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.
___________________________________
There is a follow-up to this post here.
We just got back from a week in Seoul, Korea where we adopted a beautiful baby boy – so beautiful that every single person who has guessed his sex – including Korean’s – have guessed his a girl. (I think he looks very much like a boy . . . but you know who that goes). Anyway, as a result of this type of situation in Korea, I had a conversation with the (Korean) person and somehow we got around to the fact that a huge number (the preson made it sound like ALL, but I find that hard to believe) of teenage girls have this surgery done on their eyes . . .it’s pretty common, elective . . .accepted, desirable. I know it’s not the whole story . . just another piece.
To be clear, I don’t have a problem with people choosing to have the surgery on their own. Especially if they are adults.
But a parent making this decision for a child? Creepy. Especially given the baggage that transracially adopted kids have to carry anyway.
Amen.
That is all.
I’m sick.
It’s not just her eyes, either, that he’s told her need fixing. What effect will this have on this girl as she goes through adolescence, knowing that her father has already once judged her physical appearance and decided it needs improving?
I’m shuddering just thinking about this. It’s ringing all sorts of alarms for me about how this man thinks about and views his daughter.
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around this. A violation on several levels…in terms of the child’s identity, as well as in medical ethics–at least that’s how it strikes me.
I just want to say that this was a well written, kick-ass post.
Yes, completely kick-ass!
What a great point — we APs all have scalpels, don’t we?
Amen.
I see a parallel to domestic adoptive parents who close off any connection to children’s first families, even when contact is safe and possible. I hear all the time APs saying they don’t want to do an open adoption, but the child can always choose to pursue that relationship when they’re older. It sets up the same kind of impossible/difficult decision-making that you’ve talked about.
I read Malinda’s post right after reading something in ULB’s shares about the sexual abuse of Asian adopted daughters: Screening for Woody Allen
http://adoptionsurvivor.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/screening-for-woody-allen/
It’s all part of a continuum.
That’s our society all over, isn’t it? A plastic surgeon probably isn’t the least bit phased by the idea of a permanently-altering nip or tuck, and surgery for him is just another day at work.
Don’t forget that medically-unnecessary cosmetic surgery is the #1 procedure performed on newborn baby boys.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately, as we just made the decision to come back to the US instead of staying in Asia. It is easy to have your family immersed in Chinese culture when you live in Greater China, but so much harder back home. I keep thinking that no matter what we do (Chinese school, live near Chinatown, etc), it will ALWAYS fall short.
Love this post! Love love love it.
“How does a child make a choice to identify with people or a culture he or she has never been exposed to?”
Precisely.
What’s the point of taking Chinese classes if you NEVER have the opportunity to use it? if you never have anyone to practise with? if no one else is interested in it?
Kids will usually feel more inclined to take an interest in what their parents’ interests are. If a Chinese kid is told to take language classes, but her mother shows little to NO interest outside of class nor has any opportunities to put the language to use… the Chinese kid ain’t gonna be sticking with classes for long. Why should she? No one else is interested in it.
[...] Advocate” at AmericanFamily Jump to Comments Go read this post over at American [...]
I’m sad to hear that this man would do this to a child, take away her right to choose. And in fact, to me it really looks racist.
We once had an adoptee at our in-person support group meeting here. She and her (adoptive) sister had been adopted separately from Mexico as infants, by a wealthy single woman who worked for the gov’t in Washington, DC. This woman had plastic surgery done on both her adopted daughters to “make them look more white,” as “graduation presents” when they finished high school.
Living in Korea now, I can say that yes, eyelid surgery is very common here. But I can also say it is not to look white, as many Asians (even Mongolian-descended Koreans) have what is referred to as “double eyelids.” It is just deemed more attractive and is a cultural thing. However, many of the girls here do not elect to get this surgery, but are FORCED to by their mothers, who feel it will enhance their ability to climb socially. And even this is seen as an offense to the ancestors, and some of my students have spoken about how one should pray and beg for forgiveness for having defiled what was given them and that what was given them was not good enough…
And WHY the emphasis on physical perfection to the extent mothers will force their daughters to altar their natural appearance? Or that young women volunteer to do so because of the heavy prevalence of double eyelids in the media? Because it is a patriarchal society and women are still not empowered enough to rely on wit and talent and a sense of themselves as equal people.
Like someone else said, this is all a continuum. Attitudes about physical beauty, sexuality, power – it is all about women’s rights. And babies available for adoption is also direct result. This IS a preventable scenario in most cases, and we returning adoptees are doing all we can to change society’s attitudes towards unwed mothers, as well as make it a viable option to keep their children.
Please scrap my last submission, as I left out some things. Here it is again:
Living in Korea now, I can say that yes, eyelid surgery is very common here. But I can also say it is not to look white, as many Asians (even Mongolian-descended Koreans) naturally have what is referred to as “double eyelids.” It is just deemed more attractive and is a cultural thing that may have developed independent of viewing the Caucasian face. However, many of the girls here do not elect to get this surgery, but are FORCED to by their mothers, who feel it will enhance their ability to climb socially. And even this is seen as an offense to the ancestors, and some of my students have spoken about how one should pray and beg for forgiveness to your ancestors for having defiled what was given them and that what was given them was not good enough…but this doesn’t stop anyone, as the desire to get ahead is too great.
And WHY the emphasis on physical perfection to the extent mothers will force their daughters to altar their natural appearance? Or that young women volunteer to do so because of the heavy prevalence of double eyelids in the media? Because it is a patriarchal society and women are still not empowered enough to rely on wit and talent and a sense of themselves as equal people. Women are still only secondary here – wives are replacement moms for immature men, housekeepers, decoration, and hopefully bearers of sons.
Like someone else said, this is all a continuum. Attitudes about physical beauty, sexuality, power – it is all about women’s rights. And babies available for adoption is also direct result. Eyelid surgery on one end of the spectrum; get rid of the evidence of socially embarrassing transgressions on the other. The relinquished child is relinquished because they are a social liability. But often it is the family that forces this upon the young mother, and not the mother’s real choice. This IS a preventable scenario in most cases, and we returning adoptees are doing all we can to change society’s attitudes towards unwed mothers, as well as make it a viable option to keep their children.
This is so sick…we have also had several friends try to tell us we should have our Vietnamese son circumcised. I can’t see any reason to put my 21 month old son through a “cosmetic” surgery and so we have no intention of doing that.
thanks for the thought provoking post
Interesting that several commenters mentioned circumcision, because that’s what occurred to me when I read the post: Is what that doctor did really any different than what we did, when we had our first son circumcized? Ironically, it was entirely my husband’s choice, since I had no strong feelings either way and he did. My husband is a Japanese citizen (uncircumcized himself), and he wanted his son’s penis to “look more American,” since he assumed he would be spending much of his childhood in America. (Also, I should say, a close friend of my husband’s had to be circumcized as an adult due to recurrent infections, and his dreadful experience no doubt influenced my husband’s decision.)
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 honestly wish the older ones didn’t think of themselves as Japanese, and I have long made a conscious effort to make English their primary language (against my husband’s wishes). Our older son turned out bilingual, but my “exercise of parental autonomy” in language certainly limited our daughter’s “potential autonomy in a critical way,” and prevented her from ever being able to identify as true Japanese, as her older brother can.
Food for thought!
Oy, your question is a good one. I wrote an entire post in reply here: http://american-family.org/2009/10/22/it-isnt-the-same/
Oh Wow. How Awful about both of these issues. But in my experience, one cannot explain to people who do these things (both with a knife and an address) about how wrong it is. and to L. Why on earth would you NOT want your kids to think of themselves as Japanese? They are! I have several friends with kids with Chinese Mom and American Dad. Those kids all go to Chinese langauge and dance classes/Wushu, and learn to speak Chinese at home with their moms. How very very sad that you want your kids to deny a part of themselves.
Allyson, at 41, still gets “suggestions” from her mom that she ought to have her eyelids “fixed.”
As another data point, Alex does not go to Chinese language class, nor does she speak Chinese at home (other than good night / good morning / goodbye / please / thank you sort of things). We don’t do Chinese school because it’s affiliated with a conservative Christian church, and we don’t want her getting anti-gay flack. She lives in a house where being Chinese is the norm, though (because MIL and FIL live with us), and she self-identifies as a Chinese person who likes Chinese things. If she didn’t have that, I think we’d do Chinese school (whether she liked it or not – and when we did try, she did not like it) and other stuff that forced her to be exposed to Chinese stuff.
MA, I wantd my kids to be Japanese Americans — not Japanese-Japanese. But my 14-year old is ready to burn his U.S. passport. My almost 13-year old thinks of herself as “Japanese with an American mom.” Obvious moral: Parents can do their best to indoctrinate their kids on way or another, but eventually the kids are going to go their own way.
P.S. Also to MA — we live in Japan. That’s why I have to push the English!
The misunderstanding between L. and MA raises an interesting issue, insofar as it’s one thing to culturally equip our children – adopted or biological – to function and identify as “Chinese” or “Japanese,” but what seems to be missing from the discussion is how we raise them to claim what is theirs by birthright while at the same time preparing them for the possibility of rejection by the very groups with which they have been taught to identify.
I can’t speak for L., but in the case of my family, we’ve been considering the possibility of moving to Japan (where my husband – Japanese/Korean-American – and I met, and where we both lived independently for 10/9 years), but I’m seriously concerned about how the kids would fit in. If we somehow hit the employment jackpot (unlikely), and M. was able to snag a juicy expat job, complete with international school tuition (I’m an ex-international school kid myself), then I’d be there in a heartbeat. But I worry about how they might assimilate in Japanese school, particularly given that they look neither very Japanese nor Caucasian (if anything, daughter looks rather Hispanic and son looks strangely Italian – to me, anyway).
Here in the States, we take part in Japanese (and, to a lesser extent, Korean) activities and events, we listen to Japanese children’s songs (well, the kids do – I just bang my head against the wall and kind of tolerate them), and my husband and I both encourage a little language learning (with, possibly, mandatory Japanese lessons when the kids get a bit older). But none of these things will ever make the kids Japanese, and it’s a certainty that they will never be perceived as Japanese in Japan – even if, were we to move there – they themselves identified *as* Japanese. It seems to me that one of the things we need to figure out is how to instill a strong sense of self in our kids, and it’s here that I think that people writing from a ‘hapa’ perspective are saying interesting and useful things (and, even with the problems of the term itself, in its co-opted form, ‘hapa’ seems a particularly useful way of thinking about our kids, since it doesn’t necessarily have to refer to race; it could be a ‘hapa’ upbringing or frame of reference).
(I know you think about these issues, A. – I’m just speaking generally…and kind of vaguely. It’s early. I’m in dissertation mode.)
We are in the process of adopting transracially. Where we live now, white is the minority. Where we grew up white was an ubermajority. We know that it would be unfair to ever live in a place like where we grew up and single our children out as the kids who aren’t white. The kids are Hispanic and we haven’t made any real effort to teach them Spanish, but most of our adult Hispanic friends speak little to no Spanish. It’s something we keep in mind, but don’t obsess over too much.