Kids Of "Quiet Migration" Come Of Age

[Seil]

So a while back, CJ had a thread about the pros and cons of adoption, and I saw this in the paper today and thought of her. It's an interesting article, and I just wanted to share it:

News Story!

I think it's a really cool facet of human behavior - searching for belonging. I couldn't tell you about the psychological aspects of it, or, well anything about anything really. I just thought that the idea of those adopted seeking to learn more about their biological parents and why they were given up would make a great thread discussion.

Fragments of memory

Jenna’s parents made her file available, and made sure she knew they were willing and ready to talk when she was.

“Anyone who is adopted always wonders why they were given up,” Jenna said.

She was around 10 or 11, she says, when she leafed through the file of her adoption papers.

There wasn’t much information: her name. The names of her birth parents. What she liked to eat, how much she slept.

But Jenna had memories, feelings, sensations, like glimpses of the beach glass that sometimes surfaces and then tumbles back into the waves.

She remembered the roof of a house. It was wavy, like corrugated plastic.

She remembered being locked up, wrapped tightly in a bunch of blankets, in the dark, peering through a crack into another room. She remembers being afraid.

“I didn’t know when that was, or why it was. I just knew it wasn’t a dream, and it wasn’t made up.”

As much as her adoptive parents wanted to be open, Jenna was not able to communicate the strong feelings that moved inside her. She was in a wonderful, loving, tight family, but she was different.

“Abbotsford is a very Caucasian community,” she said. “I remember saying, ‘I want to be white.’”

It wasn’t just race. It was part of herself she was missing: “To look around the dinner table and never see that I have my mother’s nose or my father’s eyes.”

Jenna’s parents had adopted a fourth child, a boy, from Hong Kong.

“My little brother was feeling some of the same things,” she said. “It helped to be able to talk to him.”

The feelings were as unique as their situation. “It was not a lack of love or good parenting. It’s abandonment. It’s identity. Part of me felt a bit of guilt if I questioned why I was feeling the way I was feeling. It felt like I was not being loyal.”

Throughout her teens a mix of feelings surfaced: resentment, anger, perfectionism.

“I felt that if I was perfect, I would be more loved.

“If I was perfect no one could be mad at me, or not love me, or give me away.”

At 20, Jenna met a journalist from Korea who had come to do a documentary about one of her former high-school teachers, who was also Korean.

At a dinner, the reporter casually invited Jenna to visit her in Korea some time.

“Something inside me said, ‘Just go.’ I quit my job and two weeks later I had a ticket.”

Her parents wanted to come, her boyfriend wanted to come, but she knew it was a journey she had to make alone.

“I needed the freedom to feel my feelings without guilt, whatever happened. This trip wasn’t about having fun. It was about finding myself.”

In Seoul, she felt like she fit in, somehow. “Even though I didn’t speak the language any more, I never felt stressed or anxious.”

Jenna visited the agency that had handled her adoption, and its staff agreed to help.

She travelled around Korea and visited Dageu, where she had been born.

She saw small shacks with corrugated plastic roofs. The roofs she remembered.

On the train back to Seoul, the agency called: Her birth mother was sitting in their office.

[Aerozord]

I really feel sorry for all those kids, where the real answer to why they were given up is simply "we wanted a boy"

[Magus]

Originally Posted by Aerozord

I really feel sorry for all those kids, where the real answer to why they were given up is simply "we wanted a boy"

It's slightly better when the full message is "we wanted a boy, but didn't want to drown you".

[Seil]

Guys... That's... Well, that's pretty horrible, guys.

[Marc v4.0]

It's also true, more often then you would want it to be

[Hatake Kakashi]

Originally Posted by Aerozord

I really feel sorry for all those kids, where the real answer to why they were given up is simply "we wanted a boy"

I'm not reading that in Jenna's story, however. What I'm seeing is the destruction of a marriage in Korea by a man who took advantage of a situation and became abusive once it became apparent that his wife had little other place to turn. I'm seeing a mother giving up her children, a boy and a girl, to protect them. Korea doesn't have quite the problem of overpopulation that China does, so it's much less likely that Jenna was given up, or that her father became abusive, strictly because she was a girl.

On the topic of China, I had heard somewhere that China's One Child Policy was up for reconsideration, in that they were planning to relax it a bit. But it does not appear that much is changing.

[Aerozord]

Originally Posted by Hatake Kakashi

I'm not reading that in Jenna's story,

not in this story, but this migration, well that was a main contributing factor, mostly thanks to rest of your post

Originally Posted by Hatake Kakashi

On the topic of China, I had heard somewhere that China's One Child Policy was up for reconsideration, in that they were planning to relax it a bit. But it does not appear that much is changing.

which I hope China realizes they have seriously screwed up male:female ratio. For one their population will drop but not in the way they wanted. There just wont be enough women to go around. Many of those that gave up their daughters for a son will find no wife for their son and have their bloodline end. Those with daughters will ironically be better off, cause while women have lower status they can marry into higher standing then previously

Good chance this will have an odd cultural shift as a result. But I dont want to speculate on that

[Magus]

Originally Posted by Aerozord

Good chance this will have an odd cultural shift as a result. But I dont want to speculate on that

I will: rampant gay sex. Just scads of it. I foresee the legalization of gay marriage in five years due to the massive amounts of gay sex that is going to occur any day now in China.

[Hanuman]

The racism was intense, and confusing. “I identify as white,” Kim said. “In New Zealand, they would yell ‘fuck off, monkey!’, throw stuff at me from car windows, tell me to go back where I came from.”

.........what? Seriously?

Man, is that even racism or were they just stoned?