On the last post, L from the Home Sick Home asked an interesting question:
Also, my kids aren’t adopted, but do parents of biological mixed race children have the same moral obligations to expose the kids to both cultures and languages?
I am going to say my answer is a big fat NO. I don’t think that parents of mixed race (or multicultural) children have the same obligation to expose their kids to both cultures and languages as adoptive parents.
As the bio parent to a mixed race kid, I think it is nice if we can make sure that M is connected to her heritage. Mr. A’s family did a pretty crappy job of helping him remain connected to his Taiwanese extended family and Chinese culture in general, so when we had M we thought we might try to do a better job. Mr. A spent a chunk of his young adulthood learning Chinese and living in China trying to get a better understanding of himself as a Chinese / Chinese American. By making M learn Chinese as a child and making sure she has a working understanding of herself as an Asian America, hopefully her search for identity will be more about finding herself and less about trying to figure out what it means to be Chinese / Asian American / mixed as a citizen of the USA.
But again, I think it is nice that we try to do that for her. I don’t feel obligated at all. With M, I feel like all those Chinese lessons and trips to Asia etc. are just part and parcel of the kind of liberal yuppie over-achieving parents we happen to be.
It is just one more parenting choice we make that doesn’t have any moral weight to it. I don’t feel any more obligated to do Chinese stuff than I feel obligated to make her learn to play an instrument. Playing violin would be nice, learning chinese is nice.
I know other bio parents of mixed race kids who don’t do any cultural stuff and I don’t feel any judgment at all. (I might confess to wondering if my kid might end up more well-adjusted than theirs, but that is not the same thing as judgment.)
With L, it is a whole different story. So far, in L’s short life a lot of crappy things have happened. She lost her birth family; she lost her ayis; she lost all the children she lived with in the orphanage; she lost the language she heard every day; she lost the opportunity to live in a country where everyone looks like her; she survived the trauma of being uprooted and shipped across the globe.
She survived all those things before she was even a year old.
When L came to us, she was visibly broken. Her world had shattered. Our desire to be her parents caused many of those losses. It was our choice to adopt her. We took her from her home, the only family she knew, her country, her people. We made that choice because we wanted to be the parents of this child.
While I still believe adopting L was the right thing to do (both for us and for L), I am going to do everything in my power to make sure that she does not lose one more thing she doesn’t have to lose because of me.
So L will go to Chinese lessons. She will visit China. We will look for her family and try to give her the tools to know them as much as she possibly can. We will make sure that she has every opportunity to reclaim what was taken from her, be it her language, her home, her culture, her family.
Yes, I feel morally obligated. It is the very least we can do.
It is such a small price to pay for the privilege of being the parent to such an amazing little girl.
Over at ChinaAdoptionTalk, Malinda posted about an adoptive parent who was a plastic surgeon. Apparently, this doctor gave his adopted Asian daughter that surgery that creates fold in the eyelid to make eyes bigger/rounder aka whiter.
Before I go any further, let me clearly state that I find this so absolutely appalling that I am nearly speechless. What the effity eff eff????
Yes, of course I am outraged, but then I was thinking about this during my morning run and one part of the article got stuck in my head: (italics are mine)
In choosing the surgery, the father took from his daughter the ability to make her own choice about her identity. His exercise of parental autonomy thus limited his daughter’s potential autonomy in a critical way; it took away her right to make a decision central to her identity as an adult, a right that is, like others, central to an open future.
As I was running, I just kept thinking, well, that asshole just did something physical that many transracial/transcultural adoptive parents do metaphorically anyway.
Sure, he removed some fat from her eyelids, but is that really much worse than white adoptive parents who adopt a child of another race and remove him or her from having contact with people who look like them? Aren’t we exercising our parental autonomy when we decide where we will live, the activities our children participate in, our places of worship, and the friends we choose to surround ourselves and our children with?
It is no secret that there are many, MANY white adoptive parents who make choices for their transracially adopted children that make it extremely difficult for their children to “make their own choice about their identity.” How does a child make a choice to identify with people or a culture he or she has never been exposed to?
We all know those parents who say “I am not going to make my child learn Chinese now, when they are old enough they can make that decision on their own;” or “She can move to a city/neighborhood with more Asians when she grows up if that is important to her;” or any of the 10,o00 variations on that theme, how is that really so very different?
Let’s not kid ourselves here, choosing to learn Chinese/travel to China/participate in Asian American activities/be a member of the Asian American community when your parents have never prioritized your Chineseness might feel like you are making an obvious choice to reject your parents’ culture/parenting/community etc. It might be too hard or too late or too awkward to comfortably make that decision by the time you are an adult.
As a matter of fact, who can say how late is too late? My kids are already thinking about this stuff now at ages 3 and 6.
It isn’t just a scalpel that can do that kind of damage to our children’s identity. The choices we make as parents — as WHITE parents who adopted Children of Color — that are impacting our child’s ability to make their own choices about his or her identity. Every minute of every day.
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There is a follow-up to this post here.
Lately, that is what L has been saying a lot.
All things “chinesey” have been a big topic for M too. Both girls are processing appropriate to their different developmental stages. It is challenging to make sure that we are getting to the root what they are saying when they are saying (yelling) it.
Recently, when L gets frustrated or upset she says “Let’s talk about CHINA!” as part of her yelling or talking about something completely unrelated. One night in the middle of a tantrum caused by waking in the wrong sleep cycle because she had to pee she yelled “No! I do not have to peepee! Let’s talk about CHINA! I have to peepee NOW!” I dont’ know if she really wants to talk about China or if she knows it is an easy way to make me stop and talk about the subject that she chose.
Just this week, I decided to show her some pictures to go with the stories we tell her about China (because I still haven’t finished her lifebook because I suck) and she is mesmerized. She especially likes watching a video we have of her with her nannies feeding her a bottle. She has been reading that Hippo book 3-4 four times a day and she obsessively asks about the page where the baby hippo is alone in the big ocean. “He all alone? Why? Why he all alone? He’s scared.” When she asks to hear about China, I tell her her story. I tell her about China. I try to answer her questions, but I don’t know if I am giving her what she needs.
L is also trying to figure out what “Chinese” means. We hear a lot of Chinese in M’s new Chinese classes. Because she is small and cute and practices her Chinese with them (at my prodding), she gets a lot of fawning attention there. She mostly recognizes when they are speaking Chinese (“they talkin’ Chinese?”), though she doesn’t seem to have any recognition of people looking Chinese if they happen to be Asian. In a very funny turn of events, the other day my friend J (who is white) came to visit. M’s old Chinese tutor was also named J, but she was Chinese. When J and I were talking, L said “Why she not speak English?” when obviously English is what J and I were speaking to each other. I wonder now if she thinks everyone named J should speak Chinese.
M is working on something completely different. If you ask her a logical question, she will acknowledge that she is half Chinese. We just went to this girl’s birthday party M again mentioned that both she and T are half Chinese. I asked her tonight at dinner if all Chinese people look a certain way and she looked at me like I was an idiot. “Well, NO. *I* have brown hair and *I* am Chinese. So does T and she is Chinese too!” she said. I think she understands that most Chinese people have black hair and she and T are exceptions, but she doesn’t want to acknowledge that her appearance doesn’t fit that categorization.
Other times, she seems to equate being “Chinese” with being a fluent speaker of Chinese. Because she knows her Chinese is not fluent, she seems to sometimes choose to not identify as Chinese at all. The other day, she was being very cranky about doing her Chinese homework and had a very out of character tantrum in which she yelled “I wish you never married Daddy, so then I wouldn’t have to do this DUMB CHINESE HOMEWORK!” Obviously, on that occasion she was identifying more with me than with Mr. A.
A few days later, at her her new Chinese class (where she is one of the top 3 in the class in comprehension and speaking because the other 7 kids are total beginners), she came up to me and stuck out her arm. “This is all the Chinese. ” She said. Then she pointed at her elbow and said “I know THIS much Chinese right now.” It was interesting that she chose about half as the amount she knows.
M had a school assignment in which she had to give a short description of all the members of our family. This is what she said:
M: M loves to play. She spends most of her spare time reading.
L: L is the little sister. She is very interested in the things M does. She is very funny.
Daddy: Daddy is a hard worker. His father is from Taiwan, so he is Taiwanese.
Mama: Mama is a good cook. She is lots of fun. She is very good at commanding people to do things.
Heh.
A little while back, I saw a review on Goodreads for Mama: a True Story (in which a baby hippo loses his mama during a tsunami, but finds a new home and a new mama.)
I read a couple reviews and decided to request the book from the library. I thought maybe the book would be a good segway into talking about adoption with L. My friend Peg saw that I added it on Goodreads and warned me that it was a really sad book that is sometimes used in grief work with children.
Today, I got the book. I was surprised that there are really only three words in the whole thing (Mama, baby and mmm.) I looked over the pictures and decided I would try reading it with L. We worked our way through the story. L isn’t the most verbally expressive kid, but she was clearly drawing connections between the baby hippo and her own story, even though I didn’t mention her adoption at all.
She recognized that the hippo and his mama were scared when they got separated. When the people brought the hippo to the “safe place”, she asked “Are there ayi’s there?” When we learned that the hippo found a new mama (a tortoise), she said “Like you?”
In the last picture, the baby is sleeping happily next to the tortoise, but in the background you can see the shape of the mother hippo, who is smiling. That picture was initially a little confusing for L. She thought the hippo was happy because the hippo mama was there. I had to tell her no, the hippo mama was only there in spirit or in the baby hippo’s imagination. But the mama hippo was smiling because she wants her baby hippo to be safe and loved even if she can’t be there. She is happy that the tortoise is taking care the baby hippo — that the baby hippo has a new mama since she can’t be there. L seemed to be pondering that very seriously.
In just our first go-around with the book, I can see that there are a lot of ways that is a great springboard for talking about loss and adoption. I was initially annoyed that the story wasn’t there in text, but that left it open for us to have a discussion rather than me reading while L passively received the story. I don’t usually recommend products on my blog*, but this book seemed like it might be something other people might appreciate too.
*With the exception of my Magic Light, which I rave about every year in the fall. FYI, it is working fabulously this year too.
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