Look What I Found!

This weekend I was pulling books off my bookshelves to put into boxes, and I found dozens of independent chapbooks and zines that I’ve collected over the years. One of them was Kim So Yung’s “I was abducted by white people”.

Ironically, I bought it when I was still working at the nonprofit adoption agency.

Kim’s political tract is full of enlightened, vengeful and humorous short essays on, mainly, the unavoidable racial(ist) overtones in transracial adoption. The title and the booklets’ message are meant to produce a shocked response from the reader because they serve to split open and deconstruct not only the stereotype, but also society's expectation, of a happy-go-lucky adoptee forever grateful that people took pity on her and allowed her to live under their roofs.

Anyway, I noticed a confluence of media here.

So Yung’s chapbook actually anticipates Jeanne Marie Laskas’ book, “growing girls”, (which I previously reviewed here) in which Laskas condescends to So Yung by wishing that her adopted Chinese daughters do not follow in So Yung’s footsteps. That is, Laskas fears the unintended consequences of raising her daughters on a farm in rural Pennsylvania where she can ignore and erase her daughters’ racial difference and instill in them the type of gratitude they will need in order to live comfortably under her wings.

So Yung has a section in which she reviews several books on transracial adoption. The last selection is entitled, “The Animal Book”. And, this is what she writes:

Okay, so there probably isn’t a book with this exact title, but it’s a common type of abduction narrative, and since this stuff is so depressing, I’m just going to summarize. There are lots of children’s books that tell the story of a little animal, like for example a bear, that is raised by a different kind of animal, like maybe family of chipmunks, and that one day goes off in search of other bears thinking that it will find its “real” family. Long story short, the little bear discovers that it doesn’t fit in with other bears and its “real” home is with the chipmunks. The point of the story is that the bear can’t survive outside of chipmunk “culture,” and it certainly doesn’t belong with the other bears. I read books like this when I was little. I guess they were supposed to make me feel like the “chipmunks” were my real family who loved and accepted me even though I was a freakish “bear,” instead they made me feel like I didn’t belong anyplace at all.

Taking into account Laskas’ book whose overriding theme is the pairing of different species and their ability to overcome their separate genetic traits when it came to nurturing and raising the abandoned young, So Yung’s point is well taken. By telling the above timeworn, persistent allegory to adoptees, society hopes to counteract any confusion that adoptees of color may have as they sense that they are once again “the only ones” in a homogenous crowd. Use of the allegory could be seen as a protective measure to allay adoptees’ anxieties about fitting in or belonging to their communities, but as So Yung notes, reality has a funny way of showing maternalistic idealism the door and taking the adoptee for a ride that could drop her off somewhere very close to the Truth.