Before you go any farther, I am going to ask that you please read this post as intended, which is with a gentle tone. Mr. A and I have a hot date and I don’t have the time to finesse it to make sure I am not hurting people’s feelings.
Violet asks:
If you had a white husband, do you think you might still have adopted internationally, or considered doing so?
At my request, Violet also added some of her personal back story to her question, which you can read here. I think there are two ways to answer this question: a) Would *I* have adopted internationally if I had a white husband or b) Do I think *OTHER PEOPLE* adopt internationally/transracially.
Answering question A): Yes, I probably would have very strongly considered it. I started thinking about adopting internationally back in 1999 (L was adopted in 2007, for reference). I read a bunch of books about about adoption because they were next to books about refugees which I was reading because I was doing volunteer work with a refugee resettlement agency that summer.
Very early on, I felt drawn to international adoption and told Mr. A that if he wanted to be with me, adoption would be in our future. If Mr. A and I had not ended up together, I probably would have adopted anyway because I had it in my head that I was going to do*. Once I get an idea in my head, it is hard for me to let it go. That being said, without Mr. A, I think it would have been unwise.
Answering question B is a bit trickier, given the demographics of my readers, but I am going to answer truthfully anyway. Do I think white couples should adopt transracially/transculturally/internationally? In most cases, I would say no.
Oooh, I can hear the collective gasp of indignation as you read that, but I am going to stand by it.
Why? Kids have an absolute and undeniable right to have people around them who reflect their own ethnicity or race. They do. We all know it fucks kids up to be the only brown kid in their school/community/circle of friends/family. You can’t just have one or two people of color around and think that is going to be enough to insulate your kid from that fuckedupedness.
Just imagine if you were a single mom who lives in a women’s commune* and you had a son. Then you send him to the commune’s all-girl school, your family attends an all-female church, he plays on an all-girl soccer team, he has a circle of friends that is all girls. In most of every day, including in his own home, he is the only boy to be found.
You are a mom who loves your son and you want him to be comfortable being a guy, so you have to find role models and friends for him. Just how much guy-guy time would he need to know what it means to be a happy healthy man? How many male friends would be enough for him to feel ok with having a penis when 99% of the people he knows and loves don’t have one?
How many field trips to boy-things would it take to teach him to be a good husband or father? Is one really good male friend enough? Two? Three? Maybe add a male pediatrician? What about adding a male teacher or a coach or two?
Sure, you like watching sports on TV and some of your best friends are guys. As a mom who loves your son, would you be willing to go to the all-men’s church and live on the all-male commune? Would you hang out with all-men all the time and do man things? Would you be willing to be the odd-(wo)man out for the majority of the time?
If you wouldn’t choose that for yourself, how can you choose it that kind of outsider-ness for your child? (Obviously, that is just a thought experiment and most of us don’t live on communes, but just humor my analogy.)
Plain old parenting is HARD. Just getting the kids to school, playdates and their various lessons takes up a LOT of time and energy. If you adopt kids of color/another culture and you want to do it right, you don’t the luxury of just regular parenting which is already stinking HARD. Adoptive parenting is Parenting PLUS: Regular old parenting PLUS adoption issues PLUS transracial/cultural issues PLUS issues related to post-institutionalization.
If you want to do it right, you have to find a place for yourself and your children in a community that may or may not welcome you. You have to help your children with struggles you have never experienced. You have to watch as your children struggle due to the simple fact that you are who you are (i.e. you are not like them).
In my family, I am the minority. I am the only one who is not Chinese/Chinese American. My girls see their experiences as Asian Americans in each other and reflected back in Mr. A’s experiences every single day. Do I think that Mr. A is enough to make them grow up comfortable in there own skins? No, I don’t. They need to see and know and love many different people who have walked down the road they are traveling.
When Mr. A and I chose to adopt, we knew it would be harder, but we thought we would be up to the task. I had no idea how much harder it would be. It is HARD.
L doesn’t have to look far to find an Asian face, but I don’t think that is enough. I don’t think Chinese lessons four days a week are enough. I don’t think traveling back to China every couple years is enough.
Honestly, no matter how much we do and how much effort we make, I don’t know if I would ever think it is enough. I say that and I think we do more than maybe 80-90% of white transracially adoptive parents, AND we have the advantage of having Mr. A in our home.
Since we started our adoption journey,** I have met a lot of well-intentioned white adoptive parents who love their kids a lot. They start out intending to do all the things the experts say transracially adopted kids need, but life gets in the way. Other priorities rise to the top of the heap. There are only so many hours in the day. I get that and I try hard not to judge it, but who will pay the price? The kids.
These kids deserve better.
So, if you have a choice on how to build your family, I would advise against choosing a very difficult option if you don’t really have to.
/end Soapbox
Edited to add: Just to clarify, when I originally wrote this, but I was writing more specifically to address the idea of white potential adoptive parents who are preferential adopters like myself or Violet (based on her longer explanation in the comments).
___________________________________________
*There were other reasons Mr. A and I chose adoption, but that was my initial interest.
*To borrow from a very famous-in-my-mind analogy by someone on the Big Chinese Adoption group back in the day.
**Gag at the terminology, but I can’t think of a better way to say it.
I really appreciate this post. Thank you for answering so honestly and eloquently. It is so valuable to hear a well thought out perspective on this. NaBloPoMo rocks!
I think the reason I asked this question is because I might agree with your overall thoughts on this, but the truth of that makes me sad. I loved hearing that you probably would have done it anyway without Mr A because you came to the idea on your own. That is how I’ve been feeling, and it’s heart warming to have it reflected. Having said that, I think to through with it, would ultimately be unwise for me too.
I hope you had a fabulous, fun hot date!
ps I meant to say ‘to go through with it’
pps the gender analogy was brilliant
Do you feel the same way about adopting a child of a different race out of foster care in the U.S.? I’m thinking about the separation of race and culture in this scenario…
I totally hear what you’re saying about the otherness, and frankly it’s probably what will keep me from adopting at all (because white babies are in short supply), but I can’t help thinking that a child of color, though burdened with some difficulties being raised by a white mom, would still be *miles* better off than s/he would be growing up in foster care or a group home.
I know there is a school of thought that you’re not supposed to consider yourself as a “rescuer” of the child, but you really are. A loving adopted family home is better than an orphanage. A loving adopted family home is better than a series of foster homes. It’s not better than a capable birthmother/intact family, but the kids I’m talking about have already lost all chance at that. However white, however “other”, my house is still an improvement.
Very curious to hear the answer.
I don’t know how I feel about foster care. I answered the way I did because the question was specifically about international adoption. I have done a lot of research and learned a lot from internationally adopted adults, not to mention having the input from Mr. A’s experiences. I don’t have much knowledge about how foster care alumni feel.
I guess one way to look at it would be this: Would foster children be better off if they were adopted by Chinese families in China rather than staying in foster care in the US? To me that is a mind-blowing idea, but it is not different than bringing Chinese kids here
What if they could be adopted by an American-Chinese family in China that look similar to the child, but are still culturally Chinese? What about an expat American family living in China that are culturally American? Or an American family living in that child’s home state?
Sure, in any case, you gain a family, but there are undeniable degrees of loss there. How do we weigh the potential losses against the potential gains?
In general, I believe families are better than no families. But better is not necessarily the best. The best option for Chinese kids is probably to be adopted by qualified Chinese adoptive parents. For some foster kids the best option might be adoption by a family of their own race/culture, for others the best option might be a parent of a different race who have experience with that child’s particular mental/physical health needs, etc.
If the best options isn’t available, then we go to the next best option and so on and so on. Adoption is messy.
As to “b” I agree…we have an unique situation in that although we “look” white we are actually Hispanic. We are also extremely lucky that our immediate family and circle of friends is VERY mixed (black uncles and aunties who each have biracial children both hispanic, black and asian as well as situations that reflect hers ie. parents that don’t match their kids, etc.) yet even with this very lucky blend of people all around her (plus a very mixed neighborhood and school) it’s damn hard on my kid…and this is w/out us having to try too hard…so yeah…as the years have gone by I’ve changed my position on this as well…
Has her life been better with us than bouncing around in the foster care system…probably but that doesn’t address the real issues which include children who are often taken away from situations that could be fixed in other ways or maybe being more proactive in marketing adoption to families of color (there is a lot of distrust…rightly so…of the system as well as a history of informal family adoption w/in black and hispanic families – grandmas that will take grandkids, aunties that will take their nieces/nephews, etc.) or making the rules not so restrictive so that families can take the kids (for example…the two kid per room thing…poor families have to sometimes put more kids in a room)…anyway…just wanted to share that we really need to be aware of just how difficult it is for the children who are raised in families where they are the minority.
I also think that all too often families adopt thinking that within time they will become mine. I am experiencing it easier in lots of ways to adopt trans-racially than from a domestic source. Given my first child is white just like us finding things for him to fit in and be part of both his birth and adoptive family was a big struggle for my family and now since adopting 2 trans-racial children and they have each other people always assume he is our biological child. That is a real issue as often they expect alsorts of behaviour etc that they don’t expect from the 2 younger ones and on the whole we live in a mainly white city with a strong Chinese heritage we have been acepted into that community with more open arms than we ever were once we said we had an open domestic adoption.
All parting is hard and adoption parenting is Harder with many many layers to it just by the nature of disruption one way or another.
Thanks for the topic!
Hugs Ruth
The comment from mccxxiii makes me think from the other side of the fence. In England, it is unusual for parents to adopt a child domestically that does not match their ethnicity, as it is considered paramount in the matching of a family and child. Unfortunately though, this stringency doesn’t fit the landscape of domestic adoption in this country; there have been plenty of news reports in the last few years discussing the fact that the majority of children available for adoption in the UK are black, Asian or mixed race, while most available adopters are white.
There are clearly difficulties on either side, no one wants to say it is better for a child to have to wait without a home, yet it is evident that race matters. I think whatever people choose it’s important they stick to their guns; the end of your post was really sad, Amber, about how many great intentions go by the wayside when life gets in the way.
@mccxxiii: there are plenty of older white children in foster care.
Great post. As you know, I really looked into adopting from Japan. It would have been possible, since I’m of Japanese heritage, but very difficult, and insanely expensive. I couldn’t justify it. Even if I cleared those hurdles, it would mean a huge emotional investment that I’m not sure I was ready to take on. I would probably need to try and learn Japanese… a language I’ve got a difficult relationship with. And here in Atlanta I’m really not part of a Japanese-American community.
Adopting transracially was a closer fit in many ways than adopting intraracially and internationally. My son and I are viewed as different races (Asian versus black). But we share a lot of similarities. We speak the same first language (English). I used to live in the white suburbs, so did he, until he came to us. It’s incredibly easy to connect him with people that look like him. For example, his soccer team is all black. He doesn’t need to go to heritage camps or study another language (though he studies Spanish anyway because it’s great to be multilingual). Also, my husband is white, but he comes from an environment where black and white culture is similar in a lot of ways, in food, religion, and so on… African-American culture is much closer to us, geographically, than Japanese or Japanese-American culture. I wouldn’t say I have any kind of mystic special connection, it’s just that we live right in the middle of it.
We’re not a black family, and yes, that’s a negative. But there are other positives that balance that out. Sometimes transcultural differences can be as important transracial differences, though they’re not entirely separate… they do overlap.
I agree with most of this.
Nothing beats the absurdity being “afraid” of others from your own ethnic background because you were raised in isolation.
I mean, think about it. You’re the ONLY CHINESE GIRL in your entire neighbourhood, classes and extra-curricular activities. You grow up being surrounded by whiteness. Your FIRST encounter of an Asian-Canadian group is at a Chinese New Year festival IN COLLEGE and they ALL speak their native dialects. You’re not white. You’re Chinese. You’re Asian. You’re Canadian-Asian.
But you’re SCARED OF THEM. You’re scared of people from your ethnic background because you have been alienated from them your ENTIRE LIFE.
Is there anyone who doesn’t think that scenario is absolutely mindblowing?
Yeah, it is mindblowing. But not limited to international adoptees. I have a Vietnamese friend (not adopted) who grew up in an area where there were no other Asians besides her family. There is nothing that causes her more anxiety than to see a group of Asian people. Even now, she doesn’t have many Asian friends, and she married a non-Asian man.
This is not unlike Mr. A’s experience growing up. I have half a post written about a conversation we had about that very topic last night, but I don’t know when I will have time to finish it.
I think these are wise words. We are friends with three families who adopted from China where one parent is Chinese-American. While these families do share some similarities with our family, the differences are still quite noticeable. As much as we love our Tongginator, there are some things my husband and I just can’t provide for our daughter… not to the same extent as a same-race adoptive family… and definitely not to the extent that a biological family could.
I get this…a lot. It is much the same as the fact that the vast majority of disabled children grow up in a house where they are the only minority. Further factored in is that most of the time, the parents did not voluntarily choose to have a disabled child, and often are preoccupied with “fixing” or at least minimizing the appearance of the child’s disability. It is an isolating, isolating way to live and can and does cause long-term damage. And then disabled people grow up and travel in fiercely loyal packs with other disabled people and their parents don’t understand why.
Anyway, though. It is hard to say that children of color should be left without families vs. only being adopted by a same-race family. I think there should be a priority for families of the same-race (wasn’t that the meaning of your “expedited” status? because Mr. A is Asian? I think that is a good thing), some kind of priority given to those who can and are obviously very willing to expose the adoptee to their own cultural/racial experience. But I would hate to see it absolutely outlawed for people to adopt outside of their race.
Your logic is confusing.
If (A is True), then (B is False)
but
you state for you
(A is True) and (B is True)
I understand your points, however I would have to agree with Johnny here. Additionally, to stretch your logic to the point of absurdity, if you and Mr. A were to divorce (stopping now to spit to avert the evil eye) then Mr. A. should automatically get custody of the children simply by virtue of his race while simultaneously being unqualified to raise them due to his sex.
In fact your logic seems to argue white families should avoid living anywhere they in the minority, say in Mexico or even in a black neighborhood, as their children will inevitably suffer from a crippling lack of cultural identity which the white parents could do nothing ameliorate. And conversely, non-white people should avoid living anywhere but “with their own kind” so that their children are not subjected to those same perils.
I realize that this is NOT the point you are trying to make, but it is the beginning of a very slippery slope. In October a judge in Louisiana used essentially the same argument – “it’s bad for the children; they grow up confused” – to deny a marriage license to an interracial couple. It is also the same logic that is used to deny gay and lesbian couples the right to adopt or to marry, and to prevent single women from choosing to parent on their own.
I wrote mostly about race in this post because of the nature of the original question, but the whole issue is really complicated. I wrote about it from a different angle in these posts:
Thoughts on the Anti-Adoption Movement
and
My Response to Comments on the Anti-adoption post
in your scenario my gay fathers shouldn’t have adopted a daughter….
Did they raise you in an all-male commune or where there woman and girls in your community for you to know? Given the sheer numbers of women and men in almost every community, I find that hard to believe.
There MANY are white adoptive parents who raise their children in almost exclusively white communities, like the personal experience Mei-Ling shared above. It sounds so crazy when you look at that kind of isolation in terms of gender, but it happens to transracially adopted kids all the time.
And many white adoptive families live in racially diverse communities and have diverse groups of friends. Should they not adopt transracially? It seems ridiculous to say that no white families should adopt transracially because SOME white families live in all-white communities.
I didn’t say NONE, I said in most cases. Living in a diverse community does not necessarily mean that one is integrated into that community.
I think that it would be fair to ask potential adoptive parents to demonstrate their connection with and integration into communities of color before they adopt children of color. If those children are going to be asked to integrate into white families, it only seems fair.
I just want to repeat: thank you for answering.
Generalising on this topic of course provokes debate, but I was really interested in your personal reaction considering the experiences you had (and obviously had my own motives for hearing it, given adoption being on my mind).
I don’t think logic is really that relevant to this specific question. I appreciate the thought you put into expressing this view.
I appreciate you responding to Violet’s question – and nothing about your answer is surprising to me. I thought you might say something about concerns re: A’s side of the family mental illness even further convincing you not to go the bio route again – unless I’m totally imagining that thread…I think you’ve discussed this before. I fall in with Johnny and k2 when it comes to playing this logic out – while I know you’re speaking namely of race here – though it is a slippery slope.
I have to say I agree with mostly everything you say here. I came about this opinion only recently after reading blogs written by international adoptees. When I attempted to talk about this with some friends (who, for the record, did NOT adopt any children), they attacked my opinion and said all the predictable things we’ve already read on the blogs: “but they would have had a worse life in the orphanage” and “isn’t it better for them to be with people who love them?” These friends were all Asian by the way. I explained till I was blue in the face and they still didn’t get it. This is a great post, I’m glad to have read it.
hi Amber, I remember that post on the big list very well (though I always kind of thought that particular poster was someone posing as an a-parent. don’t know why, there was something that struck me that way about that person….)
but you know, it’s not that way… not for your family, for many reasons. Not for my family, because we’ve worked to make it that way. Not, probably, for many of your readers – after all the people who stay are to some extent a self-selected group.
Do I think it’s wrong for a family to adopt when their child will be (I think maybe I first saw this on Twice the Rice, maybe on Not So Calm) the “only” – yes, I probably do. I’ve met adult adoptees who grew up that way, love their families, haven’t really recovered nonetheless. But what about the all the families whose children really are benefiting from what their parents have learned from the adult adoptees?
I shouldn’t comment yet, since I don’t have the brain space for all of it. But I DID grow up in Asa’s commune. I was the only deformed/disfigured/handicapped person I ever knew until college.
Your logic is actually the same that my mother used when I had an AfAm boyfriend-relationships are hard work, and so much harder when you bring race into it. So don’t do it.
I used similar logic when I thought I couldn’t raise two children of different races. But now I am doing that. And I am getting a lot of help from people who recognize my efforts and offer help.
Sure, many people do it badly or haphazardly. But many do it thoughtfully and still make mistakes. That’s parenting.
I wish my mother hadn’t raised me in a commune, yet, as an adult member of several groups for children born with differences like mine-sometimes I think I was lucky. Some of the collective wisdom of people with limb differences doesn’t work for me. I find that I enjoy being me and not fitting any group boundary. And, though I am raising my children trilingually and with cultural knowledge-primarily I hope that they learn to develop their own identity like I did. And like many many multiracial Americans are doing.
As someone who has spent several years working in a Chinese orphanage, I was asked to come here and read/comment. I hesitate to do so because I have such mixed feelings on the whole subject. However, I can state what I am sure of and that is this:
1. I feel that the best situation is for Chinese children to be placed with Chinese families whether in their own country or another.
2. I feel that China does not make it feasible for the ‘average’ Chinese family to afford adoption– probably because they would rather get the steep international adoption fees [or donations..whatever you want to call it]
3. As a volunteer in the orphanage, it was eye-opening to see the babies gravitate and bond with the foreign women rather than their own Chinese care-takers. Why? Because babies [of any color] gravitate towards those who care for them and show them LOVE. How can that be wrong? Despite the hurdles of growing up with another culture, it is a better outcome to have a family who loves you than to grow up lonely and neglected or abused in an institution.
The best outcome would be for China to focus more intently on the well-being of their children and to offer more incentives and assistance for domestic adoption. They need to dig into the problem of abandonment and find solutions for parents who cannot afford medical care– and revise the one child policy to dissuade parents from giving up their ‘girl’ infants to try for the coveted boy.
It’s infinitely better for children to be adopted by parents who love them… white or any color.. than for them to live in an orphanage anywhere.
Are there some parents who raise children as white with white privilege.. yes… is that right.. no… should they educate themselves about why white privilege may create issues in their child’s life.. yes.
I believe it is adoptive parents responsiblity to expose their children and encourage their culture. Does this take work and creativity and persistence? YES. Is it easy? No. But it is our responsibility and if you adopt internationally, this is part of your job as a parent, I think. It is part of the mental health of our children, in my opinion.
I think the Chinese people who want children should be able to adopt and I think the Chinese govt should make it easier for them to do so. Do I think they will change the one child policy? No I don’t. I don’t think we are looking at it realistically if we think they will do this. They most likely will not. I do not necessarily think children are better off with Chinese parents. Many will have more opportunities in the United States than they will have in China. They are certainly going to have better lives here with families than if they are raised in the orphanages. Working in a factory forever is not a good life either. CHinese families who want to adopt should have the same opportunities as we do with regard to adopting and the cost should reflect their income since it is dramatically less in China. This would encourage Chinese parents to adopt.
Really? I should call my cousins who work in the Procter and Gamble factory and tell them you don’t think their lives are good. If only they could have been adopted by a wealthier family, maybe their lives would be worth living. And gosh, maybe we should take babies away from all those welfare families too, since a factory job would be a step up for them.
A factory job in China is a good, middle class job for most people.
What the fuck?
AmFam, I’ve been really appreciating these conversations but haven’t responded much since I’m not involved in international adoption in part because we’re not willing to pretend we’re not in a lesbian relationship and in part because I think it’s super weird that we keep getting the question of why we’re not going to (specifically) China or Guatemala when the obvious answer is because we’re a black woman and a white woman and we don’t have ties to either country, so nothing strikes us as “natural” about that fit.
But if Lee and I weren’t together and I adopted a child from foster care, would I still have a stated preference for a black child? If I were staying in-state, probably, because I know the stats and I do believe I could do a much better job raising a black child here than could most other white people here who might want to try and there just aren’t enough black families to go around (for reasons that have more to do with social services in our state than with the black families). But there is no way to talk about any of this without a million caveats.
Right now, our stated preference is for a child who’s black (Lee prefers a boy) or who might be queer and/or would benefit from being in a two-mom placement because we feel like those are cultural needs we can meet by stretching our lives to cover whatever specifics best fit the child. We could end up with something completely different, but from the outside this kind of decision-making strikes me as somewhat different from what families going into international adoption do, but maybe that’s because the whole setup and process is so different. Just thinking out loud here….
Ooh, that is a tricky question.
One of the things that troubles me most as a mom is that I don’t feel particularly well-qualified to parent my (biologically-related) mixed-race kid. I’m half of a gay couple – my kid’s not welcome at the (very conservative Baptist) Chinese churches, unless she’s willing to conceal the nature of her family. Chinese school is technically secular, but is held at one of those churches, and almost every kid in the school speaks Mandarin as a first language and is there primarily to learn to write. When she’s out with me, everyone who sees us assumes she’s adopted. Except for maybe the cashier who told her she should be on “Jon and Kate Plus 8,” and I have no clue what she was thinking. She came home upset from school the other day, because the kids in her class said her hair was black – her valid gripe being not that black hair was unattractive, but that her hair is medium-brown (and no darker than the hair of white classmates who were identified as having brown hair).
I am so thankful that she lives in a majority-Chinese household (even if it means that I have to share a house with my in-laws). She really needs that.
Also, one of the (myriad) reasons we are not having a second kid is that I am convinced it would be a boy, and elderly grandfathers IMHO are not sufficient role models for how to grow up as a boy.
“Working in a factory forever is not a good life either”
My mother has worked in a factory for probably her entire life. Didn’t realize that the term “factory” meant an automatic low-life standard.
She works, she gets money, she pays her bills. It’s just the way her life is.
i get what you’re saying about factory jobs in china being good “middle class” work for many chinese, though when you’re talking china IA, you’re talking southern provinces – and i think it’s important to focus on the common labor conditions for women there. namely for southern province female migrant workers, especially those lacking formal education. just for general reference: china-labour.org.hk
it’s impossible for me to look at these issues from the outside – through objective eyes, and i’m far from the “dancing around the ladybug bush” orphan-saver voice.
of course i agree with adoption reform and transparency – but this isn’t cut and dry. this isn’t a clean solution type of problem that closing the doors to IA across the board in china solves. i agree with the points made by kay bratt in your comments above – i too believe in those priorities, and overall the intention of the hague agreement.
though i know in my daughter’s province – china’s poorest & most rural- that without IA funding – the grassroots foster program which supports several rural swi’s would not exisit. her CCAA supported swi had no running water, no heat, no paint on the walls, no cribs, no toys, one shared bottle for too many children – while the fat and happy swi admin host self-congratulatory dinners patting themselves on the back for the great work of their foster families. foster families who i know have been handed at times starving/naked/barely alive children. and these are the “NSN” program kids -you don’t want to know what happens to the SN kids, and others deemed “unadoptable” who are left behind. kay bratt knows what happens to many of these kids – and her swi was supposed to be one of the “best” – this isn’t a problem of the past.
in my daughter’s province in particular, don’t i wish that chinese families were lined up to adopt these kids – and if it were simply a matter of IA $$$ incentive only – then the brian stuy solution would be fitting. shut it down – cut off the demand and the supply problem will be solved. as if. throw in the layer of ethnic minority discrimiation – and you have a partial answer as to why middle class han chinese who can afford it, don’t pursue adopting bou yei, miao, or dong orphans.
I like the way you deal with people that post awkward phrases like “Working in a factory forever is not a good life either.” Cuz who wouldn’t want to work 12 hour days in a 100 degree factory for 70 cents an hour?*
Hell yeah, that is a good, middle class job for most people. We should all turn in applications now so we can leave these miserable lives behind.
Do your cousins at P&G get to share a room with 30 other people for free too?
*http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/10/29/am-iphone-workers/
It’s cool I can read all this on my $99 iPhone. Just sayin’
And maybe standing for 14 hours a day in ankle deep mud in a rice paddy would be more fun? Or picking through a garbage dump? Or maybe recycling computers while absorbing who knows how much toxic waste? There are a lot worse jobs in china than standing in a hot crowded factory.
Where Sweatshops are a Dream.
And the issue isn’t are factories pleasant or not, but are we really going to use orphans possibly unpleasant future work conditions as a reason to ship children the globe? That is just stupid.
Really stupid indeed.
I feel qualified to comment on the other side of this. My father was a war orphan who was adopted domestically in Japan. His childhood wasn’t easy. His rural, elderly adoptive parents may have adopted him more so they could have a son to take care of them in their old age, so yes, there could have been exploitation involved (that is, exploitation according to a contemporary American child-centric ideology). Would he have been better off adopted into a rich family in America? I would never even ask that question because it would probably send him flying into a rage. He’s deeply proud of who he is, where he comes from, what he went through and what he accomplished.
You are right it is stupid. It’s just that, as many others have pointed out, this is a very complicated subject, and there aren’t easy answers. How nice factory work in China is, is really a red herring to the original question of whether white folk should adopt trans-racially, sorry for kicking it back up.
It’s just that comment seemed to lose the gentle tone the whole post was intended with.
I would like to echo what you’ve said about the potential for life getting in the way of our good intentions as parents to children we’ve adopted transracially. I don’t think I could have really fully understood pre-parenting how absolutely time consuming the basics are. I am a stay at home mom committed to leading a low-key life with my kids and still we are always on the go.
At the end of the day, it seems most practical that cultural/linguistic reinforcements of our children’s heritage are most effectively accomplished if they happen in our every-day activities. If we have to go out of our way to do “special” events, it is much harder to maintain those commitment over the long haul.
I believe that there are many pits we can stumble into as parents with transracially adopted children, but I also believe in the potential for raising strong, confident children with strong identities.
I have two young daughters who are Chinese adoptees. We were very careful to chose a school with the highest Asian population in our area and as it turns out, there are 2 other Chinese adoptees in my youngest daughter’s class of 12 and one in my older daughter’s. Their closest friends outside of school are also adoptees (and many of our closest friends are White parents of Chinese children). At my youngest’s upcoming birthday party, the majority will be Chinese adoptees. This is their normal. It is a different life and a different culture than they would have experienced had they been adopted within China. But, they are surrounded by children like them – every day. Other kids who have Moms/Dads who don’t match them. (BTW, they (and we) do have “non-adoptee” friends of Chinese decent and friends from other cultural backgrounds as well.)
I think in a way (for better or worse) we are creating a new culture. Had we not adopted our daughters, my husband and I would probably not celebrate CNY or Moon Festival. We would have fewer books about China and by Chinese authors on our bookshelf. We would probably not be able to read pinyin. Our lives have changed as well (Although I am acutely aware that this is a change WE initiated…not so for our daughters).
I am not saying that we should dismiss the effects of the loss of their first culture and language, but just that I think because these kids have each other, they will not feel that loss so deeply…or feel alone in their struggle.
I think it IS possible for a White family to raise a Chinese child with a strong sense of identity. We hope to do it by maintaining ties to their peers, maintaining ties to their first culture and finding ways to ensure that they will very rarely be the “only” (This one may mean checking out four gymnastics classes before signing up, or driving past the local grocery store to the one downtown).
Sorry I’m late to the party, but I’m just now reading this post.
“Why? Kids have an absolute and undeniable right to have people around them who reflect their own ethnicity or race. They do. We all know it fucks kids up to be the only brown kid in their school/community/circle of friends/family. You can’t just have one or two people of color around and think that is going to be enough to insulate your kid from that fuckedupedness.”
But that suggests that black people should live in black neighborhoods, and white people should live in white neighborhoods, and asian people should live in asian neighborhoods. I’m not saying you’re advocating segregation, I’m just saying that a completely (or even mostly) homogenous environment is not necessarily a good thing.
“Just imagine if you were a single mom who lives in a women’s commune* and you had a son. Then you send him to the commune’s all-girl school, your family attends an all-female church, he plays on an all-girl soccer team, he has a circle of friends that is all girls. In most of every day, including in his own home, he is the only boy to be found.”
Culture is not DNA. That boy in a woman’s world is always going to be a boy in a woman’s world. But a child who came from another culture doesn’t necessarily long for it. Many don’t give a rat’s patootie about that culture, just as many adopted children (international or domestic) don’t give a rat’s patootie about finding their birth families. I am the child of an immigrant who left the Old Country and never looked back. Sometimes they just want to be “American.” Sometimes they don’t want to be an Adopted Person, they just want to be a Person.