Jiaozi

Racist much?

Parenting is complicated, but transracial and international adoptive parenting is doubly so. I've been an adoptive parent for 15 years, and the concerns tend to come and go. Sometimes issues of identity come to the fore, sometimes the lingering effects of institutionalization, sometimes race and culture, and sometimes you're just trying to get everyone out the door in the morning.

This past month has been a big one for racism. Maybe it's because of Halloween, which tends to make people think they have a license to be offensive. Maybe it's the coming elections; I came across two separate posts on Facebook recently in which people made fun of the president using a stereotypical "Stepin Fetchit" black dialect. And maybe it's just a thing that happens from time to time; we've recently had another round of schoolchildren doing the "slant eyes"* gesture at one my kids, a recurring problem.

What puzzles me, perhaps even more than the offensive remarks, is the defensiveness people immediately throw up when you call them on racism. The responses are so predictable you could play Racism Bingo. Even the most gentle, light, or heartfelt of admonitions -- "You know, that's considered to be an offensive gesture," "Not cool!" or "I am offended by that" -- bring out all the old chestnuts and flippant remarks: "Why does everything have to be so PC these days?" "Chill out!" "I didn't mean any offense, so it's okay."

I've been around and around with people about calling kids like mine "China dolls." Many people are honestly unaware of the history and connotations of this term. I understand this. There are still innocents in the world. What I don't understand is why they want to argue with me when I tell them why it's offensive. That's not ignorance. That's arrogance.

It's so simple. Don't say or do things other people find offensive. Don't tell them it's not offensive; that's not your call. Apologize if you say something offensive by accident. It doesn't matter how you "meant it." Refer to groups by the names they prefer. Don't argue with them about their choice. You don't even have to understand it. You just have to know.

Especially if you are white. You do not get to be the arbiter of what is and isn't racist any more than men get to be the arbiters of what is and isn't sexist. The group in power does not get to tell the group that is in the minority/oppressed/marginalized what's offensive. Oppressed groups get to retain that right, at least.

I knew this before I adopted transracially, but I didn't feel it in my bones. Now I do. And it has been humbling. I feel weird talking about race. I feel weird pointing out racism to my kids. I feel weird talking about my whiteness. But I think it's the right thing to do, and I'm going to keep doing it.

And I feel good when I see that they really do understand about racism and will be able to take up the battle on their own, in their own way.

A couple of weeks ago we were watching an episode of "Dance Moms" in which the African American mom was trying to make the dance teacher understand why it was not okay to put her daughter, the only child of color in the group, in leopard-print leotards and Afro wigs (there was more, but it was too awful to repeat here). The dance teacher held her ground and insisted that she was creating more opportunities for the little girl.** May snorted, "Racist much?"

All three girls are getting pretty good at seeing racism aimed at themselves and others. They are well aware of the stereotypes that other people are going to try to push onto them. They know it's not okay for anyone to make "slant eyes" at them, and they speak up when it happens.

This is what we promised to do for our children, isn't it? Our adoption agency required us to read books, attend classes, and respond to questionnaires about race and culture. We had to have a plan for how we would responsibly raise a child of color in a white society.

I feel like some people didn't get the memo.

 

*I'm sorry, I can't think of a better word for this. Angry Asian Man calls it "chink eyes," but I'm not sure I can say that.

**Why on earth doesn't that mom pull her kid out of the school? She shouldn't stand for it.

Why we talk about race

After school yesterday, May told me, "We had a big laugh in English class today."

"Oh?" I asked.

"Yeah. We took our grammar test, and Mr. H graded them in class while we were supposed to be reading, but mostly we were talking. In the middle of class, he said, 'May is my new hero. She's the first person to get this section on plurals all correct.' That was the part we studied last night."

"I remember," I said. "Good job!" (Fist bump.)

"Then Nina said, 'Well, of course she did! She's Asian!' and everyone laughed and laughed."

This is why I talk to my kids about racial stereotypes, including "positive" ones -- so these sorts of comments don't take them by surprise and they can be in on the joke.

But the joke is on Nina and Mr. H. They don't know that May has been speaking English for only five years.

Best new explanation for ditching your mom at the mall

Ella and I went to the Asian mall yesterday in search of (reasonably priced) mooncakes. As we were walking, she suddenly dropped behind and trailed me by a couple of yards.

"I'm going to walk behind you," she said. "I don't want people to think I'm with the white person."

It made me laugh.

Language arts

For the first few months May was in our home, she continued to speak Mandarin and attempted very little English. This was so unlike any other child I’d heard of – most internationally adopted children lose their first language within a few months – that I wondered if she was ever going to speak English. We communicated sitting side by side at the computer running words through a translator. When she did begin to talk to us in English, it was in complete sentences. She is a bit of a perfectionist, and I suspect that she didn’t want to speak English until she was sure she could do so without error.

She remained quite fluent in Mandarin for several years. It helped that she continued to hear Mandarin on her DVDs and CDs, spoke with Mandarin-speaking children at school, and attended weekly language classes. But even she eventually lost her fluency. Now, almost five years on, she is familiar with Mandarin but not fluent. She understands it when it is spoken to her, she recognizes written characters, and she knows when a tone or pronunciation is wrong. But she is reluctant to carry on a conversation in Mandarin – though, again, I think that may be because she isn’t sure she can do so without error and doesn’t want to embarrass herself.

Language acquisition is a complicated process. Most of the studies on how children learn a language have involved young children learning their first language and kids from immigrant families learning a second language. Dr. Boris Gindis, a developmental psychologist, is one of the few researchers studying cognitive development in post-institutionalized children, working primarily with Russian adoptees. His website is a terrific resource for adoptive parents.

He explains that the reason most adopted children learn their new language very rapidly, while forgetting their first, is that they acquire language by a process known as subtractive learning. Completely immersed in the new language, they must learn to speak well enough to have their needs met by their new families. Because their original language no longer serves a purpose, it is soon forgotten. Children in immigrant families, who hear and use English at school and their native language at home, are able to add a second language and may become truly bilingual; but adopted children, who hear and use English almost exclusively, will not.

Many parents who adopt older children vow that their children will retain mastery of their first language, but I have never heard of anyone succeeding. A child must hear – and use – a language for significant portions of each day in order to stay fluent. In fact, Dr. Gindis believes that it may impede a child’s development to attempt to retain the first language while learning the second.

Because adopted children tend to go from being monolingual in one language to being monolingual in a different language, ELL (English Language Learner) programs, which are geared toward bilingual children of immigrants, are not especially well suited to them. We didn’t find ELL programs to be particularly helpful for May. The first year she was here, she spent an hour or so each day with the ELL instructor, plowing through English workbooks. The second year, she received in-class help once a week or so, and the third year, she didn’t see the ELL instructor at all.

The chief advantage of ELL for her was that it entitled her to certain accommodations; she was excused from the state standardized test the first year, she could do her workbooks while her classmates did more advanced reading, and she got easier lists of spelling words than most of her classmates. But she clearly did not learn English through ELL; she learned it listening to and speaking with us. Her ELL classification simply gave her a bit of breathing room in which to catch up.

It can be hard to understand how some adopted children can carry on conversations with family and friends, make jokes and complain and express affection, and yet have difficulty with schoolwork years after arriving home. There are in fact two aspects to language learning: communicative or social mastery, and cognitive or academic mastery.

Immigrant children in ELL programs typically attain communicative mastery in 2 years and cognitive mastery in 5 to 7 years. Internationally adopted children achieve communicative mastery more quickly, usually within 6 to 12 months, and cognitive mastery several years later – if they achieve it at all, since some children will continue to have difficulties as a result of early deprivation and unresolved developmental delays.

This makes me appreciate even more that May had a variety of experiences in her birth family, orphanage, and foster home that helped her develop the capacity to learn. Even if her experiences were not always happy ones, she had opportunities to explore her world and meet different people, which prepared her well for the many changes she has been through.

An interesting side note: Studies have shown that children who learn a second language before puberty will speak it without an accent, while those learning a language after puberty will always have some accent. I think May has a slight accent, though most people think she speaks perfect English. She first learned the Western alphabet so that she could read pinyin, and her pronunciation reflects that. For example, the Chinese y is a weak consonant, so that “yi” (“one”) sounds very much like “ee”; May, who is currently interested in baking, continually confuses me by pronouncing “yeast” as “east.” But I am learning to understand.

Educating May

We were prepared for May to be behind her American peers academically. She was 8 when we met her and had been attending third grade for two months. She was not in the orphanage school, but attended what was described to us as a private school near her foster family’s apartment. Our home school district recommended placing her according to age, but I knew from talking to other adoptive parents that it might be necessary to place her a year behind.

I could see right away that she was very bright. She could write the English alphabet and knew what sounds the letters made. (Most likely she learned the alphabet in preparation for writing pinyin, not English.) She had studied Chinese reading and writing, a bit of art and music, and mathematics.

Watching her over the first couple of weeks, I didn’t see any signs that she was immature compared to a typical third-grader. She was well-behaved, related well to people, and was interested in learning. There didn’t seem to be any reason not to go ahead and enroll her in third grade, with English language learner (ELL) support. (The Chinese grades do not directly correlate to ours, but third grade is pretty close.)

May got right into the school routine. Obviously, language was a challenge. She was pulled out of class for ELL instruction for an hour every day. She completed reams of language arts worksheets while the other kids did their spelling and reading lessons. A couple of older students who spoke both Mandarin and English were assigned to help her find her way around, which was invaluable. Several girls in class took her under their wings, and I’ll be forever grateful for their kindness.

She was ahead in math, at least in computational skills, because the American students were just starting to talk about multiplication, and she already knew multiplication and long division. But American schools’ highly verbal approach to teaching math was a disadvantage to her. I’m not just talking about the ubiquitous story problems. She brought home worksheets asking her to identify place numbers – ones, tens, hundreds, thousands. This was in preparation for learning the more advanced computational operations, which she already knew. In most of her homework, she was expected not just to get the correct answer, but also to explain how she arrived at her answer. It wasn’t enough to do math; she had to be able to talk about math.

She finished third grade speaking conversational English, beginning to understand American-style math, reading first-grade books, and playing and chatting with new friends at recess. We spent her first summer building on that foundation. I read more challenging books to her while she followed along, to give her a better “feel” for English. She did some language arts workbooks. She watched American TV and Chinese movies.

Mostly, we talked, all of us, and she learned proper English, and colloquialisms and slang as well. For a while, it was like having a 2-year-old again; she clung to my side all the time, constantly asking questions. It was intense and exhausting but necessary, because she had a lot of catching up to do emotionally, socially, and intellectually.

Third grade is about basics. In fourth grade, we got a better sense of her educational gaps. Social studies and science were completely new subjects to her. She had no sense of world geography or history or cultures outside of China and the United States. She wasn’t familiar with art or literature, Chinese or Western. She didn’t know how many planets are in our solar system or that Earth circles the sun or that the sun is a star. She didn’t know how plants grow or where baby animals come from.

This I was not prepared for. May had skills, but she had no foundation of knowledge on which to build her broader education. Partly this was because of the Chinese educational system. The Chinese language is so complex that students spend many years learning to read and write characters properly, and language is the most important subject in school. Math comes in second.

There were also cultural reasons; China is still quite closed off, and information about the rest of the world is closely guarded. (Ethnocentrism is certainly not absent in our country – we study the history and culture of the Americas and Europe, but learn little about Asia or Africa, for example.)

But her gaps had to do with more than schooling. Most American third-graders have never studied world history or science either. But they’ve been surrounded by the general concepts since birth, through popular culture. They’ve watched Ratatouille and have a sketchy idea what France looks like and how the people speak and what they eat. They’ve recited nursery rhymes about London Bridge. They’ve seen ancient Egyptian mummies on Scooby-Doo. They’ve watched Bugs Bunny rocket through the solar system with Marvin the Martian in hot pursuit. I’m not kidding about this. You don’t realize how much our daily lives are saturated with information, trivial and important, until you spend time with someone who missed that exposure.

May learned quickly. She received minimal ELL support in fourth grade. By the end of fifth grade, she was reading English at grade level. She soon tested out of ELL. Today, having just finished seventh grade, she has a straight-A average. She writes amazing poetry and creates beautifully executed school projects. She works very hard, and complains equally hard. She is absolutely on track with her peers socially, physically, and academically, even ahead of them in some ways. Despite the challenges, placing May in third grade when she arrived was absolutely the right choice for this particular child.

We continue to build her general fund of knowledge. She is very expressive in English, but some of the more irregular aspects – helper verbs, prepositions – still trip her up. Building vocabulary is difficult because she does not have an innate sense of the language. She doesn’t automatically recognize prefixes, suffixes, and root words as a native speaker might; for example, she would not be able to figure out what monophonic means despite knowing the words telephone and monotone. She can’t figure out words from context while reading because so much of the context is meaningless.

She has little sense of historical time. I try to explain ancient Greek or Roman mythology and she can’t place their ancient civilizations in time. I try to use Jesus as a milepost, but she can’t quite grasp the magnitude of events that can occur over the course of 2,000 years. Classical music means nothing to her. She can’t associate a musical style with a particular era. The same goes for art. She wouldn’t know a Michelangelo from a Picasso. (I suppose not all American 13-year-olds would, but this is a household where art and music are valued and available.)

Literary references are lost on May. Even the nursery rhymes that every American child knows are strange to her. If she jumps away from a spider and I joke, “You’re like Little Miss Muffet,” she gives me a blank look. So many of the cultural touchpoints that we take for granted are missing. She enjoys reading young adult fiction, the more angst-ridden the better, because the language is contemporary and familiar, and she can understand modern teens’ challenges. But the language in classic works of children’s literature – Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables – is too antiquated for her to get anything out of them. She quits in frustration after a couple of pages.

In the world of science, I keep explaining that Earth is the third planet from the sun, and there are nine planets (or eight, it keeps changing) in our solar system, and our solar system is one of many in our galaxy, which is one of many in the universe, but it doesn’t seem to stick. I know she just doesn’t have the picture in her brain that we all have because we once made a model of the solar system with Styrofoam balls or a teacher took us out on the playground and used a marble to represent Earth and a basketball to represent the sun.

She learns facts, but she doesn’t know them in her bones yet. This year she learned to identify all the countries in Europe and Asia on a blank map. But she still isn’t exactly sure where Europe is on the globe. She isn’t dense; she lacks the benefit of repetition. How many times did you study the solar system in school? She is hearing this stuff for the first time. I explain as much as I can, but there’s no point of reference on which to pin the bits of information.

Helping her with schoolwork is like stitching together a tablecloth that is filled with holes. She will get it eventually, but we both feel frustrated in the meantime. She is a good enough student that several of her teachers were encouraging her to sign up for honors courses next year, and we said no. Part of her wants to do it – she says, “Mom! I’m the only Asian kid who isn’t in honors math or learning an instrument!” – but she also understands our reasoning, that she needs to get a really solid grounding in the basics before moving on to more challenging work.

So we patch the holes and make connections wherever we can. Summer is a great time for this. Movies work just fine. For literature, we can watch Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet and the Katharine Hepburn version of Little Women. Amadeus should help with music history. I’ll let her watch Scooby-Doo (shudder), and then I’ll unroll the big Wall Chart of World History on the family room floor and point to where those ridiculous mummies came from. We’ll get there one way or another.
   

The Americanization of May

When May joined our family, we had been parenting Chinese-born children for 9 years. I thought I understood Chinese culture. I was wrong.

I was surprised to find that, compared to our other children, May was so much more...Chinese. Bess and Ella were indistinguishable in behavior, temperament, and values from American-born children of American-born parents. Culturally, they were American kids with an awareness of their Chinese heritage. They celebrated Lunar New Year and ate mooncakes during the Autumn Moon Festival in much the same way that a child whose grandparents immigrated from Norway might celebrate Syttende Mai and eat lefse. China was in the background of their lives (though never far away), rather than at the forefront.

But May had been raised and schooled for 8 years in the People's Republic of China. She was in every way a traditional Chinese girl. She was extremely modest, preferring to bathe and dress herself. She was shocked by women on television showing great expanses of cleavage; she pointed at them and made faces to show me her disgust. Kissing scenes were also new to her -- you almost never see kissing in Chinese television and films -- and she covered her eyes during romantic scenes. She was generally obedient and did not speak to adults unless asked a direct question; even then, she often said what she thought the adults wanted to hear, and she spoke in a soft voice with downturned eyes. She loved girly, dressy clothes and wore jeans only if there were nothing else available. She did not understand why anyone would wait in line, and punched the buttons in the hotel elevator impatiently, as she had seen the adults do. She loved TV and believed that Tom & Jerry was a Chinese cartoon -- well, obviously, they spoke Mandarin!

May was also a modern Chinese girl. And that means that she was a C0mmunist. She revered Mao Zedong and Lei Feng. She saluted the Chinese flag and sang patriotic songs. She wore the red scarf of the Young Pioneers to school. Her formal education involved reading and writing Chinese, studying mathematics, and practicing art. She had no knowledge whatsoever of world geography. She had heard of Japan and the United States, but had no idea where they were located; she knew only that the two foreign countries had a better standard of living than China (that is, she had heard that everyone there was rich). She knew nothing of science, nothing of world history, and nothing of Chinese history prior to the Communist Revolution.

As a modern girl, she had never seen anyone wear a qipao besides waitresses at restaurants catering to tourists. And she had no sense of spirituality. She was vaguely aware of Guan Yin, and had seen statues of Buddha. But when we went to the Temple of the Six Banyan Trees in Guangzhou, she seemed to have no clue what to do with the incense sticks. 

When we returned to the United States, we eased her into American ways as slowly as possible. At her insistence, we enrolled her in school fairly quickly. (She now denies that she was in any hurry to go to school, so this may have been an instance of her saying what she thought we wanted to hear.) But at home, she watched Mandarin-language videos and had Chinese books at her disposal. We let her choose her own clothes for the most part -- the more pink and sparkly, the better, as far as she was concerned. I offered rice, noodles, and vegetables at every meal. We didn't fuss over table manners, letting her learn by example, which she was eager to do.

Of course, over time she became acclimated. She learned, to her surprise, that Tom and Jerry spoke English and were invented here in America. She tried American foods one by one and decided which ones she really liked. She hung on to her Mandarin for a year or two, much longer than most children, but eventually she learned English. She has learned things about China and its history and leadership that she couldn't have learned in China, and she now has a more balanced view of both China and America.

But her character remains, in many ways, Chinese. She is much less likely to talk back than the other girls, and mutters under her breath when she has a beef with us. She tends to employ passive resistance rather than open defiance. She still speaks very softly. She loves fashion and makeup, and, though she wears jeans most of the time, they have to be skinny jeans in the latest wash, and she is always dressed to the nines; she never went through a tomboy phase. (If you have been to China recently, you know that young women there tend to dress up all the time rather than wearing sweatshirts and sneakers everywhere like American women.)

May has very high expectations for herself academically. As she explains it, in China, if you score less than 95%, you will earn a scolding; less than 90%, and your parents will slap you. She complains bitterly about her homework -- which, granted, is a bit more difficult for her than for native speakers -- but berates herself if she gets anything less than an A on an assignment. (She is still trying to fill the many holes in her world knowledge; I could fill another post with her school experiences, and plan to.) She gets straight A's, but she notes ruefully that she's the only Chinese kid at school not taking accelerated math or learning an instrument.

Socially, she knows and is friends with most of the Chinese-American kids at school, and she probably feels more comfortable with Asians. Her two best friends are a girl whose parents immigrated from Shanghai and a girl who was adopted from China at age 6. She has friends who are not Asian, but they're more casual friends. I can see May returning to China to live someday and being perfectly comfortable doing so (provided she has enough money to go shopping).

I am telling you this because I think it's important for prospective adoptive parents of older children to be aware that their new children's behavior, demeanor, and values may be more, and differently, "foreign" than they have anticipated. And they will likely remain Chinese at heart long after they have forgotten how to speak Chinese. (Or Korean, or Spanish, or Hindi, or Amharic, or Creole, as the case may be.) Their cultural and racial identity should be honored and not completely "Americanized" out of them -- an effort that would probably fail and frustrate both of you anyway.

And I think there is a message here for those of us who adopted infants. Even before May joined us, I had some nagging questions about how effectively and accurately we as adoptive parents are conveying "Chinese culture" to our children. Celebrating Chinese holidays, wearing qipaos and silk pyjamas, putting Chinese artwork on the walls and story books on the bookshelves -- there is nothing wrong with these observances, per se, and they certainly give our children more exposure to their birth culture than most of the Korean adoptees of the 1950s through 1970s received. But it's a sort of Epcot version of Chinese culture, a sanitized version that is stuck in the 19th century and pretends that the Communist Revolution never took place.

We tend to ignore the aspects of Chinese and Chinese-American culture that are alien to us as white Americans -- values such as filial piety, high academic achievement, a rigorous work ethic, sacrificing individual desires for the good of family and country. We buy silk fans and brocade slippers at the gift shops in Guangzhou and leave behind the Mao caps and propaganda posters. We celebrate the Autumn Moon Festival but not Learn From Lei Feng Day. We take our children to culture camp to make kites and sing traditional songs, but we don't, for the most part, sign them up for Saturday math classes and violin lessons or sacrifice our free time to prepare them for an Ivy League education.

This has always bothered me, and I think we do our children a disservice when we limit their view of Chinese culture to a two-dimensional cartoon. It would be confusing to hand our 3-year-olds copies of Mao's Little Red Book in place of New Year hong baos, but contemporary China should be represented at appropriate times in their upbringing, in a manner both truthful and respectful. Our children should have the chance to make a return visit to China at some point, but they also need opportunities to associate with other Asian Americans of all ages in this country.

As for the cultural values -- well, Big A and I do expect respect, academic achievement, and hard work from our children, but that's because we are old-school, not because our children are Chinese. (Though we joke that our parenting sometimes aligns better with that of Chinese-born parents than with some of our more indulgent American peers.) I'm not suggesting that we all try to turn our children into academic prodigies -- the long-term effects of institutionalization would make that difficult for many of our children anyway -- I just find it interesting that we resist enforcing the same high standards that our children's birth culture would likely have imposed on them.

For May, over time her "Chinese-ness" has become not an obstacle but an advantage. She fits in easily with the Chinese-American community. She has a strong sense of race, culture, and identity. Bess and Ella are more thoroughly assimilated, which means they have an easier time fitting into the dominant American culture, but they would have difficulty adapting to life in China or an exclusively Asian American community.

It is too soon for me to say whether this will be a liability for them. But I do believe that May's ability to smoothly negotiate her two cultures will, despite the challenges, be an asset for her in the future. And that, too, has been a surprise.

Choices

Right. So having just explored, over the course of three or four posts, my qualms about writing about my children, especially my older children, I am of course going to follow up with a story about my eldest child. Or maybe it's more a story about my inadequate parenting skills. You be the judge.

I have mentioned before that I've been after Bess to take Mandarin as her high school language. Please understand that she is not lacking in exposure to her birth country. She knows some basic Mandarin, she has gone to Chinese summer camps and adoptee events, she is familiar with our Chinatown, she has done school projects on China, and, most important, she has made two return trips to China.

But I saw this as a chance for her to really learn Mandarin -- my assumption being that this is something she ought to do -- without having to take summer or after-school classes. I should mention that there was one logistical drawback to the school program -- they offer only two years of Mandarin, though many colleges want three years of the same language, so at some point she would probably have to take a class at a community college or somewhere. I didn't see this as an insurmountable obstacle.

The insurmountable obstacle was Bess herself. She did not want to take Mandarin. She wanted to take Spanish. I was insistent that she take Mandarin, perhaps as an elective in addition to another language. No deal. I made various other offers, even bribes, but she would not meet me halfway. I asked what language Mia, another Chinese adoptee in her class, was taking. She said that Mia was taking Spanish (thanks a lot, Mia's parents) and anyway, what difference does it make what Mia is doing?

I don't know why Bess didn't want to take Mandarin. She couldn't explain her reasons, or didn't want to. She didn't seem to see learning Mandarin as compulsory for someone who was born in China. Bess is very much a here-and-now kind of girl, left-brained and logical in her thinking, and she just couldn't see any advantage to it.

I knew why I wanted her to take Mandarin. I didn't want her to go to college and make friends with other Chinese-American students and have to explain that she doesn't know how to speak the language of her birth country. I didn't want her to visit China someday and feel that she doesn't fit in. I didn't want to take her back to visit her orphanage and have to explain to the officials why she doesn't know Chinese. "What do you mean?" I could hear them say. "She is your child! You just make her do it!" I could imagine having to explain it to her birthparents, in the unlikely event that we located them someday. I lay in bed at night and, no joke, imagined that her Chinese ancestors were looking down at me from heaven with disapproval in their ghostly eyes. (Not to mention having to admit defeat to everyone who reads this blog.)

So I dug in my heels. Angry words were said. Doors were slammed. It got so bad that Big A wound up running interference because Bess wouldn't talk to me anymore. 

One evening after talking with Bess, Big A sat down next to me on the couch.

"You know, she's afraid of you," he said.

"Hmph," I said. "Yelling at me is a funny way to show it."

"She doesn't want to disappoint you. But she really doesn't want to do this. She told me, 'Maybe I'll take Mandarin someday. But I want it to be my decision.'"

That stopped me in my tracks. I have heard those words before. Several years ago I wrote an article about birthparent searches in international adoption. To a person, the adult adoptees I spoke with advised adoptive parents not to undertake such a search on their own. It has to be the child's choice, they said. The decision to search, and the search itself, are therapeutic. The process is at least as important to their personal growth and identity as the final result is. I do not completely understand this, but I accept it because the people I spoke with were so adamant about it.

Of course we make important decisions for our children all the time without their input. We feed them meat or make them vegetarian meals, have them vaccinated or not, enroll them in school or choose to homeschool, attend church or not. As adoptive parents, we made the decision that brought our children into our families. We tell them about their early lives and give them opportunities to learn about their birth culture without asking them if they want to. We expose them to things we believe are helpful and keep them away from the ones that are harmful.

But when a child is old enough to articulate that she wants to make her own decisions about who she is, it is time to listen and step back. I gave up on Bess taking Mandarin in high school. It was not worth becoming alienated from her. I surrendered the battle in hopes of winning the war. If she someday regrets her choice, she will at least know that it was her choice to make.

Probably the orphanage officials will scold me, and perhaps someday I'll come face to face with my children's ancestors and have some explaining to do. I'll give them my stock answer, which is that we made the best choices we could as imperfect people in an imperfect world, and I'll take my lumps. Bess's feelings are the only ones that matter on this issue. And I am starting to trust my smart, strong girl to make choices about identity and culture for herself now.

And if I'm worried about explaining myself to my children's Chinese ancestors, that's nothing compared to the questions my white Southern ancestors will be asking. Let's hope we're all more enlightened in the sweet by and by. We'll have a big potluck supper. I'll bring the Chinese dumplings.

Talking about race (kid edition)

"Ella, look!" I said. "Owl City is coming for a concert. Those are the guys whose CD you just got. Here's a picture."

Ella looked. "Oh," she said, disappointed. "They're so white."

*****

I showed May this video of George Bush shaking hands with Haitian earthquake survivors and wiping his hand on Bill Clinton's shirt.

"This is so funny," I said. "He gets sweat or something on his hand and wipes it off like a two-year-old."

"It's because they're black," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"Mom. He's racist. Of course he wiped his hands. He doesn't like black people."

(For the record, I may have said many things about George W. Bush, but I never said he's racist.)

*****

We have been having an ongoing argument discussion with Bess about whether she will take Mandarin as her high-school language. We are insisting that she do so; she has no interest, and wants to take Spanish. We argued about discussed it again at dinner last night. You know, light dinner-table conversation.

She stormed away from the table and slammed the door of her bedroom, shouting, "Just because I'm Asian doesn't mean I'm interested in Asian things!"

Yep. We talk about race at our house. Not always well, but we talk about it.

What if?

Abby asked a question on my blog a while back, and I've been thinking about my response ever since. She wrote:

I think a lot about international adoption, and older-child adoption. But I wonder if it's always the right choice for the children involved. I'd love to hear from you, and from May, any thoughts on removing children from the only country, culture and language they've ever known. How much does May remember? do you plan to visit the region she is from with her when she is older, or does that seem too traumatic still? Would she have like to have had the option of being adopted by a Chinese family? (I know you are her family and she loves you and is probably happy with her life, so that might be a hard question to even consider, but maybe she can remember what she thought of it when she was younger.) How much of her story does she share with you? with peers?

Hmm. Is it always the right choice for the children involved? No. There are some children who really, truly do not want to be uprooted. Children over the age of 10 are supposed to sign a paper indicating that they agree to be adopted, and some refuse. Some wait until they're at the embassy or airport to refuse. And some make the trip and let their resentment be known for years. It happens.

Even for the children who agree to be adopted and travel to another country, there are questions about whether it's the best thing. Should anyone be uprooted that way? Probably not. And most of the adoptive parents I know support charities that work to improve the lives of children in their home countries. But there will always be children who need families, and sometimes imperfect solutions are the best we can provide in an imperfect world.

That's a philosophical, moral, and practical view. As far as each individual child goes -- I'm not sure any of them could say whether they would rather "have had the option of being adopted by a Chinese family." That's like asking you and me if we would rather have been born to other parents. It's a nonsense question -- even if we think our parents did a lousy job, we'd be completely different people, literally, if we'd had different parents. My children's lives would be so unimaginably different had they stayed with their original families or, for that matter, been adopted by a different non-Chinese family.

No one knows this better than May. She remembers a great deal about her life with her birth family, informal foster parents, and SWI-authorized foster parents. She was very interested in being adopted and coming to America, though it's doubtful she really knew what that meant. She is sometimes homesick for China -- for the food, the ability to walk everywhere, the language that is still imbedded in her brain. But she does not miss being on the receiving end of random and frequent corporal punishment, or being neglected and ignored, or smelling cigarette smoke everywhere she goes. She is happy to have birthday parties and a cell phone and dance classes and a mom and dad to tuck her in every night.

It is easy for someone who has not lived in a culture to romanticize it, but she knows what life was like for her in China, good and bad. I think she will always be more Chinese than my other daughters (it would take a separate post to explain that), and I can see her returning to China to live someday, but she would go with the experience of a different way of life (and probably a cushion of money to make life there easier).

We will go back to China to visit, I hope before the children are grown. Bess has been back twice and Ella once, but May has not been there as a visitor. I will be very interested to see how her perceptions of China now compare with her memories. 

She talks to me about her life in China, but she would rather that her peers not be too acutely aware of her past. She does have one close friend who was also adopted from China as an older child, and they compare notes. I would imagine this is a huge comfort for both of them. And I think if you asked them, both girls would say they were very happy to be adopted by their current families.

But ask me again after they've all turned 18.

This is what you have to look forward to

My eldest daughter had a big meltdown this morning over eyelashes. As in MY STUPID EYELASHES WON'T CURL and MOM YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND but YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO DRIVE ME TO SCHOOL. This worked a couple of weeks ago with her dad, but I made it clear that I was not going to drive her to school and she ought to be thinking about breakfast, not her eyelashes and the lack of curl thereof. Doors were slammed.

The thing is, I do understand. Right now eyelashes are huge, in more ways than one. What big bre@sts were to baby boomers and big hair was to Generation X, that's what eyelashes are to today's young women. You've probably seen the TV commercials and magazine ads: Eva Longoria with eyelashes long enough to get tangled in her perfectly groomed eyebrows. Kate Moss flashing what appear to be tiny minks perched on her eyelids. Brooke Shields cheerfully putting glaucoma medication on her eyes (one of the side effects of which is that it can literally turn blue eyes brown).

Have there ever been so many different kinds of mascara? They have names full of promise, names like XXXL and Xtreme and Sky-High. Some require multiple steps, including primer, color, and sealer. It's like refinishing a car. There are mascaras for volume and mascaras for length, mascaras with "fibers" and mascaras with added protein. And because it's not enough just to have long eyelashes, there are mascaras that curl, eyelash curlers of every shape and size, and even heated eyelash curlers.

I have explained to the girls that you can't believe everything you see. Those eyelashes in the ads are either fake or Photoshopped. (I am pretty sure that it is permissible to have a model wearing false eyelashes in a mascara ad as long as she has put the mascara on the false eyelashes.) But they claim they know girls with amazing eyelashes. May came home from her first day at junior high and said, "Mom! You wouldn't believe the long eyelashes some of those girls have!" Their older sister Abbey has long, thick, curly eyelashes and huge green eyes -- she looks in real life like those Photoshopped pageant photos. So they think lush, curly eyelashes are doable.

But, see -- my daughters are Asian. They have beautiful, black, short, straight eyelashes. They are only going to get so much length and curl out of what they've been given. Isn't it enough that they have satiny golden skin, lustrous black hair, and sylphlike figures?

Apparently not. They are obsessed with eyelashes. I bought them mascara. I bought  eyelash curlers especially recommended for Asian eyes. May has managed to do a pretty good job, but Bess's eyelashes are as stubborn as she is. If they lose their curl after she puts on mascara, she takes all her makeup off and starts over. I've tried to explain to her that eyelashes wet with makeup remover won't curl, but she doesn't listen. Tears don't help much either.

I tell the girls that looks are fleeting, that what truly matters is what's inside people. But at the same time, I understand the need for young women to feel attractive. (Hey, I understand the need for middle-aged women to feel attractive.) When you look good, you feel good. But obsessing over one little detail instead of appreciating the big picture is not healthy. I am constantly walking this fine line with the girls -- sure, make the most of your physical assets, but don't forget that character is far more important.

I think it's time for a little self-acceptance. Or a heated eyelash curler. Maybe both.