Outsider 101

Today was a good day only because I stood up for myself. Although a guy did push me into a locker, but it was an accident so....... :D

I've been wondering about my birth mom a lot lately it's hard not knowing someone who makes up who you are. I went to get my Tyro cards read and the women said I would probably find her. It could be a bunch of bologna but I like wishing. One time I had that dream it was in a garden and it was sunny kind of like being in a giant green house sort of place, and I run up to her and give her a big hug really I could care less what she looked like I can't judge her, she's my mom.

here's some fun pics....

Well there's not that much to say see blog to you later!!

Monday Musings - Living London, Living Large, Living Loss

photo above: Last week's From Home to Homeland AUTHOR PARTY! (edited by Debra Jacobs, Dr. Iris Chin Ponte, Leslie Kim Wang, Yeong & Yeong, 2010). Thanks, Deb, for sending us photos!

Bonjour à tous!

This Week's Blog Question:
"What Schools Did You Attend?"
-Kate Adie's Nobody's Child (chapter 8 title)

Off to London this week!!! (I'm so excited. I'm giving some presentations at a conference with friends from the UK and the Republic of Ireland.)

Dear Erin ~ I should mention that I recently realized that I feel ever so much more at home in the UK than I do in the USA (will explain later).

Dear Sabrina ~ Last week you asked: "How much does this feeling of loss contribute or take away from our identity formation as Chinese adoptees?"

This is an excellent question. Loss is a relevant subject germane to adoptees, but moreover, it's a subject that's close to our hearts if we are simply human beings! One reporter rudely blurted out, "Jennifer, Do you have a GREAT BIG GAPING HOLE IN YOUR HEART because YOU WERE ADOPTED!!?"

Let's put this into context. Consider this scenario:
Would anyone consider it normal for a complete stranger(!) to ask someone who has lost a parent: "Do you have a great big gaping hole in your heart because you lost your mom/dad?"

Being adopted means that our "loss" -- a loss that is inevitable and universal to all human beings (eventually, who doesn't lose their parents!?) -- is rendered "visible." (And in answer to your question, Sabrina, I think that what "makes one adoptee feel loss and another not?" is simply a matter of life experience, context...and time. For instance, I personally did not experience much (conscious) adoption loss until my (adoptive) mom died from cancer. I was 21. Losing my mom made it impossible not to truly understand (and I mean truly! down to the core) what it meant to lose any parent, including my birthmom. Mine was a double loss, triggered by the death of my (adoptive) mom. But before mom was diagnosed with cancer, I hadn't been conscious of feelings of loss regarding my birthmother or my adoption. I was very close to my (adoptive) family growing up. (Now, this doesn't mean to say that they didn't - ahem - on occasion drive me nuts, or that I didn't fantasize about maybe secretly being a princess from China and that my mom -- naturally, a Chinese Empress -- would swoop down from the skies in pure silk to carry me to my rightful throne in China -- much to the shock and dismay of my snotty classmates!)

When people ask me about loss and how I feel about it as an adopted person, I reply: "Who hasn't experienced loss!" Almost all of us humans are orphaned eventually -- it's merely a matter of time.

Of course loss shapes us. Virginia Woolf had a series of losses in her family, and this greatly affected her writing, and the rest of her life! But she wasn't adopted.

I say, YES, we have lost a lot as adopted people. Let's claim that loss right now. We have lost our parents. We have lost our extended birth family. We have lost our medical history (for many). We have lost our birth cultures (for some). Our birth language(s) - ditto. We have lost our birth histories. We have lost the connection to people and places, sights and smells, stories and symbols, images and dreams of hundreds and thousands of our ancestors and relatives. We have been disconnected. Unplugged. Detached from who we could have become, we have quite literally lost (family, identity, home, history, culture, words and languages) everything that really matters. This is tragic. This is a loss beyond words. This is hard. And harder still for some than for others.

But you know what this means? (Flip over the "loss coin" - after all, loss and gain are two sides of the same coin!)

This means...we are FREE. We are free to CHOOSE who we want to be. We have an opportunity. The gates are wide open. Some say that life is short. I say that life is like ice cream. There are an infinite amount of flavors, and we can create new ones all the time. La vita è bella. So what are you waiting for?

Being adopted means that our ice cream-making ingredients are rich indeed! It means that we have a vast potpourri of "ingredients" from which to draw and create from, a multiplicity of histories (birth and adoptive), ancestors (birth and adoptive), and beautiful stories and dreams of salty tears and (YES!) loss, too (both birth and adoptive losses), an infinite well of possibilities at our fingertips, dipping into the mystical, magical seas of our soaring spirits. Anyway, this is what I think today! Ask me again tomorrow and maybe I'll have a completely new experience. Who knows...? La vita è bella. Why not make some delicious ice creams?

Life is hilarious. Loss is mysterious. But most of all, our loss fills us with power and possibility. Remember that.
P.S.
And on that note, for the first time in my life today I am meeting with a personal trainer to explore new physical possibilities (one of my top 3 Year of the Tiger goals: body, books, Ph.D. dissertation). What are your top three goals this week? See you in London next week!

"BLOOM YOUR BEST"

~Love From Jennifer~

Native Province: Taipei & Jiangsu (mainland China) Hometown: Laguna Beach (OC), California Arrived in the USA: Dec 1979 / Jan 1980 Education: NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Harvard & UC Berkeley Generation: G2, “A Global Generation” Why This Blog: “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller

Nobody's Child Question 7: Where is Your Home?

This question I had to think about for a while. Conflict arises when I attempt to determine whether my home is in America or China.

I would define the home as the place where your heart is. This doesn't necessarily mean family and friends, but it often does for many people. I thought about this for a while. I never believed I had many meaningful family members or friends. Unfortunately, I have never been to China, so I do not know what it's like. Truth be told, I do not know where my heart resides.

As of now, I would say that my home is in America (but definitely not the area where I live). My home is not my mother's house. My home is not where my adoptive family lives. I have never been to China, so I have yet to determine whether I deem it my home. In my development of self-identity as a Chinese American Adoptee, I am in a developing stage. That is, where I have not yet been exposed to China enough to call it my home.

Whether one day I do consider China to be my home, rather than America... only time will tell.

In the future, my home will be where my career, family, and many of my friends reside. However, I have friends from all over the world.

Erin
Jiujiang, Jiangxi, CN
High school student in the U.S.

In Pursuit of Images and Shadows A Chinese Daughter's Search for her Adoptive Mother's Past - A work in progress: Introduction

In 1994 my (adoptive) mother, Elsa Oiesen Bement, passed away at the age of 94. I inherited a rich legacy: memories of a loving relationship, fifty-two years of shared adventures and life experiences, and the belief that one could achieve anything, if sufficiently motivated. In addition, my mother left me two unexpected gifts that played a critical role in the pathway I eventually would choose: an envelope bearing the words, "to be read after my death," and a bulging suitcase hidden away in the storage room of the Tuscan farmhouse where she had lived since 1970. The envelope contained a six-page letter, started in 1968, shortly after my wedding and added to throughout the years. The last entry was dated 1992. It was a love letter from my mother in which she thanked me for the joy I had brought her. She claimed that I had been the "perfect" daughter (far from the truth), rejoiced over the birth of my children, and reminded me to always follow my intuition. But that was not all: tucked away in a small yellow envelope, I came across a tattered map of the main cemetery in Copenhagen. A bold X marked the site of my grandfather's grave.

Sometime later, while sorting through trunks and boxes, I uncovered my mother’s final bequest. From the time I had set off from Florence, my home from 1957-1962, to attend the University of Geneva, I had tried to maintain a weekly correspondence with my mother, (essentially ten to eleven months out of the year). The bulging suitcase concealed thirty-two years of letters arranged according to date and neatly bound together with colored ribbons: a detailed record of more than half my life. I do not plan to draw from my own letters for this book; in fact, I may never make use of them, but the message from my mother was unequivocal. Despite my passion for teaching, she always assumed that I would ultimately become a writer. I now had a clear mandate. Setting aside a thirty-two-year-long academic career, with considerable trepidation I embarked upon a course of full-time research and writing.

At first, I set a modest goal: unable to let go of the only mother I had ever known and loved, I envisaged compiling a biography of her colorful life. It became clear within a few months, however, that it would be senseless to isolate her tale from the history of her siblings and parents. Naively, I believed at the outset that I held all the threads of the family story within my grasp. I was convinced that I had the makings of a compelling tale featuring an unusual cast of characters, two generations of a biracial, bicultural family, part Danish, part Chinese whose historical background dated back to the mid-eighteen hundreds. I counted on a felicitous blend of dramatic, tragic, poignant and comic stories to keep the reader involved. With a vast collection of family letters, documents, photographs and first person accounts at my disposal, I had a veritable treasure trove from which to draw. Yet, as the project began to take shape, I discovered that some indefinable element was missing; the primary sources simply weren't sufficient. Two powerful forces swept me along, adding to a sense of urgency as time was of the essence: my intellectual curiosity and scholarly training, and a profound need for a spiritual connection with my mother's past. I have haunted libraries from the Boston area, Northampton, New York City and Washington, DC, to London, Paris, Copenhagen, Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, Bornholm, and Seoul, both to confirm what I already knew and to search for greater cultural and historical insights. My hunger for more family stories and a deeper understanding of the people and events involved, have transformed me into a resourceful investigator, a consummate detective. Driven by instinct and intuition, assisted by serendipity or fate, I have pursued unlikely clues that have led to startling discoveries and secrets laid buried for close to a century.

Most adoptees yearn to find out about their biological origins. In my case, I loved my (adoptive) mother so deeply that, after her death, I had to find a means of keeping her alive in my every day life. This urge led me to my ongoing 12-year-long search for connections to her past and a memoir in progress. Perhaps the fact that Mother was half Chinese and shared her childhood memories of growing up in China until age 11, created an overlap. In searching for connections to her past, I found myself visiting China for the first time in 1998, and thus discovering my ancestral land.

In answer to Sabrina’s well-formulated question, I can only say that I find it impossible to conceive of a more loving, supportive, or inspiring parent. I consider myself infinitely fortunate and blessed. Later in life, I developed the desire to find out anything I could about my birth parents. The facts surrounding my adoption were shrouded in ironclad secrecy. I have faced innumerable hurdles and false trails in my ongoing search.

Beyond sheer curiosity, what has given me the energy and courage to face challenge after challenge in my twofold search, has been the compelling need to fully belong, not just to my immediate family, but to be able to embrace and become part of my extended families and their cultures, on both sides. Did the urge stem from a sense of loss? A comprehensive answer would be complex and multilayered, but I can state unequivocally that I mourn the loss of the mother who lovingly raised me, as well as the loss of the mother who carried me in her womb for 9 long months. I also celebrate them both and am grateful to have had two mothers.I speak from the perspective of someone approaching her 7h decade who has two beloved children, now adults, but still as close, if not closer than in their early years. Above all else, I treasure my family, the children I bore, the many children I have acquired informally, my "siblings" in spirit and the ghosts of all my ancestors, adoptive or biological, known directly, through stories, anecdotes, or my vivid imagination. My wish for my new family members of One World is that, in time, if not now, you will savor the same emotional richness. With much love, Mei-Mei

A species obsessed with origins

大家好! Hi all,
I want to share with bloggers and readers some of my thesis and final paper in college, on cultivating an imagined “Chinese” identity within Chinese adoptees in America. I recently met a very interesting woman through Mei Mei at a dinner in Beijing. We got to talking about the great “feeling of loss” and sense of urgency to connect with origins and ancestry that some people feel. Naturally the subject of adoption was part of this conversation. How much does this feeling of loss contribute or take away from our identity formation as Chinese adoptees?

Here is some serious food for thought:

From intro:
I affirm that in Chinese adoption, the perception of the child’s loss of cultural heritage and imagined birth culture is the essential reason for parents to cultivate a Chinese cultural identity because they sense a displacement in their child’s life when they are taken across the transnational distance into America. This is based on the fundamental social and cultural perception that blood and ethnicity is tied to a certain place and culture.

It is vital to note the cultural essentialism that lies within the term “cultural heritage” and constructions of the Other through problematic representations of Chinese culture. In response, parents realize that the strongest connection they can give the child is a reconnection of a tie to the birth culture. This represents the cultural and social ideal that the strongest bond is forged through blood relations. The idea of cultural heritage or roots also carries the idea that an adoptee has an “original identity” to which they will belong and will be pulled “back” to (Yngvesson 2002: 247); one that pre-exists and is distinct from their family’s identity… an identity seeming to only exist through a connection to an obscure, imagined origin.

The transnational boundaries of China and the U.S. also place the adoptee suspended between two possible identities, in a liminal space in which the adoptee “cannot be alienated from roots but can only ‘find’ herself in the relationship between self and other, birth country and adopted country, birth parent and adopted parent” (Yngvesson 2002: 239).

From conclusion:
The loss of this birth mother and culture and the ambiguity of their beginnings are considered by the parents to be a huge piece of their personal identity as people; a large hole in their being that if not cultivated will be a permanent absence, or an identity that forever lurks in the shadows of their life as a missing piece….
*****

I have never really struggled with feelings of deep loss or abandonment. Maybe this is because I knew my birth mother tried to get married, couldn’t and then had to give me up. There are just so many factors that have shaped my identity, but a factor of “loss” was never one. Though that isn't to say I don't understand others' feelings of loss, just that I'm more curious about my past and birth mother, etc. than feel loss about it.
What makes one adoptee feel loss and another not? Hmm…

I want to pose a scenario and question now that I discussed at that dinner:
Chinese people always ask me where I’m from, and when they hear I was born in China but raised in America, many times their response is “Oh you are so lucky.”
How does an adoptee who feels terrible loss towards China feel when they hear this response?? In other words, how do they reconcile that Chinese people themselves (who live in their “motherland”) think that these Chinese are lucky to have been adopted to an American family and to live in America, even though it means they are American, and not Chinese? This response does not signify that it is a loss for them or Chinese culture, but rather more of a personal fortune for the adoptee. This response elicits so many underlying questions!

I’m asking you adoptees out there!

Much Love,
Sabrina x


(Yngvesson, Barbara.
2002. Placing the ‘Gift Child’ in Transnational Adoption. Law & Society Review. Special Issue on Nonbiological Parenting. 36(2): 227-256.)
(also please do not plagiarize!!)

Nobodys Child "What schools did you attend?"

I attend a private high school, and I absolutely love my high school and the amount of things I learn from it. However, I feel that not only do we become educated through academic teaching (at school), we become educated through other experiences such as traveling, hobbies, and new experiences where we learn to step out of our comfort zones and take risks. In truth, all of these ways we learn influence the person we become, and having new ways to learn something everyday helps you become that person.

Monday Musings - From Home to Homeland

[Photo Above: over the weekend I participated in a "Bridging Cultures Workshop: Enhancing Your Cross-Cultural Skills for Personal and Professional Growth" with Ambassador Martin Brennan, Dr. Liliane Koziol, Intercultural Trainer Breidi Truscott, Executive Director Emeritus Joe Lurie at International House - University of California at Berkeley. It was fantastic.]
*****

Dear Jazz and Erin,
I'm sorry to hear about the bullies at your schools. Know that you are not alone. (As a young girl, I was also bullied for being Chinese, adopted, and "different" at my very Euro-American school.) Bullies have an uncanny way of suspending your own good judgment, making you temporarily forget how very powerful you actually are. Don't fall for their spells. Remember this: YOU ARE POWERFUL. YOU ARE WISE. WORTHY. TALENTED. INTELLIGENT. BEAUTIFUL. While meeting an amazing group called "MAPS Adopted Teens of Portland, Maine," one girl (adopted from Vietnam) told me about a club she started at her school called "BULLIES NOT WANTED (BNW)." BNW held socials, raised awareness, and changed the social dynamics at her school. She took a difficult experience (being bullied by other students for being adopted and Asian) and transformed it into something positive by reaching out to others, thereby educating her entire school! I was so inspired by her story, so I thought I would share it with you. Keep your chin up. Keep nurturing your own special talents. We're here for you. We're all in this together ~ ONE WORLD. xx

*****

Kate Adie's Nobody's Child (Chapter 7 Title)
"WHERE IS YOUR HOME?"

"To go home, 'to return,' is -- at its core -- more about people (including the ghosts of our pasts, presents and futures), community, and a sense of continuity, belonging and pride: Adoption Pride...[ours] is a lifetime journey, one that varies as much as the vicissitudes and veracities of each individual human spirit."

----From "Goodnight Moon, Goodnight Mom" by Jennifer in the anthology From Home to Homeland (edited by Debra Jacobs, Dr. Iris Chin Ponte, Leslie Kim Wang, Yeong & Yeong, 2010)

THIS WEEK'S BLOG QUESTION:
(Kate Adie's Nobody's Child, Chapter 8 Title)
"What Schools Did You Attend?"

*****
Post #13 Dedicated with Love & Gratitude
to the CAL G2 Teen Ambassadors, to Lisa Kamino, Ambassador Martin Brennan, Dr. Liliane Koziol, Intercultural Trainer Breidi Truscott, Executive Director Emeritus Joe Lurie and Shanti Corrigan
to my fantastic "From Home to Homeland" editors Debra Jacobs, Dr. Iris Chin Ponte, Leslie Kim Wang - Thank you for making "From Home to Homeland" a beautiful fundraiser book for FCC Orphanage Appeal, which provides "foster care and sponsors 'grandma's' who offer supplemental care in Chinese orphanages...[and] The AIDS project in Anhui and Henan Provinces...supporting children orphaned when a parent has died of AIDS."
And to my sister Huan in Ireland and her mum, Cáit. Thank you for believing in our little volunteer project called CAL and ONE WORLD when other people told me it was impossible.

Congratulations to author Ruthanne Lum McCunn!

"BLOOM YOUR BEST"

~Love From Jennifer~

Native Province: Taipei & Jiangsu (mainland China) Hometown: Laguna Beach (OC), California Arrived in the USA: Dec 1979 / Jan 1980 Education: NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Harvard & UC Berkeley Generation: G2, “A Global Generation” Why This Blog: “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller