Building Bridges to Your Child's Ethnic Community

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Building Bridges to Your Child's Ethnic Community

by Chris Winston, President Friends of Korea
http://members.aol.com/ForKorea/Index.htm

Part I: Why it is important

Adoptive parents are forced to examine many things about themselves and about adoption itself. It is not a one-time event, but rather, an ongoing process as we struggle to raise our children in the best way possible. Those of us who have adopted interracially find that our cute little babies do, indeed, grow up and eventually face the racial teasing that we were warned to expect.

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My own experience has been as an adoptive mother of an internationally born child. While we specifically worked to integrate our family with the Korean-American Community in Sacramento, California, I believe that our experience speaks to virtually anyone wanting connections to another ethnic community.

Innocence ended for me one day when I was standing with my son waiting for him to board the bus to kindergarten. The little boy in line in front of my son turned to him and said, "Chinese people have flat faces!" Having overheard the remark, I stepped over to them and said, as calmly as possible, "We don't tease each other about how we are different." The little boy who made the remark was with a woman who had brought the children up from a nearby daycare. She had not heard the original comment, but when she heard my remark she was concerned and asked what had happened. I didn't want to have a long discussion about it with her as I felt it might escalate things. I had said what I had said in order to show my son that I would not let such remarks just go by. However, I did not want to embarrass him by keeping a focus on the incident. I was not very successful, apparently, because the daycare lady turned and really scolded the little boy who had made it.

The following Monday as we again waited for the bus, this little boy and his mother arrived. She leapt from her car and began a verbal tirade about how I had so traumatized her son that he was now unable to ride the bus. Trying hard to stay composed and get a word in, I asked, "But you don't approve of what he said do you?" She ended by explaining that she was new to California and her son wasn't used to being around "Oriental people." What I learned from this was that I was not going to be able to protect my son from racism, and that his teachers and other significant adults might well be unable to make intervene positively on his behalf. From my perspective, he needed to know that racism was not an individual experience --- that he as an individual had done nothing wrong. It was only his racial identity that had caused him difficulty. Clearly, he needed to know others who looked like him and could share his experiences.

I could, of course, have read him any of the excellent books that address racial teasing. I could also have shared with him the times when I was teased as a child. But I believed that the most meaningful intervention would be to make solid connections to same race role models and mentors. With the support of group, he would not feel alone. Ideally, the group experience would not have to focus on the negatives faced by Korean-Americans, but could, instead, show him an array of positives. In this way, he would view his birth heritage as a source of support rather than as something to be overcome. Ibelieved that as he grew, he would be seen first by strangers not as a member of our family but as a member of the ethnic group his physical appearance reveals him to be.

As parents who have adopted transracially and transculturally, we are faced with the task of helping our children build a positive image of themselves as members of an ethnic group to which we ourselves do not belong. An associated press article on Korean language schools quoted adoptive parent Barbara Randolph as saying about her children, "They wear Korea in their faces every day of their lives, and I think they should wear it in their hearts."

Most parents are aware at some level of the difficulties that their children face in coming to terms with their ethnicity. They buy their children multicultural books and gifts and plan to take them on trips back to their birthcountry when they are older. Most families, however, do not give their children access to same race role models and mentors. Sometimes this is because such an ethnic community is not availble. Sometimes it is difficult to make meaningful connections, even when the potential exists to do so. More often than not, I believe, our owns fears get in the way. Still, there is no real substitute for personal relationships. While books, festivals, and cultural artifacts are enriching and much, much better than no exposure at all to a child's "roots," these "enter and leave" events still keep children isolated from a real sense of community. These reasons alone may be enough to make the venture into your child's ethnic community worthwhile. My experience has led me to consider two other reasons as well.

Many proponents of open adoption believe that children who know their birthparents are better able to resolve the issues of loss in adoption. For families who have chosen intercountry adoption, access to our childrens birthparents --- or even to reliable information about our children's birthparents --- is often not even possible. The closest we may ever come to any sort of open exchange of information for our children is by helping them build a comfortable relationship with others of their race or ethnicity. Already I have seen my son use his contact with other Korean-Americans to work out some personal puzzles. To quote my son, "I like Korean food and Korean people, but I don't like some Korean rules." He feels that there are differences between things Korean and things not Korean, and he is exploring what those differences are and how they affect him. The value of this is that I am not making ethnocentric or cultural judgements for him.

Of course, our adoption agency gave us reasons that Korean children are often available for adoption. They told us of cultural elements that would lead to our children's not being accepted in Korea. But if I myself am the one explaining these things to my children, I may be doing them the disservice of promulgating cultural stereotypes and inducing fear in them. I do not, even with a few years exposure, have sufficient cultural competence and little personally acquired information to help them understand just how their adoptions came about. But I think that some of the answers may well be there in the interactions that they have with those in the Korean community itself. Some answers may exist even in the negative interactions as well as the positive ones.

The other thing that will happen is that our children will develop enough cultural competence to make better judgements about what constitutes rejection and what doesn't. By being in environments where a different language is spoken, where accented English is the norm, and where different manners prevail, I believe that our children will be more able to find such differences non-threatening when they are older, and to accept these things as just what they are --- differences. There will be no reason to read rejection into what is really just a different life experience. They can face the issues that really matter rather than being stopped by the fear that lack of familiarity breeds.

The final justification for venturing into your child's racial or ethnic community has to do with our ethical responsibility as adoptive families. There is a wonderful book by Cheri Register called Are those Kids Yours? - American families with children adopted from other countries. Ms. Register writes as a parent of children adopted internationally. In the last chapter, she explores the ethics of intercountry adoption and talks about how our actions as adoptive parents affect events and policy in our children's countries of origin.

While adoption may be a wonderful solution for individual parentless children, it is not always the appropriate action at time of upheaval abroad. When I hear the news of a mudslide in Brazil that buried a community of women and children living in fifty shacks on a hillside, or the orphaned or starving children in some war-torn land, there is always a haunting refrain at the end: These could be my kids. I have made the joyous discovery that I can feel complete and natural parental love for a child who is related to me by neither blood nor race nor cultural origins. Perfect as the match seems, and as willing as I am to attribute it to fate, I know that I would feel the same attachement to virtually any child who might have been placed with me. How can I not mourn the mudslide victims? And how can I not mourn the lost gifts of children whose spirits are suffocated by poverty, hunger, disease, violence and sexual exploitation?

Yet if we are are to advocate for international adoption, we need to be careful how we portray it. By no means are we entitled to claim the children of those who, by our own cultural measures, seem less fortunate: Wealth does not entitle us to the children of the poor. Higher education does not entitle us to the children of the illiterate. Marriage does not entitle us to the children of the unwed. Technological advancement does not entitle us to the children of "underdeveloped" nations. Religious faith does not entitle us to the children of parents who believe differently than we do. International adoption is an undeserved benefit that has fallen largely to North Americans, Western Europeans, and Australians, primarily because of the inequitable socioeconomic circumstances in which we live. In the long run ,we ought to be changing those circumstances.