The latest issue of Adoptive Families’ magazine has an article by Mei-Ling Hopgood. She writes from the perspective of an adult adoptee, having been adopted from Taiwan in the 1970s and raised in the U.S. by white parents, together with her two brothers adopted from Korea.
I’ve written before about the discomfort I sometimes feel regarding how much to emphasize my daughters’ birth culture. Many young adult adoptees are now speaking out and saying that they either thought of themselves as “white” or desperately wanted to be, that they had a tremendous shock in high school or college when others saw them as part of the Asian student community, that they are angry about losing their native language and not knowing how to interact with Koreans culturally.
As a result, adoption agencies and counselors and adoptive parent groups emphasize over and over again that we should help our children honor their culture.
And yet, I’ve always sensed that we could go overboard. We can’t forget that adoption will always influence our family dynamics and our children’s lives, but is it possible to emphasize difference too much and give an impression that people of that ethnicity are exotic and not like the rest of us.
Mei-Ling Hopgood shares at least some of my sentiments. She writes that she was uncomfortable when she met a Midwestern mom who enthusiastically made presentations to her daughters’ classrooms every year, displaying a Korean hanbok and talking about Korea.
Hopgood said she felt vaguely uneasy. Perhaps it was because Koreans don’t wear hanboks every day (my own daughters had the impression that they did; I had no idea they thought that), Korean-Americans don’t wear hanboks every day, and this woman’s daughters never wore hanboks.
Adoptive Families has referred to this as “museum culture”—the most novel and exciting things about a culture such as food, dress, tourist sites, traditional crafts. It is sad but true that many of us adoptive parents like learning about other cultures, but have no real connection to people of our children’s ethnicity or race.
It is understandably uncomfortable to be around people who are different from us. But our kids need to see people of their culture going about daily life in their adoptive country as well.
For one adoptive mom’s story of developing ties with the local Korean-American community, see my blog reviewing A Euro-American on a Korean Tour at a Thai Restaurant in China.
Please see this related blog: