Watching My Adoption Footage as an Adult
I think many people who wage war against white people adopting internationally often have in their mind an image of a celebrity. These people also often say the most racist things in regards to Asian babies. I've heard people online say racist things like Asians have superior intelligence and looks because of their good genes. Or other very disgusting things like Asian babies are only wanted because they are sexual fetishes. The internet, I am convinced, is the cesspool of humanity.
My parents stayed in China for about one week after I had joined them, on a strict itinerary made by the Chinese couple who ran that adoption agency. They took us babies all around to temples, gardens, and outdoor malls. They even passed a school, where all the school children were playing in the yard during recess and kept pointing at us in our strollers.
At this point, the Hunan scandal had not hit the news, and it wouldn't for about another five years. Yet, it was known how the One Child Policy was enforced, but not to the extent that we know now. The official story: our mothers were unable to keep us due to the policy, so they thoughtfully placed us in a public location in the wee hours of the morning, where we could be brought safely to the orphanage in the morning. No one questioned the official story, even though the Chinese translator was one of eight children. She said she was from the countryside and not to worry their heads over trying to make sense of anything. Go with the flow.
Along the way, people kept coming up to us. A mother who ran a shop told her daughter that I was “little one” and “little sister.” My rudimentary Mandarin from self-studying finally paying off in my early twenties.
People just kept coming up to us, calling us all beautiful, lucky babies. Once in a while an old man would shoot the group a dirty look, but most parents, especially parents with little kids were very interested in saying hello to us, smiling for the camera, or taking a good look at the babies up close. I think I counted three women, total strangers, just coming up and slapping my cheeks. People clapped and cheered for us at the American Embassy, happy we were on our way to America. It certainly hadn't seemed like corruption had reached China yet. Things start out with good intentions, then become corrupt, in every country that has adoptions. That's the well-known pattern. My parents thought China was still nestled in that green zone still, which was why they had even considered China.
A few strange things happened on their journey. On their way to the orphanage, supposedly, the bus changed route and decided to go to an office building in the middle of nowhere. The itinerary claimed they would be meeting us at the orphanage, but in fact, the babies had been on a bus for hours driving down to meet the parents halfway...Don't worry about it! Don't question it! In hindsight, I believe there was a reason for it. They didn't want the parents snooping around, or they didn't want people in the town seeing what was going on. It was strange, but everyone was told to go with the flow and move on.
I was fat, well fed. The orphanage workers were happy for us to be adopted and the orphanage workers and directors were there when I was put into my parents' arms for the first time. They told my parents I only ate congee. My head had a little bit of hair on it, but looked like someone had started and then stopped shaving the back of my head, leaving a small lick of hair in the front. People seemed to like this weird strand of hair I had. It resembled a cartoon character and ancient depictions of Chinese babies. Because of it, many people on the street straight up asked if I was a boy.
My parents brought me tons of toys to play with. I knew what a book was because I opened it upside-down and flipped through the thick cardboard pages, slowly with my pudgy hand. I also pouted and sulked if I wanted to be held. These behaviors gave my parents hope that I had been treated well in the orphanage, that people would give me attention if I frowned. But some babies were not as fat, some acted like they hadn't been fed as much and were extremely hungry. When we returned to America, one of the adoptees was caught hoarding food. Another adoptee was very sick. All my baby teeth were rotten and I also had some type of parasitic infection in my gut, which other babies had too.
I didn't make a sound the first few days. I didn't even cry. Other babies cried their heads off. Not me. I was watching, learning, waiting. I think my baby self was formulating a strategy to stay safe. Babies at three months old can make decisions about right and wrong. My cousin is almost 11 months old and he definitely makes plans to make his mom do what he wants. Fake crying, random screaming, fake coughing. I was 14 months old. It’s entirely possible I was thinking. I think also my silence was a result of trauma, of feeling very scared, and being in survival mode. My parents got worried I was deaf or had a legitimate medical problem and had the doctor check on me when she made her routine rounds for the babies. Turns out, I wasn’t deaf and I could speak. I just decided not to for the first few days. I took my first steps in China too. The hotel workers liked to play with all of us and tried to get me to walk each day. It felt important that I learned to walk in China, somehow.
I understood Cantonese for the first three months of being in America. We know because a lady who worked in a Cantonese restaurant near us was very curious about Chinese adoptees and tried to speak with me. I stopped understanding her at the six month mark after leaving China. My other adoptee friends in school don't want to talk about adoption or act like it just doesn't affect them. To be fair though, I'm sure some might mistakenly say the same about me. An adoptee that I know had PTSD from the orphanage and couldn't go to school. Something about the classroom made her have panic attacks and reminded her of the orphanage. She was slightly older than me when she was adopted and her parents decided to home-school her. My adoptee friend in high school refused to talk and would always just sit curled up. I have twenty other adoptee friends who don't act like it "bothers" them (God forbid they have thoughts and feelings about adoption) but again, what do I know. Star students, star athletes, prom queens, you name it. It can be difficult to see that adoption affects everyone because people are looking for the most obvious red flags. And my life, not to brag, looks pretty damn perfect.
Looking at this footage always makes me feel so loved. In college, everyone wanted to be woke, so they all accused me of being a human trafficking victim because they had read a misleading article by some idiotic editor who didn't fully do their research. I felt alone, more than ever, wanting to just be me. But people in their wokeness crusade told me I was a sexual fetish for my parents which, bleach my brains out, just isn't true. I had to put up with so much fucking bullshit at that college, even from professors. I think my respect for people with PhDs has fallen a mile or so. It doesn't take much to get a PhD. LOL, and I am currently earning mine. Watching these videos solidified for me how very much I did belong with my parents, even though my woke college had some problem with interracial marriages because that was modern day colonialism or some bullshit like that. I think in the extreme, wokeness is racism. You can be so woke, you're walking backwards. So...maybe I'll just call a thing a thing and say, my college was a cesspool of racist human beings and racist ideas, masquerading as social justice, and often times, I was viewed as a specimen, not as a human being. The life decisions of my parents were picked apart and I was relegated to the helpless role of victim.
Have you ever watched that SNL skit where the white, woke students get on stage and chant: "Who runs the world? Whites! Who runes the world? Whites!" And then a black man in the audience says, "It just sounds like they're bragging." That pretty much sums up my undergraduate college experience.
Coupled with that, in 2019, I found out my orphanage was involved in the human trafficking scandal (even though it was really more of a local power skirmish and a baby transportation niche, sold to the unwitting international community as a scandal.) I felt Othered, saddened, discriminated against...Watching my adoption footage gave proof that my parents weren't adopting me out of malicious reasons, and neither were the other parents.
Maybe there was once a fairytale adoption story that everyone wanted to believe in so badly, including me, but no longer. I'm happy for the videos, happy that I can review them as I get older, and happy that my parents had the thoughtfulness to make them, when so many parents didn't think it mattered.
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