Over on Twitter, Lilly Schmaltz 飞岗 (@lillyschmaltz) just tweeted out: Small accomplishment. Just had my first Mandarin text message conversation with a native speaker—only needed my dictionary a few times! Feelin’ good 😆 And it made me smile, myself having learned the language “I would have spoken if….”—I know how difficult a road it is, […]
Tag Archives: language
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 […]
****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 […]
In Jung’s Symbols of Transformation, at one point he remarks on the irregular origins of birth for heroes in many sacred traditions: The hero is not born like an ordinary mortal because his birth is rebirth from the mother-wife. That is why the hero so often has two mothers. As Rank has shown with a […]
I hope, if proposing this question re-treads material already exhausted previously, that revisiting it has also a quality of refreshing it. But also, to avoid taking up a lot of space with any sort of startled “discovery” of the issue on my part, I intend only to submit it to the collective intelligence of the […]
A friend recently asked me: I was wondering how you would suggest I respond when people trot out the, ‘don’t be selfish just wait 9 months and give your child up for adoption’ BS. Besides the other things I thought to respond with, I also came up with: “Whoa, really? Your solution to the ‘problem’ […]
I came across a list of books targeting children as the audience with the subject being transracial adoption [link]. Two questions. Can you now imagine or consider that these might have been helpful/hurtful reading as a child? What books did you turn to (consciously or not-so) to help you deal with your adoption and/or these […]
Elsewhere, the “dis-ease” of nostalgia has recently been invoked. The medicalisation of this term already raises interesting questions, and its etymology sheds further light on this: 1770, “severe homesickness” (considered as a disease), Modern Latin (cf. French nostalgie, 1802), coined 1668 by Johannes Hofer, as a rendering of German heimweh, from Greek algos “pain, grief, […]
We’ve already discussed food analogies that are used as metaphors for interracial adoption; we’ve discussed how pet adoption is similar to human adoption. Now it’s time to talk about metaphorical comparisons to animals used to “help” the transracially adopted child [link]: Despite the grumblings and protests of the other animals, Baby Brown Bear learns family […]
We, adoptees, cannot force P/APs to listen to what we have to say. We can remark, on the other hand, how much what we have to say disturbs the house of cards that represents the mythologies built up around adoption. How many of us have been erased from discussions at such web sites as Canada […]
Let’s forget about falafel, and kimchee, and dumplings, etc.; let’s forget about lamps, and dragons, and carpets and I don’t know what else; all the other superficial aspects that the “West” sees as “culture” from abroad. What instead have you learned from the culture of your place of birth that contradicts what we now refer […]
This was in the search phrase list today. This comes on the heels of a post over at The Adopted Ones, as well as our own item on search phrases. Add to this the list of so-called “disrupted adoptions”, and their celebration (yes, celebration) in the mainstream media. I want to expand on this, and […]
Fellow adoptees: What advice do you have [in terms of language learning, culture shock, etc.] for those who decide to go back for a visit, travel back for an extended stay, or make the decision to definitively return to their place of birth?
This question is a follow-up to the one asking about the orphanage-bestowed name, and its importance; I’d like to expand on this a little bit if I may. In local culture, the question to ask after someone is min aya bayt?—from which house? In this way a [family] name is closely tied to place, and […]
I am currently working with a group locally that does research for returning adoptees to Lebanon, similar to such organizations in other source countries. We are going through my collected bogus paperwork, bogus passport, and bogus references and one by one crossing out the information contained in them as being useful or not (mostly not). […]
Transracialeyes 