Sometime I wonder whether my taste in music will ever "mature", but as far as I can tell, it really hasn't changed much since I was 14 or so. LOL.
Anywho, if anyone reading this is on Twitter, please let me know who you are so I can follow you! I need/want to get the hang of it. I'm not very good at using it, but I want to learn. Robert's always saying how it's the next biggest thing to Facebook, so I want to try and keep up. My user name is on my contact page on this blog.
Anyway, my real reason for updating this blog? I've recently been thinking about location. I have about 30-40 pages left of Once They Hear My Name - a collection of stories of Korean adoptees in the US. For me, it's been pretty heavy, emotional reading. I think I've taken so long to read it, simply because I need to stop and take a break quite frequently. (After this, I'm planning on reading Confessions of a Shopaholic - my friend, Jane, and I saw the movie last week, and it was the best chick flick. I need something light hearted after this adoption book!) I know that many transracial adoptees out there seem to experience much more racism than I think I did growing up. I posted about it the other week... And I think this partially has to do with where I grew up...
An adoptive mother e-mailed me last week, asking for some advice on what she and her husband can do for their two Chinese adopted children. One thing I advised was that they live in a culturally diverse area.
When I watched Adopted the Movie, one of the people in the documentary part said something like:
When you adopt a child of colour, you become a family of colour.
This small quote has stuck with me for the past few weeks. I think many families adopt, expecting things to be the other way round - that we'll arrive in Australia, or America or the UK or... anywhere else, and suddenly be expected to be white - to be brought up speaking English, to eat with knives and forks and to feel a kinship with other caucasian people, like our adoptive families. There's never, really, any consideration or integration of our original ethnic culture, or even acknowledgment. But I think it should be the other way round, and people are coming round to that fact now.
Until my family moved out of the city to a very caucasian area, where I was literally the only Asian person around for miles, I feel as though I was luckier than other adoptees out there. Sydney is a city of quite a lot of diversity. Robert and I went out for yumcha a few weeks ago with his high school friends (all of whom are Asian. Robert is jokingly labelled the "token caucasian". But this topic is waiting in my head for its own post here!), and we ended up discussing what the percentage of Asian people populate Sydney. I'm not sure what we concluded with, but it was a pretty high number. Where many adoptees grow up in areas more akin to the area my family moved to when I was a teenager, I was spared those experiences as a young child, simply because I was lucky enough that my family lived in an affluent area of a city that is quite multi racial. Conveniently, too, my very first friend was Japanese. Coincidence?
I probably don't need to go into the experiences I had when my family moved. I think it's enough, for now, to simply say that I'm extremely relieved that Robert and I moved back to the area I grew up in... I feel incredibly out of place in primarily caucasian areas, and I'm sure other adoptees out there share these feelings. I don't think it's just me.
I'm not really sure why I'm writing this. I suppose I've just been thinking recently about the impacts the area you grow up has on you. And I think it's profoundly important for adoptive parents to bring their children up in an area where they can see, socialise with, and integrate with other people of colour similar to themselves.
4 comments:
It's funny that you mention waiting for your taste in music to "mature" because I was just thinking the other day that mine was actually regressing! When I was in college I really didn't listen to music that much, and when I did it was mostly classical. Now I'm into the same bubble-gum K-pop that Korean kids half my age are into!
I like that quote from Adopted about becoming a *family* of color also, as long as white adoptive parents don't take it too far and start thinking that they *themselves* are an *individual* of color. There is still a lot of white privilege that can never be transcended by adopting a child of color. But you're exactly right that so many people still think that it's the other way around, that we will (or should) become white once we step into our "forever families".
Thank goodness for blogs, so that we can tell them otherwise!
I like classical too! =D I just don't like what's considered to be "good" music. XD It's a bit sad, really. LOL.
Thanks for your comment. I always appreciate them! ^_^
Yes, good ol' blogs. ^_^
I agree and I've said it a million times but it's the first time I've heard an adoptee say live in a culturally diverse area. I would go so far as to say, MOVE! It makes a huge difference. We speak over 100 languages here (Toronto) and you have to live here to experience what deep diversity is about. You don't need to go to Toronto but you need to go somplace where your child can see herself mirrored in her surroundings. Picking up on what you said, not coincidentally, my daughter's best friends are from Korea, Uzbeckistan, Japan, China, and the Philippines. I've often noticed that and so have friends.
If I could just make one more comment. BTW, I am the single mom of one daughter adopted from China in 1998. As with everything else, it's not what the parents "do" for the child; it's how they set the stage so that the child can do for himself or herself. There they are, parental hovercraft, waiting to have the conversations the kid hasn't even indicated he or she would like to have yet (I read the original post you are referring to). That's why I think moving to a diverse community is key. Then it isn't Mommy or Daddy trying to teach someone else's culture (something you can't do anyway); it's the whole community offering connections to the whole family, but especially the child on her or her own terms--that's really important. Just my 2 cents. Always enjoy your insights!
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