An Interview with Adam Pertman

Author Interview by Fran Cronin

Steve Jobs—a Fully Revised Adoption Nation—and What's Next?

 

---

Adam Pertman is a busy guy. Like Woody Allen’s Zelig, Pertman seems to be everywhere at once: lecturing, writing, appearing on the Today Show or NPR. And like a doctor on call, he’s always available to help enlighten the general public about the once-silent world of adoption.

Adam Pertman

Since writing a Pulitzer Prize-nominated series about adoption for the Boston Globe in 1998, Pertman has transformed his experience as the parent of two adopted children into his life’s work.

His acclaimed book Adoption Nation was first published in 2000; a new edition came out this year with the revised subtitle of "How the Adoption Revolution Is Transforming Our Families—and America." As Pertman told me, "I rewrote a big percentage of the book."

For almost a decade, he's served as the executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York City, a nonprofit that’s the go-to organization for adoption-related research and policy. Pertman is also associate editor of Adoption Quarterly, and he coedited the new anthology Adoption by Lesbians and Gay Men with David M. Brodzinsky.

At 57, Pertman has enough gray in his floppy hair and Van Dyke beard to convey an earnest man-on-a-mission. He hurried into our prearranged meeting this October at a cafe in Newton, Massachusetts, noting the moms in a mommy-baby group that had just dispersed. He ordered a dark coffee and darted to the table I’d cleared, removing papers and books from under one arm.

Before we even sat down, Pertman had started talking.

---

FC: It’s uncanny we should meet today. Yesterday Steve Jobs died, a famous adoptee and very private man. What does his story tell us about adoption?

AP: Last night, ABC’s Nightline did a piece about Jobs and described him as a “baby his parents didn’t want,” which is such a negative and bad thing to say. Just shows how little is known about adoption. There’s this impulse to revert to negative stereotypes.

Jobs was a reunited adoptee who searched and found his mother and got to know a lot about his heritage. His father was an immigrant from Syria, and his biological sister is the author Mona Simpson. He was private but open about his adoption. He liked to talk about being adopted in his commencement speeches.

We’ve made enormous progress, but the misunderstandings remain profound. When something is kept a secret for generations, how are people ever going to learn about it?

FC: It’s obvious your own story as an adoptive father has influenced you. What made you want to write your book Adoption Nation in 2000 and then revise it this year?

AP: As an adoptive father, I was an expert on my kids but not about adoption. At the time, the general public’s knowledge about adoption was not very good, either. How could it be? Adoption was a closely held secret for so many generations.

But during this last decade, there has been enormous change, and I felt it was important to show that the revolution in adoption is still in progress.

Ten years ago, adoptions from abroad were starting to soar. Today those numbers are plummeting, while adoption from foster care has been steadily rising and is now the most common form of non-family adoption.

Today, adoption is also much more diverse. Gays and lesbians now adopt in disproportionate numbers. This change has really helped to normalize and broaden the term “family.” We better understand that adoption is not just something that touches someone else’s life, but now touches all our families, our communities, and our country.

Plus, not to be too corny, every father’s dream is to make the world a better place for his kids. I thought this book would give me the opportunity to do that.

FC: In the past ten years, the Internet has also become a much bigger force. Can you describe the Internet’s impact on adoption—such as the new tools it gives birthparents and adopted kids to search for one another?

AP: The Internet is changing everyone’s world. But adoption is one of those worlds where the changes have not yet been closely examined. It’s like the Wild West. There’s been an explosion in search and reunions in all directions: kids looking for their families, and parents looking for their kids.

The best upside to the Internet is as a resource to help people with placement and searches. People are finding birth families in Africa, China, and Korea. You can just imagine that at some point a chat room will surface.

The downside is the lack of supervision. There is no monitoring, no counseling, and no understanding of what constitutes good practices. The adoption world is full of vulnerable people who could easily be taken advantage of.

FC: Another big change in the past decade is the expansion of open adoptions, in large part due to the advocacy of Betty Jean Lifton, who died last year at age 84. How has adoption changed as a result?

AP: Long ago, we made the mistake of trying to make adoption replicate the stereotypical biological family, and most babies were adopted from white unwed mothers. We mentally aspired to an ideal norm. As in any culture, we thought there was a right way to form a family: get married and make babies. When we could not do this, we thought the alternatives were second best. Set in this context, we sent adoption underground. We tried to hide our kids.

Today, open adoptions of domestic infants are most prevalent, which I think is the best practice. People like not to think about where adopted kids come from, but they come from real people, real families. Openness is better for the kids, but usually more complicated for the adults.

But we teach our kids something by being open. It’s only normal that kids want to meet their bio parents. Adoption may be different or feel harder, but we need to internalize it as our normal. It helps us appreciate our kids on their own terms. And I like to think honesty and openness always trump shame.

FC: For the past thirteen years, you’ve consistently advocated for adoption to be part of our social landscape. You call this a revolution. Where do you see the next big battle in our effort to make adoption part of American society?

AP: If you add up the numbers, almost 80 percent of the kids adopted today are either from foster care or from abroad. That means the majority of adopted kids were either institutionalized or are on the rebound from a family in which they experienced abuse or neglect. Before they were adopted, these kids had experiences that their new adoptive families need to help them work through. It takes a lot of nurturing and love.

In October 2010, we [Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute] released a research study titled “Keeping the Promise" about the need for post-adoption services. Think about it: We move children from one country to another with the implicit promise that we will give them better prospects for their future. But we don’t keep that promise. Instead, we look at adoption as a statistic, like the number of kids that are moving from foster care to families, and say, “Aren’t we successful!”

We need to change that paradigm. We need to shift from placement as the goal. Parents want to help their kids overcome the traumas that occurred prior to adoption. Our priority should be to help these kids and families succeed. We have to rethink and restructure what we do at the state and government levels in providing education and support. If we don’t understand how to better help these kids, then we will really mess up.

This country has yet to fully understand just how pervasive the impact of adoption is on our culture. If you add up all the connections, there are 100 million people in adopted families. This is not a silo issue. This is about us.

---

Where to Find Adam Pertman

• Boston Globe adoption series by Adam Pertman (1998).

• Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution Is Transforming Our Families—and America by Adam Pertman, originally published by Basic Books, 2000 (Harvard Common Press, revised edition, 2011).

• Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute

• Adoption Quarterly

• Adoption by Lesbians and Gay Men: A New Dimension in Family Diversity edited by David M. Brodzinsky and Adam Pertman (Oxford University Press, 2011).

• “Keeping the Promise: The Critical Need for Post-Adoption Services to Enable Children and Families to Succeed” (in pdf) by Susan Livingston Smith (Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, 2010).

• Adam Pertman’s website

---

And Don't Miss the Spotlight on Adoption and Parenting in Talking Writing!

Adam Pertman's interview with Fran Cronin originally appeared in the Nov/Dec 2011 issue of Talking Writing: "We Teach Our Kids by Being Open." This issue also includes:

• "Always an Orphan" by David Biddle
  A mixed-raced adoptee reflects on what it means to find his birthmother
• "Whoa! I'm a Character in a Friend's Memoir?" by Andrea Cornell Sarvady
  What it's like to live across the street from Melissa Fay Greene and her adoptees
• "Adoption, Light and Dark" by David Biddle
  A review of Melissa Fay Greene's No Biking in the House Without a Helmet
• Coming in December: An Interview with Mei-Ling Hopgood

We invite you to check out Talking Writing and subscribe—it's free!

 

Adoption on TV: "Modern Family" or "Parenthood"?

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude


A gay dad sits at the dining-room table, making a scrapbook about baby Lily's adoption. A tiny conical hat perches on his head. It's all the funnier because this dad—ex-college-football player Cameron—is so large.

"Look at this." Cameron reverently holds up the hat.

"Oh my God!" cries Mitchell, his partner. "Lily's little hat that we bought her at the airport in Vietnam!"

Cameron puts it on, its red ribbons trailing beside his cheeks.

Mitchell eyes him. "Remember how cute she looked in that?"

"Remember how I used to wear it and walk around and act like I had a giant head?" Cameron giggles.

"That was good acting," Mitchell says.

Politically incorrect? Over-the-top satire? Yes on both counts, but that's why a sharply written sitcom like ABC's Modern Family gets at the uncomfortable  aspects of adoption—especially for us white middle-class adoptive parents.

In many ways, Cam (Eric Stonestreet) and Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) are the fruitiest of gay stereotypes, but the hat episide of Modern Family that aired last spring ("Two Monkeys and a Panda"), veered plenty close to my own adoptive family. My Vietnamese adoptee is older than Lily—and he's not been slapped with an Asian flower name—but he's got his own tiny conical hat.

It's taken me awhile to appreciate Modern Family, so I'm only now watching Season Two on DVD; the show is currently in its third season. But I'm up to date with another show also in its third season—NBC's Parenthood—and lately I've been struck by the contrast between the two when it comes to adoption.

I used to enjoy Parenthood, even when this drama about the Braverman family in Berkeley, California, slopped into preciousness. Zeek (Craig T. Nelson) and Camille (Bonnie Bedelia) Braverman oversee the clan from an artsy Berkeley house that's probably just up the hill from Chez Panisse. The four adult Braverman children are by turns believably angst-ridden and annoying. But their kids make the show engaging. And the evolving story of young Max, diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome in Season One, is notable for its unvarnished look at how hard this can be on a family.

Yet, the current story involving the quest of Julia Braverman-Graham (Erika Christensen) to adopt a baby is not only an inaccurate portrayal of the ups and downs of the adoption process. It leans heavily on a heroic adoption narrative—just the sort of thing Modern Family skewers brilliantly.

The basic narrative goes like so: Two prospective adoptive parents, after battling with infertility, deeply long for a child. They have plenty of money, a huge extended family, a homey house. Meanwhile, the pregnant birthmother is destitute, without family, friends, or the child's birthfather. She struggles mightily over whether to give up her baby for adoption, but when she decides to do so, the music swells. She tearfully surrenders her infant. The End.

In Parenthood's version of this cliché, Julia and her husband Joel (Sam Jaeger) have a biological daughter, but Julia can't get pregnant again. They decide to adopt, and Julia, a high-powered lawyer, flings herself into the bureaucracy of private domestic adoption. Before you can say "adoption agency," she's frustrated. She can't just make it happen by writing a check.

This isn't what bothers me about the story, though. On many levels, adoption is a financial transaction. Julia's chop-chop way of going about it is true to her character. One of her brothers even says she's trying to "buy" a kid. To whit: In the September episode "Hey, If You're Not Using That Baby," a young woman named Zoe (Rosa Salazar) conveniently turns up pregnant and ready to get rid of "it." Zoe runs the coffee cart at Julia's law firm, and Julia shadows her like a vulture. Before long, she asks Zoe flat out if she can have her baby.

It's improbable soap opera, but I like Julia's upper-middle-class myopia. I like the fact that Zoe, who's attractive and bright, responds, "Um, no."

But here's what I don't like: In under a month of TV air time, Julia has become a saint. She's apologized to Zoe. In a recent episode, Julia takes her to the hospital when she feels ill, then brings Zoe home for the night. In Julia's fancy kitchen, the unhappy pregnant girl gets to observe perfect-dad Joel playing with their daughter. Soon after, Zoe shows up on their doorstep again, saying, "If you still want to have my baby, you can have it. You have a nice family."

On Parenthood, it's all hugs and tears—though maybe not The End, because the adoption plot is still unfolding. Maybe once Zoe has her baby, she'll change her mind. And if the adoption does go through, maybe it will be an open one in which Zoe remains part of the Braverman saga. Wouldn't that be cool?

The run-up isn't promising, however. I can just picture the Braverman clan rallying around the new adoptive parents after a few predictable twists. For example: Zoe almost revokes her consent; her ne'r-do-well boyfriend shows up and tries to stake his own claim; the baby is born with a disability—but saint-like Julia and Joel love the child anyway.

If only adoption were being handled as realistically on Parenthood as autism is. The heroic baby hand-off is never the end, as many real birthparents and adult adoptees will tell you. Even the broad satire of Modern Family, which portrays only the adoptive parents' point of view, gets across how much these gay dads have changed over the months they've been parenting.

With Parenthood, there's reason to hope that the ensuing adoption complications may yet rise above clichés. I'm drawn to the Bravermans, a big happy clan, TV fantasy though they are. I long for a form of community my own tiny family of three doesn't have.

But when a drama like this strikes too many false notes, I end up feeling manipulated. As someone who grew up in a working-class suburb south of Berkeley in the same era, it's already tough for me to suspend disbelief. I know how much the Bravermans reek of a particular kind of groovy privilege.

Most TV families—and Modern Family is no exception—are middle-class and inwardly focused, and they generate an ever-expanding tangle of unrealistic plotlines. But if the characters expose all their nasty, unpretty edges, I stay hooked. That's especially true for an adoption story, which is why I've grown fond of those argumentative, accessorizing gay adoptive dads.

Their comic outrageousness—and obvious self-deceptions—cut far closer to the truth than a thinly disguised melodrama with a pretty soundtrack.

---

Links to Episodes:
• "Two Monkeys and a Panda" (Modern Family, aired March 2, 2011)
•  "Hey, If You're Not Using That Baby" (Parenthood, aired September 20, 2011)
• "Nora" (Parenthood, aired October  11, 2011)

Adoption Books: What's the Message?

By Fran Cronin for Adopt-a-tude

Not Your Average Bedtime Story

 

My fifteen-year-old daughter has banished me from her room. She’s made it clear we are long past reading bedtime stories together. But I still revel in the occasional snuggle with my twelve-year-old son, and I love sinking into a good children’s story—especially if the message is right.

For parents of adopted children, messaging is key when choosing books to read or share, whether a child is a preschooler or near adolescence. The story needs to feel true, the circumstances familiar, and the emotional sensibility realistic.

But somehow these requirements are tough to fill. Few books resonate with my son’s story as a Russian adoptee. How many overly sunny stories about the perfect rainbow family can you read? And he is definitely not a little girl adopted from Asia who took a long plane ride to get here.

On a recent day this fall, I decided to ask a local librarian for advice. At the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library, Amanda Gazin, senior children’s librarian, efficiently rattled off almost a dozen titles about adoption. The result was a broad overview of what the genre offers.

Not surprisingly, far more books have been published for preschoolers. After reading many of those on Gazin’s list, however, I’d say the results are mixed...

 

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING

---

Editor's Note: Fran's piece appears in the December 2010 issue of Talking Writing, in which the theme is children's books. The issue includes references to more than a hundred children's books, multiple author interviews, and cartoon panels from the graphic novels American Born Chinese and City of Spies.

Fran and I think Adopt-a-tude readers will find this TW issue of particular interest. There are lots of discussions about identity, the development of children's imagination, even one middle-school author calling for "no more orphans!" in young adult books. Happy reading—Martha Nichols

---

Are You My Mother?

By Fran Cronin for Adopt-a-tude

The recent death of open-adoption maverick Annette Baran has jostled me out of my maternal complacency.

Having adopted my son in Russia, I thought I had dodged open adoption blowback: no birth mother back-story, no holiday cards, no photo exchanges or well-intended visits. In other words, there was no ambiguity or messy relational complications. I was sure my son felt snug and secure in the embrace of my unwavering devotion and love. Wasn’t that enough?

But in reading the obits of the formidable and prescient Baran, the firm ballast of my assumptions have begun to wobble.

From the late 1950s to 1974, during a time of closed adoptions—anonymity and sealed records—Baran placed more than 1,000 babies while director of adoptions for Vista Del Mar Child-Care Service in West Los Angeles.

As the placements mounted she wondered why the details were kept concealed when it was obvious that both adopting parents and birth mothers wanted to know more. Each craved the missing installment of their separate but enjoined stories.

The curtain was finally pulled back in 1978, when she and some colleagues published their research findings in the watershed The Adoption Triangle: The Effects of Sealed Records on Adoptees, Birth Parents, and Adoptive Parents. Since then, varying levels of open-adoption practices have become the norm.

Almost single-handedly, and with the strength of her own experience, Baran popularized the argument that an adoptee’s knowledge of their birth parents is crucial to identity formation. She advocated that knowledge filled the empty hollows for all parties in an adoption relationship.

So why have I thought that my complicit ignorance in my son’s birth history has been a good thing? What have I been afraid of?

Perhaps I fear losing a part of my son if we go down the path of “are you my mother?” The broad-shouldered mantle of Mom is not one I have been willing to share. As a single parent, I have fiercely protected and honed my role in solo parenting.

Adopted at five months and now a pubescent 12-year-old, my son has yet to challenge my monolithic claim on motherhood or queried as to whom might be at the other end of his genetic line. But that question does pop into my head. What is his genetic history and what might be his biological destiny?

But even if I knew the DNA of my son’s genetic make-up, I could not stem the inevitable march of his biological destiny. Having survived cancer three times, I know much about my own DNA, but that has not enabled me to redirect my genetic heritage.

While there is no right or wrong answer to the open-versus-closed adoption argument, I feel the choice to unearth the past is my son’s, not mine. Perhaps finding his birth mother would reassure her that the child she bore is thriving and well loved.

Whatever my son’s past might have been, his future is firmly with me, his sister, and the family unit we have lovingly knit into being.

Click here to read more about the life of Annette Baran.

To listen to an interview with Annette Baran go to YouTube.


Fran Cronin is the blog manager for Adopt-a-tude.

Aimee Louise Sword and the Press: "Rape" vs. a "Summer Romance"

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude



Try googling “Aimee Louise Sword.” The top hit is a compilation of news stories and commentaries about Sword pleading guilty this week to having sex with her 14-year-old birth son. At the moment, there are "533 related articles.

Yet one of the other top hits will be a ten-month-old story from the Huffington Post, complete with an embedded Fox News video: “Aimee Louise Sword Raped Son She Gave Up For Adoption.” A hit of the same vintage from ABC News opens this way: “A Michigan mother is facing a trial after being accused of having a summer romance with the teenage son she gave up for adoption.”

Unusual and disturbing as this story was when it broke in September 2009, there’s a big leap between rape and summer romance.

Let me be clear: Sexual abuse is never OK. Because parents have the power in a relationship, they are always at fault. Yet there are tricky angles on this story. Sword was not raising this boy in the caregiving sense. She claims to have initiated contact with him through Facebook only after she stopped hearing from his adoptive parents. What happened is repellant; it also pushes all the wrong buttons, just as so many stories about adoptions gone terribly awry do.

Last year, I wrote about the online response to Sword's arrest (click here). The story swirled through the blogosphere with a wild array of facts; some reports said her son was only 10 years old. Most said little about his adoptive parents. While the original news story from the Oakland Press in the Detroit area was a standard journalistic account, almost none of the subsequent commentaries paused to question why Sword might have done what she did.

A "MILF" in her mid-thirties, Sword has become both a pariah and an object of prurient interest. Her MySpace photos still appear all over the Internet. She's also been married and has five other children.

Advocates for birth mothers—or adoption in general—are not shaping this discussion, and that's a bad thing. Some recent media commentaries, like Tracy Clark-Flory's piece in Salon, have at least addressed the fact that reunions between birth parents and children can be fraught with all sorts of intense emotions. The UPI account includes a quote from Sword at her sentencing: "I am remorseful for everything that occurred."

But then we get all the ugliness oozing up through the cracks. A quick review of recent online headlines gives us, among others "INCEST MUM" and "Yummy Mummy Heads for Jaily Waily."

Now she's been sentenced to jail for at least nine years. More facts are on the record, although Sword herself admitted in court that she still doesn't know how it happened. It's not at all clear that she "tracked" or "stalked" her son on the Internet. The UPI story notes in passing that the prosecutor (not Sword's lawyer) said "it was the son who got in touch with her."

Last September, the site You Can't Make This Up did stick up for Sword, noting that a social worker representing her son's adoptive family “asked his permission to find her, because he was getting unmanageable at home….” In this version, he’s a “gangbanger” who may have coerced his birth mother into having sex. She supposedly complied “partly due to guilt, partly out of fear of losing contact with her son forever and last but not least, partly because she was asked by his adoptive parents…[to help].”

Again, we don't know. Some of this doesn't square with reports from her sentencing this week. Although this unfictional.com story is one of the top hits for Aimee Louise Sword, its sources aren't clear.

So we are left with all the scary stereotypes about what happens to adoptees: the son is either a victim raped by a depraved, sexually loose birth mother or an irredeemable gangbanger. There's way too much heat and no light.

We humans will always be compelled by this kind of sensationalism. But the first kneejerk responses linger online in a way they didn't used to. They continue to float before readers' eyes, courtesy of Google, all those 530-plus headlines that trumpet some variation of "guilt" and "sex" and "mom."

I hate it all—what Aimee Sword did and the feeding frenzy that's followed.


This piece also appears in Martha's blog on Open Salon.

Podcast on "What's My Heritage?" and Other Adoption Topics

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude


Today I was interviewed by Mary Beth Wells on "Adoption—Journey to Motherhood." We talked about Artyom, the adoptee who was sent back to Russia this past spring—what Mary Beth termed the issue of "good child-bad child"—and also the push-and-pull of culture-keeping with international adoptees, based on "What's My Heritage?", my article in Brain, Child magazine last year.

It was a wide-ranging conversation. To listen in, click here (it's the July 12, 2010 show). You can also download it for free.

And for those who can't get enough of The Last Airbender, click here for my review. I finally watched the thing with my son and assorted children and adults last Friday. Lord have mercy. A preview:

"I left the theater feeling jangled, as if somebody had spit up on me. As one of my fellow adult sufferers, a scriptwriter, described the waterbending special effects: 'Yuk. Death by spit and icicles...'"

Adoption, Russian-Style: Are We Up to the Challenge?

By Fran Cronin for Adopt-a-tude

The saga of seven-year-old Russian-born Artyom Savelyev’s adoption gone wrong has once again focused attention on the controversies that dog international adoptions.

Artyom’s tragic journey begs us to consider if there is a difference between an adopted and a biological child—and if so, does adoption give a parent the right to return a child when the relationship disappoints?

As the adoptive mother of a twelve-year-old born in Russia, I have to say an emphatic no.  From the moment I held my son in my arms and smelled his skin, I knew he was a part of me. These kids are not Russian dolls. They didn’t ask for us. We wanted them.

The problem is, Artyom’s story has become a convenient hook for Russian politicking as well as for commentators who know little about the experience of parenting deeply troubled children. Sensationalized headlines make great copy, but they distract from the truth.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called the actions of Artyom’s adoptive mother, Torry Hansen, a 33-year-old single mom and nurse, “a monstrous deed.”  Pavel Astakhov, the Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner, threatened to suspend adoptions unless Russia and the U.S. sign a treaty to ensure that Russian children are better protected once they leave the Motherland. Acrid complaints about the treatment of Russian adoptees in the hands of American families have resurfaced, specifically 16 deaths due to abuse since 1996.

What is omitted from the storyline is Russia’s own treatment of children who are abandoned and orphaned and then placed in institutional care.

The Russians also conveniently seem to forget that protective laws are already in place. The United States and about 80 other nations have signed on to and ratified the Hague Convention, a body of treaties whose purpose is "to work for the progressive unification…of private international [adoption] law…” (from Article 1 of the Statute of the Hague Conference). Standardizing these practices, especially when it comes to money, adoption disclosure, and parent training, seems a crucial tool for monitoring pre-and post-adoption placement. Russia, however, is currently a non-Hague Convention country.

Brandeis researcher E.J. Graff, laid out in the Boston Globe this past week just how dire Russia’s intransigent position could prove to be.  Thousands of institutionalized children who desperately need homes may not be placed in one. Those placed might fear return to their first country if the placement does not go well.  

Russia officialdom’s outrage is a hollow distraction as it tries to dig into the deep pockets of American largesse. Lacking both the political and financial will to fix their corrupt institutional care system, the Russians would love nothing more than to have American dollars pay for the care and oversight they themselves have chronically failed to provide.

In the pecking order of Russian social services, institutionalized children get a very thin slice of the safety-net pie. In a 2007 report, Unicef cited that nearly 200,000 Russian children lived in state institutions and were provided only the minimum of custodial care. With a low qualification threshold for childcare workers and a woeful lack of adequate resources, the staff often reflects the same lethargy as the children in its care.

Compounding the neglect is the Russian political tactic of delaying international adoptions. Since 1998, when we adopted our son, the waiting period has doubled from four months to eight, if everything goes without a hitch. The intention is to give Russian nationals the opportunity to adopt before proceeding with an out-of-country placement. The reality is that Russians have been slow to adopt.  The number of children available greatly outpaces the demand.

While the media, the U.S., and Russia wrangle and posture over the legal machinations of this case, the real-life tragedy has been pushed off-center like a sidebar. 

Last year, Americans adopted 1,586 children from Russia, the third highest rate for non-domestic adoptions. Chuck Johnson, CEO of the National Council for Adoption, stated on NPR last week that more than 60,000 Russian children have been successfully adopted in the United States.

When looking at failed adoptions, Johnson said the rate is 15% for both foreign and domestic adoptions. Biological families, like adoptive families, can also become unhinged. In 2006 (the most recent year for which there are statistics), the number of children in domestic foster care topped 510,000.

So if many kinds of families do fall apart, why has this story captured our collective consciousness?

Simply stated: shame.

Artyom’s story tells us not just that two nations and assorted agencies supposedly working on his behalf failed him but that our American ideal-laden notions of parenting, family, and adoption did as well.

How frightened and alone this seven-year-old must have felt, plucked, like a toy in a claw-operated prize booth, from where he lived and flown across the ocean to an English-speaking home in predominately white, rural Shelbyville, Tennessee.

Although some facts have dribbled out through the media free-for-all, we really know very little about Torry Hansen or what actually occurred in her home. Hansen herself says she will not speak or meet with investigators unless she is formally charged with a crime.

Artyom’s life both prior to and after his adoption is a mystery, deeply concealed by both language and cultural barriers. It is unclear when Hansen began to feel overwhelmed by his unhappiness. Was she self-blaming and resentful? Or was the reality of life with her adopted son so removed from her imaginings of motherhood that she found the situation unbearable?

Adoptive parents may be able to empathize with Hansen, but what we need, as a society, is a reality check. Adoption is not a trial run. When we adopt, as when we birth, we bring into our orbit of love and care a being wholly dependent on us. It’s about a no-turning-back lifetime commitment to raising a child and helping that child navigate his or her way safely into adulthood.

I know something about what Hansen must have been going through. Like her, I am a single parent. (My husband died three months after we adopted our baby son. Our biological daughter was three at that time.)  Like the alleged reports about Artyom’s disruptive behavior, my son has been a tough kid to parent: four schools, multiple therapists, meds, lots of acting out, and need for in-home support.

But unlike Hansen, I never thought it an option to relinquish my son, despite extreme moments of exasperation, his bouts with unpredictable behaviors, and the number of gray hairs he has given me.

Although my son was just five months old when we adopted him, institutional neglect was already apparent. He was constantly hungry, underweight, malnourished, listless, prone to self-soothing, and subsequently chronically ill for the first four years of life.  In pre-school, the best that could be said about his social skills was “does not play well with others.”

But instead of his challenges pushing me away, they have fueled my quest to be a better, smarter mother. I have attended workshops, support groups, individual and family therapy, and secured mental-health services.

I say this not as a putdown to Hansen, or any other parent who has struggled with difficult children, but as a way to offer insight into what it takes to nurture, care for, and love a child that flails against your best intentions. Living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I have benefited from a highly educated, massively professionalized, and resource-intensive urban area. As an older parent, I have many friends who have also adopted, and together we share our uncertainties, experiences, and support systems.

With professional help, I learned to overcome the great waves of inadequacy I encountered when my son was a toddler and I wasn’t sure I was up to the job of being his mother. With the loving support of friends and family, I have navigated through the tough social and educational choices I needed to make for the well being of my son.

I have learned that asking for help is not shameful and does not reflect on my parenting inabilities. I have learned, as all parents must learn, that the needs of my son are often much more urgent than my own.

And I have also learned that the only thing shameful about this kind of struggle is a lack of funding and political will for the services families truly need to care for their children. If we’re not up to the job, then who is?

To read more about Fran's personal story of adopting an infant son in Russia, read her 2009 Adopt-a-tude piece "Why Do the Russians Make It So Hard to Adopt?"

Russian Adoptions: Who's at Fault and What Do We Do?

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude


When I first saw the pictures of seven-year-old Artyom Savelyev—who is close to my son’s age—in Moscow, after his adoptive grandmother put him on a flight from Washington, D.C., by himself, I wondered what the hell is wrong with us.

Who is “us”? That’s the question. American adoptive parents? Not most of us, by any stretch. The American adoption agency involved, which has now had its license suspended by the Russian education ministry? Again, that’s painting with a broad brush. The Russian orphanage in which by some reports the boy was mistreated? Who knows?

I wanted to blame somebody, though, as did the many commenters on news stories and blogs about Artyom’s fate this past weekend. Adoptive mother Torry Hansen and grandmother Nancy were right at hand, courtesy of the AP. Here are a few comments about the story from Lisa Belkin’s Motherlode blog:

“This is totally unconscionable and irresponsible.”

“This woman's (I cannot say—‘mother's,’ for she doesn't deserve such a title) behaviour is despicable.”

“This article made me cry. It takes the patience and endurance of Mother Theresa to deal with special needs children. Where did this woman not understand the commitment to a young, troubled child that she adopted into her family?”

Last week, Nancy Hansen decided to fly Artyom (called Justin by his adoptive family) back to Russia because his violent behavior had become too much for them. According to one of the AP stories, his grandmother “chronicled a list of problems: hitting, screaming and spitting at his mother and threatening to kill family members.” He apparently slammed one aunt with a statue when she pushed him to do math homework. (The family was home schooling him.) Hansen says he threatened to burn their home down.

Back in Russia, he was accompanied by a note from adoptive mother Torry Hansen, who is a registered nurse: “This child is mentally unstable. He is violent and has severe psychopathic issues…I was lied to and misled by the Russian Orphanage workers and director regarding his mental stability and other issues…. After giving my best to this child, I am sorry to say that for the safety of my family, friends, and myself, I no longer wish to parent this child.''

As of Friday, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was threatening to suspend all U.S. adoptions, calling this “the last straw.”

Grandmother Nancy says she had no idea she was setting off an international incident. She did tell an AP reporter, "The intent of my daughter was to have a family and the intent of my whole family was to love that child."

I hate stories like this, in which a child becomes abandoned over and over again, unwanted by anyone. I hate what this does to me as an adoptive parent of a son born in Vietnam, of the doubts I start to feel about whether I had any right to everything that my family means.

I’m also waiting for more facts. The problem, as usual, is that a media storm has managed to make the situation even murkier, spreading an array of misinformation about international adoption, attachment disorders, and what constitutes “normal.”

Shocking headlines like “Boy from Russia said ‘he’d torch our home’” and “Grandmother: Boy terrified adoptive kin” keep the focus on extreme behavior. Here’s the blurb that introduces the AP report in the Seattle Times: “Torry Hansen was so eager to become a mother that she adopted an older child from a foreign country, two factors that scare off many prospective parents. Her fear came later.”

A distorted look at “the inside story of adoptions that go horribly wrong” aired on ABC's Nightline Friday, including videos taken by parents of children having “meltdowns.” (Click here for the accompanying article.)

This prompted developmental psychologist Jean Mercer to debunk some myths in a Psychology Today blog. She rightly castigates Nightline for running home videos without questioning the parents’ interpretations. In one case, shortly after a pair of Russian sisters had been adopted, the older sister wanders around her American home in tears, clutching a blanket, and crawling under furniture. Mercer notes,

“[T]he parents seem to have regarded it as such bizarre and unacceptable behavior that it needed to be recorded because no outsider would believe it.

“But what do we actually see in this video of a child who has been in the adoptive home for about a week? Let me just inquire how similar it might be to your own behavior, if you had been taken by very large people who spoke a different language, put on an airplane with little comprehensible explanation, and taken far away to a new house, new food, new ways of doing things? Would you be grateful?”

Meanwhile, it’s important to keep the numbers in perspective. According to the U.S. State Department, there have been about 15,000 U.S.-Russia adoptions in the past five years. I’ve heard that in the last fifteen years, it’s about 50,000. As many adoption experts have noted, most of these don’t go “horribly wrong.”

Whether Artyom is really psychopathic and violent is unclear. Even if it were true, shoving him onto airplane is at the very least an act of ignorant desperation. Giving him an American name when he was already six years old indicates a lack of awareness and empathy. The Hansens—not to mention those parents supplying videos of their children for Nightline—appear to have little understanding of what it means to suddenly land in another culture.

Yet something much larger is at play than the actions of two unfit adoptive family members. Based on the official outrage of Russia—following on the travesty of American missionaries trying to hustle Haitian “orphans” out of that country after the recent earthquake—the practice of international adoption is once again under fire.

There are lots of ethical reasons why it should be. In Haiti, a number of the children involved still had biological parents. In many other developing countries, from Vietnam to Ethiopia, there’s always been the risk of money paid for babies to finance a less than savory adoption industry.

Yet there’s the flip side, too, and you see it in Russia and Haiti: social welfare systems that simply are ill equipped and far too under-funded to support the rolls of abandoned children. What you see is poverty and its brutal impact on society’s most vulnerable: children who receive little or no adult care.

Let me say it again: you see poverty, on a global scale, ramped up by the churn of developing economies. The Harvard University Project on Global Working Families, research that surveyed 55,000 people in a variety of countries and is detailed in Jody Heymann’s book Forgotten Families, makes clear that many children have no one to take care of them. Here’s a quote from my own 2007 review of Heymann’s book in Women’s Review of Books:

“Of the working parents interviewed, nineteen percent in Vietnam left their children alone or in the care of an unpaid child; 27 percent did so in Mexico; and a whopping 48 percent did in Botswana, which has almost no publicly funded child care.”

Even the reference in a USA Today story about Artyom—“United Airlines allows unaccompanied children as young as 5 years old on direct flights. Children age 8 and above can catch connecting flights, as well”—chills me.

So maybe we should blame global capitalism and every one of us (that “us”) who participates. Maybe it’s not just the Hansens of Shelbyville, Tennessee. Maybe we should blame general ignorance about international adoption—for example, the various media commentators ranting about the numbers on the rise when in fact they’ve been in steep decline since 2004.

Our son was a baby when we adopted him from Vietnam, from an orphanage in which he seemed very well treated by affectionate staff. He is now a happy and healthy little boy. I say this not to vaunt my own skills as a parent but to add that even my son, who remembers nothing of the orphanage—an orphanage that was far from a horror show—has occasional meltdowns. When he was just a little younger than Artyom, he would cry uncontrollably when I left him at school. My son still sucks his thumb, though he’s working on it.

Loss experienced by young children can be profound and impossible to process rationally. The fact that my mother was hospitalized when I was six still sits in my soul. Sometimes I believe my own loss has helped me to understand my son’s; other times, I think that all humans walk alone.

In my adoptive family, some days we walk in the light. We are together, we are whole. But have we really become a world in which so many children have no safe homes?

Apparently so. At this moment, all I can do is hug my boy close.


This piece also appears in Martha's Open Salon blog, Athena's Head.

Political Pretzel: Twists in the Adoption and Abortion Debate

By Fran Cronin for Adopt-a-tude

Common to all deeply personal matters is the complicated thinking that gets wound around them. At this time in our country, there are few issues as fraught with knots as the political, cultural, and religious tension of the adoption versus abortion debate.

From the picketer on the street corner hoisting photos of fetuses to the blogger on the net challenging the moral intentions of our pro-life politicians, a battle wages for the right of a woman to choose whether or not to carry a conception to term.

But what about the sideline issues that are not so easy to sloganize?

I have yet to read a bumper sticker that addresses which babies are put up for adoption and how many actually get adopted; or, if abortion is not the solution, the importance of better education and access to birth control. If the goal is stopping unwanted pregnancies, why is preaching abstinence touted as the best solution for sexually active teens?

Like a hard and gnarly pretzel, the issues are so intertwined and morally charged that the questions raised don’t neatly sort out. They get mashed and crumble.

Before I get too deep, I want to state my position: I am the mother of an adopted child; I’m also a woman who had an abortion in her late twenties. I am thrilled my husband and I were able to adopt our son. I also feel the abortion I had was the best choice for all the right reasons.

My husband and I decided to adopt when I was no longer able to conceive yet wanted another child. The abortion I had when I was single, careless, and certainly not in a mindset to even think about bearing or caring for a child.

As a woman, wife, and mother, I have had the good fortune to act upon what I thought was best for me. With power to control my child bearing, I have created the family I want and a family I can care for.

Sadly, most women around the world, including many women in this country, cannot say the same.

According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau on “2007 Poverty Thresholds,” almost 14 million children under the age of 18 live in poverty. The hardships of poverty amplify when you factor in compromised or no access to quality health care, limited access to higher education, poor housing, enhanced risk to a spectrum of abuses, a perpetuation of poverty, and little recourse to unwanted pregnancies.

When you look beyond our borders, the numbers grow more alarming. Unicef reports that between the years 2000 and 2007, poverty was responsible for the death of almost 70 million children. No corner of the world was exempt.

For the women bearing these children, their fate is no better. According to the recent Unicef report, State of the World’s Children 2009, Maternal and Newborn Health:

“Having a child remains one of the biggest health risks for women worldwide. Fifteen hundred women die every day while giving birth. That's half a million mothers every year. The difference in pregnancy risk between women in developing countries and their peers in the industrialized world is often termed the greatest health divide in the world.”

Yet women’s bodies and the babies they bear continue to be the domain of politicians. When you look at the composition of Congress, that means they’re under the thumbs of a controlling bunch of aging white guys. Just think back on that sea of stony faces, panned by cameras while the President was delivering his recent State of the Union address.

For over two decades, from the time of Reagan through the Bush years, these guys had their way with the lives of women and their children. Using the Global Gag Rule introduced by the Reagan administration in 1984, Congress mandated that no foreign organizations receiving U.S. family planning assistance had the right to use their own non-U.S. funds to provide legal abortions, counsel or refer abortions, or lobby for the legalization of abortion in their country.

For those NGOs that refused to comply, the loss was not just in hard dollars. They also forfeited valuable technical assistance as well as U.S. donated contraceptives, including condoms—both critical components of the USAID family planning program.

The rule was rescinded in 1993 by Clinton and then reinstated in 2001 by George Bush on his first business day in office.

Two days after Obama was inaugurated, he struck down the Global Gag Rule, stating, “It is time we end the politicization of this issue.” (Click here for a piece about this in The Democratic Daily.)

But the politicization of a woman’s right to choose has not ended there. Thick in the muck of our current health-care reform quagmire is the Stupak Amendment—authored by the namesake Democrat from Michigan—that requires women to buy an additional insurance rider to cover abortion.

As did the Gag Rule in the mid-80s, this two-page insertion into an almost 1,100 page (and counting) bill has ignited a debate about whether federal tax dollars should be allowed to fund abortion. However, this time the funding denial is not embedded into a foreign aid policy, but in legislation that will impact the health and well being of women and their children nationwide.

Cynical me scratches my head and asks (myself or anyone else who will listen), three questions:

1. With money so tight and the chronic cry to cut spending, how can we encourage compromised women to bear unintended pregnancies while simultaneously cutting back on the entitlements that support these needy women and children?
2. Where are the statistics that demonstrate that for every unwanted birth there is an adoptive home (not with a gay couple, of course)?
3. Why are women always legally punished for being pregnant? The last time I consulted a biology book, it took two to make a baby—and one of them was male.

On the basis of dollars and cents, parenting remains the most expensive choice.

Outside our borders, the prospects for women and children are even bleaker. When the earthquake struck Haiti, the group hardest hit was its children. Ranking number 50 in the world for highest birth rate/1000 people, Haiti is also the poorest country in the western hemisphere. There were too many children to begin with, and since the earthquake, an estimated 380,000 are now orphaned.

The high-profile case of U.S. “missionary” Laura Silsby’s effort to leave Haiti with 33 undocumented children illustrates how vulnerable children are when the only adjective that can describe their future is desperate. Haitian authorities feared the children were to be trafficked across the border and sold into either domestic or sexual services.

Columnists such as Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times have written impassioned accounts of human trafficking both domestically and abroad, primarily in Asia. While estimates from Unesco and Unicef vary, both conclude that between half to a million women and children are sold into a form of slavery all over the globe every year.

Armchair politics want us to think that the choices women make are easy and linear. We love our children, therefore every new life is sacred.

But facts on the ground continue to prove otherwise. Where is the love when a woman is forced to birth a child that’s the result of rape? What if a woman keeps bearing children knowing she cannot feed them? What if survival entails selling your daughter into the sex trade?

If we love our children and want what is best for them, then it is time to stop playing politics. Instead, it is time to take responsibility for what it means to protect and care for the new lives we choose to bring into this world.

Yes, it’s true, but not in the way all those smug male senators think: Mothers know best.

Haitian Adoptees: The Problem with "Why Not?"

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude

This is the third in a series of commentaries on Adopt-a-tude about Haitian orphans and international adoption. The press spotlight has been on ethical infractions, for very good reason. But now we have local news stories about U.S.-Haiti adoptions that have been completed successfully. The word "savior" is never mentioned, but that's where the focus seems to be—again.


It's Saturday morning, and the Boston Globe has a beautiful, provoking, complicated photo above the fold on the front page. A dark-skinned girl with a purple headband and huge grin tackle-hugs a white woman with strawberry-blonde hair.

They're sitting on an oriental rug that's covering a hard-wood floor. The caption: "Wislandie, an 8-year-old orphan from Haiti, is right at home with adoptive mother Beth Wescott of North Andover."

I love this picture. As an adoptive mom myself, it's a relief after all the mug shots of misguided missionaries trying to smuggle children out of Haiti. In the video that accompanies the online version of the story, "A New Home for Wislandie," adoptive mom Beth gently rocks a little girl who is lively and mischievous but also clearly in need of comfort.

Yet the Globe's photo spread, video, and story by Maria Sacchetti—"Joy, Frustration Brought Home"—raise big questions for me, too, because of all that isn't said or shown. This front-page feature, more than all the press about those criminally ignorant Baptists, exemplifies the cognitive dissonance that's part of transracial adoption.

Why is the white-savior storyline so entrenched? And why is it so hard for the "objective" journalistic voice to talk about race?

The racial difference of these Haitian adoptees and their adoptive parents isn't mentioned once in this story. Perhaps the photo and video are supposed to lay that issue on the table—and they do—but the story frame is the usual one of dedicated church members (Wislandie's adoptive father is a pastor) visiting Haitian children in a Christian orphanage in Port-au-Prince.

To be fair to Wislandie's new parents and the orphanage (the Marion Austin Christian School) and this story, "about 10 Boston-area churches regularly send mission groups to help at the school," Sacchetti writes—and the connection prospective adoptive parents have formed with children apparently often goes back to when they were toddlers. Many of the prospective adoptees are in their teens.

Before the earthquake, some adoptions were already in-process; according to the article, a few like Wislandie's have been successfully completely. But other potential adoptive parents and adoptees wait, mired in even more bureaucratic red tape, as conditions for the orphanage children worsen. (In this same issue of the Globe, the story above Sacchetti's, after the jump to page A8,  is headlined "Haiti Wants Refugees Back in Ravaged Areas.")

As Massachusetts state rep Barry Finegold asks: "These children are never going to have families in Haiti, so why not try to bring them into loving families in Massachusetts?"

Yes, why not? The rhetorical question rings true in the most immediate way for long-time orphans. Seventeen-year-old Auguste Joseph wants to join his frustrated adoptive parents in Ashby, Masschusetts. Like other kids in the orphanage wearing Red Sox T-shirts, Auguste is quoted as saying, "I'm dying to go.... I've been waiting for a long time."

Why not?

For many of us in the international adoption community—adoptees, adoptive parents, birth parents, and adoption workers—this question is far from simple, though. After "why not?",  I also wonder "what next?"

There are hints of the dissonance to come in an evocative description at the end of the Globe feature: Wislandie is now wearing pink Crocs and has a bedroom of her own with heart-patterned wallpaper. "It is not an easy transition," Sacchetti writes; the girl's adoptive parents "look alternately joyful and exhausted."

Most haunting: "Even though she has so much now, Wislandie insists on dividing every snack or sandwich, to give away half to her mother, father, or sister."

The story then closes with her adoptive mom insisting—rightly—that her daughter isn't the only one who's lucked out.

Yet this is really just the prologue. The rest of the real story, which varies with every transracial adoptee and his or her particular family circumstances, is full of complications of race and culture and loss that apparently can't be accommodated in a mainstream news feature.

Here's where have I to ask: Why not? Why can't a daily paper like the Boston Globe, in a metropolitan area that includes a large Haitian immigrant population, tell this story as more than one white family's joy and the frustration of other waiting white families?

At least one caller to a January 20 NPR show, "Where Will All the Haitian Orphans Go?", raised issues of cultural and homeland loss. These were treated seriously by Tom DiFilipo, president and CEO of the Joint Council on International Children's Services, the guest on this edition of Talk of the Nation.

Other sources, such as the ColorLines' blog RaceWire, have grappled with the racial question of whites adopting Haitian orphans. And as one topic on the Haitian Internet Newsletter, "Haiti's Orphans, what are we going to do about it?", puts it:

"Let me ask you a question:

Do you really think that the rest of the world will just fly to Haiti and take all these Haitian kids into new homes somewhere outside of Haiti so they can live happily ever after?

The orphan children of Haiti are Haiti's problem and now is the time to start talking about how we're going to deal with it.

This is our country, these are our kids..."

Discussions about race and culture and international adoption are all over the Internet and in various blog and editorial forms, even in mainstream-press outlets. But you wouldn't know it from this Globe feature about Wislandie.

Interestingly, a number of the online comments to the story so far have been negative, pointing out snidely that there are American black kids waiting for adoption, too. That kind of knee-jerk response flips too far in the other direction, but it's obvious that readers and video-watchers are reacting immediately to the racial difference.

You could argue that daily news features are really people stories. Americans adopting orphans from countries like Haiti or Vietnam (as in my own family) can surely be heart-warming.

Simplifying the emotional storyline, however, by focusing only on getting home to America has political and social implications. It seems to deny that differences of race and culture matter. And I don't think daily news is off the hook for promulgating musty stereotypes—letting anonymous online commenters criticize or go out on a limb rather than reporting on what this white mother, for example, thinks about parenting a black child.

Of course Wislandie is happy to be free of the current devastation in Port-au-Prince, where many families huddle under nothing but bedsheet tents as the rainy season approaches.

Yet what will she think of her homeland as she gets older? Will she make connections with the local Haitian community in Boston and Cambridge? Will she keep speaking French and Creole? Will she realize that Haiti has a rich history and literature, a complicated history, that it is not just defined by poverty and disaster?

That is the international adoptive parenting journey. It is very possible that Wislandie's adoptive mom and dad will help her along the way. In the video, Beth holds the girl close and talks realistically about adjustment challenges and the scene in Haiti.

But not until I read more mainstream stories that dig into white adoptive parents talking about race—and not until I hear more about the links that could be forged between adoptees and the Haitian American community—will I believe that the discussion of international adoption has moved beyond saving those poor lucky kids from a place better left behind in the rubble.

Asian Adoptees, Anime Heroes, and the Racebending Controversy

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude

I began writing about the anime-inspired Avatar/Last Airbender cartoons in order to rave about how much everyone in my small family loves them. But I soon discovered that the live-action movie, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, has been cast with mostly white actors in the lead roles.

The controversy has been brewing for awhile, but I'd like to alert other adoptive parents to this "racebending," as it's been called by Asian American critics, especially after a glitzy ad for the movie ran during the Super Bowl. Please take a look at Racebending.com for information about the movie protest.

Who would have thought I’d develop a midlife crush on anime?

It’s true that at a recent showing of the New England Anime Society I felt a hundred years older than the mostly male geek audience. I had to leave within five minutes, unable to sit through the dialogue.

An approximation: “Look at his underpants!” “Ooh, he’s wearing underpants with a heart on them!” (Snigger, snigger.) “Careful, that girl on a bicycle has breasts.”

I won’t claim cartoons like this grip me. I've never been a big animation fan. But The Last Airbender, the epic Nickelodeon series, exists on a different plane altogether.

Whether it's My Neighbor Totoro, the kind of Japanese shorts I saw at the anime festival, or the American-flavored Nickelodeon series, these cartoons are undeniably Asian-themed.

As in Japanese anime, some of the characters have white skin or those big manga eyes. As in Kung Fu Panda, the Airbender cartoons employed mostly white voice actors; sometimes the young heroes sound like they've walked off an iCarly set.

But anyone who's watched the animated Airbender series knows that everything in it, from the character names to the music, is steeped in Asian cultural references. What my son sees in the cartoons are Asian heroes taking charge of the action—heroes who look like him.

That's why I'm frankly appalled that white actors will be playing many of the young heroes in the upcoming movie of The Last Airbender. In a good play on words, critics have called this racial reworking of the movie yet another example of "racebending."

Because my son has just turned eight, I want to celebrate what he so obviously loves about the Airbender series—the martial arts sequences, complete with lightning and ice arrows; the Asian imagery; the teenage heroes—and its particular meaning for us as an adoptive family.

I know I’m on suspect cultural ground here. Yet my son, an Asian adoptee, is growing up in a white American household. The Airbender cartoons are an anime hybrid created by two white American guys with the help of Korean animators—a fitting metaphor for us.

Now here comes a special-effects extravaganza of a movie, one my son will surely beg to see, which is another kind of metaphor. It will symbolize why Asian adoptees often feel like honorary white people.

I do worry about how my boy will put himself together as an Asian American man; I've come to see his fascination with anime and manga cartoons as a way for him to grapple with his heritage on his own terms. But with the Airbender movie, he'll get no help. Directed by the high-profile M. Night Shyamalan, it's in the works for this summer and may soon become a juggernaut. 

Shame on you, M. Night Shyamalan.

My husband and I can never claim we have a personal understanding of racism. We could be accused of ripping off Asian culture in adopting a child from Vietnam. Our family can't be reduced to that, but if I'm mercilessly honest, I have to admit that Asian culture is as appealing to me as it is to other white Americans who dabble in martial arts and yoga, attend anime festivals, and go to Chinese New Year's parades.

That makes it even more important for parents like me to challenge racism, unconscious and otherwise, and to name it for what it is.

When I mentioned to my son that white actors will be playing many of his favorite characters in the movie—including Aang, the last airbender and center of the story—he said, "What? That's weird. That doesn't make sense."

No kidding. Here's a fun YouTube montage from the animated original:

Aang is a bald 12-year-old monk with a blue arrow tattooed on his forehead. He's also a reincarnated spiritual leader known as the “Avatar.” He's the Dalai Lama, not Gandalf. 

Avatar: The Last Airbender first aired on Nickelodeon in 2005. Because we watched all three “Books” on DVD long after it was broadcast, we could see as many episodes as we wanted in a sitting. Every time we’d say a collective "No!" at the end of one—my son always adding, "What a cliffhanger!"—we’d look at each other and hit play for the next. (In case you’re wondering, the Avatar cartoons have nothing to do with the James Cameron movie.)

When the series opens, the Fire Nation is ruled by an evil lord who wants to take over the world. In The Last Airbender universe, benders have magical powers based on the four elements—air, water, earth, and fire. The Avatar is the one person who can bend them all. Aang is very young to become the Avatar. But the Fire Lord is on the march again, and Aang, with the help of his loyal companions, has to learn fast how to bend the other elements.

For those who don't love fantasy, there's no way to avoid the inflated portentousness this gloss implies. It’s manga-meets-The Lord of the Rings-meets Buddhism.

Yet it works. At least the animated version does. Thank God we've watched the cartoons before Shyamalan's epic rolls out. Here's the trailer that ran during the Super Bowl last night:

Impressive as it looks, it seems too bombastic and literal. As for the racebending casting choices, cartoonists Derek Kirk Kim and Gene Yang have written eloquent posts about why this is a problem. Take these excerpts from Kim's post, written a year ago "on the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration":

"[I]magine if someone had made a 'fantasy' movie in which the entire world was built around African culture. Everyone is wearing ancient African clothes, African hats, eating traditional African food, writing in an African language, living in African homes, all encompassed in an African landscape...

...but everyone is white.

How offensive, insulting, and disrespectful would that be toward Africans and African Americans? How much more offensive would it be if only the heroes were white and all the villains and background characters were African American? (I wince in fear thinking about The Last Airbender suffering from the latter dynamic—which it probably will....)

But curiously, when similar offenses are committed at the expense of Asian Americans, and Asian American men in particular, this sort of behavior goes mostly ignored by the press and the people involved." 

It's true that outcries of racism by the model minority are generally shrugged off by mainstream America. This trailer from an upcoming documentary called Yellow Face emphasizes why protesting the racial reworking of a kid's TV show is not just "silly" or a waste of effort.

The Shyamalan movie, the first of a planned trilogy, will likely get a big promotional push, especially after the success of Cameron's Avatar. That Shyamalan, an Indian American, went with such casting choices indicates how unconscious racism can be. Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire will play the crucial role of Prince Zuko, but only after replacing the original white actor cast for the role.

Just to be clear: Japanese and Korean creators of anime characters, be they super-ninjas or ghetto-talking African Americans, aren't off the hook for perpetuating racist stereotypes.

These days, there's an endless parade of martial-arts superhero franchises (and action figures and trading cards to buy), but most of this drek never rises above the ridiculously rote. There still aren't many positive, complex images of Asian characters in popular media—people who aren't karate-chopping villains on speeding trains or running nasty industrial cartels.

Which is why it's such a shame that many of the Airbender heroes won't be Asian in the movie.

In the Airbender cartoons we get Katara, a waterbender with healing powers, and her brother Sokka, resident goof and complainer. We get Toph, a blind earthbender who can bowl over bad guys four times her size and sees the world through her feet. We get Appa, Aang's flying bison, whom the loyal buddies ride through the air. 

There are kick-ass evil girls as well as good ones; soldiers who ride bird-horses; a haiku rap contest; even an old and cold soul in the spirit world who steals people's faces.

There are romantic entanglements, far more than in the buddy-plot of The Lord of the Rings. Aang’s cheeks often turn pink—in best anime style—in the vicinity of Katara.

Most important, there's character development and moral ambiguity, especially in the person of Prince Zuko, the banished teenage son of the Fire Lord. Zuko starts off trying to capture the Avatar in order to regain his father's approval. By Book Two of the series, Zuko is in a major tug-a-war of conscience over which side he's on. 

Adults will get more of the satirical references in The Last Airbender cartoons, but I think my son really understands and wonders about the same conflicts I do. To "bend" this story racially in order to appeal to a more mainstream audience is to do a real disservice to the complex questions about history and family the cartoons raise. 

In an early episode called “The Library,” Aang and his companions, along with a professor of anthropology, find a legendary library of all the world's knowledge almost completely buried by sand in the middle of a desert.

Once they enter the library through an upper window, they meet an Owl-like spirit who runs it. The Owl is not warm and fuzzy. This amoral spirit looks like a kabuki-painted demon in a black shawl.

Still, the Owl agrees to let them stay as long as they don't take away knowledge in order to hurt other humans. Sokka, in particular, doesn't keep that promise, and the Owl flies into a frenzy. They flee for their lives, just escaping before the library collapses forever into the sand.

On the way out, however, the professor can't make himself leave. He stays behind and disappears with the rest of the library. 

"Why didn't he leave?” my son asked. “Didn't he die?"

“Some people will do anything for knowledge,” I said.

He didn’t look convinced.

“It’s hard to explain,” I said. “Some adults just get obsessed.”

"Why?" His voice quivered. “Did he die?” 

I wanted to comfort my boy then, as if he were a baby, murmuring it will be fine, it’s all right, you will never lose anybody you love. Ssshh, real adults don’t act that way. 

I reached for him, but he slapped my hands away.

“No!” he sobbed.

I stayed with my son as he cried and raged—internally kicking myself. Stupid professor. Except I understood the man’s love of books and his obliviousness, just as my son knows some adults really do disappear.

More recently, he and I have talked about which Airbender episodes are the most disturbing. He doesn’t want to watch something like “The Library” again, and I’ve since wondered if I should have spared him the disturbing parts. But on balance, I'd say no.
 

Birthdays have their own emotional weight for adoptees. My son has just celebrated another one with us—happily, I think. Yet birthdays inevitably evoke missing parents, too, and in his case, a missing race and culture. At eight, my son is full of joy. He may also be excited by the prospect of traveling beyond his white American existence, a desire that churns up guilt and grief.

The point is, his journey will be complex. Shyamalan's movie may ask big questions, too, but he's got a hard act to follow.

Late in the animated series, Prince Zuko visits his family’s summer house on a remote island, discovering photos of his mother and father when he was a small child. In the pictures, they're laughing; they seem happy. Teenage Zuko, estranged from his father, his mother gone, becomes more furious and sullen.

As we watched Zuko burn the photos, my son snuggled closer to me.

“It’s sad,” he said.

I nodded my head against his glossy black hair. “It’s very sad.”

Oh, my dear boy. Happy Birthday.


This post appeared on Open Salon in a slightly different form as "How I Became an Anime Fan—Not a Racebender."  Some of the comments there indicate why racism keeps sneaking in under the wire.

 

All drawings by my son and used with his permission.