Marketplace

I couldn't resist making this post.  I was browsing another blog about adoption called CJ on Adoption and came across this website that acts as a facilitator for prospective parents and children in need of adoption.

I was serious when I titled the post Marketplace because that is exactly what it was.  It looks like a Craigslist for adoption, just a bit more organized.  It even lists a whole slew of children waitlisting for adoption.  Here is an example of the Marketplace.  Even more disturbing for me is the sign "Reduced Fee" right next to some little kid's info, making it look like a shopping website hoping to entice the prospective couples to pick out one of these kids like shopping for grocery. 

Whatever on sale would go faster!  And be hurry to let those kids outta the door, cuz they're near the expiration date!

Taking the Plunge

Well, since I can't just go and adopt a child right away without the proper means to support her.  So, I went to the ASPCA instead and got Skipper!

I'm allergic to almost everything there is so I have to start taking Claritin everyday.  It's a new experience taking care of another living being, someone whom relying on you to feed and keep them clean and healthy.  The experience of cleaning up the litter pan is very painful to my sense of smell, I guess it's almost like changing little kids' diapers.  That and telling them to stop making poo poo on people's beds...

He's a 18 month old, 16 lbs, short haired, domestic stray who got badly injured in fight with another animal (we assuming it's dogs since he hates them with a vengeance).  But he's cuddling next to my leg right now... and that's very distracting.  I guess the cuteness is superseding the yuckiness.

Louis Bardo Bullock

So Sandra Bullock has filed for divorce AND adopted a little boy from New Orleans as a single mother, just like Vanessa Loring (played by Jennifer Garner) in Juno.  After a long process of paperwork with the prospective adoptive fathers, the couples broke up and the women decided the joy of motherhood is worth it to be a single mother.

In an effort to shield her new son from the prying eyes during the award season, she had hidden the news of adoption and little Louise away from the press' reaches.  Already, she's protective and acting thoughtfully concerning her son.

She named her baby boy after the jazz great Louis Armstrong, commemorating his signature song, "What a Wonderful World."  Some might be tempted to compare this to Brangelina's Pax and Zahara's names.  Louis Armstrong is a black musician just like Bob Marley, Zahara's namesake.  Thien is not such a bad Vietnamese name for Pax since it's usually a boy name.  To my untrained ears, it actually sounds so much better than Pax Sky.  Plus, in this case, Thien is a middle name.  When is the last time you introduce yourself using your middle name?  Mine was at the registrar, trying to decide whether I want the middle name in the certificate.  Also, Thien is easy to pronounce, has you ever try to pronounce popular Vietnamese male names such as Dung, Phuoc or even Phuc?  Yeah, try doing that without offending everyone within earshot.  See?  Pax Thien is a good name, so is Zahara Marley, Louis Bardo and Naleigh. 

Adopting Characters

After watching the TV series, you might want to change the pace a little bit and read a book instead.  If so, here are some lists of adoption related books

• Webrary - 2002 - C. Elmore
• GoodRead - Listopia 
• something for the kids Bestselling Adoption theme Biblio list  
• Slayground's list
• or the teen fiction series by Caroline B. Cooney about a girl called Janie.

And I also learn from the website of Slayground that November is the National Adoption Month.  I guess it's really true that you learn something new everyday.

I found this YouTube video of Nia Vardalos of the movie "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" talking about her journey to be an adoptive parent.

Rescuing Babies

I was reading the Wikipedia... yes, it's pathetic.   BUT I came across something to blog about so it's not that bad, huh?  Well, it's called Operation Baby Lift, a mass evacuation of South Vietnam's children during the last day of the Vietnam War.  It placed thousands of Vietnamese kids in homes around the world.  If you are looking for media presentations of this event, here are three that you can probably get on DVD:

• Daughter from Danang
• Operation Baby Lift - the Lost Children of Vietnam
• Precious Cargo

This was the case of an impressive maneuver of government and nonprofit organizations' efforts in case of great disaster.  The newest comparable case would be the Haitian's orphan rescue by the New Life Children's Refuge of Idaho. If the children were taken out of a disaster stricken country, without proper paperwork, put up for adoption, chances are those kids still have living relatives that would like to take them back.  This is where the pros and cons of swift actions versus correct paperwork come into play.  Is it better to place the child in a stable environment ASAP or to wait for the UN-recommended 2 years waiting period?  Or in the case of Kyrgyzstan's investigation that I blogged about earlier, dragging its proverbial feet and making the families waited needlessly?

TV Shows that Have Adoption

Since I watch a whole lot of TV whenever possible, I'd swear Hulu is the best thing ever.  I thought it might be fun to make a post about TV shows I've watched and liked that have adoption.

Bones - Lance Sweet, a recently regular character starting the 3rd season, was abused until when he was adopted at 6.  Cam, the boss lady, adopted a teenage daughter. 
Dexter - Dexter was adopted by the cop who found him.  Later on, the adopted father taught Dexter the Code so he can become a serial killer who killed serial killers and not get caught.
Grey’s Anatomy - Izzie gave up her first child for adoption before she went to college.
Heroes - the Cheerleader, one of the main character, turned out to be adopted by the Glass Man.
Kyle XY - Kyle is a boy with no belly button, no memory yet he seems to know everything in the encyclopedia.  He is then adopted by his psychologist/ social worker.
Rags to Riches - 5 poor girls were adopted by an uptight millionaire.
Sister, Sister - Twin sisters were separated at birth, got adopted and found each other later on.
Smallville - Clark Kent is an alien, crashed on Earth years ago.  A nice couple took him in as their son.
Spartacus - Well, just a bit of it.  The main evil guy was infertile, his wife had an affair and got pregnant.  He told her that is his child and they would finally be a family.

Famous People and Adoption

If you read my superheroes post, here is something else in that nature.

This link leads to a list of famous people who were either adopted or adopters.  I was surprised to find out Leo Tolstoy and Aristotle were adopted.  Or that Alexander the Great, George Lucas and Julia Andrews have adopted children.

Brad, Angelina Take Kids for Ice Cream -- in Italy!

Look!  Well, follow the link to see the couple taking the kids out for ice-cream....  I mean, just look at Zahara in this picture.

News – PIC: Brad, Angelina Take Kids for Ice Cream -- in Italy! – Celebrity News – UsMagazine.com

Bureaucracy!

I just found this on Yahoo! News.  Apparently, American families have been trying to complete the adoption process for children from Kyrgyzstan for 2 years.  The process was first halted because of a Kyrgyzstan initiated investigation because of suspected corruption in the adoption system.

Hopefully, the recent riot would not make them wait too long since most of the matched children have serious medical problems.  At least 1 child died and another sustained neurological damages in the 2-year wait.

One does not need to think long and hard to see these children have suffered unnecessary.  If only bureaucracy does not have so many red tapes and incompetent handling.

Superheroes a Product of Amazing Adoptive Families?

Have you notice that most of our superheroes are adopted children?  AND their families are almost all wonderful?

So far I come up with

• Superman
• Spiderman
• Hulk

Can you think of anyone else?  Leave a comment if you do

Wolverine and his Cubs

I did not know that Hugh Jackman and his wife actually adopted both of their kids.   I mean the older boy looks kinda like Mr. Jackman for heaven's sake!  Then again, maybe I'm color-blind since Oscar is mixed race and way darker than his dad...  Look at them, who knows Wolverine can be this awesome?

Jaden Smith needs to be careful, there might be a serious competition for future heartthrobs.

Losing Isaiah, Losing Faith

Losing Isaiah is a movie about Isaiah, a black crack baby whose mother put him in the trash one night thinking she’d come back after scoring a hit but her getting stoned and passed out leaving the baby to found by strangers.  A white social worker named Margaret Lewin bonded with Isaiah in the hospital, she and her family later on adopted him.  In the meantime, Khaila was arrested and entered a rehab program.  Four years later, Khaila found out her baby was not dead, decided to fight for Isaiah’s custody and contested the adoption.  The court resolved to dismiss the adoption largely based on the issue of race.  Obviously, Isaiah did not adjust well to his “new” mother.  The movie did have a happy ending with the mothers putting asides their own feelings and placed the welfare and happiness of the child first.

My main grudge with this movie is how the court would feel that it was in the child’s best interest to literally tear him away from the only family he’d known and thrown him unceremoniously to his now-reformed mother. In this case, the court system behaved as if racial identity was the end-all solution and purposefully refused to figure the roles of responsibility and love into the equation.  I believe we need to examine the intentions of the parties involved before summarily positing a life-changing judgment.  According to my understanding of the movie, Khaila willfully abandoned her child in a dangerous place, the outdoor trash, to look for a cocaine fix.  The fact that she was stoned to the point of passing out did help the matter either, as it was, Isaiah was in mortal danger if the workers did not notice the boy and proceed to work normally.  Khaila did not volunteer to attend the rehab center but was placed there after she was caught shoplifting.  Therefore, one can argue that she did not intend to get clean, and the rehab center was a by-product of her arrest.  So the judge was taking the side of segregating the races and ignored the child’s safety and desire stay with his “white” family.  Just by saying Khaila was Isaiah’s mother and so her mother instincts should be enough to take care of him is wrong since Khaila had erroneously failed her son once before. 

The ending was pretty much a fairytale cop-out.  It looked like the director take a look at the plot and say “Well, we have to throw the Lewin character a bone to keep the audience happy and make us appear less racist.”

Sans famille

Lately, I've been thinking about books.  The really old type, the ones that your father read when he was young and the yellowed and battered copies are still on the bookshelf at home, out of the grubby reach of children.  I really, really liked to read those books, partly because it was a way to connect to my dad, but the main reason is so I have materials for daydreams.  Since the moment I got to touch the fully annotated version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West, I was hooked.  As any self-respecting, old fashioned Vietnamese book lover, my dad also have the translated work of famous French writers; two of the authors I've always come back to reread are Victor Hugo, whom wrote Les Miserables, and Hector Malot, the author of Sans Famille.

In both novels, one of the main characters would be an orphan or was abandoned, Cosette for Les Miserables and Remi in Sans Famille, respectively.  Cosette was adopted by Jean Valjean, a former convict, after her parents' deaths while the poor and childless Mother Barberin after Remi was found abandoned by her husband.  Valjean had ensured Cosette grew up in comforts and relative luxuries when Remi, homeless, wandered the countryside with his close friend.  The more notable part I found in both novels is that the relationships between the adoptive parents and the children were happy ones.  The parents provided for the children the best they could manage, giving them better lives than they would've had otherwise.  In Cosette's case, Valjean witnessed the way her foster family abused and maltreated her; Remi would've grow up in overcrowded and underfunded orphanage without knowing a good childhood.

And because Mr. Barberin was absence from the home due to his work in the city, both Cosette and Remi were brought up in single-parent households.  This proved that 19th century people, or at least French writers, believed a child would be better off in a loving environment rather than an ideal one.  Case in point was Cosette, before she came to Valjean, she lived with the Thénardiers' (2 daughters, a father and a mother) but she was treated with less care than a pet might expect.  After Valjean rescued her, he'd provided shelter, education, love and support above and beyond social expectations for a stranger's daughter without reservations.  He sacrificed his life for his daughter's love interest and only passed his last breath after giving her away to said man.

Compare this to the single mother from Tennessee who gave up on her transnational adoptive son from Russia, sent the boy back to his native country by himself with a note inciting Russian government into "threatened to freeze adoptions for U.S. families" as AP Associates reported.  News like this makes me wonder if we could somehow measure what people called "mother instincts" and just how much the roles and relationship between a child and their parents is influenced by the parents' own relationships with their own sets of parents.

Let's Do It Korean Style

After the last post on adoption a la "As Seen On TV," I got to thinking, apparently never a good thing, since I keep coming back to the Korean TV drama series.  Have you ever watch one of those?  You would start laughing or crying and proceed on crying on and off throughout the show.  Since 99% of the shows are limited run, meaning everyone knows exactly how long the show last so the directors would milk the shows for all its worth, putting in as much clique as possible.  An extremely common plot device is an character who turns out to be adopted but somehow get embroiled into old family grudge.  Somehow, the adopted kids always have to choose between the adopted family and the birth family.  Add that to the fact that Korean culture, and the rest of Asia, pretty much insist on blood ties and we have fireworks.

Just look to the right, that's a Kdrama called "I'm Sorry I Love You."  Don't you feel sad already?  I mean, I can tell before I watch the show, there's going to be a lot of crying/Kleenex and at the end of the movie someone will die, probably of cancer.

If you want a taste of Kdrama and movie, just watch this music video, you understand what I mean.



All that ramblings lead me to Naleigh.  So have you seen her?  Katherine Heigl and hubby Josh Kelley adopted a daughter from Korea named Nancy Leigh, or Naleigh, to be their first child.  She is a special need child that made the adoption process faster than normal.

Though the adoption process was arduous, Heigl confessed to Ellen DeGeneres that it was worth it.  Korea seems to be VERY throughout in the vetting period.  Well, I do think a 40 page long questionnaire is extensive and that's just on the child-rearing philosophy, mind you.

Naleigh looks bright and cute in this picture.  I sure hope she'll have a sibling to play with... whenever mommy quits Grey's Anatomy, that is.

One thing we know for sure is that Naleigh would never have to make that awful choice like the Kdrama actors have to, right?

Open and Blind - Adoption Through My TV Screen

So I was listen to the soundtrack of the Runaway Bride, you know, that song "Where Were You On Our Wedding Day?" is really catchy, pop-ish and funny song.  Anyhow, it reminded me of the movie Juno, which also has a pretty awesome soundtrack and if you have watched it, you'd know the main character is a teenage girl who got pregnant with her high school boyfriend and then decided to give up the baby for adoption.  Throughout the movie, she maintained contact with the couple she decided on giving the baby to, one of those "open adoption" where the adopted family and the birth parents are not constraint by court order to seal the paperwork as in a "blind adoption."

This got me thinking: is it better for the kids and everyone involve if the adoption is "open" as oppose to "blind" ?  And does it really matter if the kids never found out about the adoption until the very last moment on the adopted parent's deathbed: "Oh, btw, you're adopted."  It's so clique, I can almost see it as a movie trailer, in which the kid immediately set on a journey to find the birth parents.  You know what?  I bet Hollywood, or at least Hallmark, has made something along this line...  IMDB is going to be my next stop.  No, I don't think there's nothing wrong about that self-discovery journey across the American landscape to find your birth parents, it's just that I happen to enjoy those type of movies from time to time.  It also remind me of that episode of Friends, where Monica and Chandler were trying to adopt and so they spent an evening at another random couple who have adopted this young boy.  Chandler, in his typical fashion, let it slip out that the boy was adopted and caused him to scream on top of his lungs "I'm ADOPTED?" when his parents had obviously decided to withhold the fact.

I know the practice of optimistic couples who want to adopt would go to these agencies, having interview with these (typically young girls) pregnant women and hope that someone would pick them to be their unborn child's parents.  Between The Blind Side, Juno and Friends and the fact that I've learned most of the necessary American culture tidbits from the tube, I'm wondering if the common type of adoption on the TV changes from "blind" to "open" because of the more open minded people we have now versus 10 or 20 years ago...  or is it the media was just portraying cases that would support their argument for "open" adoption?  I personally think that international adoptions are one of the major selling point for "open" adoption.  Really, if you are a middle aged, white woman walks into a school uniform store with a middle aged, white man and 2 kids in tow, the assumption the salesperson would have is that the man is your Significant Other and the 2 kids are your kids.  Would your perception change one bit if I say the kids are two cute Chinese-looking girls?  Everyone would take a wild guess and think you'd adopted from China.

My story is convoluted but my point is that international adoption leads to interracial adoption, which would be impossible to pretend that "I'm, the white woman, has [birthed] an Asian looking kid with my white husband."  Well, unless you used in vitro to have the baby then you should probably talk to your fertility specialist about the mix-up.  Just like that episode in Desperate Housewives where Gabriel and Carlos found out their in vitro baby carried by a surrogate was mixed-up with a black couple's baby-making materials.



Well, here is the obligatory link to the trailer for the movie Juno, if you haven't seen it yet, make sure it's somewhere near the top of your Netflix queue, OK?

Blind Sided by an Oscar!

Even though I've just posted a blog post already, I have to shout out a CONGRATULATION to Sandra Bullock for winning the Main Actress Oscar tonight!  So the Blind Side has been recognized aside from the random joke told during the presenting. 

And Bullock thanked Meryl Streep for being an very very good kisser and an excellent "partner."

Some people have all the luck!

and yes, my joke is corny...

Haitian and the Brangelina Bunch

Well, most of the missionaries that were caught in Haiti on child abduction charges have been released.  Meanwhile, we found out the leaders of the group were previously investigated for inquiring about how to quickly getting Haitian children into US, barring any and all international adoption laws.

On the other hand, Angelina Jolie says that she's "open" to a Haitian adoption.  Would the Brangelina bunch has a new addition soon?  That is possible even though the recommended "wait time" after this type of disasters is 2 years as per the UN but I don't think Brad and Angelina would encounter much problems if they decide to adopt from Haiti.

Well, here to a possible new sibling for Zahara.  

Picture courtesy of the Us Magazine.

News – Angelina Jolie Says She's "Open" to Adopting Child in Haiti – Celebrity News – UsMagazine.com

A New Start

Since I was fortunate enough to be an American citizen and everything, you know, as a way of paying it forward kinda thing I was looking at Jolie's adoption of Pax from Vietnam and wonder if I could adopt a child from there as soon as next year.

Well, apparently it's almost impossible now, I say "almost" since I haven't contacted the VN government directly but... as far as the related organizations' websites then the US government has halted its agreement for international adoption with Vietnam.  Most of the organizations have lost hope of a quick resolution and have pulled out of the country.  Apparently it was allegations of baby selling that spooked the US side, making it re-examine the whole process and trying to ensure the adopted children would come from volunteered parents, not being coerced or for financial gains.

Edit:
4/27 - I just realize that most (ok, all) of my posts are related to the media (ie. TV shows, movies, books...) in one way or another so I changed the tag line on the top to "Adoption through the Media"