It is Chinese New year, and as a family with a child from
China, our family will be celebrating. I
don’t discuss my kids and family much on this blog, it’s just an arbitrary boundary,
but I have two daughters who are more a part of me than anything I've ever posted. One was
adopted from China and the other came to us the old fashioned way. Our decision to adopt was not due to my wife
and I not being able to get pregnant , it was more of a calling and it just felt
right. I couldn’t imagine life without her.
At this point, we
both completely forget she is from China at times, and at the same time, make
sure to always honor it. Once somebody is part of your family and your heart,
you don’t see skin color. You literally forget, and have to remind yourself. We
recently went to a place where it was pretty darn white and non-diverse, and
got some looks and comments, and it was like “oh, that’s right. We are an
inter-racial family.” It is something that
happens periodically, but not frequently.
I was home from China for less than a week before somebody asked “How
much did she cost?” in a grocery store.
So we do what we can
to honor that she’s Chinese and celebrate it. It would be wrong to dismiss her experience as
a racial minority in her own family and as someone who has tons of questions
about why she was given up for adoption. But to only identify her as a child
adopted from China would be a major mistake too.
We have done tons of reading on the subject and have regular
age appropriate conversations with her. This will continue. The implications of international adoption are
too many to mention here, but they are many. She will never know about the
circumstances of her first months of life, will never look into the eyes of her
birth mother, and may always wonder if she has biological siblings running
around the other side of the world. Plus, there’s the grief of not being from her
mommy’s tummy. Her real mommy. The one who is raising her. They have developed the
greatest bond I’ve seen two humans have.
My novel about Chinese adoption, The Jade Rabbit, is
partially my attempt to come to terms with what she has experienced and perhaps
may experience as an adult. In fact, all of my books I am realizing how autobiographical
they are. Writing, like running, is
where things get squeezed out of you, and you find out what’s inside (I’m losing
my boundaries here).
I have issues like Thomas Cleaves does from my novel STRAY due
to watching so many clients relapse over my 17 years of working with other
addicts.
My novel, On the lips of Children, was written after my
brother passed, who lived near San Diego, and some of this darkness certainly
found its way inside the novel. In fact, as I look back, I wonder if he isn’t
the nameless homeless man in the story who was taken hostage in the cave and is
left for dead. There’s guilt inside for
leaving him.
The Jade Rabbit, the story of a woman adopted from China, is
my only book written in first person and it was done consciously as a way to
try and experience the perspective of my daughter. I wanted to get inside the head of someone
who has had her life experiences, at least in a general way. I certainly cannot
expect my presumptions about what she may feel to be accurate. Still, it helped to imagine best I could by really
getting inside the character of Janice Woodward from The Jade Rabbit. I still
cry when I read the ending, not because it is so good, but because it is so
personal.
And just as in real life where I have my best insights and
emotional catharsis in the throes of a run, I made Janice into a runner who
actually has spiritual connections to her heritage and ancestry as she runs.
This isn’t fiction, however, this is daily stuff. Just recently my daughter blurted out matter
of factly, “I can’t be president.” Of course you can, I thought, a woman can be president. But then she explained,
“No, I wasn’t born in this country.” I
felt a stab in my gut. I will get the law changed, I said, or just become vice president, and I will take
care of the rest.
People are people, skin is skin, but it matters, beyond any
type of white-guilt political correctness crap.
For most of us, we are rarely the only person in the room with our skin
tone. I once went to a Baptist church
and had a great time, but I was one of maybe 4 folks who were white among the 4,000.
It makes you self-conscious and takes a degree of confidence. The community where
we live is diverse, but still, rarely is my daughter not the minority in the
room. We have put her in situations where this is not the case and will
continue to do so. It’s up to us to give
her exposure, gauge her needs, her hopes, and give her
the confidence in who she is. We are
saving to go back to China sometime soon. Until then, we do things like
celebrating Chinese New Year from across the world.
Happy New Year. It is the year of the horse.
