I suppose it’s fitting in a way that my first entry on this blog falls on my arrival day. There’s no good place to start talking about adoption because there are so many facets of the subject, so many ways to approach it and discuss it, and for those of us who are adopted, as with anyone really, it is hardly the easiest thing in the world to write out our own experiences in a logical, cohesive and coherent fashion.
My arrival day, at least for me, serves as suitable a starting place as any. Not that I remember anything about it. I was barely four months old when I arrived at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport from South Korea twenty four years ago. Apparently I was generally in very good health, but had picked up a nasty virus on the way over and was not a very happy camper when my parents first met me, and of course I was jet-lagged so I kept my parents up for about the first week and a half before finally settling into my new time zone.
Now I can assure you, even if I was at all aware of how different my surroundings were from the ones I had been in back in Korea, any “trauma” or “grieving” I might have felt didn’t carry over to my awareness as I got older. I was far too young to know much more than being hungry and needing a diaper change. For kids who were older, of course the day they arrived was difficult, traumatic even, but for me, it was not, and the fact that my parents like to celebrate my arrival day by giving me flowers or taking me out to dinner doesn’t bother me at all.
I think, though, that the things that bothered me about other arrival days that I’ve been to as a young adult were probably present when I arrived. Things like balloons and cards that say “Welcome home,” and people talking about how the adoptee is “finally home.” That sentiment that somehow, all is “right” with the world now that the adoptee from whatever far corner of the globe is finally in America.
It’s not that I don’t think of my parents as my parents, or my home as my home. It’s more subtle than that. For the first four months of my life, I was also home. In Korea. When I was adopted, I was home. In the U.S. Being adopted from Korea to the U.S. doesn’t mean that I was meant to be American rather than Korean. It doesn’t cheapen the validity of Korea as my home for those first four months. It simply means that papers were signed and homestudies were completed and background checks were done and I was no longer Jee Sun, but Julia.
I think the “welcome home” sentiment is well meant. I don’t see it as the first salvo of adoptive parents’ attempts to wipe out their adopted child’s culture and identity. Acceptance like this is something a lot of us find in very short supply if/when we go back to visit or live in our birth countries. I think it’s largely a product of the power structure that is inherent in international adoption (third world/underdeveloped countries supply the children for the wealthy/developed countries that demand them) and the perhaps subconscious sense of entitlement that many adoptive parents feel to “their” child. For this reason, though, I always try to make a point when I speak to panels of prospective adoptive parents at the local adoption agency that adopted children are children of two homes, two worlds, two families, and just because they are adopting, does not make their identity any more important or valid than that of the child’s birth country/culture.
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