The Sad, Unnecessary, Journey of Transracial Adoptees
Book review by Mirah Riben
Extraordinary Journey: The Lifelong Path of the Transracial Adoptee adds to the throngs of memoirs, anthologies, countless articles, blogs, documentaries, videos, etc. by adult adoptees transplanted to foreign shores — mostly Eastern — into Western homes almost always of races other than theirs.
Hagland attempts to distinguish his personal experience as a Korean-born midwestern-raised adoptee from his experiences gleaned from having had attended forums of transracial adoption — in person and online — for over two decades as he incorporates interviews from a dozen adult transracial adoptees from all backgrounds with an over-riding cognizance that:
“. . .one of the most challenging aspects of all of this, is this: the need for the transracial adoptee to develop a sense of self, an identity, that is necessarily designed and architected, one that does not simply ‘happen’…. was in my 50s by the time I felt truly confident in my identity as a person of color who is Asian-American and who is an adult transracial adoptee.”
Hagland notes that the path of interracial adoptees is complex and thus some ”resist accepting” and “acknowledging” it, as is true of all adoptees. Denial is far safer than opening a door that can never be closed — a door to a journey “that is inherently filled with challenge and surprises, twists and turns at every corner of the road, and tremendous cloudiness and uncertainty.”
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The author speaks of the “parallel” journeys of the adoptee and adoptive parent. Having created an interracial family, they ironically — and very sadly — claim not to see race and find no need talk about racism.
It can often be akin to living in the same house and yet in two different realities, sometime parallel universes: Planet TRAP (Trans-Racial Adoptive Parent) is an insular color-blind world. They see no differences and are apparently deaf as well to the BLM movement, police profiling and brutality focused on POC, and oblivious of the recent rash of Anti-Asian attacks.
Meanwhile, however on planet TRA (TransRacial Adoptees) Hagland notes:
“it was clear that everyone did see race. All the children who taunted me and my brother, all the children and adults who in various ways excluded us — I knew implicitly that everyone saw race.”
This reality of experienced bigotry is echoed by many of his contributors as well.
Living in a reality that is not acknowledged is classic gaslighting which induces cognitive dissonance; a crazy-making dichotomy often with no one who shares, understands or will even attempt to address your day-to-day struggles.
Hagland deftly and very necessarily also unpacks the unspeakable subjects of: saviorism, white privilege, and white fragility and is clear:
“. . . if you choose to raise your child in total or near-total whiteness and without daily mirrors of your child’s specific race (and hopefully, even ethnicity as well — meaning, Korean, Chinese, Haitian, Mexican, etc.), your child will end up with a fair likelihood of the really bad physical self-image.”
“I often hear adoptive parents say things like, “I would do anything for my little angel. I would crawl over broken glass, I would walk through fire.” But asked whether they might be willing to move to a part of their metropolitan area with greater racial diversity and mirrors for their child, the answer is so often, ‘Oh, that’s just impossible’.”
He hits hard on this point that if you are going to adopot a child of another race or ethnicty it is impertiave to provide him with people who reflect his appearance and culture, lest you make him a scarifical lamb.
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Adoption is intended to serve the best interest of children in need, as such children who need extra-family care should be kept with kin or at the very least within their native country. There are no child-centric arguments for importing and exporting children like artifacts or trophies.
The pro-adoption author pushes for those who adopt transracially to educate themselves. He asks them to address systemic racism, yet this book ignores a multitude of existing memoirs, blogs and other anthologies and conversations such as Code Switch: Transracial Adoptees On Their Racial Identity And Sense Of Self, wherein transracial adoptees talk about their identity crisis and feeling as if “adoption was really centered around my mom being a savior.”
Hagland includes an interview with Sandy White Hawk who seeks and end to the adoption of indigenous children and Melanie Chung Sherman, who comes close to suggesting that transracial adoption should end. Yet, in the end the author falls short of condemning these practices.
The problems of Interracial (and transnational) adoption are not isolated but part of the problems of the corrupt mega-billion adoption industry that commodifies children to meet demand. Taking children one-at-a-time to meet a desire to parent solves nothing but bringing joy — often temporarily — to the recipients of that child. It leaves behind the child’s family in the same conditions that caused the need. It leaves behind parents who will continue to have more children born into the same lack of food, medicine, education. Instead it adds the grief of loss to already suffering souls.
Hagland fails to suggest an end to the trafficking of children to meet a demand and never once mentions the monetary incentives pushing the commodification of children of all colors to be redistributed throughout the world. Nor does he suggest those who have a desire to “save” or “rescue” children in need be called upon to save not just the children but families and communities via organizations such as Save the Child or UNICEF, or by making donations that will help families and communities in need of medical supplies, books etc.
Many countries have put an end to the corruption off child trafficking for adoption — Guatemala, Ethiopia, and Russia to name just three. They stopped allowing their children to be exported like manufactured goods, or parts or agriculture and found ways to care for their own within their borders. Orphanages sound inhumane to Western ears until we recognize that 90% of children in orphanages worldwide have at least one parent who often use such institutions to provide temporary medical care for their children with no intent to have their children adopted to strangers. Many are duped into believing that their children will be taken temporarily to be educated and returned.
Orphanages sound cruel but so too is being the only little black or brown child in small town USA or Norway. So too is losing your language, heritage, your lineage, your culture so that you cannot ever return and feel a sense of belonging either here or there. Orphanages seem cruel but so too are those adopted as children only to grow up stateless and deported as adults. So too is being saddled with survivors’ guilt when you are the one adopted into a land of opportunity but not your siblings or parents. So too is any adoptee, regardless of race or origins, growing up denied the simple basic human right to know their progenitors, their familial medical history, and a vital record that is true and accurate not a legal lie.
Children all over the world deserve adequate care but it is egotistical and xenophobic of westerners to assume it is duty — nay or right — to “save” them and bring them home as little souvenirs to save the “saviors” from childlessness. It is pure selfishness to convince oneself and lawmakers that the “advantages” and “opportunities” offered via adoption would be willingly chosen over continuity of family and community and national heritage. Hagland talks about healing the trauma of adoption loss, but what about more effort to prevent it? Adoption — at best — is an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff.
Hagland’s interviewees are important and we need to hear it all. We need, however, to take heed to prevent the need for more of the same from continuing so that the next generation will not be re-writing the same or similar books.
While making a point of keeping his personal adoption experience separate, he has another agenda entirely. Hagland is pro-adoption eithe rbecause he has internalized the “savior” mentaility or for reasons of his own that have nothing to do with the best interest of children, and that are not mentioned in this book but which involve the alleged — non-existent — “right” of same sex couples discussed here and which very sadly prevent a truly objective view of the exploitation, commodification, trafficking and corruption that are adoption.
In the end this book is huge disappointment as the reader is exposed to the first-hand the struggles of adoptees torn from their roots, their heritage and culture, subjected to racism, only to have a confutation of same condoned with better understanding of the fact that this is what is happening, as opposed to scholars such as Estye Fenton and others who expose international adoption (IA) as “a growing societal awareness of international adoption as a flawed reproductive marketplace. . . questioning whether the inequality inherent in international adoption renders the entire system suspect.”
A hit and a major miss of an opportunity to join the scholarly voices and those who lived the experience such as Jane Jeong Trenka, in calling for an end to child international trafficking.
Revised 10/9/21
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MIRAH RIBEN has been researching, investigating, writing and speaking out to expose the corruption, coercion, exploitation, commodification, and trafficking of children in the mega-billion-dollar adoption, anonymous contract conception and surrogacy industries, and the denial of adoptees’ right to their authentic birth certificate since 1980.
Riben has authored two internationally acclaimed books and more than two hundred thirty articles appearing in such publications as: Huffington Post, Medium, Dissident Voice, Crime Magazine . . .
Her works are cited or quoted in more than fifty books and professional journal articles.
