Tsunami Babies: What Kind of Future for Adoptees Taken Abroad?

Commentary

By Pueng Vongs, Pacific News Service

Many Westerners are seeking to adopt children orphaned by the Asian tsunamis, but Vongs questions the wisdom of bringing up children away from their birth cultures.

Jan 12, 2005 - Huge numbers of people from developed nations are seeking to adopt orphans of Asian families wiped out by the recent tsunami disaster.

International adoptions agencies have been overwhelmed with inquiries from Little Rock to Paris on the possibility of adopting what UNICEF estimates to be more than 30,000 children orphaned by the waves that devastated coastal towns in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and other nations.

The growing enthusiasm to adopt children in need from Asian countries has troubled me since a return trip from China a few months ago. A quarter of the way into the grueling 13-hour trans-Pacific flight I awoke, stumbling around in the dark cabin, and my eyes focused on dark-haired Asian toddlers resting on the laps of long-legged Anglo parents. The scene was repeated row after row throughout the plane. I felt like I had stepped into some futuristic, sci-fi movie, where the Asian babies had been cloned somehow. I was bothered by the thought about the difficult path that lay ahead for those kids.

I rubbed my eyes, sure this couldn't be real. But indeed, more than one quarter of all babies adopted from abroad by American families come from China, more than 6,800 a year. China leads all other countries in foreign adoptions to the United States.

A good number of the Chinese babies come to San Francisco. Caucasian parents toting Asian infants are common sights -- in Golden Gate Park, at my neighborhood café. I also learned that a business associate had just adopted from China and was planning to adopt another baby from there. A woman in my meditation class also told me her sister had just adopted.

When I think of the fate of the abandoned, predominantly Chinese girls, casualties of the country's unbending one- child policy and deep-seated patriarchal bias, it's not difficult to conclude that these children would be better off in a new tract home in suburban Walnut Creek rather than in a cold, institutionalized orphanage. Similarly, when I consider where tsunami orphans from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand are most likely to find economic and educational opportunities, all signs point westward.

But how does one weigh the consequences of being brought up removed from the culture of your birth? A friend of mine, a black Guatemalan adopted by German parents in the 1940s, says it was not until she was well into her adulthood that she began to process the volumes of inner cultural conflict and pain resulting from growing up clearly set apart from her parents. She says she struggled with finding a space within the mostly white circles she lived in.

"This was especially difficult in the 40s, where civil rights struggles were nowhere on the horizon," she says. Girls of color were expected to take up less room and be more reserved than the white girls around her.

A Vietnamese American, orphaned after the Vietnam War and adopted by Caucasian American parents, says that
growing up she was spoon-fed solely the culture of Middle America. But a part of her subconsciously was always trying to reach back to her Vietnamese origin.

Both my friends had to come to terms with the realization that they may have been better off materially with their adoptive parents, but that in many other ways they were not. And whether by calamity or choice, loss of one's original family or culture is never easy.

My own family made the choice to uproot us from our Thai homeland when I was two. Their decision was an economic one, and though I have certainly reaped the benefits, I've also fought to find an identity in a culture not my own. I grew up first in a primarily black neighborhood in Chicago and later
in a mostly white neighborhood in Memphis. Both experiences only further alienated me from a real sense of myself. I've gone through trials and numerous journeys to carve out a place where I belong.

To be sure, there are many successful adoptions by parents who are extremely sensitive to the cultural, racial and social hurdles their children must face. My Guatemalan friend says such successes must be treasured, because finding a sense of identity for the Asian adoptee will require much more than just taking them to Asian restaurants or cultural summer camps, such as the ones for Korean adoptees from the Korean War, or biracial Vietnamese Americans from the Vietnam War. This pattern of the dominant, affluent, America coming in to the weakened, disaster-stricken, war-torn Asian country to rescue children has been eras in the making, and creates a lopsided balance of power.

And I wonder why the same amount of attention has not been paid to needy orphans from war-ravaged, famine-stricken African countries. In the United States, nearly half of the 258,000 children adopted internationally are Asian, according to a new Census survey.

After the tsunami, Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka have all placed a moratorium on adoptions, partly out of concern that the kids would be taken for use in the sex trade or for cheap labor. Some of these governments already have strict policies governing foreign adoptions. After the disaster, governments say they are still searching for surviving family members and would first explore options to keep the orphans with relatives or new families domestically. The United States has also urged calm urging restraint in adopting the children. France and Canada, however, are looking for ways to streamline the foreign adoption process.

But this matter will take much time to sort through. Every time I see flaxen-haired parents holding a baby with almond-shaped eyes in their arms I can't help but wonder about the person he or she will grow up to be. Will this child transcend cultural expectations and definitions and be able to navigate freely between class, boundaries and borders? But I also can't help but think at what costs.

Vongs (pvongs@pacificnews.org) is a journalism fellow in child and family policy, a program of the University of Maryland and the Foundation for Child Development.