What is the obverse of “ghost” and “haunting”?

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 […]

Adoption: Abide or die.

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” […]

Guilty as charged: Aiding and abetting adoption

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 […]

Adoption and “Chaperone Syndrome”.

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 […]

Cuisine, Culture, Identity, and Adoption.

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 […]

The imminent “model minority” smackdown.

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 […]

Gender issues for rematriating adoptees.

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 […]

Assimilate or…?

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 […]

Breaking open the adoption discussion.

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 […]