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Race Matters

Well, at 27 years old, I can say quite confidently that I am:

~Possibly the world’s biggest dag;

~A confessed book nerd. I would rather spend money on books than clothes;

~A spelling nazi. I can spot a spelling mistake from a few kilometres away (well… maybe not quite that far!);

~A nerd. A nerd that would prefer to spend her Friday and Saturday nights at home feeling comfortable with a book than out on the town;

~Anti-social. I really dislike social events. Mainly ones that require being around a lot of people I don’t know;

~NOT a workaholic. I like to go home and not have to think about what I do from 9-5

…and I’m sure there are many more.

The saying “just be yourself” has become something of a cliche in our western societies. And although it has some nice connotations, it’s definitely one of those things that’s much more easily said than done. It has taken me 27 years to accept the above list of things about myself. Ten years ago, I was struggling to be something I’m just not: social, loud, attractive, popular, grammatically stupid. There’s no place more like high school that teaches you the contrary to “just be yourself”. But you know what? I have struggled to “just be myself”. And a lot of the time, that’s still not good enough for a lot of people, but I’m kind of over caring.

You know what I love about being around my Mum, Dad and sister? Is the feeling that I can just be myself. And things like my racial heritage and hobbies don’t really matter. I mean, I like having somewhat intellectual discussions about books and (stupid) people (LOL), but it’s nice to think I’m not being judged purely on those things. And that’s great. I’m sure that’s something my parents strived to achieve in having children: a place where their kids can feel accepted and loved (awww). And I’m sure many adoptive parents have this same sentiment in mind. Why wouldn’t you? But unfortunately, the outside world just isn’t this way, and it can be a bit of a contradiction to the values you’re being taught when you’re an adoptee of a different race to those around you behind closed doors.

One adoptive parent recently wrote about her frustrations with the things people say in regards to race and racial difference. It seems she got a little annoyed, saying how race shouldn’t really matter because we’re all human: why does it matter what piece of land we all come from? And that’s a nice thought and sentiment. It really is. But I think that what a lot of adoptive parents fail to realise and accept is that as much as it sucks, that’s just the way the world is. Furthermore, race does matter, and I don’t agree with telling this to children. Why? Because as soon as we walk out our front doors, we’re taught that it does matter, and we realise later on that it matters, because it makes up for a huge part of the people we are. Like it or not, race partially defines who we are as human beings. Yes, it might suck, yes it might make people uncomfortable, but it matters. Colour blindness is just that: blindness. It’s ignorance and it’s a failing to accept the world for what it is. Colour blindness doesn’t make you more moral than the person next to you who thinks otherwise. You’re not doing the world a favour by adopting a child. Adopting a child from a different country doesn’t mean you’re making some huge change to the world. Regardless of whether or not you adopt, the world is going to keep on spinning, and people are going to be just as narrow-minded as they always were.

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Choice.

Choice. It’s a pretty small word. Only six letters. But it’s a word that comes loaded with meaning, presumption and action. It’s a word that has been sitting in the back of my mind since starting to blog about adoption. It’s an idea that also comes up regularly on other adoption blogs, whether they be of adoptees, adoptive parents or first parents. We make choices every day. For me, choice is what determines getting up at 7:30 in the morning to go to work; drinking coffee when I get to work; continuing to write my story; whether we have home cooked food for dinner, or deciding to be lazy and order in; it was deciding to marry Robert; it’s the difference between buying or not buying those $500 boots in the window of my favourite boutique… etc etc. These all seem like quite obvious things: things we take for granted in western societies.

Choice plays a huge role in adoption, and I think it’s something that everyone knows is there, but no one really wants to talk about. It’s easier not to think about choice because not thinking about it can make the present easier to deal with.

I think what many people fail to realise is that there are different types of choices. Some of which are luxuries; not available to others in other places. Particular choices are like luxury items. My iPhone 4, MacBook Pro, 50″ TV,  ever-growing collection of books etc etc are luxury items that came from luxury choices. And I love that about my life. I love being 20-something. I love being at the stage where I’m old enough to make my own decisions. I’ve said this many times, but I was a pretty awful teenager. And part of what made me frustrated, as I remember it, was “not being able to do what I wanted”: not having the choice to come home when I wanted or go where I wanted, when I wanted. As a child, they were, of course, things my parents decided for me, regardless of whether I liked it or not. As children, we often don’t have the luxury of those choices, because it’s our parents’ duty to look out for us. Or so we like to think. The items I listed above are the results of my having the choice to purchase stuff that I don’t necessarily need. I didn’t need an iPhone 4. I’ll admit that. Even without a mobile phone, I’m sure I’d likely be surviving similarly to how I am now. I’d still be living in a wealthy part of Sydney, going to work each day, etc. Owning an iPhone 4 is not something that determines my survival in this world.

When it comes to adoption, there are different types of choices that I see get argued back and forth. I think it’s something that’s included in arguments, and probably will be ’til the end of time in the adoption world. Mei-Ling made a post here about whether or not her birth mother had a choice in giving her up. And until very recently, I had a bit of hatred toward my birth mother, because I always felt that she chose to get rid of me. (That’s got nothing to do with my life here.) But having read some birth mothers’ blogs and in thinking and researching a bit more, I’ve come to this realisation about choice: that it’s nowhere near as black and white as we like to sometimes assume.

I’m going to start by saying that, as I see it, there’s a conflict between choice for adoptive parents, adoptees and birth mothers. For most adoptive parents, the choice to adopt is a luxury choice. Just like my 50″ TV, it’s a choice that was made out of want. Regardless of the reasons for doing so, people adopt for selfish reasons. Adopting a child from a foreign country is not a biological need. You do not need children to survive. For survival, we need food/drink, shelter, warmth. We do not need children. And what I think many adoptive parents fail to see is that in adopting, they were lucky in the first place to even have the choice available to them to even consider adoption. No matter how you put it, adoptive parents have benefitted from the lack of choice available to mothers in dire straits and desperate situations. Adoptive parents have taken advantage of the fact that someone else has not had the luxury to choose.

You know what I can’t stand? Is when people make their own choices in life, then proceed to whinge about how terrible their lives are. One of the most recent examples that I saw of this was someone I went to uni with on Facebook, posting about her lack of having a job since she’s been out of uni. For almost a year, she has whinged about having to “only” work as a casual teacher when she wanted to be full time. Whinge whinge whinge everyday. But a couple of months ago, I believe she got some full time work. I, along with many others proceeded to congratulate her. And I nearly blasted her a few days later when I saw her complaining about the amount of work she now had, and that school holidays should be more frequent and longer. For people like this, nothing’s ever good enough and life’s so unfair and everyone else has everything while they go with nothing. My Dad’s family does this a lot. And although we don’t see them all that often, it drives me crazy to think that here are these people who could have gone much further in life, but haven’t because their lives are “just so drastic”. They only perpetuate their own misery and quite frankly… I want nothing to do with it.

That being said, I’m not saying this is something all adoptive parents do. But I often read adoptive parents’ blogs, many of which have an abundant amount of writing about how they feel so sorry for their child’s birth family and the loss their child has to experience. Yet I can’t help but think that had they not adopted in the first place, they wouldn’t be perpetuating, encouraging and continuing adoption and the lack of choice that many women have. Of course, this is not the only reason why adoption continues (DUH), however it seems a double standard to me when people adopt, then go on and on about how terrible it is for their child to have lost their birth heritage. Do you not realise that through your choice you have only continued to take things from your child for the happiness and satisfaction of your own wants? Again, I am NOT saying that adopting is wholly wrong (heck, I actually considered adopting one day, myself, the other day). And nor do I think adoption will ever truly end. But I think people really need to think much deeper about what they’re doing by adopting. Remember: it’s a choice. It’s a luxury. And as much as I hate to think of myself as another commodity like a television, that’s, in a way, what we are. We make others happy, we’re purchased, we make money for a third party.

Adoptees had no choice in being adopted. And this is what has often frustrated me the most. Despite what I just said above, I still love my parents. I couldn’t imagine any others. But I hate that I had no choice. OK, what baby gets a choice into what family they’re born in? Why is it different for adoptees? Well, quite frankly, regardless of who my family ended up being, I didn’t choose to have my heritage stripped away from me like a layer of skin. Having my Korean-ness taken away from me was through others’ choices. And that makes me angry in some ways. I wish I’d had the luxury to choose whether or not I sacrificed a part of myself.

I’ve experienced a very love/hate attitude toward my birth mother, and it was always easier to hate her at times, because I used to say to myself that she chose to get rid of me. I even got annoyed when I read birth mothers’ blogs, saying they didn’t have the choice but to give up their children and were still living the pain from having done as such. In my view, they were no different to the people that I mentioned above: those that make a choice then continue to whinge about the repercussions of that choice. But as I’ve read more, I’ve begun to think that maybe birth mothers don’t have this choice. Maybe adoptive parents are really the only people involved in the adoption triad that have the luxury that the rest of us would have loved.

You may (like I was/still am sometimes) be inclined to say “but your mother did have the choice. She didn’t have to give you up”, but I go back to what I said earlier about survival. Keeping in mind what Korean culture was like in the 80s (and still is), what would the alternative have been for my mother (assuming that she was, in fact, just another victim of harsh Korean society)? Had she kept me, would her family have kicked her out of the family for good (AKA: something that’s terribly unimaginable for traditional Korean families and their group mentality)? Would she have been living on the streets where I only would have died? If so, wouldn’t her only other “choice” be to give me up for adoption? Sure, giving me up and living on the streets is a “choice”, but it’s not a luxury one. It’s one that comes from need and fear. It’s not a choice that’s the same as whether or not one buys the latest technology. I don’t really like saying these things, because I don’t know my mother’s story and so I can only assume based on the research I’ve done over the past years into Korean culture and listening to the stories of other adoptees and their families. It also feels like I’m making excuses for her when I still harbour some sort of resentment toward her.

I don’t like to think that I go around feeling sorry for myself. And I don’t believe I do. But I can’t get parts of myself back. Sometimes that intangible loss feels as though I walk around without a physical limb. And what annoys me even further is that people think they can tell us adoptees that what we’ve lost in being adopted isn’t as bad as how our lives “could have been” had we not been as such. This often comes from white-privileged individuals: people who have become so accustomed to their luxurious choices in life, they think they can assume what it’s like to be in an adoptee’s shoes. But honestly: who are people in those positions to decide? Who are they to choose how we should and shouldn’t feel? Who are they to tell us such? Hence… who are Caucasian people to adopt us? Who are they to come along and take a child out of their home? What has decided this? Is it the fact that they had the choice in the first place? If they hadn’t had the choice; if all birth mothers had kept their babies, they would have been the ones without the choice. What is it about choice that gives power over others? Just because you have the freedom to choose something, why does that give you the right to impose on another’s life? Hmm…

Choice is a big thing. And like I said, it’s an idea that’s been sitting in the back of my head, simmering away. It plays a huge role in adoption when we don’t even really know it. Sometimes I wonder whether I’m the huge control freak that I am because I hated not having a choice about my identity when I was a baby. I’m a tad obsessed with the idea that I have to control my own life. When I was a child I used to think ‘I’m destined to be the way I am. I should have been white’, but now I just try to deal with my circumstances and do the best I can with them and make the choices that I have now. (Hopefully) without regret.

Anywho, it’s lunchtime! And it’s a beautiful day outside. I could probably write a whole lot more, but I think I’ll go sit outside with a book and my phone and my music.

Posted by 윤선 | 14 Comments

A Response to Ignorance: The Typical Idea of Gratitude

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Loss VS Gain

Being adopted means living in a world of opposites. I don’t really think adoption has problems. I think adoption is a problem in and of itself. No matter what you do, adoption is merely a continuation of the breaking-up of something. It doesn’t really fix anything. Well… it fixes things for adoptive parents: they get the family they want. But for others involved does it really fix things? Yesterday was Korea’s national “Children’s Day”. I intend to celebrate Korean celebrations more: Chuseok, Seollal etc. But Children’s Day is one that I won’t celebrate, or really acknowledge. Not in terms of Korea, anyway. I find it ironic and almost… offensive to adoptees, because despite the fact that Korea has had a really high number of children given up for adoption, here they are, celebrating kids. Sure, there might be more to every situation, but I don’t like it. It’s like something you don’t like eating leaving a yucky taste in your mouth.

That being said, it’s Mother’s Day here on Sunday: a usually happy event in my family. The “clash” of these two events has highlighted the love/hate relationships with things, people and countries that adoption has given me. Adoption will never be perfect because although it gives, it takes. And although it gives wonderful things, it also takes many things: things adoptees can never get back.

In my time as an adoptee blogger, it’s been funny for me to see the term “loss” used so often. Like I’ve said on here before, when I was growing up I never really thought I was experiencing a “grieving process”. Looking back, that probably was what I was going through, but as a child, I just didn’t have any words for the feelings I felt. Normally when I think of grieving I think of death. And death isn’t something I’ve experienced a lot. I’ve just experienced grieving in a way others don’t. Which is kind of weird to think about. The problem with the loss, though, in adoption is that you can’t get it back, even though the things you lost feel as though they’re only just out of your reach. It’s frustrating; it’s an itch you can’t scratch, no matter how much you try. Furthermore, the problem with the things lost in being adopted is the repercussions that has.

I’ve done a lot of art in my 26 years. I don’t do it so much nowadays (I prefer to write), but I did quite a lot of painting throughout high school. Although I never really liked it, I painted on a lot of canvases. Have you ever painted on a canvas before? You can’t just grab a piece of canvas and start sloshing paint all over it. After it’s stretched it needs to be primed. Usually you give it two or three coats of primer (kind of like an undercoat of paint on a house). It firms the canvas up before you start your masterpiece; it provides a foundation for something beautiful.

Being adopted is like being a painting without primer. On the outside, things may seem wonderful. But underneath there’s something missing. Dr Phil always seems to say that children are born like “blank slates”: blank for their parents and other influences to write on and affect. I don’t really agree with that. I don’t think we’re born with nothing “written on us”. Our heritage and our biological relations are the primers for our lives and our personalities. If you paint on a canvas, there’s not a lot you can do about priming it. You can scrape off some of the paint, prime the spot then re-paint over it, but… is it really worth it? You can just keep painting, but how long will it last?

But what of the painting? Where does that leave it? Yes it’s beautiful. So why ruin it?

And I guess this is where the love/hate thing comes in. What is the opposite of loss? Gain. As it’s Mother’s Day on Sunday, we’re going to visit my Mum and spend it with the only Mother – I feel – deserves my company and celebration on Sunday: the one that’s loved me and shared my highs and lows all my life. I’ve never really thought about my birth mother on Mother’s Day. I guess I could say a lot more here, but for some reason… I’ve ended up at a loss for words. I hope everyone has a great Mother’s Day. Particularly the mothers who deserve it.

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Understanding: A Challenge for all Parents, Adoptive or Not

Arg. I’m really failing at keeping this blog updated regularly. I’m developing quite the backlog of unfinished posts in WordPress, and I keep thinking of things to update with, but just don’t manage to get them finished. So to any readers that have been hopeful for new posts, I’m sorry about my absence.

One of the most commonly used phrases in my vocabulary is “I don’t understand”. And I’m certain my husband would agree! For me, this sentence/outburst applies to many things. Recently, it’s applied significantly to Sunday’s naming ceremony that I wrote about previously. Since I was a child, it’s applied greatly to all sorts of mathematics. LOL. And it often refers to my husband’s family (most recently, the fact that my husband’s own mother has chosen not to come to his upcoming 30th birthday event). Today we went to my sister’s (first) university graduation. It was a wonderful day and the ceremony was followed by a lunch on Sydney Harbour. One of the speeches during the graduation ceremony had something in it about a “search for knowledge”. It just made me think about knowledge in a wider sense – the search for knowledge outside of an academic context. Despite the fact that I have two university degrees, I don’t learn particularly well within a school/uni environment.

But I’m still always on the search for new knowledge, and I love learning new things. But I love learning new things through experience and immersion, part of the reason why going to Korea will provide me with so much more than what I can gain from reading books and even watching things on YouTube and listening to them on podcasts. Yes, modern technology is great, nowadays, but I still don’t think it’s the same as really experiencing something for yourself.

Like I said recently, my cousin had a baby about a month ago. This child has an extremely mixed background. She’s a quarter Malaysian, a lot Caucasian (don’t ask me of the percentage), with who-knows-how-much Aboriginality. It seems a very eclectic mix, and I can’t help but notice the attempts they’re going to to incorporate the child’s background (even though it confuses the rest of us) into her life. It would be very confusing for a mix like this, and as a bystander, it’s confusing to know what they’re doing, exactly, but on the other hand, I can totally understand why.

About three to four months ago, I received a heap of paperwork that directs me where to “go” in the next phase of my birth mother search. It included a heap of information about Korea, its culture, language etc. I guess it was put in there, in the assumption that I didn’t know the first thing about my “motherland”, due to having been adopted and raised in a different country. In a way, this sort of made me feel a bit bummed. Not toward any “fault” of the Department here that provides me with assistance, but just because it was a bit of a slap in the face. It was kind of like it was saying: “in being adopted, you’ve had a chunk of your identity taken away from you. Let us attempt to give a little of it back to you”. Ouch.

With a lot of people my age around me getting pregnant and having babies, I can’t help but consider important things I’d like to do if/when Robert and I have a family. Last year I decided that it’d be nice to do things for certain Korean events, such as Chuseok and Seollal (Lunar New Year). Why? I guess because I’ve come to accept that I’ll always be Korean. LOL. It may seem obvious, but it’s a pretty big thing to accept when you’ve spent such a long time trying to deny it. So why not embrace it? I feel that if we have our own family one day, I’d probably try and make an even more definite point of these events that are an integral part of Korean society and culture.

I didn’t grow up with a lot of Korean knowledge or Korean customs. It’s had to be a conscious decision, on my part, to incorporate it into my life. But I’ve come to realise the importance of having an understanding of one’s cultural/racial background: regardless of how aware of it we are, racial background makes up a huge part of who we are as individuals, and it’s really not something you can/should ignore: it’s ignoring a part of what makes you you. Growing up in Australia, I was taught and surrounded by Australian history, European history and the histories/backgrounds of my adopted families. But these histories and sets of knowledge have never really resonated with me. When Kevin Rudd gave his apology speech to the Aboriginal people of Australia a few years ago, I don’t think I could have been more indifferent, because although I live here, I just didn’t/don’t feel connected. However, when Japan apologised to Korea last year for the oppression they put the people of Korea through in World War II, I actually felt something: an affiliation and soft spot for “my people”. It was a strange feeling, really…

In being married to a Caucasian guy, I’m quite happy with the fact that any children we may have will simply be half Korean and half Caucasian. I feel that with the current knowledge and understandings we have about our backgrounds (well… Robert’s pretty indifferent when it comes to this sort of stuff), we’d have enough to pass on to them; to help them develop secure senses of self, without having to wonder about it later on in life.

But I definitely feel that it’s important to have an understanding of where you come from. Having an understanding of your background, I feel, is kind of like the roots that trees and plants have – it’s the foundation for an individual identity and sense of self. “Normal” people, I feel, don’t really need to think about it. Their backgrounds are things that are just lived day by day. In being born wholly Australian, Robert (for example) lives his background, and it’s simply a part of everyday life. Whereas this is something that we adoptees miss out on (and is probably a huge reason as to why many of us yearn to (and do) go back to our original countries), and so we have to try and make up for it in any way we can. I don’t like having to learn Korean via podcasts and text books; I don’t like seeing people of non-Korean heritage knowing and understanding the language I should be fluent in; nor do I like having to sit in (mostly) silence around my Korean friends, simply because I haven’t lived the lives of Korean people that they have.

I guess this can be a challenge for adoptive parents, because it’s probably like making something from nothing. But it’s the challenge they have chosen. And I don’t think it’s one that should be avoided, simply because they now have a child and the family they’ve wanted. As a parent, I believe it’s your job to encourage your kids to grow up healthy and sure of themselves. And I really do feel that in order to do this, you need to give kids a solid understanding of where they come from. Let them decide whether or not they like it, but at least give them the options to choose.

In other news, I could make a whole post about this, but I think it’s all pretty self-explanatory:

I really hope I don’t “have to” make a whole post on this…