Adoption, Guns & Ammo Style

Well, isn't this charming?! The NRA doesn't want adoption agencies to ask prospective adoptive parents if they have guns in the home, according to this article:

The National Rifle Association is pushing legislation to ban adoption agencies from asking potential parents if they have guns and ammunition in the home.

NRA lobbyist Marion Hammer said adoption agencies are violating gun-owners' rights by asking about firearms in an adoption form. She said any request about gun ownership from an agency connected with government was tantamount to establishing a gun registry.

"Gun registration is illegal in Florida," Hammer said. "An adoption agency has no right to subvert the privacy rights of gun owners."

Thanks to Family Preservation Advocate for the link! As AdoptAuthor cogently notes there, no one has a right to adopt. If you don't like questions about your gun ownership, then don't adopt. Courts frequently note that there is no privacy right in adoption.

Adoption agencies ask about all kinds of LEGAL activity -- do you have a swimming pool? do you spank your children? do you smoke? -- without anyone looking to change the law!

Beyond Culture Camp:Promoting Healthy Identity Formation in Adoption

Great title, eh? Beyond Culture Camp -- that's the title of the research report from the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, reported in the New York Times.

Here are the central findings, verbatim from the executive summary:

• Adoption is an increasingly significant aspect of identity for adopted people as they age, and remains so even when they are adults. A primary contribution of this study is the understanding that adoption is an important factor in most adopted persons' lives, not just as children and adolescents, but throughout adulthood. Adoption grew in significance to respondents in this study during adolescence, continued to increase during young adulthood, and remained important to the vast majority through adulthood. For example, 81 percent of Koreans and over 70 percent of Whites rated their identity as an adopted person as important or very important during young adulthood. This new insight has profound implications for policy, law and practice relating to adoption.

• Race/ethnicity is an increasingly significant aspect of identity for those adopted across color and culture. Racial/ethnic identity was of central importance to the Korean respondents at all ages, and continued to increase in significance into young adulthood. Sixty percent of them indicated their racial/ethnic identity was important by middle school, and that number grew during high school (67%), college (76%) and young adulthood (81%). Based on their overall scores on the Multi-group Ethnic Identity Measure, Korean adoptees had a stronger sense of ethnic identity than did White respondents, but with caveats. While being equal to Whites in agreeing that they were happy about being a member of their ethnic group and feeling good about their ethnic background, they were less likely to have a strong sense of belonging to their ethnic group, despite identifying more strongly with it. They also were less likely than Whites to feel welcomed by others of their own race

• Coping with discrimination is an important aspect of coming to terms with racial/ethnic identity for adoptees of color. The Korean respondents in our research were less likely than Whites to face discrimination based on adoption status, but more commonly confronted racial discrimination. Eighty percent reported such discrimination from strangers and 75 percent from classmates. Nearly half (48%) reported negative experiences due to their race in interaction with childhood friends. A notable finding was that 39 percent of Korean respondents reported race-based discrimination from teachers. It is clear that adoption professionals, parents and others - including schools - need more effective ways of addressing these realities.

• Discrimination based on adoption is a reality, but more so for White adoptees - who also report being somewhat less comfortable with their adoptive identity as adults than their Korean counterparts. Adopted people of all colors report that they experience discrimination, based on how they entered their families, in all settings of their lives - from classmates to employers to strangers. Most Americans probably do not perceive that adoption discrimination exists, per se, but this finding makes clear that stigmas and negative stereotypes linger in our culture and adversely affect adopted children and adults. When asked to identify the context of adoption-related bias, white respondents identified extended family as the most frequent source (for 40%). For Koreans, adoption-based discrimination was most common by strangers (31%) and classmates (25%).

• Most transracial adoptees considered themselves White or wanted to be White as children. Of those adopted from Korea, 78 percent reported they considered themselves or wanted to be White as children - a stark message to parents and professionals, even though the majority grew to identify themselves as Korean-Americans as adults. Analysis of their responses to open-ended questions demonstrates that integrating race/ethnicity into identity can be a complex process. While the most common reason cited for the shift was simply maturity, access to a more diverse community and affiliation with people of Asian background also facilitated the shift. For others, negative experiences such as racism or teasing led to reconsidering their identities and coming to terms with being Asian. A minority of respondents classified themselves as "unreconciled" --- that is, even as adults, they still long to look like their parents or members of the majority culture.

• Positive racial/ethnic identity development is most effectively facilitated by "lived" experiences such as travel to native country, racially diverse schools, and role models from their same race/ethnicity. any Korean adoptees were active agents in resolving identity struggles related to race/ethnicity, with 80 percent reporting that they tried to learn more about their ethnic group. Most had visited Korea (61%) and participated in adoption-related organizations or Internet groups. Korean adoptees offered practical suggestions to adoption professionals about actions that would have helped their shift in identity from White to Korean-American. Travel to the country of their birth topped the list. They also noted the importance of attending racially diverse schools and having child care providers, teachers and other adult role models of their race/ethnicity. One respondent poignantly described the loneliness of being in an all White community this way: "I was the diversity in my high school."

• Contact with birth relatives, according to the White respondents, is the most helpful factor in achieving a positive adoptive identity. When asked to name the experiences or services that are most helpful in achieving a positive identity as an adopted adult, White adoptees rate contact with birth relatives as the most important. A lopsided majority of the respondents - 86 percent - had taken steps to find their birth families. An unexpected finding was that a high percentage (49%) of the Korean adoptees had searched as well and 30 percent had experienced contact with birth relatives, despite the common assumption that those adopted from Korea have little access to information about their families of origin. For Whites, 45 percent reported having contact with birth relatives. This finding - like the one above - underscores the essential fact that adoptees, like their counterparts raised in their families of birth - want to know (as the cliché puts it) "who they are and where they come from." A deeper understanding of this reality has broad implications for adoption law, policy and practice.

• Different factors predict comfort with adoptive and racial/ethnic identity for Korean and White adoptees. This study sought to identify the factors that predict adopted adults' comfort with their adoptive identity, as well as with their racial/ethnic identity. The strongest predictor of comfort with one's adoption identity for White respondents was life satisfaction. For Korean adopted adults, three factors predicted comfort with adoption identity: gender (females were more comfortable with their adoption); satisfaction with life (higher satisfaction predicted greater comfort with adoption); and self-esteem (higher self-esteem predicted greater comfort with adoption).

Struggles of Korean Adoptees

Here's a New York Times article about a new study coming out from the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute about the struggles of Korean adoptees (I'll post the link to the study when I get it). There's not actually very much about the study in the article, but it's an interesting read in its own right:

As a child, Kim Eun Mi Young hated being different.

When her father brought home toys, a record and a picture book on South Korea, the country from which she was adopted in 1961, she ignored them.

Growing up in Georgia, Kansas and Hawaii, in a military family, she would date only white teenagers, even when Asian boys were around.

“At no time did I consider myself anything other than white,” said Ms. Young, 48, who lives in San Antonio. “I had no sense of any identity as a Korean woman. Dating an Asian man would have forced me to accept who I was.”

It was not until she was in her 30s that she began to explore her Korean heritage. One night, after going out to celebrate with her husband at the time, she says she broke down and began crying uncontrollably.

“I remember sitting there thinking, where is my mother? Why did she leave me? Why couldn’t she struggle to keep me?” she said. “That was the beginning of my journey to find out who I am.”

The experiences of Ms. Young are common among adopted children from Korea, according to one of the largest studies of transracial adoptions, which is to be released on Monday. The report, which focuses on the first generation of children adopted from South Korea, found that 78 percent of those who responded had considered themselves to be white or had wanted to be white when they were children. Sixty percent indicated their racial identity had become important by the time they were in middle school, and, as adults, nearly 61 percent said they had traveled to Korea both to learn more about the culture and to find their birth parents.

Asian-American Bloggers Getting Together

Here are two video promos for BANANA: Where Infamous Asian-American Bloggers Unite to Chop It Up, the first-ever get-together of Asian-American bloggers at USC. If you're a fan of Angry Asian Man and/or 8Asians (like I am!), the videos are a chance to see some of the bloggers from those blogs. Sounds like a very cool conference -- wish I could attend. It'll be filmed, so I'll be tracking down the video after the conference!

Orphan Sunday

Today is Orphan Sunday, where participating congregations across the nation will be asked to pray that all the orphans in the world find forever families and that all Christians open their hearts to adopting orphans.

I will pray for all the adoptees sitting in those pews, hearing their experience of adoption reduced to charity and proselytizing. I will pray that the former orphans in the congregation will retain a positive view of their birth parents and home country after hearing both denigrated by the stories told of horrific lives of orphans prior to adoption. I will pray that the adoptees of color will be able to develop a positive racial identity as they notice that all the photos of orphans splashed on the big screen in front of them are children of color like them, and all the charitable adopters are not.

I will pray that no church my children will ever attend will participate in Orphan Sunday.

Happy 9th Birthday, Zoe!

Hard to believe, but Zoe turned 9 today! And Zoe will remind you that it happened at 3 o'clock this morning -- she's still so thrilled to have discovered that information about the time of her birth! She wanted to set her alarm for 3 a.m., but I put my foot down on that one.

It was a very Chinese birthday this year. Zoe declared last month that for her birthday she wanted "everything Chinese and panda." I did lots of running around and found a veritable smorgasbord of pandas -- a Groovy Girl panda, Hello Kitty dressed as a panda, a "realistic" stuffed panda, a "realistic" panda figurine, a My Little Petshop panda, a Hello KaiLan panda tshirt, a blown glass panda ornament, a National Geographic panda game for Nintendo DS. Whew! Add in a handful of Chinese tchotkes -- a Buddha magnet, a dragon backpack charm, an ornament of a Chinese girl playing with a Chinese yo-yo, the American Girl Spring Pearl doll I bought years ago and saved for her -- and I think we achieved success in the "everything Chinese and panda" department.

I went to have lunch with Zoe at school, and brought a celebratory dessert for the class -- ice cream and fortune cookies. The fortune cookies were a HUGE hit with the 3rd grade. They're at such a great age -- old enough to read the fortune by themselves, but still a little young to get much of the advice being doled out. Asking them what they thought their fortune meant was a hoot. They really had a ball sharing their fortunes with each other. I wasn't sure whether they'd like the fortune cookies, but no worries! We'll definitely do that again.

Family celebration tonight with Mimi and Grandpa. We went out for dinner and Zoe got to pick the restaurant, and given the theme of the day, you won't be surprised to hear she picked Chinese.

It was murder getting the girls to bed tonight -- Zoe said, "I don't want this day to ever end!" I, on the other hand, am worn out and can't wait to take myself to bed where I can shed a few tears because my baby is growing up so fast!

Sex Ed (or lack thereof) in China

Slate has an entertaining/disturbing piece up about sex education in China:

The first time Hu Jing tried to have sex with her college boyfriend, there was a technical difficulty. "We knew we had to use a condom," she said. "But we didn't know how."

Faced with this conundrum, Hu and her boyfriend went looking for answers—he from his more experienced friends, she from the university library, where she combed through Dream of the Red Chamber, a literary classic from the Qing Dynasty.

The following week, they reconvened for a second try. This time, they managed to roll on the condom but then … well, where was the penis supposed to go? It took another week of research before they succeeded in doing the deed.

* * *

Even though Chinese culture has become increasingly liberal, traditional values endure. As a result, there's a gap between how open people are about sex and how informed they are, and stories like Hu's are more common than you might expect.

In China, Who Adopts Girls & Why?

Domestic Adoption of Female Children in Contemporary Rural China, by Weiguo Zhang, is a terrifically informative research paper on domestic adoption (mostly informal adoption) and attitudes toward girls in rural China:

Data for the current paper were collected in three separate studies between 1992 and 2004. In 1992–93, I examined adoption behavior among 21 adoptive families in a north China village within the context of market reforms and the one-child policy.

In 2001, I organized a survey on adoption in rural China in Hebei, Henan, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hunan and Fujian. Information was collected from 425 adoptive families, with the major results presented elsewhere.30 I also interviewed an additional 20 adoptive families, as well as people who had knowledge of adoption among their kin, neighbors and friends. Informal interviews on adoption continued during my fieldwork in rural North China in 2002, 2003 and 2004. In total, I have
information about adoption from 668 adoptive families located in many parts of rural China.

Attitudinal changes concerning girls are nicely summed up in this paragraph:

Society in general is changing, and new patterns of family relationships are emerging. Married daughters now easily return to their natal families to offer help, while many adult sons leave the villages to earn money in urban areas. Further, the traditional family structure is changing to one where the elderly have little authority within the family, and where the once-central relationship between father and son is giving way to increasingly intimate conjugal relations between husband and wife. The old saying, “having sons for old age security,” is being replaced by a new saying, “yang nü fang lao, yang er song zhong,” which literally means that daughters are brought up to provide old-age security while sons are brought up to send parents off at the end of life (that is, to pay for burial costs and perform various burial rituals). A man from Anhui used this saying to explain why he adopted a girl from his wife’s natal village in 1988. A man from Hebei remarked, “Yang er hao ting; yang nü hao ming”, meaning that it sounds good when one has a son, but life is actually better when one has a daughter. This is supported by cases in which parents give up one of their sons for adoption in order to adopt a girl. A couple from Shanghang County, Fujian Province, for example, adopted out their third son before adopting a 20-month-old girl in September 1997.

Published in the China Journal at Australia National University in 2006, it's a must-read for adoptive parents of Chinese kids. It's very easy to read -- more so than many research papers! Thanks to kantmakm at adopttalkcanada forum for the link.

What Does "Gotcha" Mean to a Birth Mother?

A must-read from Jane Jeong Trenka (of Jane's Blog) at Conducive Magazine, where she imagines what her Korean birth mother (who died nine years ago) would say about adoption "if she could read other people’s blogs in English, and if she could blog back:"

I did not give birth to my child “with my heart.” I gave birth to my child with my body – painful, and tearing.

I did not “give” my child to another mother as a “gift.”

I was desperate and without the means to earn enough money myself. I and my children were victims of domestic violence. There was nowhere for us to go. No one would help us. We were so alone. I had no other choice but to relinquish my children.

But my children did not feel relinquished. They felt abandoned. I am so, so sorry.

* * *

I was so desperate that I signed away my baby for international adoption the day I brought her to the orphanage. I signed her away with my red-inked thumbprint because I had no stamp. I didn’t know what international adoption meant. I thought my daughters would just live well in another country and be raised in privilege, send pictures and letters, and then come back to me, their mother.

The noise of the airplane taking off tore my heart.

* * *

What does “Gotcha” mean?

What have I gotten from this?

I am not a whore, not a saint, not a storybook character.

I am a real person.

I am a real mother.

My name is Lee Pil-rye.

My children were never orphans.

This is what adoption means to me.

Prose with the power of poetry. Please use the link above to go to Conducive Magazine to read the whole thing.

Louisiana JP Resigned!

Remember the "I'm-not-a-racist-I-let-black-people-use-my-bathroom" justice of the peace in Louisiana who refused to marry interracial couples out of concern for their future children?

He resigned!

As Disgrasian put it, "That’s what we call 'justice.' That’s what we call 'peace.'"

Maybe Louisiana is for Lovers after all.

"Perpetual Foreigner" and "American Enough"

The story's headline reads: Is New York Marathon Winner American Enough? The minute I saw that headline, I knew I'd be writing about it even though it doesn't have anything to do with adoption. It does, however, have everything to do with some naturalized citizens not being "American enough," and some birth-right citizens being "perpetual foreigners," too.

As soon as Mebrahtom Keflezighi, better known as Meb, won the New York City Marathon on Sunday, an uncommon sports dispute erupted online, fraught with racial and nationalistic components: Should Keflezighi’s triumph count as an American victory?

He was widely celebrated as the first American to win the New York race since 1982. Having immigrated to the United States at age 12, he is an American citizen and a product of American distance running programs at the youth, college and professional levels.

But, some said, because he was born in Eritrea, he is not really an American runner.

But even if he were born here, he might not be seen as "really" an American. Remember when Tara Lipinski and Michelle Kwan won gold and silver in 1998 Olympic figure skating? The headline announcing that read, "American Beats Kwan." Tara Lipinski, American. Michelle Kwan, not so much, despite the fact that she was born and raised in California.

The relevance of this to our children -- bearing the marks of perpetual foreignness, having been born abroad, being of Asian, Hispanic or African heritage -- is clear.

Some Talking Adoption Links

Real Families: Talking to Kids About Adoption, from New Jersey Family Magazine:

It isn’t hard for most people—preschoolers included—to figure out that my family doesn’t exactly share a gene pool. My daughters are Chinese; my husband and I are not. And that fact leads to the inevitable questions many children ask: Why does so-and-so look different from her mom? Is that her “real” family? What does “adopted” mean?

I know how hard it can be for children (and even adults) to understand adoption, since I’ve been trying to help my own kids grasp the concept for the past four years. Because November is National Adoption Month, it’s a good time to help all children try to make sense of the topic.

Real Real Mama, from Dawn at this woman's work:

We are reading Charlotte’s Web for our bedtime book right now and after we read
tonight she wanted to talk some about being adopted. We talked about the things she misses and then we talked about the things she has (like Noah) because she is adopted. We talked about how one doesn’t make up for the other but it’s ok to be happy and it’s ok to be sad and that adoption is complicated. “Yeah,” she said. “Like missing your real real mama.”

“Well,” I said. “I can’t make that better for you, honey. I wish I could but I love you.”
“I know,” she said. “I know you’re doing the best you can. I love you, too.”

It sounds like a very gloomy conversation but it wasn’t.

The Family Stories Project from the University of Michigan:

The Family Stories Project has explored the experiences of internationally adoptive families in order to learn what makes early conversations about adoption helpful to young children. At the first phase of the project children were between the ages of 4- and 7-years old; during the second, follow-up phase they will be in the 7 to 10-year old range. We look forward to learning from the children and their parents how their perspectives on adoption have changed as the children have moved into middle childhood and are interacting with the wider world around them, including school, friends, and community.

Haiku Poem Contest for Adoption Awareness Month

OK, November is Adoption Awareness Month. It seems we ought to recognize it in some way, but you know already that I don't do exclusively happy-happy-joy-joy stuff about adoption, and oftentimes that's the narrative of Adoption Awareness Month. I don't mind happiness and joy (really!), so long as folks recognize that adoption isn't ALWAYS happiness and joy all the time for all members of the adoption triad. So, I've decided to institute a month-long Haiku poem contest in honor of Adoption Awareness Month. I've always loved Haiku -- seems perfect for pithy sarcasm as well as more heart-felt emotions!

A haiku is a non-rhymed verse genre, conveying an image or feeling in two parts spread over three lines. There are 5 syllables in the first sentence, 7 in the second and 5 again in the last sentence. Here's my poor example:

November is here
Adoption Awareness Month
Reminder of loss

Haiku is simple, so everyone can play! Post your poem in the comments. Prize is an adoption book of your choice from Amazon.com! I'm the sole judge, but will consider words of praise from other readers.

Searching for Foster Family in China/Foster Child in the West

Mary McCarty's column on searching for her daughter's foster mom in China:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the meaning of family.

As the mother of a little girl from China, I’ve known for a long time that it goes a lot deeper than blood ties. Now I know it can extend to a woman I’ve never met, 8,000 miles away, in Guilin, China.

We have found our daughter NiNi’s foster mother after years of searching.

Ever since the adoption, people have asked, “Do you know anything about your daughter’s birth family?”

We always say, “No, we’ll probably never know anything about her family.” That answer always felt unsatisfying because it left out NiNi’s foster mother, the woman who cared for her so lovingly the first year of her life. What would it have been like to raise her as your own, then give her up with no word of her?

* * *

The futile fantasy of finding her birth parents gave way to the dream of finding her foster mother. But we got nowhere. A Chinese-speaking friend contacted NiNi’s orphanage but they offered no leads. We weren’t surprised; we had often been told that orphanage officials discourage contact between adoptive and foster families.

* * *

[Finding a letter from a family whose child had been fostered by the same mother] Now she was asking for a small return on her investment; she hoped the Webers could help her find four foster daughters who had been adopted by American parents. Foster Child 4 had been “born September 6, 2001, left foster mom November 17, 2002.”

NiNi.

All this time, as we searched for her foster mother she had been looking for us.

Click here to read the whole story.

When I found out with her referral information that Maya was in foster care, I was determined to continue contact with her foster family after the adoption. We sent a box of presents to Maya even before the adoption, and I put our address, phone number and email address on EVERYTHING! I even hid our address behind photos in the small photo album I sent. That package was sent via the orphanage, so I wasn't sure the address remained undiscovered and delivered to the foster family.

We were delighted to meet Maya's foster family at the time of adoption, and I was able to hand-deliver our gifts to Maya's foster mom. I hid our address in everything, again! I put the address openly in lots of places -- photo of our house, where Maya would be living, labeled with our full address! Where I work -- a business card, that included my email address! I slipped my business card into the package with a necklace for the foster mom. I put it in with money in a red envelope. I actually handed it to her, too. All of this happened at the orphanage, so I wasn't sure if it would remain with her.

After we returned home, and a few months had passed without hearing from Maya's foster family, I contacted another adoptive parent from the same orphanage. They had adopted the month before us, and had made contact and continued contact with their child's foster family. I asked the dad to send the picture we had of Maya's foster mom and foster sister to their foster family to see if they knew her. They did, and gave me her email address!

When I emailed her, she said they had emailed me, but hadn't heard back. I think the message must have ended up in my spam box. I can't imagine what they must have been thinking, after we had given them contact information, when they didn't hear back from us. I'm so glad I didn't just assume they weren't interested in keeping in contact!

Since then, they've sent yearly birthday gifts to May and we visited them in 2007 when we were in China -- an enormously positive experience!

They have also asked me for help in finding other children fostered by them. The picture above is Xia Feng-Yi. She was fostered either through Mother's Love in Nanning, Guangxi Province, or Nanning SWI, in Nanning Guangxi Province. I'm not sure exactly when she was fostered -- sometime after 2007, I believe. Click here for the photo of another child fostered by the family; she was with them when we visited in 2007, and was fostered through Nanning SWI, in Nanning, Guangxi Province. She was about a year old then, and the foster family told me that her file had just been sent to CCAA. I've posted this information on a variety of adoptive parent sites with no result, so I thought I'd try again here. Feel free to pass on the info, and contact me if these children look familiar.

Blog Carnival III: Zoe's Blankie

My mom told me about a blog carnival, where everyone blogs about the same topic, and I wanted to do that, too. The topic is special adoption pictures.

This is a picture of me and my favorite blankie. It's my favorite adoption picture because it's my favorite blankie since I was a baby. My mom brought the blanket to China to make me feel better since she knew everything was going to be different after I left the orphanage and I might be scared.

I don't remember that first day, but I think I must have been scared because I never saw American people before and I wasn't used to seeing other people around, just Mr, Gan, the director of the orphanage, and the nannies.

When I got home to America I sort of forgot about the special blankie, I just liked any blankie. But then when I was about 3 or 4, I saw this picture of me and the blankie in my scrapbook and I remembered! I ran to go find it and I haven't forgotten it since. It was special to me again, and I still love it. I sleep with it every night in my bed. It's special because it kind of tells me about when I was a baby, since I don't have anything from my birth parents but I have something from my forever mom.

Do you have anything special you had since you were a baby? If you do, please let me know!

Bye!
Zoe (age 9 in 6 days!)

Abandonment & Chinese Birth Mothers

Amy Eldridge has a post up at Life of Giving, the blog for the Love Without Boundaries, that is likely to move you to tears, an episode during screening for surgery for cleft-affected infants:

I was sitting in the intake room one morning when an anxious young woman came running in holding a tiny bundle. I could immediately tell that the baby was a newborn, and I asked our Chinese director to break the bad news to the woman that the baby was far too young for surgery. As she was given the news, the young lady burst into tears and began pleading and begging to have her child be seen. My friend came over to me and told me that I needed to go and speak with the woman in private, and so I did. She pulled back the blanket to reveal a tiny baby girl with severe cleft lip. The mother told me that her daughter was 28days old , and that their period of confinement was over in just 2 more days. As she was crying and talking, the mom kept kissing her baby's forehead, and she kept telling me again and again, "I love her....I love her so much."

But then she went on to tell me that her extended family would not accept her
daughter since she had been born with a cleft lip. They felt this tiny baby would bring shame to them all. With tears streaming down her face, she told me that her mother-in-law was coming to take the baby away from her in two days' time. The mom was begging me to heal her daughter, to make her daughter beautiful, so that she could keep the baby that she had carried inside of her for 9 months….the daughter she loved completely. When I explained that the baby could not safely be put under anesthesia at four weeks of age, she fell on her knees and was sobbing at my feet, pleading and crying and begging me to help her. Right now...even typing this story....it brings a pain to my chest that I cannot describe.

Amy writes that that visit changed everything for her in how she viewed birth parents in China. Those one-line explanations for abandonment -- one child policy, social preference for boys, medical needs -- were suddenly inadequate. They clearly hide incredibly complex family dynamics, heartbreaking decision-making, deeply personal stories of anguish, sacrifice and loss.

Blog Carnival III: Photos of Adoption

This month's blog carnival at Grown in My Heart focuses on photos: What is your most treasured adoption photo (or two)? Wow! Too many to choose from! I'm cheating by including just one photo -- of a scrapbook layout with 12 photos! These photos are from Nanning, Guangxi Province, where we met Maya for the first time. I've posted the photos of our first meeting before, so I thought I'd use this layout from our first week together as a family.

One of the most amazing things to witness when we added Maya to our family was Zoe and Maya becoming sisters. I swear it was instantaneous! I know we always say that bonding and attachment is a process, not a moment, but with Zoe and Maya it really seemed to happen the moment they met.

I could actually see Maya scope out this new family and figure what her role in it would be (yes, some is innate personality, but some was trying to occupy a space that Zoe wasn't occupying). She would be the little sister. Her job was to be taken care of by the big sister. She also saw her job as cheering Zoe up when she was sad (and, oh, boy, did Zoe have her sad moments in China, meltdown after meltdown at having to share Mama with this new sister! But she never took it out on Maya (too busy taking it out on me!)). But mostly, her job was to lounge on a comfy couch and be fanned by a grape-peeling Zoe!

Zoe also scoped out her job in an instant. She was the big sister/little mother. Just like she told the social worker in a homestudy visit, her job was to take care of Maya in all ways except changing stinky diapers! She fed Maya, holding her bottle as I did, and feeding her noodles from her own chopsticks. She pushed Maya's stroller (when she wasn't sharing it, by squeezing her skinny body behind Maya in the single seat!), she put on her socks and shoes, and brushed her hair ALL the time! She herded Maya like a sheepdog with a single sheep. Zoe LOVED being the boss, and amazingly, Maya did too.

The pattern was set there in Nanning at the first meeting, and five years later, the pattern is the same. And Zoe and Maya are both truly OK with that (we discuss a lot that it's not Maya's job to make Zoe happy (seems like a lot of responsibility for a little girl) but Maya still feels it's her duty to cheer Zoe up when she's down). Maya still exercises her personal code of energy conservation -- not exerting any energy if she can get her sister to do it instead. Zoe still loves mothering and herding Maya (we've actually made it a verb -- "You're big-sissing Maya again!"). They are the closest sisters I've ever seen, happily sharing everything (except Mama -- still a lot of competition on that one), including a single bed (I put them to bed each night in their own beds and wake them up each morning in one bed!).

So that's why that scrapbook layout is one of my favorites -- it illustrates two strangers becoming sisters.

Zoe Blogs!

Hi! Remember me? I'm Zoe. I'm worried that I will never see my birth parents and they might have forgotten me. Do you ever feel that way? If you do, please give me advice. I miss my birth parents. I miss them because I wish I spent more time with them, and then got adopted. So then I could tell my America family about what China is like. Then people could pass it on and everyone or almost everyone would go to China.

Bye!
Zoe


Zoe has been very impressed with Eden's blog (Eden is an 11-year-old China adoptee, and she blogs with her mom, Darlene Friedman, the author of Star of the Week, A Story of Love, Adoption and Brownies with Sprinkles), and told me the other day that she wants to start her own blog. I've suggested that she should post to my blog for awhile to see if she really wants the responsibility of her own blog. So expect to hear more from Zoe here!

Cash, Consent, and the Hague Convention

It’s been known for a while (click here to see what Brian Stuy says on the issue) that some Chinese orphanages have “incentive programs” – programs where cash payments are made to birth parents who bring a child to the orphanage or to an intermediary who pays cash to the birth parents and then brings the child to the orphanage and receives a payment from the orphanage. As one China-born adoptive parent (who disagrees pretty violently with everything that Brian Stuy says!) said recently in reference to "the age old debate about finders fees for orphans," the practice has been in China since way before there was any IA program. There may be disagreement over how many orphanages are involved in incentive programs, but little doubt that orphanages are.

Some argue that these payments are a good thing – it prevents babies from being abandoned in unsafe conditions where they may become ill or die before they are found. They further argue that it is the One Child Policy that is inducing birth parents to give the child to the orphanage or an intermediary, not the cash payments. Some argue that it is reasonable for the orphanage to pay cash to finders to compensate them for their inconvenience and expense in bringing the child in.

But others argue that these cash payments to birth parents may be inducing them to relinquish children they might have otherwise raised – not all children born in violation of the One Child Policy are abandoned or relinquished, and what looks like very little money to us could in fact induce relinquishment in China. And, they argue, payments to intermediaries encourages those intermediaries to acquire children in improper and/or illegal ways. We’ve heard of finders for orphanages seeking out babies by contacting hospitals, doctors, midwives, and by seeking out pregnant women by word of mouth. As intermediaries systematically make it known that they are in the market for children, the quid pro quo aspects of intentionally paying money for children seems unmistakable. And there is always the concern that children will be kidnapped and turned over to an orphanage in exchange for a finder’s fee.

Since there are differing opinions, and offering my opinion wouldn't further the debate in any way, I want to focus on something I do know a little about -- the requirements of the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption that might be relevant here. I've done some research, so to the extent that legal interpretations are "opinions," mine is an informed opinion!

Article 8 provides that sending and receiving countries shall take all appropriate measures to prevent improper financial or other gain in connection with an adoption and to deter all practices contrary to the objects of the Convention. One of the objects of the Convention, according to Article 1 is to ensure that safeguards are respected to prevent the abduction, the sale of, or traffic in children.

In addition to that kind of fluff language, the Convention requires specific safeguards. Article 4 provides that before a child can be placed for international adoption, the sending country must:

a) have established that the child is adoptable;

***

c) have ensured that

(1) the persons, institutions and authorities whose consent is necessary for adoption, have been counselled as may be necessary and duly informed of the effects of their consent, in particular whether or not an adoption will result in the termination of the legal relationship between the child and his or her family of origin,

(2) such persons, institutions and authorities have given their consent freely, in the required legal form, and expressed or evidenced in writing,

(3) the consents have not been induced by payment or compensation of any kind.

First of all, the sending country has to make sure the child is adoptable. In China, this has been done by showing that the child was abandoned and the birth parents were searched for and not found. This wouldn’t be all that different from how it would work in the U.S. for an abandoned baby – a birth parent’s parental rights can be terminated on the grounds of abandonment, freeing a child for adoption.

But with the “incentive program” orphanages, abandonment isn’t what’s happening. The child was not abandoned at all – either the child was brought to the orphanage by the birth family or was given to an intermediary with the understanding that the intermediary would take the child to care for it or to take it to the orphanage. These are not acts of abandonment. In the U.S., if a person were to leave their child with a responsible adult, it wouldn’t be abandonment. Neither would relinquishing a child for adoption be abandonment. So it would seem China needs to prove the child is adoptable for some reason other than abandonment, and that reason would be a consented-to relinquishment.

The Hague Convention has some pretty stringent requirements for a consented-to relinquishment. The birth parents – “persons whose consent is necessary for an adoption” – have to be counseled appropriately and have to be duly informed of the effects of their consent, including the fact that their consent terminates their legal status as parents. Those consents have to be freely given, and must be in writing. And the consents cannot have been induced by payment or compensation of any kind.

The Hague Convention makes it the sending country’s duty to prove these points before a child can be adopted internationally. The Central Authority overseeing adoptions must complete at least a brief investigation into the motives of those placing the child up for adoption to satisfy this requirement. Thus, China would need to investigate each case where money changed hands to make sure that the child would have been abandoned or turned over to the orphanage even if money had not changed hands. If there is evidence of the birth parents receiving money to the extent that it may affect the decision to give consent, the Convention is violated if that adoption is approved.

If children are truly being abandoned, as we once thought was the exclusive way to place a child for adoption in China, these issues with the Hague Convention are not present. That’s probably why China maintains the fiction that this is what’s happening, going to the extent of making up abandonment stories for children in the orphanage (falsifying records is another violation of the Hague Convention, of course).

But China also seems to be moving toward another system for placing children for adoption, a typical system of birth parent relinquishment. But that system falls woefully short of the requirements of the Convention. Birth parents are not likely to be appropriately counseled by the intermediaries looking to find babies for the orphanages. We have no evidence that birth parents coming to the orphanage – or being approached by intermediaries – are consenting IN WRITING to the relinquishment and adoption. And we know that money is changing hands, and the burden is on the sending country to investigate and prove that the money is not what induced the consent. China has done no investigations, because it continues to claim that children in the orphanages are there because their birth parents abandoned them.

I think there is little doubt that China’s use of incentive programs converts the method of placement from abandonment to relinquishment. And those relinquishments are made in circumstances that clearly violate the Hague Convention on a number of fronts. They are not in writing, no counseling has been given to give assurance that relinquishments are voluntary, and there's no one investigating whether relinquishments are induced by money.

On the plus side, if families are already coming to orphanages to relinquish a child, it wouldn't take that much retooling for China to develop a relinquishment-based system that would benefit children in making the possibility of birth parent information and contact possible. First step, get the money out of it.

What will I . . .

. . . look like when I'm all grown up?

Zoe and Maya have each gone through stages where they're fascinated with, um, uh, my chestal area. You know, breasts. How many times have you been with your kids and suddenly you look down and there are two little hands right . . . THERE?! For a while there, I didn't think Zoe would ever potty-train, because when I asked her if she wanted to wear big girl panties like Mama, she asked, "And a BRA?!" It seemed there'd be no pottying in our house unless she had a matching set of lingerie!

The girls have often asked whether they'll have "breasts like Mama's" (I admit, I'm not sure if there's a tinge of envy or horror in the question -- though I am well-endowed, gravity has not been kind!). It's not just breasts, of course. It's looking at me, and wondering what their aging bodies will do. The difficulty of answering that question for adopted children struck me twice in two days this past week.

First, thanks to Facebook friends, I was reading a great story about a local all-Chinese-adoptee Girl Scout Troop:

[The Daisies] lined up eagerly beside the stairs to hear Mei Lin Saunders, a 15-year-old Girl Scout cadet from Carrollton, who had brought her old Brownie and Girl Scout vests festooned with pins and badges to show them how they, too, can progress through the ranks.

"What do you all have in common with Mei Lin?" Daisy Troop leader and mom Kimberly Powell asked the nearly two dozen girls. . . . "We're all Girl Scouts!" chirped one little voice, with the others murmuring agreement. The parents chuckled softly.

"Yes, and you're all adopted from China," Powell continued. This time the girls murmured "Ahh" and looked up at Mei Lin, who usually goes by the name Jamie, all the more intently. . . . They stared as if they couldn't get enough of her.

Mei Lin's mother, Susan Saunders, nodded, understanding what was going through all those little heads, as she looked proudly at her daughter. "They want to see what they will look like when they are grown up," whispered Saunders, watching from the kitchen.

And then I ran across this post at The Queen of Denial, thanks to Tonggu Mama's Sunday Linkage:

No one ever really talks about how adoption screws with your future. I mostly talk about how my past was affected by being surrendered. Or if I do talk about the future, it’s to wonder about medical history and genetic stuff. But lately, as I’ve thought a lot about aging, I realized there are a lot of things I’m missing from my view of the future such as something as simple as knowing more than one generation of your DNA. And that is something I think far too many people take for granted.

You see a lot of yourself in your family. Where you came from, where you are, and where you will be. I know where I am, and a good chunk of where I came from, but there are no clues laid out for me as to where I might be headed in the future. Most people look at their parents, their grandparents, and can see patterns of aging. It’s not an exact science. It’s kind of a look into the future. It may not be exact, but it’s a glimpse, a preview.

As of today I’m twenty two years and some odd months old. I’m still young, still in my prime years. I don’t have wrinkles and my energy levels are high and my hips still slimmed by a fast metabolism. I don’t know what the future of my body, my face, my skin, bring. I watch my adoptive parents as they are getting older and wonder a lot about my natural family. I wonder if they’re young still or if they are getting closer to being senior citizens. I wonder if my mom has wrinkles or if her skin is still taut. If she is still healthy or if she has developed a disease. The kind of things I really need to know about my future, I can only get from her. She is really the missing link I need to chain my past and future to the present.

While it doesn't replace actual contact with and information about birth families, this is a place where adult role models of Asian heritage can be important. If you needed yet another reason to make sure your children know Asians of all ages, this is it. How else will my girls figure out that they're not likely -- for good or ill -- to have breasts like Mama's?!