Rant on Adoption Narratives

When you're adopted, you come up against many severely ingrained ways in our culture of how to interpret this. None of these ways are for the adoptee's benefit and for years have been written by adoptive parents for adoptive parents.

There's your Oliver Twist tropes, you know, the classic Baudelaire orphans, or Quasimodo. Someone tragically orphaned and going through life battered by fate.

There's your religious zealots, the ones who view adoption as a conversion tactic to save souls. Those people are very annoying, or so I hear, and it's almost as annoying as when people assume that this is my situation.

Then there's your sci-fi existential crises. What if twins got switched at birth? What if your soul is really of a white person and you're trapped in an Asian body? What would life have been like as a Chinese rice farmer instead of majoring in architecture or finance at some liberal arts school?

It used to be easier in some ways to encounter the Judeo-Christian narrative over and over again. My mother comes from a Catholic background and in America, the dominant narrative surrounding adoption was that the birthmother made a valiant Jesus-like sacrifice because she was likely unmarried, a single mother, and thus "impure" or "unworthy" to raise a child. The nuns would convince the birthmom that she'd plunge her entire family into ill-repute and that making the baby disappear into a much more fortunate family would be best for all. Of course, these adoptions would provide the church with money for their operations, and no one really cared about the birthmom or the baby's feelings or rights. Most of these adoptions were closed and there was a lot of guilt and shame. People adopting from China in the 1990's came from backgrounds where this was the experience of birthmom's and tried to put this narrative on top of China's situation. The One Child Policy is complicated enough, but for most adoptive parents, the birthmother making a "sacrifice" was how they interpreted and simplified the scenario because it was what they knew.

Growing up, you'd often hear people tell you that you were "lucky." Presumably, you were lucky for escaping the orphanage. For having a family. For having love. For having food and a roof over your head. Presumably, you were lucky to be alive because worthless orphans don't DESERVE such luxuries. You're simply LUCKY.

Quite ironically, this viewpoint I believe encourages adoptees to commit suicide because if you do not own the right to your life and are a burden to your family, then you might as well be dead. You shouldn't be alive. Orphans don't deserve what other children get. Go kill yourself = You're so lucky.

As I've gotten older, I've encountered many other responses. People looking for sordid little details about being raised by-gasp- white people. People searching for ways to paint me as a victim of my adoptive parents purchasing me or of being white-washed, the most heinous crime in the world and defined by self-proclaimed gatekeeps of who is white and who is Asian. Very few people want to hear your story. Very many people want you to confirm their ignorant ideas about who you are, because it must make them feel good or something.

The more contemporary or "woke" ideas of privilege in adoption builds upon the more archaic tropes of orphans until you're so confused, you're not sure what's up or down anymore.

Some adoptees think that being adopted into a white family is superior to being adopted into a black family, an idea I quite frankly find racist, but which in this day and age is often considered woke that we adoptees are woke enough to identify our "white" privilege. "I've had the privilege of being adopted into a white family."

Ewww.

Some adoptees believe that they are victims of cultural genocide, which seems a little extreme to me. We are allowed to acknowledge our loss, pain, and suffering without stretching to "genocide," I'm sure, but it doesn't matter. No one really listens to me. People want us to make dumplings and wear qipao and perform a fan dance because it fits their preconceived notions of what constitutes "Asian," which is incredibly myopic. Being Asian is not a checklist or an appearance. We are Asian, however we want to be. My Chinese American friends cannot speak or write Mandarin and they are just as Asian. People need to stop gatekeeping, sorting, and ranking other people. 

More recently, I've been faced with a rather primitive idea of "parent exchange." It combines both the sci-fi existential crisis and the white privilege talk. Some of my non-white friends don't have any white friends, or very few, and it becomes easy to get swept up into "white people are x, y, and z" and other generalizations when you don't know anyone personally. I'm not saying reverse racism, etc, etc, blah blah blah. I'm saying that I absolutely detest generalizations of any kind. I hate when people say, "Asian people this, and girls that, white girls this, black girls that, Asian boys this, etc. etc." I hate it. I draw the line somewhere in the middle of comedy, because I think that there is a place for relatable racial humor in some stand-up acts, but I have seen people make college admission decisions based on such sweeping judgements as race or gender, and it isn't so funny then. 

This friend of mine was falling into that trap, where she simultaneously envied and despised white people because she had this idea that all white people were rich. She envied Chinese adoptees with white parents because in her opinion, we were afforded opportunities such as attending more expensive colleges that she was able to. I hated to burst her bubble, but if you crunch the numbers, her college had an endowment ten times as large as the college I went to and she had twenty times less student debt than I did for the same tuition costs. In other words, her parents paid more for her education than mine. I also told her my college was full of middle class white people, not the sons and daughters of America's elite, and that certainly no one was scrambling to get into it. Yes, systemic racism is real and I've been on the receiving end of stupid people saying stupid things that have real impact, but having an easy scapegoat to blame for every woe you have does not help you to improve your life. It was victimhood culture and I was surprised she was stuck in it. There are many Asian people I know who are richer than I, and many white people I know who are "poorer." Many parents, adopted or not, won't even pay a penny of their kids' undergraduate education, white or Asian or not. Her simplistic ideas that we could assume people's character, finances, and opportunities based upon skin color with individuals both of us grew up knowing was astounding to me. I agree, it's not always what you know, but who you know--but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to get to know more people, and that doesn't mean that I've been fed everything on a silver spoon because I've had the fortune of having white parents. And maybe it's her belief that you can in fact judge people by their skin color that is keeping her from trying to change her life, because why fight against something as nebulous and unstoppable as systemic racism? I suppose we non-white people might as well just put a bullet in our heads because we've lost the game at the start.

I see comments online like "I'm an adoptive mother and my child understands that while adoption is a loss and a trauma, that she's been afforded opportunities and gifts she never would have had if she were back in the orphanage."

Any level-headed person would agree that this adoptive mother has a savior complex and an incorrigible ego. Yet, I see so many people agree or write something similar. It is the world we adoptees live in to be in perpetual orphanhood, to be a perpetual beggar in our own homes. We aren't really children, but charity cases. It doesn't matter that my parents don't think this way, act this way, or speak this way. It doesn't even matter that my parents attack adoptive parents who do. The fact is that I live and swim in a world where I am seen not as I am, and very seldom listened to.

I can't fix how the media portrays us. I can't encompass why adoptions should not be characterized as good or bad, or why adoptees shouldn't just be happy or angry, grateful or wretched. I cannot get adoptive parents to stop being annoying or stop adoptees from saying whatever they think people want to hear so that they feel secure.

I fight against the urge every day to tell people I'm grateful and lucky. I fight against the urge every day to write some tear-jerker Facebook post about my adoption or "gotcha" day. I fight against the urge every day to PERFORM for a crowd of faceless, selfish individuals so that I can be labelled a good adoptee and be safe. It is so very easy to please people because they want to hear orphan tropes and not reality. It is very easy to pull at heartstrings with the Chinese government's bullshit story of abandonments. It is very easy to conjure sympathy and praise with the word "orphanage." It is very difficult, I find, to tell the truth, because no one really wants to hear it.