Talking Story 
by Polo

 From The Asian Reporter, V19, #44 (November 10, 2009), page 7.

Tragedy and joy

Directed by Barb Lee

Produced by Barb Lee and Nancy Kim Parsons

Distributed by Point Made Films

I was moved when community activist and transracial parenting educator Astrid Dabbeni asked me to watch and think about and write about Adopted.

I know first-run films cost a lot. I know really scary U.S. copyright statutes keep responsible people like Astrid’s Adoption Mosaic crew from ripping their own. And everybody knows you don’t put in my hands expensive items like German car keys or original DVDs, and certainly never delicate stuff like the subject of this 2008 documentary — adopting pretty babies from outside your color, culture, or country. Nothing you’d hate to lose or mess up.

And speaking of untidy: If you ask around any of Portland’s ethnicky enclaves about this achy issue, chances are you won’t find a single objective soul. Not one. Not about this. Not about interracial or international adoption.

And I am no exception.

Still, I took my sister’s movie. I tucked it in my jacket’s inside pocket. And I took it home, because 6 million adopted Americans are a big bite of us to be ambivalent about. To be leaving out in the cold.

Paradox of joy and tragedy

"The joy and the tragedy coexist." So go the opening frames of Adopted, director Barb Lee’s tender and troubling documentary film. This "is the paradox of adoption," she goes on to say, "and we are caught up in it."

And I was hooked. Hooked hard because dialectics is how you snare grumpy Old Worlders — opposing yin/yang dynamics. Day and night. Creation and destruction. That, and of course knowing we’re shameless suckers for the awesome mysteries of human existence. The paradoxes of our precious planet.

Director Barb Lee and her co-producer Nancy Kim Parsons, both adoptees in an earlier era of American child development thinking, do not disappoint with what remains of their 80 ferocious minutes. Adopted is riveting. Adopted raises blood pressure, it raises impossibly complex issues. Its producers, same as Portland’s Adoption Mosaic, want to invite open-hearted exploration then some broadshouldered conversation. So much is at stake.

Adopted is two stories. It’s two strands asking hard-hard questions about our kids’ health, about good parenting, about our racialized society. It’s about two sets of moms and dads adopting, and about two girls adapting, and everybody loving as best they can.

Paul and Judy Fero brought Yun Bai Jung into their home in 1975. She grew up Jennifer Marie Fero in Milwaukie, Oregon. We see her running on foggy Washington’s Long Beach, and running an emotional vocabulary as good as an Olympic gold. Jen cooks and cleans and cares for her ill and old parents as good as any Korean daughter. And yet it’s plain to see she’s living with an ache and a break forever removing her from feeling fully inside her Asian bones.

Her loss is all over her face. A face so unlike her parents’ and her patient brother’s. They’ve always tried reassuring Jenny that they see her "as one of us."

"— Well, ‘one of us’ was a white working-class kid with blue eyes and big ears," Jen fires back. Funny. Or not.

Adopted’s second story belongs to Min Xin Pei and her newer generation of adoptive parents, Jacqui and John Trainer of Nashua, New Hampshire.

This second story opens with issues still unresolved from the darker days of Jenny’s separation from her birth mother and her mother country — the enormous macroeconomic and ugly personal power disparities between child-sending neighborhoods and child-receiving ones. Monster issues not the fault of either Jennifer’s or Xin Pei’s (renamed Roma) parents. Unhappy matters all adoptive families do their very best to alleviate, one delicate baby at a time.

In contrast to Jenny’s parents’ experience three decades ago, of picking her up at Sea-Tac in answer to a prayer, John and Jacqui jet to South China where they meet Roma’s foster mom. Where they cry with her. And when they leave, carrying a sobbing baby girl, this generation’s adoptive parents are acutely aware of the awful tear between their baby girl and her red soil.

In the 1970s, Jenny’s naturally protective parents wanted to distance her from Korea. From her loss. More modernly, Jacqui and John bring a child and her history into her new home in suburban New Hampshire. While an earlier generation of adoptive parents inhabited a society sincerely believing in colorblindness, our current understanding of what makes whole, healthy, and happy children of color has evolved markedly. Roma’s deliberately ethno-culturally rich family room is a stark comparison to Jenny’s racialized isolation.

No must-do items, except one

There are more, many more advantages Roma and her family enjoy. But in the end, Adopted is not an instructional video. No must-do lists are spelled out on screen, except of course that love is not enough.

Director Barb Lee’s film is instead, a story arc punctuated by utterly honest, often sudden, expressions of sorrow and resentment and betrayal. In up-close conversation, Jennifer Fero presses hard on mom Judy Fero to say how she really feels about Jenny’s other mother. Doesn’t she want to know what she looks like? — Her Korean birth mom.

"I don’t care about her," Mrs. Fero says. She says out of frustration. She knows it hurts her precious child. And she’s so sorry. And so conflicted. It’s all in her exhausted eyes.

"What if my face is hers," Jennifer snaps back. Like a bird snare. Trapping both of them in their shared and unshared worlds of hurt.

The host of an upcoming Adopted screening, Adoption Mosaic executive director Astrid Dabbeni, is hoping for a bigger world of conversation. "This film builds us all a platform for deeper discussion," says Ms. Dabbeni, who was adopted out of Colombia inside the same era Jennifer Fero was adopted into her American family. Theirs is a generation ready to talk about what went well and what not. They are the subjects of that queasy issue not one of us can be objective about. All that transracial stuff this column started on.

Adoption Mosaic is not a local or international adoption agency, it is a nonprofit community providing a variety of educational resources and ongoing support to everyone influenced by adoption. The Portland-based organization offers intensive and casual discussion groups, workshops, youth and parent activities — all based on Ms. Dabbeni’s urging that "adoption is a lifelong experience, not only the event of taking a child home."

"I am adopted," she goes on to say. "It’s not just that we were adopted, a short time or a long time ago. You cannot separate that early experience from someone’s present, from his or her selfhood."

According to Ms. Dabbeni, because Adoption Mosaic is not an adoption agency, the place people go to get approval for their parenting ability, the Mosaic community "can exist in a territory of having no opinion, no judgement, about who should adopt or why adopt, or what do we do when things aren’t going so well. We are a safe place for discovering an effective vocabulary and developing our problem-solving strategies."

"We have a lot of work ahead of us," she says.

"Adopted generations need a lot of help. So do our parents."

In honor of Adoption Awareness Month, Adopted is screening on Thursday, November 12 at Oregon Health & Science University’s Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, located at 700 S.W. Campus Drive in Portland. A 5:30pm dinner precedes the show and discussion follows, facilitated by child psychologist Ally Burr-Harris and Adoption Mosaic director Astrid Dabbeni. For more information about the screening and Adoption Mosaic workshops and events, call (971) 533-0102, e-mail <info@adoptionmosaic.org>, or visit <www.adoptionmosaic.org>. To learn more about Adopted, visit <www.adoptedthemovie.com>.