Insights from Angelina and a boy named Pax

Tram Nguyen

Insights from Angelina and a boy named Pax

Lately, I’ve been mesmerized by the newest Angelina Jolie adoption. Maybe it’s because I’ve been spending a lot of time in airports, in need of brain candy to get me through another flight. This latest adoption also hits close to home, since it involves a 3-year-old Vietnamese boy taken from an orphanage in Ho Chi Minh City, where I lived briefly as a child.

Of course, I don’t much care what Angelina and Brad do with their jet-setting lives. As long as they do no harm, it’s just a diversion to fixate on the pros and cons of how they choose to go about forming their family or trying to solve the world’s problems through charity. But, as one of those things that make you go “hmmm,” these tabloid tales made me think about the sticky questions of choice and responsibility that transracial and transnational adoption pose.

There was a time when I seriously contemplated adoption. As I approached 30 without marriage or childbirth on the horizon, the idea of creating a different family unit appealed to me even more. And, having edited numerous stories in ColorLines about the child welfare system and the political and personal aspects of transracial adoption, I felt fairly familiar with the issues. In my mind’s eye, I pictured adopting a black or mixed-race child, preferably a girl, from the public system where I live. Black or mixed-race because I knew they were “hard to place,” the least wanted in the hierarchy of kids. Local so that I could hopefully research the child’s background and keep her connected to any community roots. With good intentions and hard work, I was confident I would be able to tackle the challenges, get help where I needed it, and in the end provide a better life for a child while building a family I wanted.

Nowadays, though, I doubt I will ever adopt.

More and more, I’ve been dwelling on the aspect of adoption that is about exerting personal privilege at the end of a long chain of structural forces that result in more children from impoverished Black American, Native American, and Global South families ending up in foster care and orphanages. I could deploy my privilege with purpose, with the best of intentions and conscientious effort within the system, but it doesn’t sit right with me anymore as something I want to do. I say this with difficulty, because I have close friends and colleagues who have adopted transracially, and have learned from and supported and participated with respect in their decisions.

Adoption, and the balance of race and social justice within it, bears no easy answers or judgments.

Somewhere along the way, I started to focus less on who the “neediest” children were, and more on who I am and what I can realistically bring to the best interest of a child. Am I necessarily the right person to raise a black or mixed-race girl within the realities of this society? Am I any more attuned, by race or culture or societal expectations, to a child brought from Vietnam, China or Korea?

I suppose the biggest factor in my change of heart is that I began to suspect it would never be so idealistically simple to tailor a family to my own wants and choices, much as I do my career or dating life. Maybe I have yet to reach the next stage, of still having the love and humility to start a family anyway.

In the meantime, I’ll refrain from judging even if Angelina did re-name her new son Pax. What hubris! What privilege! What cultural and racial superiority! But then, I realized, at least that means they won’t be butchering his Vietnamese name.

Posted at 3:51 PM, Apr 02, 2007 in Identity | Permalink | View Comments

Comments

I have had a very similar shift in thinking around my own choices re: motherhood. So I really appreciate your insight. For me, a great book concerning these issues really turned me on my head: Rickie Solinger's Beggars and Choosers. From there, Solinger's claim that one woman's choice is almost always connected to another woman's choicelessness has stayed with me. I agree that there are no perfect answers in this issue, but given the lack of attention on the communities where children are placed into adoption, as well as the absence of birthmothers and the choices they might enact given proper resources, it makes the range of issues a lot more political.

Thanks for the honest, insightful, critical examination of this important issue!

And anyone out there who hasn't read Solinger's book, pick it up! It's absolutely vital to anyone who cares about antiracism, feminism, and the ways that the whole range of inequalities, here and globally, interlock.

"More and more, I've been dwelling on the aspect of adoption that is about exerting personal privilege at the end of a long chain of structural forces that result in more children from impoverished Black American, Native American, and Global South families ending up in foster care and orphanages. I could deploy my privilege with purpose, with the best of intentions and conscientious effort within the system, but it doesn't sit right with me anymore as something I want to do."

How exactly? In what ways? (With all due respect)

Thanks for writing about a difficult subject with such honesty!

I think adoption is a defining aspect of women's lives today in a way that it wasn't for previous generations. So many women that I talk to have adopted or contemplated it or decided against it and for women of color the whole topic seems to be a very intense one.

Lately, I've been thinking about how my parent's generation parented. I have three aunties that didn't have children so they helped to raise my sister and me and other kids. I began to contemplate how I could parent as my aunties did given that I only have one sister who doesn't have kids. It struck me then that it would mean building new relationships with new people. and it struck me then that it's easier in some respects to adopt and set up a nuclear family of 2 at home than to actually build relationships with families who already have children.

I began searching for local organizations who provide free childcare in Latina communities. Recently in New York, I talked with someone who does childcare for parents who are organizers. I'm beginning to think that this way of "parenting" might suit me better personally and politically.

Thanks for your insights on adoption. As a transracial Korean adoptee I think the issues you're grappling with are quite real. I've really enjoyed this book "Outsiders Within." It comes at the issues of transracial adoption from a feminist and reproductive justice lens. The idea of this book is that on one end of the reproductive rights debate you have birth mothers who have relatively no reproductive options other than adoption, and on the otherside are these Western country mothers who have a full array of reproductive options that always tend to end with adoption if others have failed. Well I think it raises some good questions like, "why can't the money that goes into intercountry adoptions go toward helping unwed mothers raise their own children?" It's a good book and has really shaped the ways in which I analyze the whole adoption process.