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Chapter One
Who We Are
* * *
The Facts
I believe that when you become a multiethnic family, you need to change almost as much as the child who joins you. That doesn't mean that you have to cook only Korean food or speak Korean, but you have to be very open to it, and it has to become part of you in some way. If you don't feel that you can somehow identify with this ethnic group, then transcultural adoption is probably not for you!
-- Seattle mother of four children,
two born in Korea, two biological
A Critical Mass
In September 1999 the first international convocation of Korean adoptees--organized by the adoptees themselves--took place in Washington, D.C. Some four hundred adoptees from the United States and Europe took part. This event was a milestone. It represented the first time that adoptees, most in their twenties and thirties, had taken ownership in such a visible and significant way of the dialogue and debate on what it means to be adopted across cultures.
Although the events were closed to non-adoptees, I followed the discussions closely, as reports came in on adoption listservs. I also met with some of the organizers. The more I talked with them, the more it became clear that I had a lot to learn, and that the process would be lifelong. Some of the adoptees had taken Korean names; others had kept their American surnames and flaunted them with pride. Some had made a relentless search in Korea to try to find their birth parents; for others this journey was not a priority. And, of course, some adoptees chose to stay home.
Through a Web site related to this gathering, I gained access to a forum that enabled me to experience vicariously the give-and-take between adoptees and parents. Would this be Sadie and me in fifteen years? In each case I was struck by the range of responses, many fraught with emotion. Some grown adoptees reported harboring an abiding hurt over being separated from their birth family. Others were filled with exhilaration at being able to share their life experiences. It was like a coming out party for many of them. The adoption experience, clearly, is hardly monolithic, on the part of either the parents or the adoptees. Coming to terms with being adopted, and being an adoptive parent, can be an ongoing struggle. Parents are particularly tested when children approach young adulthood; this phase of any child's life can be particularly trying.
An underlying theme of the gathering of the Korean adoptees was that intercultural adoption can be an empowering and positive process. The vision statement of one of the organizing groups praises intercultural adoption because of the way in which it enables families to "cross borders of race, ethnicity and blood."
As part of a process of preparing to parent my own child from a different background (and to collect materials for this book), over time, I have also listened to young adults born in Latin America as well as black and biracial young adults adopted by white and interracial families within the United States discuss their experiences and dilemmas growing up. In talking to parents whose experiences crossing cultures had preceded mine by many years, I came to realize two critical points. One was that I was hardly alone in my concerns. The second was that it was essential to keep my learning in context--and never to stop listening. Families that adopted from the 1950s through the 1970s, when much less information was available, perhaps had more issues to struggle with and far fewer resources to turn to, including other families who were facing the same challenges. There just weren't as many--and the sharing that comes naturally to many families these days wasn't so automatic then.
Thirty or forty years ago there was little knowledge of what it meant to be cross-cultural, either. The idea was to be American and to leave as much of the past behind as possible. As a consequence, many parents later found themselves doing a quick course in "catch-up" as their children grew older. Pat Palmer, an Iowa mother who has adopted seven children in all, five from Korea who are now in their thirties and two younger children from Vietnam (she also has two birth children), reports:
When my children were young, I was eager to find out anything I could about the experiences of those parents who had adopted Korean children ahead of me, but no one was talking. Parenting Korean children was still at the "experimental stage," and I guess most of those involved didn't want to admit to their detractors, who said intercountry adoption wouldn't work, that everything wasn't perfect, and so all problems were kept quiet. There were rumors, but not many were talking. And the Korean adoptees themselves hadn't grown up, so they too weren't discussing their experiences.
Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, key adoption alliances were formed, the adoption literature expanded (the magazine Ours , later renamed Adoptive Families , made its debut in the 1970s), and the number of adoption agencies handling interracial and international adoptions began to multiply. National adoption organizations gained in stature and influence. The first culture camps were organized.
As families' experiences with cross-cultural adoption increased, more information became available. Several studies have shown that children adopted interracially generally grow up with their self-esteem and identity intact--provided that their adoptive parents understand the implications of adopting across racial and cultural boundaries and respond accordingly.
Some negative media images of cross-cultural adoption also emerged--particularly in 1972, when the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) pronounced its opposition to interracial adoption. At a conference that year of the North American Council on Adoptable Children in St. Louis, the president of NABSW gave the keynote speech to an audience that included many white parents who had adopted black children. He accused the parents of committing "cultural genocide" and said that these children could not form a sense of black pride or black identity in such families. Despite claims by advocates of interracial adoption that there were not enough families for black children needing homes, NABSW maintained that the opposite was true, but that bureaucratic restrictions were preventing placements from taking place. Among other reactions to the NABSW's controversial stance was the departure of some of its members and the passage of a resolution by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) supporting interracial adoption. Nonetheless, as a result of NABSW's public statement, interracial adoption placements declined dramatically through the rest of the 1970s and into the early 1980s.
Meanwhile, parents did their best. Kirstin Nelson, the biracial daughter (now a thirty-two-year-old law school graduate) of a Nebraska couple who adopted other biracial children, reports:
My favorite childhood books were from the Little House series (it was my favorite TV show, too), and I also loved Nancy Drew . I distinctly remember my parents trying to guide me toward books on Harriet Tubman and other stories with black characters and themes. I did read many of those books, but the Little House books remained my favorites. I really don't think it made any difference in the long run whether I read or played "Little House" or "Underground Railroad"--although I did both over the years.
I think the best thing to do is provide as many options as possible but let your kids make their own choices and decisions about what they are interested in. There is a fine line between guidance and over-parenting.
By the 1990s, the cumulative numbers of interracial and international adoptions, along with ease of access to adoption information via the Internet, transformed the adoption process. With little more than a keyboard and a modem (and a credit card), we could get most of the information we needed to learn how to adopt, where to adopt, how to find families like ours, and how to hook up with support networks.
These days, the questions I raised about my own ability to raise a child born in another culture and of another ethnicity are being echoed more widely as many more families are being created or are expanding through multicultural adoption. Recommendations on how to move forward are far easier to come by. Discussion groups on the Internet enable parents with common adoption interests, wherever they live, to share information. And the e-commerce revolution makes it possible to obtain difficult-to-find books, clothing, food, music, and other resources and to develop a multicultural environment for our families, whether we live in a rural area or a large city.
Yet merely acquiring multicultural materials and taking part in cultural activities will not address our children's emotional and psychological needs as cross-cultural adoptees, nor will these approaches to parenting our children make up for the fact that they have lost something most of us take for granted: their birth culture. As parents we need to recognize that being a multicultural family is not something to celebrate only on special occasions; it is a fact of our daily lives. Being vigilant of the needs of children whom Pat Palmer aptly describes as "double minorities," that is, adoptees who do not share their parents' ethnic background, must be a key element in our overall approach to parenting.
How Cross-Cultural Adoptions Began
To put this discussion into context, I think it helps to understand how and why cross-cultural adoptions came about in the first place, and what the current patterns and trends appear to be.
INTERCOUNTRY ADOPTIONS
Cross-cultural adoption from outside the United States began in a significant way in the late 1940s, when homes were sought for European children orphaned during World War II and following the Greek Civil War. Occasionally we read accounts of these orphans--now grownup and connecting with their roots, or perhaps seeking lost relatives--but the adoptees tend to be scattered.
Cross-racial adoptions of Korean children orphaned in the Korean War began in the 1950s. Many of these children were ethnically mixed--their mothers were Korean and their fathers were of the race or ethnicity of the various military forces involved in the conflict. Because Korean society rejected children born out of wedlock--and ostracized their mothers--most of these mixed-race children were rejected by their biological families and placed in institutions. Koreans were not prepared to raise mixed-race children.
Neither, to some extent, were people in the United States. These early adoptions represented, in the words of Madelyn Freundlich, former executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York City, a type of "crazy social experiment." Children from a specific Asian culture were placed with families in the United States who generally knew little or nothing about that culture. In those days it was rare for families to travel to Korea to adopt; in almost all cases the children were escorted by adoption professionals on the long plane ride to the United States (certainly longer in those days than it is now!), and their first encounter with their new family was in an airport.
Imagine this experience reported by Pat Palmer when her family attended its first potluck supper with other adoptive families in the early 1970s:
There we were with our four young children--five, three, three, and one, two by birth and two by adoption--with families who had adopted in the early to mid-sixties and their school-age children. A minister and his wife led the program afterward and introduced a song they had written for the occasion, which we all sang. It was a sad little dirge entitled "Who Needs Me?" about Korean orphans and their rescuers/adoptive parents. I looked around the room at the school-age Korean children and wondered what they were thinking. I was glad my children, all four of them, were too young to understand.
The international adoption of Korean children (mainly in the United States but also in some European countries, and overwhelmingly by white couples) continued over the next four decades for a number of reasons. First, as Korean adoptions became more widely known and perceived as "successful," infertile couples seeking healthy newborns sought to adopt from Korea. Second, Korea itself did not have a tradition of adoption, and the state infrastructure for caring for orphaned and abandoned children was overburdened. Seeing that families in the United States and Europe were willing to adopt children whose own families could not care for them, Korea established formal agreements with overseas agencies to make the process more efficient. From the mid-1950s to 2000, close to 100,000 children were adopted by families in the United States. In all, some 141,000 Korean children were adopted worldwide during that period.
In the intervening decades, international adoption grew in waves, with some countries dominating placements at different times. During the early 1990s the numbers stayed steady at about 7,000 to 9,000 per year. But during the second half of the decade they gradually veered upward. More than 16,000 "orphan visas" were issued in 1999 by the U.S. State Department, owing to a number of factors:
• Adoption itself was becoming a more popular way to form or expand a family.
• More older couples and single people were adopting (thanks, in large part, to sponsor countries formulating policies that welcome these people to apply).
• More employers were adding adoption support to their benefits packages.
• More countries that lacked the capacity to care for abandoned children adequately were creating programs to make adoption possible.
• The breakup of the Soviet Union and more outreach to the West increased adoption opportunities in some of the newly formed countries of what had been the Eastern bloc.
• Increased contact with China also led to increased opportunities for Western families to adopt Chinese children, mostly girls.
• The Internet streamlined the adoption process. In addition to private agencies going on-line, the State Department published adoption guidelines and offered essential forms on-line that families needed to file with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to get the process going.
• In 2000, new legislation granted automatic United States citizenship to internationally adopted children.
• More information on cross-cultural adoption became generally available, both in print and via electronic media.
• Finally, cross-cultural adoption itself became more "socially acceptable" in line with overall social trends.
THE NUMBERS ON INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION
We have solid data on international cross-cultural adoptions because the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) tracks the numbers of immigrant visas issued to adopted children.
To give you an idea of how adoption patterns change, here's a sampling of the number of international adoptions in the United States in 1989, 1994, and 1999, based on the number of visas issued to children who were adopted by U.S. citizens.
Some adoption patterns have changed dramatically. China and Russia, which barely registered on the adoption radar screen in 1989, each processed more than four thousand adoptions in 1999.
Although data on the age and marital status of adoptive parents have not been formally collected, many agencies report that the types of households now adopting children are changing and more nontraditional families are adopting children. A contributing factor, as has already been noted, is the growing number of employers, from universities to corporations and federal agencies, that are extending parental leave benefits to families who are adopting. ( Working Woman magazine lists adoption benefits as one of its criteria for selecting the "100 Best Companies for Women.")
Just ten years ago, I would have had far fewer options, as a single woman over forty, to adopt. China didn't have a formal program yet, and the few countries that did were not welcoming applicants like me. Adoption e-mail discussion groups now include subgroups of "older" parents, and several new books focus on guiding single individuals through the adoption labyrinth, including tips on money management, estate preparation, childcare, and other concerns. We've come a long way, in a relatively short time, from the days when women in my situation had to search long and hard, sometimes for years, to find an adoption agency that would help us fulfill our quest to become parents. In her book Family Bonds , Elizabeth Bartholet describes her own harrowing quest to adopt in Latin America in the mid-1980s as an older single woman. Although the book came out in 1993--not so long ago--the adoption process and the attitudes toward older, single women adopting have changed dramatically since then.
DOMESTIC DATA ARE HARDER TO MEASURE
The number of children adopted domestically by families of a different background than their own is far harder to measure. Historically, interracial adoption within the United States only began to grow in significant numbers in the 1960s. The introduction of the birth control pill meant that fewer babies--especially white babies--would be placed for adoption. Therefore many white couples turned to interracial domestic adoption to form their families. As many as twenty thousand such placements had occurred by the time the NABSW issued its statement against interracial adoption in 1972.
Interracial placements stalled for several years until federal and state legislation--and public pressure--loosened restrictions on cross-racial adoptions. Many more black children than white children were waiting for permanent homes. (Constance Pohl and Kathy Harris, authors of Transracial Adoption , note that despite reforms, the numbers of minority children awaiting placement rose in the 1990s. Bureaucratic red tape seemed to be largely to blame, as well as a preference by adoptive parents for younger, emotionally healthy children. In some cases, parents-to-be opt for foreign adoption because the process often moves more quickly than it does in domestic adoption, and some parents feel they are more likely to be matched with healthier and younger children. Furthermore, fewer babies are being placed for adoption within the United States, prompting more parents to look abroad.)
The NABSW position against interracial adoption had an important positive outcome: it stressed the need for families who did undertake cross-racial adoption to understand their responsibilities to maintain their children's racial identity. That legacy can be seen even to this day in adoption training, whether prospective parents seek to adopt across cultures from within the United States or from another country.
The National Adoption Information Clearinghouse (NAIC), an offshoot of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, maintains a database of adoptions in the United States. But getting consistent figures is difficult, the NAIC reports. There has been no organized national data collection on adoption since 1975. The quality of reporting that does exist varies widely by state, and current figures are often based on educated guesses. For the purposes of this book, after analyzing a range of NAIC data, including those on foster care placements, we can make a broad estimate that there are, nowadays, from 10,000 to 25,000 domestic interracial adoptions per year.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from dim sum bagels and grits by myra alperson. Copyright © 2001 by Myra Alperson. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
