Pidgeon-holed

While searching the web to see what other people were saying about Suzanne Berghaus I came across the The Transracial Korean Adoptee Nexus blog. The site's focus is on Korean Adoption and Pan-Asian identity issues it also looked at other adoptee related news. The goal of the site is to "empower transracial adoptees to speak out and speak with each other."

kadnexus makes a an excellent point in his post about the story.

Once again I find myself coming back to this idea of identity where transracial adoptees exist within their own space of identity. Just as many are torn between the duality of American/White culture (that they were raised on) and their birth country’s culture, it seems that trying to classify the nuanced situations ofadoptees as either immigrant or refugee is too complex.

We are still considered Asian by appearance, conform to various stereotypes of the already pervasive and systemic virus of over-achievement, yet we also have been raised within middle to affluent White Christian America-raised on many of the same values and logic that most Whites use to manipulate programs such as affirmative action, andracialize people of color. We are inherently taught how to socialize with mainstream white society, communicate with impeccable English, and are given the resources needed to survive. I realize that quite a few of us turned out “ok” but I think it was an interesting analysis that really considers the privileged status from which we come from as Asian Americanadoptees.

I think he makes a great point. Where do transracial adoptees fit in? While many of of benefit from our up brings at the same time it alienates us from our own people. My comment to him was that to white people I am Hispanic and to Hispanics I'm a gringo/white. Where does that leave me? With out a defined culture perhaps.

His response was that "America is all about pidgeon-holing people into picking sides (similarly for biracial people) we are made to feel as though we HAVE to choose sides to be legimitate individuals" I completely agree with this. Growing up I remember one of my friends of a mix racial background "picked" a side that people thought was wrong. She was given a lot of crap for not acknowledging her "black" heritage.

I guess why question is: Isn't this what America is all about? What makes America great is that it has become this melting pot of culture. That we have all these different points of view and life experiences. Why should we be made to feel like this is a bad thing?

Kadnexus' goal is to "empower adoptees to feel this space as their own-I think that our identity is unique." I think is a great goal since a big part of being a transracial adoptee or biracial individual is picking sides.

Looking into the past

While I was writing my post about the orphanage I started to wondering if I could find the orphanage online anywhere.

Maybe someone working there would remember me and could tell me a little bit more about what I was like there. We know that I had to be fed first and that I really liked coke but not much else. Maybe they would have a funny story or something about me.

I did a quick google search and I found a news letter from 2003 from an orphanage with the same name but in a different location in Honduras. At the bottom was an email address of someone who I assumed worked there. I sent them an email asking if they did in fact work there or knew of anyone who was working there.

I got a response back earlier this week from a man who no longer worked there but was able to provide me with the email address of someone who does. I asked this person if they knew anyone who might have worked there during the same time period I was there. She said she did and was glad to help.

This morning I sent her an email that she could forward asking if anyone remembered me. I haven't herd back yet but I'll be interested to see if anyone responds.

The Orphanage - By Nelson Roberto

When the gunfire stops a women lays dead face down in the door way. Two men have been shot as well. They lie slumped over rifles by there side. As the police go through the house I'm found crying in my crib. Next to me are two other girls. Social services is called in to deal with us. As I'm being as taken away a news paper photographer stops us to take a picture. One police officer is holding me while the male officer next her tries to get me to smile. It works. My face lights up in a happy little smile completely unaware of what has just happened and what is to come.

I'm taken to a private orphanage in Tegucigalpa Honduras. This will be my home for the next year. I will spend most of my days in a my crib straiting out of the window on the third floor of this clay building. I won't learn how to walk or speak very well. I won't eat very well either. But I will be fed.

During this time a notice is put into the paper asking anyone who might be missing a child to come forward and claim me. No one does, so six months after I arrive I am legally put up for adoption. I will wait another six month before I meet my parents.

It's May 1980 and I have just turned two. My adoptive parents arrived in the country a few weeks earlier. Today we will meet for the first time.

My soon to be dad wakes up early and staring making coffee. My soon to be mom lays in bed a few more minuets for before joining him. They are tired from a long night of nervous sleep.

"What do you think he will looks like?"
"We will know very soon." My mother replies.

They shower and dress quick anticipating what is to come.

My dad paces nervously waiting for the social worker to arrive. "Why do you think they wouldn't let any picture be taken of him? Do you think might be something wrong with him that they don't want us to know about?"

"I don't know hunny we will see soon enough."

"Where are they? They should have been here by now." my dad says anxiously

"They will come try to relax" my mom replies trying to hide her own anxiety.

"I'm going to call to make sure" My dad hurries off to make the call. He return shortly. "She's not home." He reports disappointedly

Then the door bell rings. Finally the social worker has come to take them to the orphanage.

As they arrive they are greeted by one of the staff members. Not wasting any time my dad asks. "What is he like?"

"Hes a sweet little boy but he will cry and cry if he is not fed first." She answers shaking her head

"Oh?" my mom inquires.

"Don't worry hes really nice" she replies quickly "but he doesn't talk much. He only knows how to say agua. That means water and he says it when hes hungry or when he needs anything else."

As they walk through the rooms filled with cribs, some of the children poke their heads up to see the visitors.

"I wonder if we could adopt more than one." My dad wonders aloud.

"Here we are." The staff member stops at the last crib on the third floor. "Oh and one more thing..." she says as a smile crosses her face "he really loves Coke."

This is the moment my had parents been waiting for. As they approach the crib they see me lying down in a cloth diaper and an old t-shirt. I look up with a blank expression on my face not knowing what to expect.

My mom hands me a Paddington bear with a blue raincoat and red hat. I play with it curiously. Its the first stuffed animal I've ever had. They pick me up and hold me. I'm not sure what to make of this. They takes turns holding me and playing my with long curly brown hair. But now they must leave to finalize the adoption.

They put me back in the crib and say good bye. They will be back for me tomorrow once it is official. As they drive away I watch from my window, holding my Paddington close, wondering who are these people and if I'll ever see them again.

Adoption stories

When I started the Ana's Miracle blog I was writing primarily to tell my family's story and reflect on everything that has happened to us. One aspect of the story that I had not spent a lot of time talking about was the adoption part. As I wrote on my Being Adopted post I don't think about it as much anymore.

However I started looking into different groups on facebook and other sites about being adopted. Reading what so many people wrote reminded me of the days when I felt very confused about being it.

There are so many other great adoption stories out there and so many people struggling with it as I did. But I didn't really find a good place to share stories. They are kind of all over the place. So I decided to build a lens on Squidoo about it. (If you haven't checked out Squidoo its a pretty cool site created by the one and only Seth Godin.

I just started it but I'm hoping to add more soon. If anyone would like to share there story I'd love to hear it. Let me know what you think.

Adoption Stories on Squidoo

The Adoption Story - Nelson/Roberto

I haven't talked much about the adoption side of things on this blog yet so I want to get into that a little bit more. I'm probably going to mess up some of my facts since I was only a little baby when some of this happened. I'm sure my mother will do a much better job of telling it but here it goes.

I was adopted from an orphanage in Honduras in 1983. My adoptive parents had just started the adoption process and were probably about a year away from getting a child. Then one night they got a phone call around 9:00pm saying that there was a child available for them however there was no picture, no background information and they would have until 3:00pm the next day to decided. I don't think this ever happens in adoption cases.

Thankfully, after a long night with not much sleep, they decided to adopt. They were living in the Boston area and had to rush to get everything ready before leaving for Honduras. It was the beginning of April and they had to be down in Central America by May. As they were getting ready to leave they found out that they would need FBI clearance in order to travel to Honduras. This normally takes 4 or 5 weeks and they only had one. To their surprise someone(we'll call him/her a Mystery Politician) pulled some strings for them and Senator Kerry's office was able to get them clearance in 2 days.

They flew down to Honduras where they were provided with a place to stay and a lawyer to help them with all the paper work. Again, this never happens. As the adoption went on the people involved where very hush hush and wouldn't tell my parents anything. They mentioned something about a gunfight but wouldn't say why I was up for adoption or why they were trying to get me out of the country so fast. My adoptive father speculated that I was illegitimate sun of the president or something like that. They did learn that our Mystery Politician was overseeing the adoption and this explained where all the political help was coming from.

They finished the adoption and took be back to the US with them. The judge who oversaw my case required that my father mail her updates every 6 months. My father diligently sent letters for almost 2 years. While talking to another parent about there experience he learned that these updates were not part of the normal adoption process and he promptly stopped. This seamed to the make the whole adoption that much weirder.

I grew up knowing that I was adopted (My parents are white and they always told me I was.) But they couldn't tell me who my parents were or even when I was born. This was very hard for me growing up since it meant it would be next to impossible to find my birth family. My Adopted father had this newspaper article that someone had gotten for us. The article had a picture of a man who had been killed around the time that I went into the orphanage. As I was growing up he would look at the picture and try to see if there was any resemblance between us.

Then one day the impossible happened. My parents got another phone call at night in the summer of 97. A man called from an organization called Probusqueda that looked for lost children in El Salvador. It turned out I had been born there not Honduras and my birth family had been looking for me for 4 years. My parents told me soon after when I got home from summer camp. It was a huge shock for all of us.

The organization sent us pictures and letters from them written to the lost child Roberto(that's me.) After a blood test to confirm that hey were indeed my family we started to make arrangements to fly down. In truth they really didn't need to do the blood test. I look exactly like my birth father and a lot like my older brother.

That Christmas we flew down to meet them the for the first time. My adopted parent were nervous that I would want to stay with my birth family but that never really crossed my mind. Since then I have been down about twice a year to visit them and we have become one big family. Its been truly an amazing and I'm so lucky to have had such wonderful adoptive parents who supported me all these years and when I went to meet my birth family.

Part 2 - The back story or read the e-book

Being Adopted - By Nelson/Roberto

I think adoption is one of the most wonderful and at the same time one of the most difficult things I have experienced in my life. The joy of adoption can best be described by the quote that begins this blog.

Losing ones family obliges us to find ones family. Not always the family that is our blood but the family that can become our blood.

However, no matter how great my adoptive parents have been, growing up as an adopted child was not always easy. The most difficult emotion I have ever had to deal with was the uncertainty that came from being adopted. I imagine that most if not all adopted persons go through a similar experience sometime during their life.

Perhaps in my case these feelings might have been harder to deal with. For my parents did not even know birthday never mind how I came to be adopted. Today I could not imagine my life without my adopted family but back then having them was not enough.

There is just something about your birth-mother/birth-father that you can never forget or completely let go of. You want to know what they look like, if you look like them and what kind of people are they. But most importantly you want to know: Why was I given up?

To this question there is no easy answer. It is something that I struggled with and watched my friends struggle with. Some were more vocal than others but you just knew even the quiet ones were thinking about it too. You wonder how can the people who gave you life simply give you away? Well I'm sure it's never that easy and I'm sure they never forget either.

I used to sit at night staring out of my window wishing I could just see my my mother. I thought if I could just see her, she would make everything better. These feelings never went away, no matter how hard I tried to fight or ignore them. But that all changed when I met my birth family.

Being reunited with them was incredible to say the least. I went from not knowing my birthday to having three new siblings and a huge family that had been looking for me all along. It seamed to answer all my questions about who I was and if I looked like my parents (I'm practically a carbon copy of my father.)

However I feel like I am very lucky in this respect. I have herd a few stories of people who went looking for their birth parents only to find they had nothing in common and could not relate to each other. I wish I could say "Don't worry one day you will find your birth parent too and everything will be alright" but I know that's not always the case. Not every adoption story has such a happy ending.

In the end I wonder how much finding your birth parents really matters. Yes finding them did answer a lot of my questions and it did take away the awful feeling of uncertainty but I don't think that's what mattered most. I think what mattered the most was the family that we have became.

I hardly think of it as my adopted family and my birth family anymore. When people say "oh you found your real parents" I say no I found my birth parents. I don't even like to make the distinction between them. I just like to think I have two sets of parents and one BIG family.

Family is more than just being related because sometimes even our own blood doesn't treat us as they should. Family is about caring for people and loving them unconditionally. Family is what we found in them and what they found in us.

Not always the family that is is our blood but the family that can become our blood...


Christmas 1997

Christmas 2006

My Birthdays - Nelson/Roberto

Yesterday was a friend of mines birthday. We went out to eat for 3 hours and had lots of fun. I love getting together like this for birthdays and my birthday. However this wasn't always the case. Growing up I never knew my real birthday and it always bugged me that everyone else knew there's. Some people even knew the exact time of birth. I had no idea. I used to look at calendar and feel like it was blank.

I did have a birthday that my adoptive parents gave me when I was adopted. Growing up this is what we celebrated but it always felt so ...hollow and fake. Even thought we had cake and everything it never felt like it was mine. Don't get me wrong I still enjoyed my birthdays and of course loved the presents...who doesn't?

Looking back on it now I think those feeling of emptiness were really part of something bigger. Your birthday while not being terribly important to the in larger scheme of life is an important part of your identity. Its something so simple that people take for gran it. Whenever someone asked how old I was I would say something like "I'm 15...I think" It was that little bit of uncertainty that bothered me so much. I could be 15 or 14 or 16. I never knew.

Now that I know when my birthday is, I developed a sense of pride when I tell people. After 16 years of uncertainty it feels so good to be able to look someone in the eye and say I was born on may 22, 1981 at 2pm in San Salvador. I think that why I make such a big deal of it now and the fact that I have two birthdays. I'll joke with friends and say "today is my second birthday what did you get me?" Of course they always come back with "you only get one" Hey it doesn't hurt to try.