries to adopt from?

Are these men pedophiles before they adopt?

What is it about these men that allows them to cross personal boundaries, morals, and ethics?

How is it these men are so infantile and self-absorbed they ultimately can not control their urges?

WHY WERE MY FATHER’S WHITE, BIOLOGICAL CHILDREN NOT MOLESTED, BUT I WAS?

[...]

From O Solo Mama:

Adoption: When Satan doesn't want you to

It’s been brewing for some time but now appears somewhat official: there is a Christian duty to adopt. Christian evangelicals are being commanded to “be at the forefront of the adoption of orphans close to home and around the world.”

[...]

Andrea says:
October 22, 2009 at 7:19 pm

Check out this story from a Christian family adopting:

http://jdavis2.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/the-cultural-advantage/

"we also have the advantage of understanding our host culture’s worldview and their very deep superstitious beliefs. thus, we were not surprised that sterling was given to us with a jade luck charm – a buddhist charm meant to bring good luck, fortune and protection. we, however, know that this charm is associated with spiritual forces meant to keep people in bondage. thus, we smiled and accepted it as we should, and then later went to the park, broke it, and threw it into the pond, and prayed for our sterling that all spiritual bondage over him would be broken. these spiritual forces are alive and real, and manifest themselves in more obvious ways (but with the same degree of power) than in the west, but we know that the power and grace of the God who created the heavens and the earth is infinitely greater than the forces of evil."

From AdoptionTalk, also discussed at American Family:

Eyes Wide Open: Surgery to Westernize the Eyes of an Asian Child
One of my colleagues told me about this article -- she teaches it in Bioethics. It is a horrific must-read:

The speaker was a proud father. To illustrate his comments about a piece of art that celebrated the wonders of modern medicine (and which he had just donated to a local hospital), he told a story about his adopted Asian daughter. He described her as a beautiful, happy child in whom he took much delight. Her life, he told the audience, had been improved dramatically by the miracle of modern medicine. When she joined her new Caucasian family, her eyes, like those of many people of Asian descent, lacked a fold in the upper eyelid, and that lack was problematic—in his view—because it made her eyes small and sleepy and caused them to shut completely when she smiled. A plastic surgeon himself, he knew she did not need to endure this hardship, so he arranged for her to have surgery to reshape her eyes. The procedure, he explained, was minimally invasive and maximally effective. His beautiful daughter now has big round eyes that stay open and shine even when she smiles.

Dark Sarcasm in Adoption

Guy recently reminded me of a conversation he had last year, when he was proudly telling his friends and colleagues about Sunny's placement with us.  I wasn't with him at the time.

One colleague gave him the standard "which country?" question, assuming international adoption. We both have the same attitude about that question: answer with a single direct sentence, ignore any looks of resulting embarrassment and just move on with the conversation.  So Guy told his colleague we were adopting from Sunny's home state.

The colleague responded, "Well, you didn't have to adopt from a third-world country!"

This would have been horribly insulting... if his colleague hadn't been Chinese-American. So the joke was really on everyone. Guy thought it was hilarious, although we won't be repeating it with any sort of frequency.

Chinese Adoption Corruption and Maddening Stereotypes in the Media

These last few weeks there have been a flurry of large media stories covering major corruption in international adoption. Guatemala. Guatemala again. Ethiopia. Now China.

I hope this new exposure will eventually lead to some serious reforms.

It's not like there aren't ethical minefields in foster care adoption... but at least families have some degree of insight into the problems. When I have questions, I can pick up the phone and talk to everyone involved. Problems in international adoption are ten times worse, and they're also ten times less transparent. You're dealing with foreign legal systems, foreign languages, foreign cultures. International adoptive parents who shrug off these corruption stories by saying "well it doesn't apply to my case" usually have no evidence whatsoever. They just don't know at all and likely never will.

There are exceptions. International adoptive parents may or may not face the same knowledge barriers (e.g. some Chinese-Americans adopting from China).  Or they're adopting older children and/or are in touch with their childrens' biological families.  In fact, that's how I think a lot of these corruption cases have come to light: older adopted children tell their new parents that the agency's story is a lie, and the new parents have enough integrity to believe them and investigate further.

Anyway, I think the fact that these corruption cases are being discussed in the mainstream media is a good step. However, I still have major issues with the way they're being framed. The LA Times China article has two major failings: 1) it doesn't include the adoptee viewpoint and 2) it fails to challenge stereotypical thinking about China.

How hard would it have been for the reporter to ask an adoptee for their perspective?  The same reporter, Barbara Demick, wrote an article several weeks ago --
Adopted teen finds answers, mystery in China -- about a teenager who had a reunion with his birth family in China. Why not include a few sentences of his reaction to the story? Instead, the American perspectives are all from adoptive parents. And this includes one randomly chosen adoptive mother who is pretty much the living embodiment of cluelessness.

She wonders what she would do if she discovered that her daughter was one of the stolen babies. She knows she could never return the Americanized 6-year-old, who is obsessed with "SpongeBob" and hates the Chinese culture classes her mother enrolled her in. But she said, "I would certainly want to tell the birth family that your daughter is alive and happy and maybe send a picture."

"It would be up to my daughter later if she wanted to build a relationship," she said.

Shades of the Anna Mae He coverage I complained about last year.  There are so many things wrong in this paragraph. It presumes being Chinese as somehow incompatible with being American, ignoring the existence of 3.5 million Chinese-Americans who have somehow managed to pull off this incredible feat.

And SpongeBob obsession is supposedly total proof of being American. They don't watch Sponge Bob in China... actually, let me confirm that by doing a few seconds of searching on Google.

Variety: China sponges 'SpongeBob'
Cartoon sweeps ratings on CCTV
"SpongeBob SquarePants" has swept to the top of the ratings on Chinese state broadcaster CCTV's Kids Channel. The quirky toon has become the most popular children's show in 15 key cities, drawing viewership of 20.5 million to Bikini Bottom.

Oops!

And I won't get into that "because she doesn't like Chinese culture classes that lets me off the hook for everything" implication. This is an extremely complicated issue (see a great blog post on it here).

Leaving reunion totally up to the child is also a cop-out. There are many complicated steps that need to be taken as soon as possible in order to maintain relationships. Waiting until it's no longer your responsibility means removing choice from the child, not giving them more choice.

I can't stand this woman's attitude and what it represents about international adoption. It's so selfish and ignorant. If this were me, I would feel morally obligated to do a lot more than maybe send a picture.

Blood Pressure Rising!

Before I go off and say nembutsu for a while to calm down, here's the interchange that got my blood boiling.

Stage One:
A transracial adoptee writes a post about changing her name to a Korean one at 8asians.com. An elegant piece with what seems like a perfectly understandable viewpoint.

Stage Two:
Supportive comments from some non-adopted Asian-Americans and white adoptive parents.

Stage Three:
Whacko troll calls her an ungrateful communist wretch.

I have a different reaction to people like this than other reform-minded adoptive parents, and also from transracial adoptees. I've been an adoptive parent, or studying to be one, for a few years. But I've been an Asian-American all my life. When I see comments like the one below, adoption is one of the furthest things from my mind; instead, a siren explodes in my head that goes WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP RACIST ATTACK WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP.

By every indication, Chun-Soon Li is American. except for adoption at birth. She has only one family, also American, and by blood only, she has a link to a Korean woman who birthed her, but whom she has never met. And the gifts she brought from Korea to America are limited to her genetic make up, and her life. The articulate nature of her posts, and (those in her support), lead me to believe all of you has benefited from a stable upbringing, significant educational opportunities, and complete freedom from material want, as is the American tradition.

[...]

Such an apt illustration of the soullessness of this horse sh*t movement. The attack is on me and other parents who have had the nerve to adopt internationally. Its implicit, here, though powerfully stated. Unfortunately, there was a time when it was explicit and directed towards good friends of mine. The decision to adopt is by its very nature, extremely personal and soul searching. Theirs is a typical profile, after many years of trying, they exhausted other means to have children naturally, and had recently arrived back in the US with a delightful Chinese daughter, proud and happy parents. A group of us were celebrating, and were somehow introduced to some academics from out of town. After several minutes of small talk, the conversation turned to this very subject, at which time one of the academics proceeded to berate the family with the new arrival; that this baby should have never left China, it was all wrong to take babies from their “culture”. and that it amounted to an act of “cultural imperialism” by the parents (the new mother, now in uncontrollable tears). I noticed a certain satisfaction in this academic woman, a certain smug, “mission accomplished” look about her when she was done.

I’m assuming all of you know better than to try to inject yourself into the private family matters of all-Asian families—that being largely Confucian and conservative—they would hand you your head. Unfortunately, parents adopting internationality tend to liberal, and vulnerable.

I guess it takes academia to elevate every grievance and perceived slight to an equal level with all others, and I really wouldn’t care if the Korean/American adoptee’s plaint were simply: “its all about me” in fact, I’d have some sympathy—but that’s not the case. This movement seeks to inject itself into the very personal and private family decisions of families like mine: “Its all about me, so I want YOU to change”

But there are, as Jackson Brown sings, those: who’s “lives hang in the balance” and their fate is callously, even studiously ignored by this horse shit movement. “Kim, sometimes “politically correct” is, simply, correct.” And Chun-Soon Li, how many times did we hear that last century, and its equivalent—just before the ax fell snuffing out thousands of lives?

Several weeks ago, I got a call from an old friend who had just seen SlumdogMillionare: “you know, I now think I really understand what you’ve been trying to tell me about orphans all these years” —good Kev, except it was staged in India—by Bollywood. Still, the flick does seem to project a certain fundamental truth, as good fiction often does.

So with China in mind, first an account about those who didn’t even get the basic gift all of you adoptees received. Its also noteworthy for those who believe China’s one-child policy is the cause of the massive disparity of boys to girls that these events happened well before PR China:

“Infanticide in a starving city like this is dreadfully common. For the parents, seeing their children must be doomed to poverty, think it better at once to let the soul escape in search of a more happy asylum than to linger in one condemned to want and wretchedness. The infanticide is, however, exclusively confined to the destruction of female children, the sons being permitted to live in order to continue the ancestral sacrifices.

One mother I met, who was employed by this mission, told the missionary in ordinary conversation that she had suffocated in turn three of her female children within a few days of birth: and, when f fourth was born, so enraged was her husband to discover that it was a girl also that he seized it by the legs and struck it against the wall and killed it.

Dead children, and often living infants, are thrown out on the common among the grave mounds, and be seen there any morning being gnawed by dogs. Mr. Tremberth of the Bible Christian Mission, leaving by the south gate early one morning, disturbed a dog eating a still living child that had been thrown over the wall in the night. Its little arm was crunched and stripped of flesh, and it was whining inarticulately - it died almost immediately.”

Fast-forward now to the current plight of China’s unwanted girls—how bad is it? Its not easy to know, and I’m not going to quote alot more, but to get a perspective, I suggest those interested Google: “The mystery of China’s lost girls” (Asia Times)

Here's my response. I just can't bring myself to present nuanced counterarguments about the voice of the adoptee when the base for his entire worldview is built on a smug white supremacy. I reject it entirely. I think this also shows why I don't involve myself in any kind of environment where people like this are free to spew their verbal abuse. It's way too upsetting. I can't believe how much it sucks that transracial adoptees so often get entangled in arguments with people like this. They don't deserve it... well, no one deserves it, but they really, really, really don't deserve it.

atlasien wrote:

Some points in Kim’s loopy racist rant:

– Asians are inarticulate. Only those who have been sufficiently assimilated can speak English, much less have articulate opinions.

– Adoptees are not allowed to speak about their own experiences. Unlike regular children, they never grow up, and their parents are in charge of interpreting their life forever.

– Being an adoptive parent means you’re white… and Chinese children are never adopted by Chinese or Chinese-Americans. Oh yes, and these adoptive parents are always blameless martyrs whose choices are always above criticism.

– All Asian families are “conservative and Confucian”. This is a neat little generalization showing that Kim is not Asian (whew!) and learned all he knows about Asian cultures from a combination of fortune cookie messages and an adoption agency brochure.

– paragaph [5]: combine irrelevant Jackson Browne lyric, insinuation of creeping communism, ludicrous mixed metaphor about axes snuffing out candles (?!?), place in blender, press “liquefy intelligent thought” (I suppose this wasn’t a point at all)

– Some stories about female infanticide from a century ago proving that the HEATHEN CHINEE are an evil race and should not be trusted to raise their own children. Nevermind that around that same time period in the American West, Chinese immigrants were being randomly lynched and murdered by angry white mobs in organized ethnic cleansing programs.

It must severely disturb similar racist troglodytes to hear that China has been increasing domestic adoption to the point where they’ll probably shut down international soon. But I guess they’ll always have their racist stereotypes to comfort themselves with.

Another piece of the puzzle falls into place

I've often wondered why there are not more Chinese-American adoptive parent bloggers. In fact, I asked a well-known China adoption blogger about this, and she gave me some answers and linked to a few other Chinese heritage bloggers.

I'd like to establish that not all Chinese-American parents qualify to get expedited, as the rules are quite restrictive. Also, expediting doesn't sound terribly dramatic. If a non-expedited parent waits two years, maybe an expedited parent waits one year, or a year and a half.

This is just to give you some background on a very disturbing thing I stumbled on tonight. It's on the front page blog of a very large China adoption forum. It's sick, sad and racist... not the post itself, but the fact someone felt it was necessary to include the note at the end of paragraph.

http://chinaadopttalk.com/2007/10/03/notes-from-this-batch-2/
[...]
One thing to note, there seemed to be a bigger batch of expedite referrals this month than we’ve seen in a while. I’m guessing that there were between 30 and 50 expedited families referred in this batch. Still a very small batch, but at least maybe it’s not almost a tie with the smallest batch ever (yeah yeah, I know, in recent history, not ever). And, as a side note - I saw a lot of questions about expedites, so I’ll answer now that if one prospective parent was born in China (or if both parents of a prospective parent were born in China, and you can prove that, which often is not possible) then the CCAA expedites that family’s file. You usually don’t see any blogs listed of people who are expedited because oftentimes the adoption community says mean things to them. So please let these families bask in the joy of their new referrals without saying anything nasty to them in the comments. They followed the rules and didn’t do anything shady and I am happy for them.

So it's a preemptive defense against those out there -- and apparently they are somewhat numerous -- who are mad because Chinese-Americans are getting Chinese babies faster than they are.

It makes me so glad I am not a part of that community. Ugh! I feel like I need to take a shower now.

NY Times article on a special needs adoption from China

There was an account in the New York Times today about a mother adopting from China. The child, presumed healthy, was in fact very ill, and after their first meeting, the diagnosis was made that the child would probably be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of her life. The response is a heartwarming counterpoint to the depressing case I wrote about a few weeks ago.

My First Lesson in Motherhood

[...]

“In cases like these, we can make a rematch with another baby,” the one in charge said. The rest of the process would be expedited, and we would go home on schedule. We would simply leave with a different girl.

Months before, we had been presented with forms asking which disabilities would be acceptable in a prospective adoptee — what, in other words, did we think we could handle: H.I.V., hepatitis, blindness? We checked off a few mild problems that we knew could be swiftly corrected with proper medical care. As Matt had written on our application: “This will be our first child, and we feel we would need more experience to handle anything more serious.”

Now we faced surgeries, wheelchairs, colostomy bags. I envisioned our home in San Diego with ramps leading to the doors. I saw our lives as being utterly devoted to her care. How would we ever manage?

Yet how could we leave her? Had I given birth to a child with these conditions, I wouldn’t have left her in the hospital. Though a friend would later say, “Well, that’s different,” it wasn’t to me.

I pictured myself boarding the plane with some faceless replacement child and then explaining to friends and family that she wasn’t Natalie, that we had left Natalie in China because she was too damaged, that the deal had been a healthy baby and she wasn’t.

How would I face myself? How would I ever forget? I would always wonder what happened to Natalie.

I knew this was my test, my life’s worth distilled into a moment. I was shaking my head “No” before they finished explaining. We didn’t want another baby, I told them. We wanted our baby, the one sleeping right over there. “She’s our daughter,” I said. “We love her.”

Matt, who had been sitting on the bed, lifted his glasses, and, wiping the tears from his eyes, nodded in agreement.

[...]

The ending lines could have been written directly to me. Nothing is ever sure. We have to hope for strength.

We would not have chosen the burdens we anticipated, and in fact we declared upfront our inability to handle such burdens. But we are stronger than we thought.

Soul Autopsy and China Adoption Disruption

It looks like most of the posts at CHEW have been taken down. Thank goodness. Maybe that woman understood the harm she was doing.

So I won't go into full detail describing the nastiness of the blog's tone.

The basics are that a woman starts the China adoption process. Halfway through she gives up and gets a child from Guatemala instead. Three weeks after bringing her child home from Guatemala, she changes her mind and decides to go through with a last-minute China adoption. After picking up her 18-month-old child, "M" she decides "M" is not healthy enough and returns her. By the way, I am not sure if I remember the age correctly but it was definitely between 1 and 2. The Chinese officials are understandably irritated and tell her she won't get a new child. On top of that, since she returned "M", due to the way the bureaucracy works, the little girl almost certainly won't be deemed adoptable again and is going to age out in an orphanage. Now, this woman has given up on getting a new child but she wants her money back.

Reading her account, two really wrong things jumped out at me.

1) A US pediatrician who makes a diagnosis of PDD autism over the phone. The woman calls him up, describes symptoms her child is exhibiting a few days after being taken into a strange environment, and he tells her to give the child back. Either she's lying or exaggerating to make herself feel better, or this doctor needs to be brought up on ethics charges.

I'd like to quote, with permission, sarahs_mom, a mother who adopted from China I know from another forum, who made some even-tempered but hard-hitting comments on the original blog posts.

Sarah was just like this woman describes M. We just came home from spending a wonderful morning at the beach where Sarah played in the sand... a major first for her. Sarah does not have autism. She has some behaviors that were pretty severe that have gone away and she has some we are working on. We have a generalist, a speech therapist and an occupational therapist and all of them think Sarah will be fine. If not, we will deal with it.

My heart breaks for M. It's clear she wasn't as bad as Sarah because Sarah did not make much progress at all in China. It wasn't until after 3 months that I started to have hope. By that lady's own account, this girl made progress.

[...]

This story should not be about her or her agency. It needs to be about M. It needs to be about people getting educated and trying to get the US off the list of families with the greatest number of disruptions in China.

[...]

I can tell you that Costa Rica closed its adoptions to US Citizens because of the antics of people like this woman. I wanted to adopt from there because that is where I was born and I called and spoke to PANI (their version of the CCAA) and was told that the corrupt agencies in the US and the unreasonable demands by the US citizens led them to stop adopting to the US. Until the US implements the Hague they will not allow a US citizen to adopt.

2) She kept making excuses for the fact that she didn't take the child back to America and disrupt there.

Now, this second one is the part I'm qualified to comment on. I have no problem sitting in judgment on this woman and telling her what she should have done. She should have taken "M" back to America. Maybe "M" really had special needs that were beyond the ability of this woman to care for. In that case, as so many others have been sadly forced to do, she could have made an adoption plan. She could have found another family that wanted to adopt "M" and legally relinquished her to them. She could have even left her at a damn fire station and run off, and it would have been better. I'm not saying she should have done something that extreme, since it probably would have been legally easier to do private relinquishment than go through the foster care system. Anyway, there would be many families (and I bet quite a few lower-income Chinese-American families) who would leap at the chance to adopt a baby like "M".

If you've been to photolisting sites before and are ready for the emotional sledgehammer effect, go to adoptuskids.org and do a search on 2-year-olds legally available for adoption in the foster care system. The tiny few you will find have needs that are so severe. Many will never walk or speak or feed themselves. Most of them will mention "lifetime" care, which means that if you adopt the child and they live longer than you, you need to figure out who else will take care of them. The reason there are so few very young children on these sites is that they are so quickly adopted that they don't need to be photolisted.

From what I've heard of other people with more knowledge of the subject, the fate of "M" if left in the orphanage is not very bright. But since this story has affected so many people, hopefully someone will find a way to get her out of the orphanage system and into a good foster or adoptive home in China.

I believe that when you have set out to adopt a child and have made that commitment and take them in your arms, you are responsible for them for the rest of their life. Even if you can't be a family for them, you are duty-bound to look out for their best interests. Both "M" and the first mother who gave her up are owed more than this.

Duty, honor, obligation: these are universal values.

Anyone who adopts from China should educate themselves to the fullest extent and think about what they would do in their worst-case scenario.

China adoptions: the good, the bad and the ugly

American Family just gave me a Thinking Blogger award! Thanks so much!

AmFam is one of the few China adoption blogs I regularly read, and I love the supportive but critical perspective found there. And this is an interesting coincidence, because I've just been thinking about China adoption a lot lately.

One thing that bothers me about China adoption is that so many of the parents don't seem to involve themselves in Asian-American issues. Asian-American culture isn't easy. It's deeply fragmented and often swirling with repressed anger and self-loathing. But forming a healthy Asian-American or Chinese-American identity strikes me as more important than "keeping a cultural connection" to China. I could be wrong on this, but it's definitely a criticism I've seen before.

There are parents out there (the good) like AmFam (or other non-Asian adoptive parents) that don't ignore that kind of stuff (the ugly).

And then there's the bad. The really, really, really bad.

I got caught up reading the mess over at cHEW. For those who haven't read it, it's the story of a woman who recently disrupted a Chinese adoption. The story points out a lot of things that are wrong with the system.

I'm going to do a long post really soon expressing what I think about the blog. As a semi-informed outsider to China adoptions, I don't come to it with an agenda, or anything at stake. I've also read a fair amount on the topic of disruption because it happens a LOT in the foster care system.

I believe that blog should be taken down, because it has some pretty horrible misinformation.

Stay tuned for more, in a much longer post...

Thanks again for the award, AmFam! I'd give it back to you if you didn't have it already. Also, I hate to become the blog where memes go to die, but I can't even begin to think about picking five of my thinkingest blogs.