It’s been two months since I’ve returned Stateside, and once again I am acutely aware of my sense of belonging in this country. In the corners of New Jersey that I grew up in, I am luckily not made aware of my “painted bird” [link] status. But trips to Eastern Pennsylvania (where my brothers live) […]
Tag Archives: identity
Prior to 2013, I was considered, by some, to be an adoption activist as I wrote and presented about historic trauma, and the role of legislation in determining legitimacy as a family, a person, a representative of an ethnic group. Adoptions were bad, staying within family/community was good. But then a funny thing happened on […]
I don’t remember the first time someone told me I was White. But I definitely remember the last. It was the summer of my junior year in college and I was a new student orientation leader. My university was diverse but mostly segregated, and this staff was about half White and half Black – plus […]
I went to the local animal shelter yesterday. I do that sometimes. To get back to my roots. This is therefore in two parts. The first part summarises details from the trip. The second part poses some of the questions as: To be chosen or not to be chosen, is that the question? What are […]
I was proactive at a very young age. Ok, full disclosure: I am wordy-nerdy. I have been thinking about how we define ourselves as either adopted or as adoptees. Both of these words feel very much about action that happened TO us. One EFL site referred to adjectives ending in ‘ed’ as words that “show […]
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 is my first post with TRE and I would like to share my gratitude to Daniel and the other contributors for this space. And for you, readers. I have this memory from 3rd grade. On the surface, it’s a fairly mundane image; I am staring at a piece of paper with a large circle […]
The following arrives at the point of asking: In the face of too much irresolvable complexity, must we simply say “fuck it” and accept and live by the (untenable) premise that we can go on living “without culture” by taking whatever we pick up (individually) to have the sustaining and grounding quality that actual culture […]
I hope not to retread overly well-worn material (about the problems or issues of identity), but I feel some threads currently adrift in the ether might usefully get woven together in (something that at least might seem for a moment) a new configuration. I apologize if this gets longer than desirable (the long post-title makes […]
This comment came in on the RAD discussion, and I thought it expanded nicely into a topic of discussion on its own: Got to your Twitter feed somehow and have been reading some of your articles and wanted to share something that I guess is not necessarily on topic, some points resonated with me. I […]
I’d like to touch back on to two discussions we’ve had so far, one on nature vs. nurture as posited by Snow Leopard, and the other one having to do with Russian adoptions, and the idea of a second-best race-based adoption, i.e., one that does not (seemingly) require those adopting from having to mythologize their […]
Do you believe transracial adoptees do not struggle as much with their cultural identity when they have a sibling who is also adopted from their same cultural background?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the general lack of response to our claim that our culture, language, and identity have been destroyed, and by the willful replacement of this with “culture” and “heritage” camps and the like. This was touched on in the item Neo-colonialism: APs on the front lines of Empire, but I’ve […]
I stumbled across this article in Asia One, which was discussing the appointment of Fleur Pellerin as a minister in the new French government. The article states concerning the Korean-born Frenchwoman: Newspapers in Seoul on Friday splashed frontpages with her picture and carried stories about her life while the ruling New Frontier Party expressed hope […]
I randomly came across your blog tonight and can’t stop reading. I am a white adoptive mom to my African-American three-year-old daughter. I already feel some ridicule just by saying that and in a crazy way feel I need to give you a synopsis to justify her adoption but am trying to just stick to […]
Transracialeyes 