Asian American Culture
by Mei-Ling Hopgood
The woman, I know, was just trying to be loving. She was a bubbly
Midwestern mom who had adopted two Korean daughters and went to
great lengths to "keep" her daughters' culture. Her girl took language
lessons, and the family celebrated Lunar New Year – they never missed it.
to help sensitize her daughter's white classmates, each year this woman
went into her daughter's school and did a presentation on Korea, pointing
out the country on a map, explaining its traditions and showing the children
a real honbok, a traditional Korean dress.
She told me this, and I nodded and smiled, trying to listen politely to
her story. Something about what she was doing made me uncomfortable,
despite her good intentions. Like her daughters, I’m an adoptee born in
Asia; I was born in Taiwan and raised by a white family in Michigan. I
thought to myself: Korean Americans do not walk around in hanboks all
day, and this child had never really done that either – unless her mother
made her.
When I was her daughter's age, I wanted desperately to avoid the
kind of identity that she was trying to give her child. I averted my gaze if
an Asian-looking stranger threatened to look me in the eye. I didn't want
people to think I was one of them, because really, I wasn't: I couldn't speak
Mandarin, Cantonese or any other Chinese dialect, and didn't do "Chinese"
things in my home. My parents weren't even Asian. I was trying so hard to
show that I was just as American as anyone else. If my own mother had
done something like that woman did, I would've hidden beneath my desk.
Over the last two decades, international adoptions have become
commonplace in the United States. More than 268,000 children have been
adopted from abroad since 1991, with China, Korea and Guatemala topping
the list of countries over the last five years. At the same time, there has
been a huge push to import adoptees' culture with them, a dramatic shift
from a time when parents were told that assimilation was best. Today,
almost all parents who adopt internationally these days try to cultivate
some kind of connection to their child's birth land. Efforts range from
throwing some ramen noodles in a salad to remodeling the interior of their
homes to an Asian motif and spending thousands of dollars to send their
children to language schools and heritage camps on another continent.
Parents do these things hoping to help their children adjust to the
sometimes tricky duality of their existence. Yet, I worry that some parents
are now taking things too far: Going to extremes to idealize the native
culture might be as damaging to an adoptee as ignoring it. Asian-American
activists have for decades fought the idea that you are born with a culture,
that if you look Asian, you must eat with chopsticks, wear different
clothing, speak a different language, that you are different and thereby less
American. Parents, to some extent, are asking children to live up to those
expectations. And without adequate acknowledgement of the reality that
actually is – their experience in America – I suspect that children might
have an even harder time figuring out where they belong.
When my parents adopted me from Southern Taiwan in 1974, many
social workers were still telling multiracial families that the best thing was
to try to help their children assimilate into the majority culture. Focusing
on differences could cause the child to feel more out of place; love was
supposed to conquer all. The idea was that parents should "raise the child
'as though she was born to you,' " said Adam Pertman, executive director
of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, based in Newton, and author
of the book Adoption Nation.
As many adoptees started to enter adulthood, especially during 1980s
and 1990s, the adoption community began to see the profound flaws in the
love-is-color-blind philosophy. Grown adoptees – many of them Korean
born – began to speak out about their feelings of self-loathing, racial
taunting and feeling like they had lost or been denied their birth culture.
Those cautionary tales sent the pendulum swinging the other way.
Adoption advocates at all levels, from social workers to the ministries of
foreign governments, now consider preserving the child's heritage to be
vital. Countries such as China even require that some element of their
culture be maintained in adoptive homes.
Eager to do the right thing, many adoptive parents – usually white
and middle-to-upper-middle class – have tried to recreate their children's
native culture. Moms and dads formed and joined support groups, enrolled
their children (and themselves) in language, dance and art classes. They
decorated their homes with Russian paintings, threw Lunar New Year
parties, bought Guatemalan jewelry and made regular pilgrimages to the
local Chinatown. They established their own specialty magazines, attended
culture camps in the United States and spent more than $10,000 on
"heritage tours" in the Motherland. An entire industry – from travel
agencies to doll makers – caters to these families' desires to provide
adequate cultural touchstones.
Parents do these things to help instill in their children pride in with
who they are, and where they came from, but also to prepare them in case
they want to return to their homeland and search for their birth family.
What perplexes me is when parents say things like they are sorry for
removing their children from "their culture."
Sociologist Heather Jacobson told me the romanticization of culture
is common among the adoptive families she interviewed for her book,
"Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the
Negotiation of Family Difference." Jacobson said mothers with children
from China told her they felt a deep connection with the country of China,
its traditions and people.
Yet she also noted, "it did not translate into actual friendships or
deep meaningful day-to-day relationships with Chinese people here in the
United States." Most of the women she spoke to wanted their children to
have more contact with immigrant Chinese – rather than, say, third
generation Chinese-Americans – because they were more genuinely
"Chinese." The traditional culture – fan dances, tea ceremonies and
holidays – is more accessible, more alluring, than the actual, more
complicated experience of being Asian American.
"For the most part, the parents enjoy it so much. This way of
approaching culture is not unique to adoptive families. It's largely how
Asian cultures are understood and experienced in the U.S.-- especially by
non-Asians or Asian-Americans," she said.
But focusing on a museum view of culture can ignore ignores -- or
become a way to ignore -- the reality of life as a racial minority in America.
One of the first racial experiences I can remember was when boys at my
grade school made fun of me, pulling their eyes back and saying, "Ah-So!"
I went home and reported the injustice to my mother, and she told my sixyear-
old self to go back and tell those boys they were "ignorant." That's just
want I did. As I grew older though, those kinds of experiences grew more
varied, from whispering classmates to men yelling "Go back to your
country!"
"So often families are more comfortable talking about culture
because culture is something that we can celebrate and food, music, and
other fun things can be associated with culture," said Amanda Baden, who
was adopted from Hong Kong, and is now a Manhattan psychologist who
advises adoptive families. Being open to talking about race is just as
important, she said.
I was Miss Everything in high school, from class president to
Pompon captain. Looking back now, part of that was probably an effort to
prove to everyone – but mostly myself – that I was as American as anyone
else. This was a discussion that I didn't have with parents, though, as open
as they were. I didn't want to worry them, knowing how hard they had tried
to impress how wonderful we were. I didn't know how, nor did I want to
tell them about my feelings of isolation until much later, when I could
understand them myself.
It wasn't until I met my birth family, at age 23, that I actually started
trying to "be Chinese." They were nothing like poor, farming family I had
imagined them to be; my father had clawed his way out of poverty and into
the middle class. In fact, their own culture had evolved into a wild mix of
traditional Chinese values and modern influences. Taiwan similarly
challenged my assumptions, with its Buddhist temples juxtaposed against
spanking new skyscrapers.
After spending a good portion of my life ignoring my heritage, I
started to study Mandarin, and even took a year off of work to immerse
myself in Chinese language, culture and history. I adopted the styles of my
sisters – their hairstyles, fashion preferences, etc –learned to make
dumplings and bought tea sets.
Yet, my enthusiasm and best efforts only took me so far. I might be
able to make small talk with the Chinese owner of my local grocery store,
but I can still barely have a one-on-one conversation with my birth parents.
I've come to recognize that I will never know them on a deep, substantial
way, and I will never fit perfectly back into the country where I was born.
More and more adoptees are returning to their native countries these
days, with similarly mixed results. Sook Wilkinson, a psychologist and
author of Birth is More than Once: The Inner World of Adopted Korean
Children, said, "I'm learning from those Korean adult adoptees who've
visited Korea many times and who have even moved to Korea to live there
for years, that no matter how much they learn about the culture and
heritage, they're never accepted as native Koreans."
This is danger, I think, in presenting the birth country and family in
an overly romantic way, and in raising a child's expectations that they will
and should fit in. Adoptees can end up feeling bad not only because they
don't fit in, but because they disappoint their parents.
My return to Taiwan and meeting with my birth family were an
important part of my own internal personal journey. But just as important
havebeen the friendships I have built with other Asian Americans: What I
share with them is not a mythical culture, but an experience in America.
Seeing others who defied cliché encouraged me to do the same – and to be
proud of who I was.
It can be tough to maneuver the multi-racial dynamics inside, and
outside, the confines of a family, but what I tell parents is: "Relax." There
is a healthy middle ground that I think my own family more or less found.
My parents celebrated my heritage, and that of my brothers who were
adopted from Korea, but they also went out of their way to find Asian-
American babysitters and incorporate Asian-American adults into our
social circles. It wasn't easy; Mom and dad, as uncomfortable as they may
have been at times, learned to live with the differences in our racial
perspectives, our rebellions, our journeys to Korea and Taiwan and back.
They listened, let us vent or cry and backed off when they needed to.
Ultimately, they let my brothers and I decide how our past would influence
our present.
Today, I don't wish that I were more Chinese, even if my biological
family and our heritage hold a place in my heart and history. I'm glad that
in college I chose to study Spanish in Mexico for a semester. Almost five
years ago, my husband and I moved to Argentina, where we are living and
raising our daughter. No regrets, either, at having to weather some racial
nastiness here and there, and come out with a more confident, fought-out
self-image. I appreciate that my parents were loving and patient enough to
let me figure out these things at my own pace.
My way of life is culled from so many places and influences,
including where I was born, where I grew up and who raised me, but also
where I've lived and the people I've loved and admired. I'm hoping my own
daughter will inherit her Midwestern grandfather's hard work ethic and
passion for learning, and the good health of her grandmother. May she also
love languages and all kinds of food, from mac and cheese to Chinese
dumplings and Korean bibimbop. I hope she'll enjoy spending Sundays
visiting long into the night with her extended family, like they do in
Argentina.
I realize that adoptees will all come to their own view of culture and
adoption, but I imagine many international adoptees and children in
multiracial families share this wider, more global view of themselves. Our
blended family backgrounds, beliefs and practices – as diverse,
complicated and dissonant as they might seem – are as authentic as any.
We are another version of the immigrant story, with a culture is just as rich
as the one we might have had.