Dreams Coming True
This week I’m transported with love, joy and wonder: Our daughter Yunhee married her beloved Josh (ours, too) on July 31. The night before we held a Korean ceremony complete with traditional wedding hanbok and ritual bows.
Tomorrow I arrive at Camp Sejong in northwestern New Jersey, where I’m the creative writing teacher for the Korean-born campers, ages 7-14, from both adoptive and Korean-American families. (For an account of my first year at Sejong in 2007, see “Hong Kil Dong Goes to Camp”.)
We’ll be creating vision maps, titled “A Bridge of Dreams,” imagining their lives in the future and how they’ll pull from the strengths of both their cultures. I’ll be using Yunhee’s wedding photos as an example of what that can look like.
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Transracial Adoption & Discussions About Race
A few of our daughter Yunhee’s thoughts (comment #11) in response to the same clip (see previous post) on not discussing race with transracially adopted children:
I struggled with identity, and the idea of why I was put up for adoption. I went through phases of sadness, anger, and every other emotion along the way. The idea of my parents telling me not to worry about it, because no one cares about race anymore is unfathomable! That would have destroyed me.
My parents were understanding, supportive and ALWAYS willing to talk about what I was feeling. That is how I moved through each phase into something healthier and happier. Not by them ignoring my questions, emotions, and pain. They nurtured both cultures in my life, and let me explore both. I have since found a happy balance between my two cultures, and I claim both.
…Children are very observant. It is why we watch our language and behaviors around them, because they will pick it up. Children are curious, observant and very, very, blunt. A child will notice if they are not the same race as their family, and even if they don’t notice, some other person will, and then that becomes the mirror for the child. And the people in the world are not always the kindest.
At one point I was at a holiday party with my parents and a woman saw me, and then stated to her friend loudly, “Yes, you have to be white to be American.” Those mirrors are there, they are real, and they are painful.
Rant
At the website, Love Isn’t Enough, there’s a post entitled “Race Is Not an Issue for the Young?”, in response to a CNN news story discussing transracial adoption and the public reaction to Sandra Bullock’s adoption of an African-American baby. The commentator at one point observes that transracial adoptees may experience confusion as children but grow up to say, “Thank goodness someone saved me!”, and the white psychologist being interviewed made statements that “adoption is colorblind,” “I think race should really only be examined if you’re over 40,” and that “I happen to have biracial children; they don’t self-identify as black or white.”
Here’s the comment I posted:
Although I could only get my laptop to stream part of this clip, I found the first half of it infuriating, on so many levels. I feel anger as I struggle to find the clarity to express what feels so wrong about several statements in the clip.
My husband and I are white. Our daughter, now 24, is Korean. (We also have a white son by birth.) If our daughter, as the commentator suggested an adult adoptee would, ever uttered the phrase “Oh, thank goodness, someone *saved* me!” I would be appalled, and convinced that I had done something wrong as a parent.
Our daughter’s adoption was not a “rescue” of some poor thing in need of being “saved.” It was a complicated negotiation to make the best of a tragic human situation by placing an infant whose young mother could not care for her and whose father didn’t know she’d been conceived with parents who dreamed of adopting her. The result is a family in which all of us are deeply blessed and enriched by having each other.
But all of us also recognize that our daughter’s adoption represents tremendous losses: of the family, culture, language, and country that should have been her birthright. We have all done well at holding onto all we can of her ethnic and cultural heritage (I grew up in South Korea and speak fluent Korean). We have supported her through stages of grieving and exploration. But none of this is the same as being raised Korean by her Korean family.
We have understood connection to Korea and education about racism – our own and our daughter’s as well as her white brother’s – to be as essential to her health and wellbeing as a vaccination or teaching her to brush her teeth. She is simply our *daughter* – not our “Korean daughter” – but we celebrate her Koreanness as we do all of the particular aspects of her singular personhood; to overlook it would be to deny one of the gifts of who she is, a disrespectful diminishment of the complexity of her whole self. It would also represent abdication of one of our chief responsibilities as parents: to equip our children to live and thrive in the larger world – as it is, not as we wish it would be.
The white psychologist’s characterization that adoption is “colorblind” and that “race should only examined if you’re over 40” is chilling. Imagine what happened every time her biracial children noticed race: their mother, who didn’t think it was a necessary topic for children, must have deflected, denied, and suppressed their curiosity, their questions and their confusion. (Given young children’s intuitive ability to pick up unspoken cues, the curiosity, questions and confusions may have never even been voiced.) Of course her children don’t identify as either white or black – racial identity is formed by the mirrors that people hold up for you when you are young. If their mother’s statements are indicative of how she raised them, the mirror in which her children saw themselves reflected rendered their race invisible.
The ignorance represented by this approach is an expression of unconscious white supremacy. (It’s also a handy dodge: avoiding the examination of race spares us the discomfort and sometimes real pain of acknowledging white racism and white privilege.) Race invisibility is an aspect of white conditioning; because we are the majority and the dominant group, we see ourselves as the norm, essentially as raceless. One way white supremacy operates is when we assume that what is true for us – the racial “pass” – applies to everyone else as well.
Because this psychologist, as a white woman, has the privilege of ignoring race without cost to herself, she presumes the same for her children, as if her willful obtuseness could give them a cloak of invisibility.
But whiteness with all its power can’t erase the race of transracially adopted children. Just because their mother refuses to acknowledge the reality of her children’s skin color and racially-defined features doesn’t mean society will be so blind. And her children have been given no tools to stand strong in their knowledge of who they truly are, no connection to the black people from whom they were birthed, no claim to that part of their cultural and racial legacy. With no affirmation of the beauty and significance of their blackness and their whiteness, as well as every other aspect of their identities, they will face uninformed and undefended a world that is all too quick to label and diminish them based on race alone.
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Reunion
Forty years ago this summer, between my junior and senior years of high school, our family and our Korean colleagues embarked on an extraordinary adventure.
Carpenters and cooks, nurses and nurses’ aides, and visiting doctors and volunteers, both Korean and foreign, together built a community health project directed by my father on Kojedo, a remote rural island off the southern coast. The model we developed there influenced the design of South Korea’s rural health care delivery system. The boldness and difficulty of what we attempted forged deep and abiding relationships, like those of war buddies.
I spent the year after high school and a year and a half after college as a volunteer with the project. My social peers were the nurses’ aides, island girls who were trained to deliver basic public health care to the subsistence-level farmers and fishermen of their villages.
In addition to creating posters for health education, my assistant Kun-sun and I ran the Mu-ji-gae Tabang (Rainbow Tearoom), where the aides gathered on their breaks for a snack of instant coffee and homemade cookies.
Last week, thirty-two years since I left Kojedo, I returned (with my daughter, Yunhee, and her fiance, Josh) for three days of reunions with former staff members, including many of the nurses’ aides. What a joy it was to see their faces again, unchanged despite our transformation from unmarried girls into middle-aged mothers, wives and professional women.
The island itself has been trans-formed by the presence of two of the world’s largest shipyards. Unpaved roads and walking paths among villages with straw- and tile-roofed houses have been replaced with a network of highways connecting busy towns and cities with clusters of high-rise apartments. The peninsula site of our project has returned to nature and is preserved as a city park, with a monument to my father and a soaring bridge connecting to the island across the channel.
But the island still has fresh air and ocean breezes; gorgeous vistas along a shoreline of steep hills, inlets and bays; fresh seafood cooked in spicy broths; and lovely people speaking the island dialect, warmly welcoming us home.
A Global Community
For more than twenty-five years, I’ve been a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) . The organization supports writers and illustrators, both published and aspiring, through a website, a bimonthly newsletter (for which I write a column, “The Illustrator’s Perspective”), and local, regional, and national conferences, plus many other services.
SCBWI is essential in connecting children’s book creators – to methods for improving our work; to information about publishing; to agents, editors, publishers, reviewers and others in the market; and best of all, to each other.
For me, those connections got broader last week. In anticipation of my presentations at Seoul Foreign School, teacher and writer Christina Farley (far right in photo) invited me to meet with members of the newly-formed Korea chapter of SCBWI. We gathered over a delicious Korean meal: Christy, her husband and I, and two other writers – Leta (far left) and Jenny (second from left), who formed and directs the Korea chapter.
What’s more delightful to a group of writers than spending an evening talking craft and marketing? The hours sped by as we shared. The chapter only formed in January, but its members are active: networking all over Asia and the world (they had some great connections for me), savvy about children’s book publishing, and most importantly, serious about writing.
The chapter presented me with a wonderful gift – a display of traditional Korean kites (SCBWI’s logo image is a kite).
