Adopted Chinese daughters seek their roots

by Love Isn’t Enough columnist Jae Ran Kim, originally published at Harlow’s Monkey

This article comes via Financial Times (which in itself is interesting to me – a story about adoptees returning to their country of birth in a publication about the world of finance?).

I have several thoughts about this piece, some of the language and themes I really struggle with and find incredibly problematic, like this:

And one American mother who visited the orphanage squat toilet with her nine-year-old Yangzhou girl reports that the child gripped her hand as she perched precariously above the evacuation hole, and proclaimed that she was glad she had not been left there forever. Those of us who live in China (as my family does) know that squat toilets are a trial for any westerner. They are a wake-up call that, to those used to western toileting ways, China is still a foreign country.

Yeah…moving on.

One of the things I find most fascinating about this article is the idea that China seems to be bending over backwards to welcome “back” their “lost girls” (referencing the book, Lost Daughters of China here). The author of this article writes:

But now, as the balance of global economic and political power shifts subtly in favour of China, Beijing is reaching out to all these lost daughters – and welcoming them back home.China has invited thousands of foundlings back to their birthplaces for government-sponsored “homeland tours” which, like last year’s Beijing Olympics or next year’s Shanghai World Expo, give the country a chance to show off to the world. On one level, what the Chinese adoption authorities call “root seeking tours” – filled with extravagant expressions of love and kinship and lavish gifts for the returning orphans – are a transparent public relations exercise aimed at raising money for Chinese orphanages, justifying the decision to export surplus children and countering decades of unfair international criticism that Chinese people “hate girls”.

In a blog post I wrote, Client, Ambassador, Gift (based on Sara Dorow’s concepts in her book, Transnational Adoption: A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender and Kinship) I wrote from an adult adoptee’s perspective what it felt like to be “welcomed back” by the country that sent me away because they didn’t want to deal with my welfare or the welfare of poor/single women and families.

In the article, the author describes this scene:

To the maudlin strains of “There’s no Place like Home”, the deputy mayor of the city told the children at a welcome banquet: “You are not guests, you are family.”

Which reminded me of the time I attended the 2004 Gathering in Seoul in which the Vice Minister of Health and Welfare said that he “loved us” and how the other officials there encouraged us to come back and “bring our families.”

I felt like they were saying, “hey, we didn’t want to support you so we found other families in wealthier countries to do it, and since they’ve got money, come back, visit our great parks and temples, eat our great food, spend lots of money on trinkets and show them what a great country we are! But forgive us, we love you, we really, really love you!”

In that older post, I wrote:

Language programs, so we can be translators as well as ambassadors and bridges. Our skills and knowledge of the “west” now being appropriated by the same country that rejected us, as we are asked to forgive and forget – and bring all our educational and financial assets with us. Not only did they not have to support us financially – or our poor families – they have received fees for adoptions (agencies receive substantially more per diem for each international adoption facilitated than for domestic adoptions, hence the incentive to continue international adoption) and they still receive charitable donations from around the world. To top that off, now we are encouraged to return and spend money in our mother land economy as well as stay and live and work here and become cultural and financial bridges between the two nations.

I wonder how many other adoptees there that day felt incredibly used by South Korea. Rather than helping me feel “better” about my adoption, the constant parade of “but look what a great country we are NOW” by South Koreans and their pleas to think of our “two motherlands” only makes me angry.I don’t think there was a single Korean speaker that didn’t mention at least once that Korea is now the 11th or 12th OECD now.

This “We had no choice but to give you away when we were poor, but now we’re not so come back and spend money here” is like some cruel, abusive relationship. And they wonder why some adoptees have attachment issues.

I have a problem with the way many of these “motherland” and “root-seeking” tours are conceived and carried out. I have never gone on any of these types of tours that are often a part of adoption agency programs but believe me, I know enough people who have gone on them, and read Eleana Kim’s articles (see here and especially here) to understand how they operate and how adult adoptees feel about the tours and their experiences of “returning to the homeland.” Kim writes in “Our adoptee, our alien: Transnational Adoptees as Specters of Foreignness and Family in South Korea”:

Since the late 1990s, adult adopted Koreans have been officially welcomed back to their country of birth as “overseas Koreans,” a legal designation instituted by Korea’s state-sponsored “globalization” (segyehwa) project. Designed to build economic and social networks between Korea and its seven million compatriots abroad, this policy projects an ethnonationalist and deterritorialized vision of Korea that depends upon a conflation of “blood” with “kinship” and “nation.” Adoptees present a particularly problematic subset of overseas Koreans: they have biological links to Korea, but their adoptions have complicated the sentimental and symbolic ties of “blood” upon which this familialist and nationalist state policy depend. Because international adoption replaces biological with social parenthood and involves the transfer of citizenship, to incorporate adoptees as “overseas Koreans,” the state must honor the authority and role of adoptive parents who raised them, even as they invite adoptees to (re)claim their Koreanness. Government representations optimistically construe adoptees as cultural “ambassadors” and economic “bridges,” yet for adoptees themselves––whose lives have been split across two nations, two families and two histories––the cultural capital necessary to realize their transnational potential seems to have already been forfeited.

I’d rather read what an adult Chinese adoptee has to say about these trips (and I’m sure that in another few years, we will) than hear about how adoptive parents find comfort and justification in these homeland tours and how they find Chinese toilets disgusting. Yeah, thank God I was adopted so I didn’t have to live with squat toilets (I wonder if this family had ever gone camping and used an outhouse or dug their own litrine? And to think for some Americans, this is a “fun” vacation).

But anyway, judge for yourselves. It was an interesting read.

You can read the article here.

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Comments

dersk wrote:

Hey, at least they didn’t have to deal with Dutch toilets with their observation decks. And to be fair, it was about the kid being uncomfortable about the toilet (of course reported by the parent). I’d expect any 9 year old kid to be a little freaked out by a different type of toilet, to be honest.

But for a serious question: for those of you who were international adoptees, how would you like to be treated by your birth nation (other than ‘not as a potential source of revenue’, of course)? Or would you even want to be treated in a particular way by your birth nation?

Posted 26 Oct 2009 at 11:27 am ¶
JBH wrote:

@dersk: I commented a little on this artilce on the Racialicious website, but I wanted to address your question.

I’m not an international adoptee, but I am a domestic transracial adoptee of Japanese descent. I knew about my “homeland roots” in an intellectual sense, but there was a part that wanted to connect on a deeper, more real level.

So when I went to Japan in the 1990s – 2000s, I was very excited to connect with “my people”, only to find out that the Japanese culture did not view me that way. The communities I was a part of (in the U.S.A.) were inclusive, accepting and celebratory of my “differences”. Japan was not. It would have been nice to be accepted for who I was. All of me. Even the adopted part (many Japanese don’t understand the concept of adoption). Instead, I had a rude awakening: “guess what…you’re not Japanese after all…no matter what your adoptive family and everyone else told you.” I had to come to terms with being 100% mixed Japanese-American.

I’ve also had friends who are third, fourth or fifth generation Japanese-Americans who visit Japan. The general Japanese public look at them and expect them to speak Japanese. When they cannot, they are scoffed at and frowned upon.

Don’t get me wrong – these reactions happen only from people who are *strangers* – not close friends and certainly not the “internationalized Japanese” who have broadened their horizons.

All the same, it would be nice if Japan’s mindset of being an island nation could be broadened a bit.

Posted 26 Oct 2009 at 4:39 pm ¶
Andrea wrote:

I’m not surprised that a 9-year-old American girl was horrified by the squat toilet and was glad not to be living in China. None of these kids are Chinese. They’re all first generation Chinese-Americans or whatever other nationality they’re being raised as. It’s not possible for them to be anything else.

The whole article makes it sound like this “Welcome Home” tour is China’s slightly heavy-handed approach to setting the stage and making everything look Disneyland perfect for the wealthy Americans and their kids, who might come back in the future. But I think they probably mean well and the trip is probably beneficial for these kids.

Posted 26 Oct 2009 at 6:31 pm ¶
Montclair Mommy wrote:

Just for clarification…doesn’t “first generation” indicate that a person is in the first generation to be born in the U.S.? So someone that was born in Korea, China, Ethiopia, Guatemala is NOT first generation–their children will be, however. My husband is “first generation” American. His parents are immigrants. So, that means that any adoptee is not first generation–they are technically immigrants, right? And I would counter that they, and only they, have the right to say whether they are “Chinese”. It doesn’t matter whether anyone else accepts it or supports it. Being or feeling “Chinese” means a variety of things to a variety of people. There is no one right way to be “Chinese” so I would counter that if when they are exploring their identities they feel that a part of them is, indeed, Chinese, that is alright. They might not be just like someone who was raised in China, but that doesn’t take away their right to identify with the country that houses their parents, relatives, etc. The country where they were born and, in most cases, spent the majority of their first year. The first language they heard and the first language they may have spoken or tried to speak. If that is how they identify, I think that should be their right. And being “Chinese” doesn’t exclude also being “American”. They are in a unique position. They are not like other first generation “Chinese Americans”, both because they are not first generation and also because they are not being raised within the Chinese/Chinese-American community.

Posted 27 Oct 2009 at 3:37 pm ¶
Jae Ran wrote:

How I have typically seen the 1st generation/2nd generation explained is that those who immigrate as an adult are considered first generation, and their children who come to the U.S. as children are considered “1.5″ and then the first generation actually born to 1st gen. families are 2nd generation. I could be wrong about that, so if anyone knows more, I’d be interested to know.

However, either way, I don’t consider myself to be “1st generation” – I consider myself an “immigrant.” I know that for many transracial adoptive parents, they don’t like that. There is a faction of White Adoptive Parents who don’t want to consider their children immigrants. But that is another story.

Posted 27 Oct 2009 at 6:29 pm ¶
Andrea wrote:

If someone is raised in the United States from infancy or early childhood, I’d consider them Chinese-American and first generation, particularly if they grew up here from a really young age. Most of their formative experiences would be American or whatever country they’ve been raised in. That doesn’t mean they aren’t also Chinese, however they choose to define it. People can be both at the same time. There are any number of immigrant families that have allegiances and affections for two different countries.

Posted 27 Oct 2009 at 7:07 pm ¶
Montclair Mommy wrote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigrant_generations

Apparently the term “first generation” is ambiguous and can be used both ways. But I would say that, from my experience, the people I know that immigrated here, even as young as infancy, considers themselves an immigrant (except the one person I know that was born in Germany while her parents were stationed there). And all of the people I know that are the children of immigrants (my husband, my grandfather, many of our good friends) consider themselves “first generation Americans”. Just anecdotal, of course. It could be something that varies based on where you live. But, again, I do think that the person themselves should be able to choose which terms fits them best. So if you feel that you are an “immigrant” even if you have lived in the U.S. since you were a day old (just hypothetically speaking), that is your right. Personally, I think where you are born and where you are from is a special and integral part of your identity and something to be cherished.

Posted 28 Oct 2009 at 11:16 am ¶
Kerry wrote:

Dear Love Subscribers,

I’m Kerry Langan, a writer and mom of two precious Chinese daughters. I will be co-editing an anthology on Chinese daughters for Wising Up Press. The anthology is part of the publisher’s series on naturalization and citizenship. Detailed information is available at: http://universaltable.org/wisingup/chinese daughters.html

I think some discussion on this site would be very relevant to the anthology. Would you or someone you know be interested in submitting to the book? If so, please look at the website for specific information.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best,
Kerry Langan

Posted 30 Jun 2010 at 7:47 pm ¶