Excerpts: Beyond Good Intentions
 

The Introduction           

I am the American mother of two adult daughters adopted from Korea in infancy. Born in 1980 and 1983, on the upswing toward the peak of Korean adoption in 1985, they belong to a growing cohort of adult adoptees that also includes the children of the 1975 Vietnam Babylift and early adoptees from India, Colombia, the Philippines, and several other countries. Soon enough, before their parents know it, children from China, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere will enter adulthood. Our kids make up the largest and longest migration of homeless, orphaned, and relinquished children in history, a social experiment yet to be fully evaluated. Research is, of course, under way, and personal reflections on growing up adopted in Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the United States are finding their way to print and to the screen. We parents can expect a vital learning experience.

      As the mother of adults, I enjoy a retrospective view of adoptive child raising, having survived their toddlerhoods and teenage years and either avoided or extricated myself from many pitfalls, some created by my own ignorance. I am on good enough terms with my daughters to feel that our family life has been successful, at least by the measures that matter to me. We suffer no more strains than the average family. My older daughter currently lives in Korea, where she has met many other returning adoptees, some estranged from their parents and others critical of the way they were raised. Her e-mails relay what she has heard from these new friends and compare their families’ habits with ours, prodding me to reflect on my behavior as a parent. I feel a sense of wonder that, in spite of all the risks inherent in international adoption, we have arrived at her adulthood with a sound relationship.

      While she has been getting acquainted with adoptees from the United States, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, I too have been listening to the voices of adult adoptees. They testify to the strengths and faults of adoptive family life on Internet lists and websites, at conferences on international adoption, and in poetry, memoirs, and documentary films. Their voices are on the leading edge of adoption literature, claiming the fertile ground where new truths arise to squeeze out the old, tired ones. Many of the voices are critical, and some of the testimony is difficult for parents to hear. Sometimes this listening has the furtive quality of eavesdropping. The adoptees are not always talking to or about us, but about themselves and their own present needs. They have more to gain from talking to each other and building community than from arguing with adoptive parents, either their own or the collective bunch of us.

      Nevertheless, we parents are eager to join the conversation, and we are accustomed to setting the terms. I watched this happen at the publication reading of Jane Jeong Trenka’s memoir, The Language of Blood, at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis in September 2003. The adoptees in the audience affirmed Trenka’s account of her childhood in rural Minnesota and her reunion with her Korean birth family; they added their own stories, which were sometimes halted in mid sentence by tears. Some of the adoptive parents seemed perplexed and distressed by this emotional intensity. They homed their questions in on the reasons for it and even tried to explain it away. An earnest couple, prospective parents waiting for a child from Guatemala, asked what they could do differently to make life turn out well for their own child so she would not end up sad or angry—in other words, like Jane and the adoptees in the audience.

      As a memoirist myself, I am mindful that readers cull personal stories for general advice and even measure the legitimacy of the personal account against what they already believe to be true. As a mother, I sensed Jane’s discomfort at having not just her literary effort but her life itself laid open for scrutiny and analysis. I wanted to rush in and save her, but resisted the impulse until I had one clear comment to offer. We need to remember that adoptees are as unique and diverse as any other population. If we listen intently to their testimony, we curious parents can begin to discern patterns that will answer our questions. That’s more considerate than asking adoptees to plumb their pain for foolproof advice.

      Those who examine the abandonment and displacement that have shaped their lives owe us parents neither congratulations nor apologies nor explanations. It is not their duty to rescue us from our mistakes or to relieve the discomfort we feel when they are unhappy. Listening is crucial, but we parents must also talk to each other. There are, of course, organizations and publications and Internet sites where adoptive parents share their joys and seek mutual help in times of trouble. But nearly all of these are dominated by parents of young children. As our children begin to hone their interests and choose their friends and resist adoption-related activities, we parents pull away into our separate social spheres. Forums intended for parents of adult adoptees are not easy to find. I feel lucky to be one of “The Moms,” a small, informal group of mothers of Korean-born teenagers and adults that meets biweekly for breakfast.

      As an experienced parent, I can address the weighty question that the parents-to-be asked Jane Jeong Trenka: What should we do differently? Because I have heard so much pain in the adoptees’ voices, the advice has come to me in shadow form, the obverse of the upbeat, foolproof guide to correct parenting that new parents long for. There is no foolproof way to raise children, especially children uprooted from their original families and cultures. The risks are tremendous, and it is the risks I have chosen to present: ten pitfalls that adoptive parents can easily slip into, with unfortunate consequences for their children and their family relationships.

      Each chapter opens with an exaggerated version—a caricature—of something an adoptive parent might say. If you think you recognize yourself, be assured my voice is there, too. The point of a caricature is not to demean, but to prompt a fresh look at features so familiar we no longer notice them. I use exaggeration to home in on some conventional wisdom I want to re-examine, drawing on lessons distilled from reading and listening to others and on my experience as a well-meaning but fallible parent. International adoption is a vast, unprecedented social experiment with still uncertain conclusions. We parents who undertake it all intend to do our best, yet we risk stumbling over our good intentions and tumbling into pitfalls of misunderstanding and ignorance. Although you may not agree with everything I say, I hope you will join me in a candid discussion of our common challenge: how to do right by our kids.

      Because I focus on the extremes at each end of a range of behavior, you may feel damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I urge you to remember that the wisest course is often through the middle, the “happy medium” between the extremes. Raising children, adopted or not, requires us to steer our families safely through the roiling waters between the Charybdis of tyranny and the Scylla of neglect. It’s a tough, scary, and sometimes unforgiving job. Yet it is also joyous and rewarding.

      My natural inclination is to tell my own story in the style of memoir or personal essay, to investigate it in full detail, and to draw out the lessons that come with hindsight. This is what I normally do as a writer, when the subject matter is some critical aspect of my own life. In this case, however, telling my story fully would mean exposing my daughters’ private lives as well. One lesson I have learned that I am eager to pass on to readers is that our children’s experience of being adopted internationally is their exclusive property, theirs to tell or not, theirs to interpret. I have chosen not to spell out details that would put my daughters on the spot or incite strangers to ask them probing personal questions. My passion for writing about this tender subject must not cause them pain. Yet I assure readers that all of my generalizations arise out of specific incidents I have read or observed or been told, a few of them my own bumbling attempts to do right by my family.

      I set out to address a broad audience of parents adopting from all the “sending” countries. The problem of how to be inclusive without cluttering the prose with country names stumped me at first. I tried familiar fictional places— Freedonia, Shangri-La, Brigadoon—but those were already loaded with meaning. Then I remembered a lecture I heard my first week of college about the strange habits of the Nacirema. We green freshmen dutifully took notes until, one by one, we got the joke. If you turn adopt backwards, you get tpoda, which could pass as the name of a country and is easily anglicized as Tapoda. Suppose Tapoda fell on hard economic times or went through a rapid, socially disruptive industrialization and urbanization or instituted a punitive population control policy. How might the Tapodans cope with rising numbers of homeless children? Tapoda will be the code word for whatever country you, the reader, may have adopted from. Alternating the gender of pronouns will solve another problem. Because I have an academic background in Scandinavian languages and can also read German, Dutch, and French, I have searched the Internet for accounts of adoptive families in Europe and read some publications in those languages, including adoptee memoirs. Though I have tried to make my discussion relevant to all the adopting countries, my vantage point is still the United States, specifically Minnesota, the state with the highest number of Korean adoptees per capita. “Are you from anywhere other than Minnesota?” American adoptees in Seoul ask each other.

      At the time I adopted my children, all the sending countries I knew of were in Asia and Latin America. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian orphanages became a popular new source of adoptable children. The parents of Eastern European children perceive them as white and thus free of the complications involved in transracial adoption. This comforting perception may be illusory. Given the volatile history of this part of the world and the prospect of rising nationalisms and ethnic conflicts, ethnicity might become a critical matter for these adoptees.

      One promising trend is a growing interest in adoption among the children and grandchildren of immigrants from the sending countries. Among the parents in the United States adopting from China, for example, are many Chinese Americans. Singapore, home to many ethnic Chinese, is experiencing a decline in birthrate and has opened channels for adoption from China. Some adoptees have adopted from their birth countries in addition to bearing children. These families will likely have their own practiced means of dealing with racial issues, and they will match well enough to be spared rude stares and questions. When I talk about race, I am indeed addressing white parents. What I say here about loss, grief, personal identity, and birth heritage, however, applies to all adoptive families. I invite readers to select what is useful to you, and I wish you a smooth journey through calm waters.

      Finally, I must acknowledge that I am wary of the growing popularity of international adoption. In the United States, for example, the number of visas granted to children arriving for adoption increased more than 250 percent in a single decade, from 1990 to 2000. What many of us saw as a temporary child welfare measure has become a self-perpetuating exchange, an important source of revenue in some poor countries, and a safety valve that delays social reform. Rather than serving would-be parents’ needs as supply-and-demand dictates, international adoption should be governed by a concern for children that puts greater emphasis on keeping families intact and daily life sustainable in the countries where they are born.

      This view is not incompatible with my love for my daughters. Imagine that you are looking at the world through a telephoto lens. Up close, you are charmed by the smiles of little children cuddled in the arms of beaming adoptive parents. Many of us prefer to keep the focus that tight. If you dial back for the long view, however, you see poverty, injustice, and the sorrow of parents who must relinquish their children to keep them alive and healthy or to avoid stigma or punishment. Everything you see, whether close or distant, is really there. The joy and the tragedy coexist. That is the paradox of adoption, and we are all caught up in it. Your family’s cohesion over the long haul depends on how you come to terms with that paradox.

Back to main page for this title.

We well-meaning parents are hardly thrilled to learn that our children are unhappy or disappointed or faring poorly in life. “What did I do wrong?” we ask ourselves as we grope for the quickest fix to the problem. If they persist in being unhappy despite the solutions we offer, we get frustrated and feel inadequate. If they insist on telling us things we’d rather not hear, we feel blamed, maybe even blameworthy. Avoiding blame is a human instinct so powerful it may close our ears to what our children are actually telling us. “It’s not my fault,” we proclaim, maybe implying that our children have made themselves unhappy.

Underneath this defensiveness lies a grandiose fallacy about parenthood: the belief that how our children fare in life is a direct measure of our competence. Adoptive parents are especially prone to the myth of the all powerful parent. When you take on responsibility for a child who wasn’t born to you and to whom you had no previous obligation, you become a very deliberate parent, one who has presumably put much forethought into child raising. When you adopt internationally, you agree to an extra set of challenges, such as loving a child of another race whom others in your community, even your family, might think unlovable. It’s natural to take pride in being open-minded and generous and willing to charge in where others fear to tread. While some parents decline the moral kudos, others feel entitled to virtue’s reward: a happy, loyal, and grateful child.

To be cleared for adoption, you must survive the scrutiny of social workers—that is, if you adopt through an agency concerned with child welfare rather than deal with entrepreneurs in it for the money. You describe how you would handle situation A and prevent situation B until you convince everyone—even yourself—that you can pull off this daunting job. Ideally, your agency equips you to address the tough matters, like race and the existence of birth parents back in Tapoda. Government officials in Tapoda and your own country give you their stamp of approval. You’re all set to be a successful parent.

It’s easy to see how you might come through this process believing that everything that happens after placement depends solely on you. Whether you’ve been advised to downplay your child’s origins or to emphasize them, you expect that certain actions will have certain predictable consequences. You are in control now. If you stick to the plan, your children will be happy and ever grateful. If they turn out ornery or distant or depressed, well . . . you rack your memory for what you might have done wrong. If you recall some instance where you slipped up, you feel guilty, an unpleasant feeling to bear. If you don’t find any wrongdoing, maybe you conclude that your child is the deficient one. In either case, you feel obliged to defend yourself. You meant well. You followed all the expert advice. You did your best. You were a loving parent. How can it be your fault? You’re so caught up in absolving yourself that you can’t even hear correctly. Your child isn’t blaming you for anything. She’s only trying to tell you how she feels.

Imagine that you’re on a family trip to a distant tourist locale. You’ve looked forward to this trip all through the spring; you’ve taken time off work and saved up precious family funds to spend. And now, as you travel the long route through an unfamiliar but scenic landscape, your child turns surly on you. You stop for lunch, sure that getting some food in her will lift her mood, but she grumbles even more. You ask her what’s wrong, and she whines, “I want to go home. I never wanted to go on this trip in the first place.” Maybe you launch into a lecture about all the trouble you’ve gone to, how lucky she is to see sights that other kids never get to see, to have parents who care enough to do fun things with her, things she apparently doesn’t even appreciate. If she has enough insight and courage, she might tell you what’s really bothering her: That she feels out of place. That she was the only person of color in the café, and people were staring at her. That all the historical sites you’ve visited are about a history that doesn’t include her and the background she comes from. That she hasn’t seen one other Tapodan on the whole trip. What do you say to that?

If the guilt is oozing out of you, you want absolution. You can acknowledge it, quickly fend it off, or dispute the cause. Suppose you acknowledge it. “I’m sorry,” you protest. “I should have thought of that. How could I not have noticed? Why didn’t I think about that ahead of time and choose a different destination? I’m so sorry I hurt you. Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Now please be nice and don’t keep punishing me for my mistake with that sour face.” The spotlight swings to you and your guilt and shines so steadily on you that she and her feelings become invisible. Your child gets a message you may or may not intend to send: that her discomfort matters less than the huge burden you bear as her ultraresponsible parent.

Maybe you handle guilt by fending it off. “It’s not my fault,” you argue. “I didn’t know who’d be in that café. I can’t help it if no Tapodans live around here. I didn’t design the history museums. What am I supposed to do about it? It’s too bad, but it’s just the way things are. You’re going to have to get used to it or end up miserable your whole life. Can’t we even have a pleasant family vacation without being reminded over and over again how different you feel?”

Maybe you’re chagrined that you’ve let her surliness get to you, and so you make light of it. “Naw,” you chuckle, “nobody was looking at you. You’re imagining things. If you did see somebody staring, they were probably gawking at that awful lime-green sweater your dad refuses to throw out. Or maybe they think you’re beautiful. Take it as a compliment. And history is history. You’re here now. That’s all that matters. Now cheer up and enjoy yourself. If you can’t find some pleasure in this beautiful place, that’s your problem.”

As a recovering perfectionist, I tend toward the first reaction. I have ached over my mistakes and heaped apologies on people I believe I’ve offended so that they could forgive me and relieve me of the ache. If I was too embarrassed to apologize, I just skulked away and licked my wounds. When my daughters told me they felt uneasy in some situation I had put them in, I felt responsible—and guilty—for my lack of foresight. With experience, though, I’ve learned a different way to respond: to set aside all thoughts of blame and guilt and simply listen. I can now imagine a different outcome to the scenario: “You know, you’re right. We have been traveling through some pretty isolated and provincial places. At least the scenery is spectacular and we’ve had some good family moments. But let’s think about spending our next vacation somewhere more enjoyable for you.” 

Back to main page for this title.