Asian Adoptees, Anime Heroes, and the Racebending Controversy

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude

I began writing about the anime-inspired Avatar/Last Airbender cartoons in order to rave about how much everyone in my small family loves them. But I soon discovered that the live-action movie, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, has been cast with mostly white actors in the lead roles.

The controversy has been brewing for awhile, but I'd like to alert other adoptive parents to this "racebending," as it's been called by Asian American critics, especially after a glitzy ad for the movie ran during the Super Bowl. Please take a look at Racebending.com for information about the movie protest.

Who would have thought I’d develop a midlife crush on anime?

It’s true that at a recent showing of the New England Anime Society I felt a hundred years older than the mostly male geek audience. I had to leave within five minutes, unable to sit through the dialogue.

An approximation: “Look at his underpants!” “Ooh, he’s wearing underpants with a heart on them!” (Snigger, snigger.) “Careful, that girl on a bicycle has breasts.”

I won’t claim cartoons like this grip me. I've never been a big animation fan. But The Last Airbender, the epic Nickelodeon series, exists on a different plane altogether.

Whether it's My Neighbor Totoro, the kind of Japanese shorts I saw at the anime festival, or the American-flavored Nickelodeon series, these cartoons are undeniably Asian-themed.

As in Japanese anime, some of the characters have white skin or those big manga eyes. As in Kung Fu Panda, the Airbender cartoons employed mostly white voice actors; sometimes the young heroes sound like they've walked off an iCarly set.

But anyone who's watched the animated Airbender series knows that everything in it, from the character names to the music, is steeped in Asian cultural references. What my son sees in the cartoons are Asian heroes taking charge of the action—heroes who look like him.

That's why I'm frankly appalled that white actors will be playing many of the young heroes in the upcoming movie of The Last Airbender. In a good play on words, critics have called this racial reworking of the movie yet another example of "racebending."

Because my son has just turned eight, I want to celebrate what he so obviously loves about the Airbender series—the martial arts sequences, complete with lightning and ice arrows; the Asian imagery; the teenage heroes—and its particular meaning for us as an adoptive family.

I know I’m on suspect cultural ground here. Yet my son, an Asian adoptee, is growing up in a white American household. The Airbender cartoons are an anime hybrid created by two white American guys with the help of Korean animators—a fitting metaphor for us.

Now here comes a special-effects extravaganza of a movie, one my son will surely beg to see, which is another kind of metaphor. It will symbolize why Asian adoptees often feel like honorary white people.

I do worry about how my boy will put himself together as an Asian American man; I've come to see his fascination with anime and manga cartoons as a way for him to grapple with his heritage on his own terms. But with the Airbender movie, he'll get no help. Directed by the high-profile M. Night Shyamalan, it's in the works for this summer and may soon become a juggernaut. 

Shame on you, M. Night Shyamalan.

My husband and I can never claim we have a personal understanding of racism. We could be accused of ripping off Asian culture in adopting a child from Vietnam. Our family can't be reduced to that, but if I'm mercilessly honest, I have to admit that Asian culture is as appealing to me as it is to other white Americans who dabble in martial arts and yoga, attend anime festivals, and go to Chinese New Year's parades.

That makes it even more important for parents like me to challenge racism, unconscious and otherwise, and to name it for what it is.

When I mentioned to my son that white actors will be playing many of his favorite characters in the movie—including Aang, the last airbender and center of the story—he said, "What? That's weird. That doesn't make sense."

No kidding. Here's a fun YouTube montage from the animated original:

Aang is a bald 12-year-old monk with a blue arrow tattooed on his forehead. He's also a reincarnated spiritual leader known as the “Avatar.” He's the Dalai Lama, not Gandalf. 

Avatar: The Last Airbender first aired on Nickelodeon in 2005. Because we watched all three “Books” on DVD long after it was broadcast, we could see as many episodes as we wanted in a sitting. Every time we’d say a collective "No!" at the end of one—my son always adding, "What a cliffhanger!"—we’d look at each other and hit play for the next. (In case you’re wondering, the Avatar cartoons have nothing to do with the James Cameron movie.)

When the series opens, the Fire Nation is ruled by an evil lord who wants to take over the world. In The Last Airbender universe, benders have magical powers based on the four elements—air, water, earth, and fire. The Avatar is the one person who can bend them all. Aang is very young to become the Avatar. But the Fire Lord is on the march again, and Aang, with the help of his loyal companions, has to learn fast how to bend the other elements.

For those who don't love fantasy, there's no way to avoid the inflated portentousness this gloss implies. It’s manga-meets-The Lord of the Rings-meets Buddhism.

Yet it works. At least the animated version does. Thank God we've watched the cartoons before Shyamalan's epic rolls out. Here's the trailer that ran during the Super Bowl last night:

Impressive as it looks, it seems too bombastic and literal. As for the racebending casting choices, cartoonists Derek Kirk Kim and Gene Yang have written eloquent posts about why this is a problem. Take these excerpts from Kim's post, written a year ago "on the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration":

"[I]magine if someone had made a 'fantasy' movie in which the entire world was built around African culture. Everyone is wearing ancient African clothes, African hats, eating traditional African food, writing in an African language, living in African homes, all encompassed in an African landscape...

...but everyone is white.

How offensive, insulting, and disrespectful would that be toward Africans and African Americans? How much more offensive would it be if only the heroes were white and all the villains and background characters were African American? (I wince in fear thinking about The Last Airbender suffering from the latter dynamic—which it probably will....)

But curiously, when similar offenses are committed at the expense of Asian Americans, and Asian American men in particular, this sort of behavior goes mostly ignored by the press and the people involved." 

It's true that outcries of racism by the model minority are generally shrugged off by mainstream America. This trailer from an upcoming documentary called Yellow Face emphasizes why protesting the racial reworking of a kid's TV show is not just "silly" or a waste of effort.

The Shyamalan movie, the first of a planned trilogy, will likely get a big promotional push, especially after the success of Cameron's Avatar. That Shyamalan, an Indian American, went with such casting choices indicates how unconscious racism can be. Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire will play the crucial role of Prince Zuko, but only after replacing the original white actor cast for the role.

Just to be clear: Japanese and Korean creators of anime characters, be they super-ninjas or ghetto-talking African Americans, aren't off the hook for perpetuating racist stereotypes.

These days, there's an endless parade of martial-arts superhero franchises (and action figures and trading cards to buy), but most of this drek never rises above the ridiculously rote. There still aren't many positive, complex images of Asian characters in popular media—people who aren't karate-chopping villains on speeding trains or running nasty industrial cartels.

Which is why it's such a shame that many of the Airbender heroes won't be Asian in the movie.

In the Airbender cartoons we get Katara, a waterbender with healing powers, and her brother Sokka, resident goof and complainer. We get Toph, a blind earthbender who can bowl over bad guys four times her size and sees the world through her feet. We get Appa, Aang's flying bison, whom the loyal buddies ride through the air. 

There are kick-ass evil girls as well as good ones; soldiers who ride bird-horses; a haiku rap contest; even an old and cold soul in the spirit world who steals people's faces.

There are romantic entanglements, far more than in the buddy-plot of The Lord of the Rings. Aang’s cheeks often turn pink—in best anime style—in the vicinity of Katara.

Most important, there's character development and moral ambiguity, especially in the person of Prince Zuko, the banished teenage son of the Fire Lord. Zuko starts off trying to capture the Avatar in order to regain his father's approval. By Book Two of the series, Zuko is in a major tug-a-war of conscience over which side he's on. 

Adults will get more of the satirical references in The Last Airbender cartoons, but I think my son really understands and wonders about the same conflicts I do. To "bend" this story racially in order to appeal to a more mainstream audience is to do a real disservice to the complex questions about history and family the cartoons raise. 

In an early episode called “The Library,” Aang and his companions, along with a professor of anthropology, find a legendary library of all the world's knowledge almost completely buried by sand in the middle of a desert.

Once they enter the library through an upper window, they meet an Owl-like spirit who runs it. The Owl is not warm and fuzzy. This amoral spirit looks like a kabuki-painted demon in a black shawl.

Still, the Owl agrees to let them stay as long as they don't take away knowledge in order to hurt other humans. Sokka, in particular, doesn't keep that promise, and the Owl flies into a frenzy. They flee for their lives, just escaping before the library collapses forever into the sand.

On the way out, however, the professor can't make himself leave. He stays behind and disappears with the rest of the library. 

"Why didn't he leave?” my son asked. “Didn't he die?"

“Some people will do anything for knowledge,” I said.

He didn’t look convinced.

“It’s hard to explain,” I said. “Some adults just get obsessed.”

"Why?" His voice quivered. “Did he die?” 

I wanted to comfort my boy then, as if he were a baby, murmuring it will be fine, it’s all right, you will never lose anybody you love. Ssshh, real adults don’t act that way. 

I reached for him, but he slapped my hands away.

“No!” he sobbed.

I stayed with my son as he cried and raged—internally kicking myself. Stupid professor. Except I understood the man’s love of books and his obliviousness, just as my son knows some adults really do disappear.

More recently, he and I have talked about which Airbender episodes are the most disturbing. He doesn’t want to watch something like “The Library” again, and I’ve since wondered if I should have spared him the disturbing parts. But on balance, I'd say no.
 

Birthdays have their own emotional weight for adoptees. My son has just celebrated another one with us—happily, I think. Yet birthdays inevitably evoke missing parents, too, and in his case, a missing race and culture. At eight, my son is full of joy. He may also be excited by the prospect of traveling beyond his white American existence, a desire that churns up guilt and grief.

The point is, his journey will be complex. Shyamalan's movie may ask big questions, too, but he's got a hard act to follow.

Late in the animated series, Prince Zuko visits his family’s summer house on a remote island, discovering photos of his mother and father when he was a small child. In the pictures, they're laughing; they seem happy. Teenage Zuko, estranged from his father, his mother gone, becomes more furious and sullen.

As we watched Zuko burn the photos, my son snuggled closer to me.

“It’s sad,” he said.

I nodded my head against his glossy black hair. “It’s very sad.”

Oh, my dear boy. Happy Birthday.


This post appeared on Open Salon in a slightly different form as "How I Became an Anime Fan—Not a Racebender."  Some of the comments there indicate why racism keeps sneaking in under the wire.

 

All drawings by my son and used with his permission.

Saving Kids Right and Left

Growing up during the 1960s, the two scariest movie scenes I ever sat through were the flying monkey scene in The Wizard of Oz when they capture Toto, and the child catcher scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. As an adopted child, I knew how easy it might be for someone to come gather me up and cart me away into the netherworld of terror and loneliness where my parents might never find me again. I wonder in fact if my fears were any different than any of my peers who were not adopted. I doubt it. Being a kid means some understanding of how vulnerable you are.

The news story out of Haiti this week is the odd little rescue mission 10 American citizens attempted for 33 Haitian children. This story has all sorts of traction but very little substance -- at least so far. Looking at the photos of the members of this group and watching them interviewed on the nightly news, it's kind of hard to see them as child snatchers or baby traffickers. However, it does make clear that for now at least Haiti is ground zero in the cultural implications of adoption -- and for the broad nature of orphans in the world today.

You're not really hearing details in the mainstream media (check NPR's Talk of the Nation here though for something interesting), but Haiti is one of a number of countries where abandoning children is essentially a societal issue requiring the development of multiple orphanages, child welfare institutions, and a heap of funding (which, of course, Haiti doesn't have). According to one report in 2008, 173,000 Haitian children were given up for domestic servitude in something called Restavek.

"Through the Restavek system, parents unable to care for their children send them to relatives or strangers living in urban areas supposedly to receive care and education in exchange for housework. But the reality is a life of hardship and abuse; enslaved by their so called "hosts", the children seldom attend school."

Observing the humanitarian scene in Haiti right now, even before the seemingly stupid efforts of this naive bunch of Idaho Baptists, the importance of rules and limitations on what happens to orphans (from 1 day of age to 21 years) in any developing nation seems to be pretty obvious. Other reports indicate as many as 300,000 unpaid child servants in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. If you wear clothes made in those countries or put their sugar in your coffee, you may well be contributing to a very serious, under-reported global criminal conspiracy.

Without a very clear, defined and accepted state sanctioning of who is to care for or take responsibility for "unclaimed" children, the means of legitimizing adoption is seriously stigmatized.

And yet, we know that at least from a US viewpoint, there are more families looking for kids to adopt than there are available kids (quibble all you want here, but see this Huffington Post post). How we balance all of that requires some serious thought and careful weighing of policy. And I'm not convinced there's enough intelligent, bias free people focusing on this issue to get us where we need to be if adoption worldwide is going to be something that becomes common and accepted (to rebut myself, check out this great resource from the NY Times debate blog).

Obviously, Haiti is a nation in crisis and no one wants to see kids in harm's way -- especially kids without parents to comfort them. The level of altruism this crisis has fostered is remarkable. However, I still shake my head at how bizarre it was that the governor of my state, Ed Rendell, flew down to Haiti within days of the earthquake and airlifted more than 50 kids out of that country to the U.S. -- and came home a hero while they were still digging people out of the rubble.

And the stories of all these parents trying to get kids they were in line to adopt out now that records have been lost and destroyed are often heart wrenching (and warming) but also very bizarre too -- to me anyway. I mean, there are hundreds of doctors and nurses and other professionals down there right now trying to help people pick up the pieces of--or just save their lives. Swooping in to a country and yanking kids out is kind of weird in the greater scheme of things.

These Haitian kids were there before this crisis hit. Swooping in and rescuing orphans is not going to solve this country's family problems. Haiti needs to be rebuilt and changed forever over the next several decades with the plight of it's children in the front of all our minds. A working agrarian economy, sustainable energy and resource systems, a rising standard of living, and a model international education system could all go so much further in the long run than child rescue missions.

You have to ask yourself -- regardless of how much you care about the protection of the innocent -- is this one of those moments where we have the opportunity to get some perspective on a vexing problem that folks have had a hard time grappling with?

Haiti isn't just another third world country that can't get it's shit together. Haiti is our neighbor and we've kind of helped screw it up for a long time. I predict that the North American connection to this nation is going to become intimate and deep over the next decade.

It wouldn't surprise me if we begin to think seriously about turning this country into a territory of the U.S. somehow. It also wouldn't surprise me at all if Haitian adoption becomes a much more streamlined and common practice (especially for our most dignified citizens in the mold of Madonna, Brad and Angie, Rosie O'Donnell, and Tom and Katie).

But it also wouldn't surprise me that as soon as we get to the bottom of the story of the Haiti Adoption Ten, this issue will just slowly settle back to bottom of the pile and we will all get on with our lives thinking about things that are less depressing and more life affirming -- like Apple iPads, quirky cable TV shows, and the 2010 baseball season.

The Birds and Bees for Adoptees: Where’s the Buzz?

Guest Post by Fran Cronin for Adopt-a-tude


Central to all our lives is the question of who we are—the desire to know who came before us and what about them we retain in ourselves. 

Do I have my grandmother’s nose? Who had my shade of blue eyes? On whom can I blame my frizzy mousy hair? Am I hot-tempered because my ancestors were Italian or Irish, or do I brood and go off on long cerebral tangents because they were Russian?

When we look at our biological parents, siblings, and extended families, each of us sees parts of ourselves reflected back. Through the act of sex, genes from each of our parents are transmitted, collide into one another, and then ricochet off to form new patterns.  While not clones—we know, we see, we feel—we are from a common cross-pollinated pool in which we have all been dipped. 

In biological families, we can identify who had sex with whom to produce the people we call our own.

For adopted children, however, this family parlor game of dissecting facial features, body type, aptitude, and temperament cannot be played out. Often, as in my own case—my 11-year old son is a Russian adoptee—adoptive parents know nothing of the ancestry or the biology of their children. Adopted children arrive in our lives fully formed, like the stork delivering the baby, void of reproductive biology or history.

For the single-digit age group, the stork tale is a very serviceable story, up to a point. But pinch-hitting, as is true for any temporary fix, ultimately exhausts its usefulness: the introspection and self-awareness of emerging adolescence inevitably disrupts the story line.

The happy-ever-after fairy tales of Disney’s family sagas, whether about deer, dogs, or elephants, give way to the to the weighted truth of sexual consequences in Juno—from “how did the stork know where we lived” to young teens recoiling at the thought that their parents did “it.”

And, as parents know, talking about sexual intimacy, or “having the conversation,” with your child is awkward, self-conscious, and a rite-of-passage parenting moment best when over. When I mustered the cool to broach the topic with my now 15-year-old biological daughter, she responded, “I know all about that.”

My adopted son, however, recently broached the subject with me. While seeking an answer to a question not out of the ordinary for an 11-year old, what he really wanted was for me to talk about his birth. 

He asked if he had been in my tummy. I had to tell him no.

The biological chemistry of baby-making is the same for every child that is birthed. But for an adopted child the context and subtext are altered. Yes, man-sperm, woman-egg, sex and conception—but with adoption, the parents relating the facts and the child receiving them are not perpetuating familial genetic history from one generation to the next. Instead, the biological tale signifies both a beginning and an end. 

By telling my son he was not in my tummy, I was acknowledging he was not of our genetic pool.  His hereditary history is different from his sister’s, from mine, and my late husband’s. 

Some may think this fact sad or harsh. But in truth, all of us are disparate until we form our own family units and form new lines. My son may not have been biologically conceived by us, but we are now a family. His place in it will be forever woven into the future coda, the story, of our family line. His children will be ours.

Adopting Nick into our family was the beginning of his new life as our son and brother to his sister. But telling my son he was not in my tummy implied he was in someone else’s.

So many times I have asked myself who this woman might have been. What were the circumstances that led her to give up her newborn son, which is all I know about her?  Was she young, old, healthy, sick, addicted, abused, overwhelmed, tall, short, athletic, musical, withdrawn or passionate? What is the color of her hair?

Does my son look like her?

Nick doesn’t ask me those questions, although, when pre-school age, he and my daughter would together imagine what his Russian mother might have been like. Instead, he asks about my husband, who died three months after we adopted Nick. Through these stories, I re-create my husband, a father that Nick never knew. These stories are his compass to manhood. Of his biological father, there is no information.

I tell him, “Daddy was tall, like you are going to be. And you like to tell silly jokes, just like Daddy did.” I also tell him, when he says he misses his father, how proud his father would be of him.

Yes, we are all conceived through sex. But is that collision and random assemblage of genes what binds families or parents to their children? Given the currents of love that surge between my son and me, I say the answer is no.

Sex is fun, mysterious, and one of the perks of our human race. Under the right circumstances, it creates new life. But the sexual act does not dictate the way we love our children, wax maternal, or hover over them like bears with their cubs.

I may not have physically conceived my son, but we did conceive our love for him. The next time he asks if he came from my tummy, I’ll say, “No, you came from my heart.”


Fran Cronin began her writing career in New York, with guest editorials for Sculpture Magazine followed by contributing stories for Technology Today. In addition, she wrote scripts and copy for health and safety print and media campaigns while living in Washington, D.C. She is currently a journalism master’s candidate at the Harvard Extension School. Her most recent article, “Why Do the Russians Make It So Tough to Adopt?” recently appeared in Adopt-a-tude.

Fostering and Taxes: How We Parented and She Gets Paid

Guest Post by Blue in TX for Adopt-a-tude

Blue in TX originally posted the following piece in Open Salon, where it created quite a furor. This is her personal take on a financial aspect of foster parenting that surprised and disheartened her. As she says after the back and forth at Open Salon, "the jury is still out" about fostering and taxes. Her situation may not apply to other families in other states. She and Adopt-a-tude welcome comments that provide more information and help demystify the finances of fostering.


The going rate for a kid in the United States is $4,600 and change to families making $110,000 or less in 2009. At least that's what my tax prep computer program is telling me. (A $3,650 dependent deduction plus a $1,000 child tax credit.) So, the mightier your uterus, the bigger your tax break.

My uterus is weak and puny and has produced only one child. But we foster parent, and one of the ways the government compensates foster parents is by allowing us to claim tax deductions and credits for our charges as though they had popped out of our own baby-makers. Or so we thought.

So, I set about doing our taxes to include the little boy who spent a little more than half the year with us in 2009. No big deal, right? Wrong.

According to our case worker, the only time you get to claim a foster child as a dependent is when the state has forcibly wrenched the child away from his or her natural family. Voluntary placement kids are still deductible by their natural parent(s).

Many kids in foster care are in care because their parents voluntarily gave them up—either because they could not afford to feed and house them or because they are in prison, or because they just don't want to be bothered.

One of our friends fosters two little boys who were voluntarily placed at birth. They are both six years old now. For six years, our friend has fed, clothed, loved, Band-aided, taught, and honored these children, apparently all without being able to deduct them as dependents. To a single mom on a high school teacher's salary, that's a huge disadvantage, financially.

A couple of years ago, when our finances were less tight and we had not even dreamed of a child, I would have thought "how crass—griping about a tax deduction instead of thinking about helping a child." I still feel somewhat like that—we won't stop fostering if we can't claim tax deductions; in fact, if the government revoked all tax deductions and charged people for kids instead, we'd still have had our own son, and been just as grateful for it.

I just have to wonder what we are trying to achieve as a society with the policies we have set around children and taxes.

On the one hand, we have a problem with more demand for social services than we have the will or the heart to budget for. The more impoverished the kids, the more demand. Worldwide population growth is an environmental concern on many levels, from food scarcity to global warming.

But instead of teaching family planning in our schools and encouraging young people to have fewer rather than more children, we offer the single biggest tax incentive available to average people (outside of the mortgage interest deduction) to those who procreate the most. And we discourage families from taking care of kids whose own parents can't care for them by denying that tax deduction to at least some of those caretaker families.

The little boy we had in our home was moved to another foster family because he was behaving threateningly towards our son. He's a great little boy and is now in a home with his natural sister, where his behavior is exemplary. He and our son still play together. We would have cared for him even had we known from the start that we would not be able to claim him as a dependent.

His mom has five children. She was broke and homeless and living in her Escalade when she placed the kids in care. Now she's broke and living with some guy with whom she reportedly smokes dope and goes to bars when she's not in hairdresser classes.
 
She sold the Escalade and bought a little BMW 5 series with the proceeds. My heart broke for the eldest child when she first saw her mom's new car. She's a precocious seven-year-old and can count well enough to see that three car seats, two booster seats, and Mom will not fit in that car. Since the mom can claim all five children despite them being in other homes more than two thirds of the year, she should get a handsome sum back from the government after she does her taxes. Hopefully, she will use the money to get a more suitable car and put a deposit on an apartment.

That's our case worker's hope anyway. I'm not holding my breath.

Foster parenting is wonderful and terrible. Amazing children, amazing love. Monotonous paperwork that goes on forever, home inspections, CPR classes, licenses, continuing education. Getting attached and having to step aside for a natural family member. Getting attached and having to admit that there are some behavior issues that you just can't handle.

Voluntary placements get turned away by our agency regularly because there is no home to place the child in. I wonder how many families won't take voluntary placement children because of the tax rule giving the deductions/credits for voluntarily placed children to their natural parent if they choose to claim them. Personally, I think that we foster parents who've actually cared for a child during the greater part of the year have earned the $4,600.

Can Birth Parents, Adoptive Parents, and Adoptees Come Together and Discuss Best Practices?

By Lisa @ Pack of Three for Adopt-a-tude

In my last post, I responded to an invitation from Editor Martha Nichols and offered one adoptive parent’s response to the reality show "Find My Family." My post sparked a spirited exchange. Now, after reading, listening, and processing, I’m back.

To be honest, I had no idea (like many people, I'd guess) about the extent of trauma experienced and the strength of feeling within the community of birth mothers. 

My situation was different.  I adopted from China. My daughter was left at the orphanage gates when she was 7 days old. I adopted her at almost 18 months of age.

I'm guessing there are many adoptive parents like me who were, or still are, under the impression that birth mothers here in this country make a "choice," albeit painful and difficult. Few of us are familiar with the difficulties or complexities that surround that choice—or the fallout that can occur afterward. What I am familiar with are the many adoptive families and parents who are part of our everyday life who love their children without qualification, who are wholly committed to doing whatever it takes to help them blossom into happy, healthy human beings. Some live comfortably while others—single moms, teachers, social workers—stretch to cover basic family expenses.

In any case, I've now read many of the blogs of birth mothers and understand better some of the trauma and lifelong pain adoption can entail.

I extend myself here, once again, with the hope readers will be gentle and understand I do so in the spirit of wanting to learn more. Here’s why:

In the middle of all the strong reactions to my post on Adopt-a-tude, I was invited to serve on the board of an adoption agency. The agency has a clean, longstanding record of good work in the field of both domestic and international adoption. I've met and interviewed with the agency's director and board members and can tell you they are good, giving, unselfish people whose hearts truly are in the right place.

The agency operates with the belief that the best place for a child is with his or her birth parents. If that’s not possible, then the next best place for a child is with their extended birth family. Barring that possibility, the next best option is an adoptive parent or parents from the child’s birth country. If that’s not possible, then the next best thing is to be adopted internationally. The last, least ideal option is for the child to grow up in an orphanage. In keeping with this philosophy, close to 70% of the agency’s placements are for older, waiting children—that is, children who have already been relinquished and are either in foster care or orphanage settings.  The agency's work is not profitable. I've seen the numbers. Adoption fees barely cover 50% of their work. The rest is supported through donations.

So, here are my questions:

(1) If you were me, or if you were a potential adoptive parent, what specific questions would you ask an adoption agency to ensure you were comfortable with their priorities and practices?

(2) Regarding an adoption agency’s domestic adoption work, what specific practices would you look for to understand how an agency ensures birth mothers understand their rights, options, and emotional risks?

(3) Regarding any proposed services an adoption agency or other organization offers—or that you recommend be offered—to prospective mothers considering placing a child for adoption, who do you believe would be the right agency, organization, or person/s to provide those services? Additionally, who do you believe should support (fund) the delivery of these services? (I’m aware this is a delicate question. I ask it with complete sincerity.)

(4) Regarding an adoption agency’s efforts to facilitate international adoptions, what specific practices, policies, or guidelines should one look for to ensure the agency’s work, in fact and in spirit, serves the purpose of connecting waiting children with waiting, loving families and doesn’t—consciously or otherwise—encourage child trafficking?

These are obviously touchy subjects. It’s my hope that those who choose to respond will be thoughtful, informative, even creative.

I appreciate everyone’s time and interest.

The Places That Scare Us

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude

A few more thoughts on "Find My Family" and a holiday wish.


On tonight's episode of Find My Family, Tina said she just wanted to know if her birth son was happy and healthy. When she learned he's in his twenties and doing fine, she said, "I could be done right now."

Of course on this ABC show she wasn't done. Tina went on to meet her son Tim. Whether those of us watching Find My Family are birth parents, adoptees, adoptive parents, or not part of the adoption triad, we know such cathartic moments often lead to disappointment.

Yet that doesn't make the intensity any less true. I've come to believe that celebrating such moments matters.

Not every adoptive family is a happy one; not every birth parent wants to be found; not every adoptee is "lucky" or traumatized by loss. We all come to this issue with our own loads of baggage.

But most of us are able to handle many conflicting feelings. We can love more than one mother or father. Love is not an on-off switch or the simplistic binary of Hollywood movies or the National Enquirer. What's most transformative about adoption is the way it allows us to extend the boundaries of love; it validates the rich complexity of life.

For me, it's ironic that a reality show like Find My Family presents more emotional nuance than you'll see almost anywhere else on TV. I admit, I was on the defensive when I watched the first episode, after reading dire warnings from other adoptive parents on sites like Rainbowkids. The soapy formula, the tearful hosts, the relentless happy endings put me off before I'd experienced a second of it.

But after the first episode, I felt divided. Artificial as the format seemed—and that glowing "family tree" on a heavenly hillside is still hard to take—it couldn't squelch the feelings of the participants.

As a result, I sought other responses to the show from different perspectives in the triad. The range of reactions to these Adopt-a-tude posts has made for a bracing conversation. It hasn't been an easy discussion for an adoptive parent like me. But it's a necessary one, I think, and I find that my frame of reference has changed.

I'm still concerned about the show's melodramatic pitch and telling edits. Yet despite its flaws, I'm drawn to the undeniable gut impact of these stories. (Click here for my reaction on Open Salon: "Find My Family: Why Reality TV Sometimes Works.")

I want to thank fellow adoptive parent Lisa for her honesty in sharing how she grapples with these issues. I recognize myself in her. I thank Claudia, a birth mother, and David, an adult adoptee, for their passionate defense of the show. The journey I've gone on is nothing to compare with the walk up the hill of those previously lost souls David speaks of in his review; that's something I can only imagine—yet I am able to imagine it now, an unexpected gift.

My wish? That we carry this conversation forward. That we hear each other's pain and accept it. That we form alliances.

"What is it that allows our goodwill to expand and our prejudice and anger to decrease?" asks Pema Chödron in The Places that Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times.

We may not want to train as "warrior-bodhisattvas," in the words of this Buddhist nun, but recognizing how interconnected we are—"to grow in understanding that when we harm another, we are harming ourselves"—makes sense to me. As Chödron writes,

"Our personal attempts to live humanely in this world are never wasted. Choosing to cultivate love rather than anger just might be what it takes to save the planet from extinction.... So we train in recognizing our uptightness. We train in seeing that others are not so different from ourselves. We train in opening our hearts and minds in increasingly difficult situations."

I thank you all for stopping by Adopt-a-tude and helping this op-ed-zine to thrive. May the new year be illuminating, too.

No More Lost Souls: An Adopted Person’s Response to “Find My Family”

By David Biddle for Adopt-a-tude

This is Adopt-a-tude's concluding review in a series about the ABC reality show Find My Family, which first aired in the United States this past November. Each episode involves the reunion of an adoptee with his or her birth parents. Click here to watch recent episodes.

Find My Family pushes different buttons for adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive families. These differences emerged in the comments to adoptive parent Lisa's post this past Monday. In our second post on the topic, Claudia spoke about the show from a birth parent's perspective. Now David weighs in as an adult adoptee.

We'd like to invite the whole adoption community to keep talking and debating together about the issues raised by this show.


What I hate about reality shows is that the stories are often contrived and artificial. You name it, Survivor, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, The Longest Race, Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, reality and the human experience give way to gross-out, gamesmanship, and goofiness.

Find My Family is different. There’s real human drama on display here. There’s no question that the footage of adoptees and birth parents learning the truth about long-lost kin is one-take, real stuff.

I can only imagine what watching this show feels like for the millions of adoptees out there still searching for—or at least wondering about—their birth parents. As a successful searcher (we found my birth mother six years ago), I think watching Find My Family does a good job of getting across to viewers the deep emotional issues that adoptees confront as adults in the world.

It has a simple premise: the hosts introduce adopted adults, interview them about their need to find their birth families, and then perform a search for the long lost. Once the object of the search is located, the hosts interview that person as well. The final meeting between the two lost souls—and, believe me, you get a hefty dose of what it means to be a real-life lost soul when you watch this show—is then filmed. Let the hugs begin.

Find My Family is definitely a full box-of-tissues tear-jerker. You cry when you listen to the story of why the adoptee finally decided to begin a search; you cry when you understand how frustrating a search can be with all the dead ends; you cry when the show’s hosts, Tim Green and Lisa Joyner (adoptees themselves), deliver bad news and good news; you cry—sometimes uncontrollably—in the reunion scenes; and you cry during the final scenes as the adopted cavort with newly found siblings and parents in lush parks or quaint middle-class American kitchens.

I may be biased, but in my opinion the adoptees and their birth parents in Find My Family are capable of showing natural emotion on a level that makes even the best actors look like they’re getting paid millions of dollars to be fakes.

Without a doubt, placing the reunion search detective story—that’s exactly what it is—on prime time is an interesting move for a major network like ABC. And it comes at a perfect moment in history for those of us adoptees who believe that we should have more rights to identifying information and our original birth records.

Groups like Bastard Nation and Adoptee Rights are growing more and more militant as states continue to control access to information that might lead adoptees to their birth families. It is very likely that this issue is going to be highly charged in 2010. Adoptee Rights is organizing a national demonstration set for July in Kentucky at the Annual Summit of the National Conference of State Legislatures.

There is no question that the stars of this show are the adult adoptees. Their birth parents are also heroes. The defining moments of the hour come when the adoptees walk up a special hill towards the “Family Tree,” a real tree under which the birth parents (or a sibling) wait. Watching that lost soul climb a long hill towards the answer to life-long questions is powerful, even if the symbolism is a bit heavy.

One quibble I have is that adopting parents don’t have a very big part to play in these tales. We get to meet some of them, but they certainly don’t get center stage. It’s easy to see why, since the drama and existential struggle of adoptees and the parents who had to let them go is so profound.

But still, I’d like to hear at the end what the adopting mom or dad thinks when the child they raised and loved all those years has found a new mom, dad, brother, or sister. Adopting parents are often as emotionally invested in the reunion search as their adopted children.

Obviously there’s some contrivance built into how the hosts tell these stories. Details are sometimes dropped in for dramatic effect. The settings tend to be highly beatific; the film crew is definitely looking for a Hallmark™ feel to scenes (and, not surprisingly, Hallmark is an advertiser on the website). The show’s participants are often perfectly coiffed, wearing heavy makeup.

I only bring this up because what is so appealing about Find My Family is that the producers can’t choose actors or even attractive amateurs. There are only so many people who are adopted and willing to have their stories told to the world on TV. As such, the “stars” are completely real people—your neighbors, co-workers, or classmates.

This is important, because the identity issues adoptees go through are really not that much different than what anyone goes through: Who am I really? Where did I come from? Why do I feel all alone?

In many ways, all people are orphans in the world. We grow up. We leave home. We have to deal with life as solitary agents. Adoptees just have to face that their entire lives.

Find My Family, of course, portrays only the successful and positive stories of reunion searches. For every wonderful, loving re-connection the show depicts there are at least as many—and probably more—searches that don’t end well. I’ve heard too many tales of weird scenes with birth families, and sometimes the trail can lead to graveyards, mental institutions, and other depressing conclusions. Perhaps Fox should one-up ABC and consider offering something along those lines in 2010.

But despite the flaws, Find My Family does an excellent job of getting across to America what it’s like to be an adult adoptee. Here are some recognizable statements in the first few episodes from my own life and the lives of my adopted peers: “I’ve always had to deal with abandonment issues.” “I felt trashed.” “This is the look of Complete!” “Oh my God, he looks like me! This is so weird.”

In the end, this show is going to empower a lot of adopted folks and at least their birth moms to stand up and be counted as examples of fortitude and grace. In this age of high-profile divorces, celebrity adoptions, and philandering heroes, Find My Family is an antidote to the cynicism and edge that continue to seep into our lives.

Call me old-fashioned, but if I’m going to let TV enter my life, I’m more interested in plot and character development than I am in being entertained. I’ll take hugs, kisses, crying for joy, and everyday people pouring out their hearts on camera any day over people who make fools of themselves pretending they’re important.

TV should be an adjunct to our individual quests to figure out what life is all about, not an escape hole. Find My Family admirably provides the former, and in this way is truly life-affirming.