We’ve spoken about ghosts here and there. Lately, with reunion looming, I feel like I am haunting my own life, finding might-have-been footsteps; meeting could-have-been friends and, inch’allah, even family. But the metaphor is bothering me. A ghost is the immaterial which haunts the physical plane of the past, of what was. What is it […]
Author Archives: Daniel Drennan ElAwar
A question from a fellow adoptee: My question for other adoptees is, what have your experiences been as far as “coming out” as adopted is concerned? For instance, I am an adoptee completely estranged from my parents for six years, but a lot of my friends and coworkers did not know anything about my family […]
Over the years I’ve received much in the way of hateful missives, personal attacks, threats, libelous statements, etc. Some I reply to, some I ignore, some I seek legal counsel concerning. After a recent uptick in such communication, I realized something about the nature and sublimated message of them, which perhaps serves as a “message” […]
In a previous post [link], Lucy explores the idea of abuse that can be stated is functional to adoptive parents withholding information from a child temporarily in their care. I didn’t want to hijack that post, so I’m hoping to expand on that here a bit. If we define the systemic displacement, dispossession, and disinheritance […]
I saw a post that compared adoption to Stockholm Syndrome, the name given to those kidnapped who eventually identify with their captors [link to article]. It got me thinking about adoptees who no longer identify with their adopters, for reasons having to do with age, evolution, rematriation, etc. But I wanted to expand a little […]
In a separate post we discussed the “slumming it” [link to post] of adoptive parents. Along these lines, I came across today a CHIFF supporter blog which reads: “After all, the poor will always be with us”. Rather Calvinist, as I’m fond of saying. There was also this, from an article about Kenya entitled: “Treated […]
Amy’s comment on knowing more about Korean cooking than her compatriots got me thinking about food and culture/identity, especially because we’ve already discussed this in terms of the negative of racist food analogies [link]. I mentioned to my sister (a pastry chef/wedding cake baker) the other day that I really missed our “first Sunday” monthly […]
This was a recent search phrase: When adoptees find their family, do some members of that family get jealous? Interpret/answer at will….
Jae Ran Kim has referred to Asian adoptees as “the model minority of the model minority”; this came up in an item discussing the arrival of a French Korean adoptee to the government ministerial level in that country [link]. We’ve also discussed the “glass ceiling” which might be described as racism suffered out of the […]
Comments on this, the movie, the musical, the comic strip, the mediation of orphans, popular culture and adoption? [link]
Can you share any “glass-ceiling” moments you might have had in your life when you realized the limits of “meritocracy”, “working hard to succeed”, and other assimilationisms?
In speaking of “rematriation” as opposed to “repatriation”, we take a different and gendered view of our adoptions and our return [link]. I’d like to expand on this with a notion that I have been painfully aware of these past years as I’ve worked with returned adoptees in Lebanon, male and female. As a male […]
Random snippets behind this post include this quote I came across on Twitter [link]: “Getting rid of your Chineseness by losing your accent, it’s like grinding away your face.” —Richard A Lou, artist; from the book War Baby/Love Child It makes me think of a former and historical/egalitarian “cosmopolitanism” or mixing of cultures in an […]
I’m touching back here to a discussion we had about AP entitlement [link], and how our discussions, which we would hope help us “break out” of the status quo discussion of adoption in fact feed back into the “adoption loop” as it were. Recently the reactions to NPR’s mediation of transracial adoption, as well as […]
I was describing my return to Lebanon to someone and the word “repatriated” came out of my mouth. It went without notice, but I was stuck on this term afterward, and it was bothering me to refer to myself this way. For one reason, it seemed too much to echo “expatriate” as well as “patriarchy”; […]
Transracialeyes 