Jen asked me why I have such a negativem visceral response when people say my child is lucky. And I’m tired, so I pulled a post from my last blog to answer the question. Truthfully, no one has made the lucky comment for quite a while, and for that I am grateful, sometimes it was too much ya know?
“It’s not FAIR!”
You’re right baby, it’s not!
If someone tells me how lucky my daughter is one more time, well I might just have to scream or walk away muttering incoherently or, or something. Soon, she’ll be of the age where people will be telling her how lucky she is. It’s not the general kind of lucky that they are talking about either. It’s the ‘you poor, little, orphaned, thrown away, Chinese girl that was plucked from certain despair to some white household far away from your heathen country’ lucky.
It also sets up this whole range of expected behaviours. She must be so thankful to just be alive, she must never voice a thought that differs from warm and fuzzy societal views of adoption, she must always be grateful enough. It’s a heavy load, and I bear a tremendous responsibility in giving her that load that she’ll carry.
So, I do my best to keep her connected to her ‘Chineseness’, knowing that I can’t provide an authentic cultural frame of reference and I can’t replace her birth parents or her birth country. I do my best to make sure that she never feels that her voice is marginalized or dismissed or disregarded. And mostly I love her, even though I know that that in itself is not enough.
And while I ponder huge questions about identity and self, I wipe her nose and change her diaper. I watch meltdowns and expressions of joy. I read her The Very Hungry Caterpillar 37 times, and teach her to sing Golddigger. I thank God that through some incredible circumstance she somehow became my daughter. You see, I’m the lucky one.
Mara – I’m not just lucky, I have ‘privilege’, ~sigh~
–Eun Mi, Adult Adoptee from Korea