You know how many of us adult transracial and intercountry adoptees talk about how it’s important to integrate young adoptees’ birth culture and ethnic heritage? And how it burns us when adoptive parents only trot out culture as a novelty or an accessory when it’s cute or when it serves to make the AP feel good? And that doing so is not helpful in encouraging adoptees to nurture a significant connection to their heritage because exoticizing birth culture instead serves to alienate adoptees from their birth cultures and makes their heritage seem more like something to further mark them as different?
Oy.
The countdown to the big day was the typical blur of lessons and studying, sit-downs with cantors and tutors, caterers and party planners. There was a thick dossier of Jewish history to master — history that Cece confessed did not feel like hers. “I just really try to learn it,” she said. “I don’t try to think of whose history it is.”
And, of course, there was shopping to be done.
“In my fantasy,” Ms. Nealon said, “we’d take her to Chinatown and have this incredibly beautiful Westernized Chinese dress made.”
But Ms. Shapiro said: “She wanted no part of it. For her, this has nothing to do with being Chinese.”
This brings to mind what another good TRA friend of mine recently wrote on her blog about the whole notion of “force-feeding” birth culture.
*sigh*
(Thanks to Kate G. for the article link … I think.)
