adoption

First Person Plural

alicia — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Imagine having three different names and three different birth dates. Deann Borshay Liem asks the viewers of her documentary film First Person Plural to do just that as she tells the story of her adoption in 1966 from Korea by American parents living in California. The film traces her childhood in America and desperate drive to assimilate perfectly into American culture, which—to all who looked at her—would say she accomplished quite successfully.

Yet, upon moving out of her parents’ house, Liem becomes haunted, literally, by memories of her past in Korea, a past that included a mother, father and four siblings. After the ghost of her father startles her by appearing in her car’s passenger seat, Liam knows that she must return to Korea and discover the truth about her adoption.

Once there, she meets her mother, brother, and sisters (her father died when she was an infant) and finds out that her real name is Ok Jin and that her identity had been switched with a girl named Cha Jung Hee (whose father had claimed her within the orphanage just weeks before her adoption was finalized). The remainder of the film chronicles her decision to have her American parents meet her Korean family because she believes this is the only way that she can hold both families together in her mind simultaneously and not have to choose between them.

The film, running at sixty minutes, follows a steady and even pace, intermixing photos and home videos from her childhood along with interviews with her American father, mother, sister and brother, and footage of the meeting between her American and Korean families. Beyond the film’s technical proficiency, its emotional impact is its greatest strength.

Her subjects are candid as they recount their reactions to her adoption and their current relationship to her, and the authenticity with which they express themselves is both refreshing and moving. For instance, Liem’s American family—in their well-meaning attempt to reassure her that she was a “real” member of the family—repeatedly dismisses the significance of her past and given name. Throughout the film, her father, mother and sister each assert that Liem’s “real” name is Deann or Cha Jung Hee, not Ok Jin, shrugging it off as a technicality. Liem’s dismay at this reaction is palpable.

Perhaps most touching is Liem’s difficulty discerning who her “real” mother is. Both of her mothers are gracious and supportive of their daughter as she struggles with this decision, and Liem comes to the realization that the only way to become closer to her Korean mother is to acknowledge that she is not, in fact, Liem’s mother after all. The scene in which Liem’s Korean mother tells her that she only gave birth to Liem and that she should do everything possible to make her American mother happy is heartbreakingly honest. Overall, the film touchingly explores the nature of identity, memory, and family, as Liem struggles to fuse her three names and two families into a cohesive whole.

While glancing over Mu Films’ website, I discovered that Liem has followed up First Person Plural with her latest documentary In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, released in 2010. In it, she returns to Korea and the orphanage out of which she was adopted to track down the girl with whom her identity had been switched. Given the quality and power of First Person Plural, I’m sure that joining Liem on this next phase of her journey to piece together her identity will be just as rewarding.

Written by: Dr. Jennifer A. Smith, February 14th 2011

Mesopotamia

admin — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 18:00:00 +0000

By Arthur Nersesian

Akashic Books

Sandy Bloomgarten is a writer you either envy, pity, or outright hate. In theory, she's an excellent reporter, but often, to pay the bills, she resorts to working for gossip rags like The Enquirer. Who of us in a bind hasn't resorted to similar means? But when tabloid celebrity gossip takes over your professional ambitions and drives you to alcoholism, it may be time to reevaluate your work-life balance.

In an attempt to make ends meet after a bad divorce, Bloomgarten takes a freelance gig near her Tennessean hometown of Mesopotamia, where she's forced to briefly reconnect with the strange, confusing liberal Jewish family that adopted her from a Korean orphanage at birth. Her nearly-mixed-race heritage and her family's strained relationship history could have been teased out in a much more interesting way, but is instead only played up for its freak factor and used by Bloomgarten to demean herself through unnecessary use of slurs like "kook" (a portmanteau of "gook" and "kike") and offset her discomfort as the only "squinty-eyed Jewess" most people have ever encountered.

Along the way to finding a story worth reporting, one of Bloomgarten's sleuth companions ends up dead as they piece together the murder of several local Elvis impersonators. She ends up babysitting for a widow with seven children who sing various songs by The King as punishment. She has orgasmic sex with a Hunchback of Notre Dame-meets-Phantom of the Opera ogre who finds and saves her from being raped by a pack of local hoodlums. These are only a few of the slightly less than believable encounters the fill the first half of Mesopotamia. It only gets weirder from there.

Bloomgarten's legitimate problems—such as alcoholism, accompanying one-night stands with strangers, and other situations which call for an exercise in compromised, possibly poor judgment—are glossed over, which left me with an icky feeling. This is no doubt due in part to having encountered the destructive nature of alcoholism firsthand, though I was generally unsettled by the rampant drunk driving, possibly unprotected NSA sex, and pill-popping found in the book. Is it because I'm the straightedge monogamist type or because the novel, with a female protagonist, was authored by a man without an inherent sense of how a woman would act in these improbable situations? Do I simply misunderstand sexual liberation and flagrant drunkenness as gendered? All of these things are possible. I can often lose myself in fiction, but personal hang-ups aside, this was one novel that failed to sell me on the improbably destructive plot.

If you're going to be able to enjoy Mesopotamia for the hedonistic, celebrity-crazed cultural artifact that it is, you'll need to bone up on A-lister gossip from the past year and retain random Elvis trivia to make sense of the puns and wisecracks. Often, you'll feel like you're spying on some sort of Bizarro World skeptics convention with a few too many of the characters tossing around self-righteous anti-Bush, pro-global warming propaganda that the most devoted leftist thinker would find irritatingly cliche. If you'd like to finish the book without being tempted to hurl it across the room, you'll also want to cultivate a bit more sympathy for the protagonist than I did.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, August 5th 2010

Sunshine

admin — Tue, 04 May 2010 12:11:00 +0000

Directed by Karen Skloss

PBS Independent Lens

The doors have been flung wide open when it comes to the liberation of the modern day mother. Well, they are cracked considerably wider than they were thirty-five years ago at least. Gestating for ten years now, Sunshine, a film by Karen Skloss, eloquently portrays just how much our attitudes toward motherhood and family dynamics have changed over the past several decades.

Skloss’s film is deeply personal yet not so focused on navel gazing that the viewer can’t glean some social commentary from it. In the movie, she explores her past as someone who was given up for adoption in 1975 by an unwed, college-aged woman. Jump ahead slightly and Skloss becomes a single mother. In this day and age, her story is one that perhaps we don’t think twice about. Sure, most would readily admit that being a single mother is incredibly difficult, but it happens all the time, right? Fortunately, Sunshine shows us exactly in what ways the times have changed.

The story of Skloss’s life begins with her biological mother, Mary, who was from a fairly prominent Texas family. In 1975, Mary left home for college and became pregnant. When Skloss interviews Mary for this film, she confesses that the night she conceived Skloss is the same night she lost her virginity. Because the possibility of keeping a child would have been out of the question for her family, Mary had to check into a home for unwed mothers where she kept her pregnancy quiet, delivered the baby, gave her up for adoption, and then returned to a more acceptable path.

The film does not move in chronological order, and Skloss jostles the spotlight to her own experiences as a single mother. Gone are the days where it’s okay to refer to children as "bastards" if they don’t have married parents, but do we still judge moms who go it alone? Skloss herself admits that she looked down on single mothers before she became one. In writing this review, I almost stated that I felt being a single mother was acceptable yet unfortunate in today’s world, but Skloss' words made me pause to rethink that judgment.

When presented with Mary's father, a very conservative man with traditional values, Skloss tries to get him to open up about what happened with the adoption, but he becomes silent. Right or wrong, his values are in stark contrast to many of the young children interviewed for the film. Young girls and boys espouse their progressive views of marriage and the ability for women to make their own choices, whether it’s to have a family after getting married or to have a family without being married. With segments of Mary's father interspersed with clips of the children, it’s as if Skloss is saying that this is what was and this is what is to come. And by comparing her own experience with Mary's, Sunshine gives us both ends of the spectrum.

It’s difficult to see where these changing social attitudes are leading us. Children nowadays are learning that there are more options than the traditional family, and one can only hope those options move us toward a better place where we aren’t so confined, and where those who want children can focus on raising them in their own loving way.

Sunshine premieres tonight on PBS.

Written by: Beverly Jenkins-Crockett, May 4th 2010

Delivery

admin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Betty Jane Hegerat

Oolichan Books

The latest novel from Canadian author Betty Jane Hegerat, Delivery is a story about the bonds that attach mother, daughter, and granddaughter. It’s about the stark choices that women have to make when facing an unanticipated pregnancy and an abrupt mid-life transition. It’s also a story about women learning what really matters to them.

The novel is written from the point of view of Lynn, a woman in her mid-forties, and of Heather, Lynn’s twenty-year-old daughter. At the center of the story is Beegee, Heather’s new baby whom she had planned to place for adoption. The story begins after Heather has brought Beegee home from the hospital, against the advice of the social worker. Heather has been caring for Beegee for two weeks and it now seems possible that she wants to keep her baby. Making what seems to be an almost spur-of-the-moment decision, Heather tells Lynn she’s decided on adoption after all. She instructs Lynn to deliver Beegee to the eagerly awaiting adoptive parents, but Lynn, who carries her own burdensome secret about an unplanned pregnancy many years before, cannot bring herself to complete this errand. Instead, she loads Beegee into a laundry basket, puts her in her car, and bolts.

Driving from Calgary to a small island off Canada’s west coast, Lynn makes for the cabin owned by her ex-husband’s friend, Einar. This is the place where she and her family used to spend their vacations. It’s also a place that she dislikes for its sunless forest, constant rain, and the memories of her failed marriage it evokes. Over the course of the novel, we’re introduced to Jack (Lynn’s former husband who left her two years previously for a younger woman), Marty (Lynn’s son and Heather’s brother), and Einar (who carries a torch for Lynn). We also meet the compelling Hannah, Einar’s neighbor and the mother of an ever-expanding brood of children, with whom Lynn forms a surprising bond.

Hegerat writes with fine and dazzling precision, a keen attention to language, and provides a beautiful rendering of both Lynn and Heather’s interior voices. She shifts easily from present to past and back to present, managing to show how the weight of previous experiences flicker into consciousness to inform and shape the current moments of her characters’ lives. She manages to give us real and very ordinary female characters who nevertheless shimmer on the page.

Delivery might be described “a quiet novel” in that the action is relatively small and domestic; it builds slowly and steadily to a final revelatory moment. Yet the novel maintains momentum because Hegerat makes us understand and care deeply about the people she writes about. We want to know what happens to Lynn, Heather, and Beegee. We also understand that the decisions they make will have repercussions far beyond the few days contained within the confines of the story that Hegerat tells. A finely crafted novel with great emotional depth and resonance, Delivery is an immensely satisfying read.

Written by: Elaine Beale, April 1st 2010

Off and Running

admin — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Directed by Nicole Opper

First Run Features

Considering the number of children in need of adoption—and the number of children who are actually adopted each year—it's surprising there aren't more adoption stories being told. Aside from The Locator, we've had especially limited access to stories about adopted children reaching out to their birth parents. The delicate, vulnerable position of someone sending a letter out into the world, waiting and hoping to hear back about where they come from, is still a bit of a mystery, and more than worthwhile. In fact, I knew little about it until my own adopted mother finally reached out to her birth parents at age fifty-six.

Not only is that seminal search a matter of discovering identity for the adoptee; it is, potentially, a matter of deep-seated tension between the child and her adoptive parents. My mother actually waited until both of my grandparents had passed before seeking her own answers, to avoid the risk of hurting them.

Nicole Opper's Off and Running provides a candid, thoughtful portrait of such a situation in all its complexities. The documentary follows Avery Klein-Cloud, a charismatic star high school athlete from Brooklyn, who attempts to continue living the life she and her adoptive parents carved out for her while waiting on correspondence from her birth mother. The fact that Avery is trans-racially adopted—the African American daughter to two White Jewish mothers—makes her quest for identity that much more significant.

At the beginning of the film, Avery frankly admits her persistent discomfort in Black social spheres growing up, and later, when a counselor asks, “Do you feel Black?,” Avery says she doesn't know what that means. Her brother Rafi, also adopted but of mixed race, provides an interesting contrast; not only does he seem to have little interest in contacting his birth parents, but he seems entirely unconcerned with his origins. At the very least, he doesn't seem as dependent on where he came from for a sense of self.

Still, Avery's bravery in her search for answers is admirable, and considering how obviously torn she is about her particular situation, she is incredibly forthcoming and self-aware. We get an unexpected amount of access to her private thoughts and feelings about what she's going through, often things that she doesn't even share with her mothers. But as the tension in the Klein-Cloud household escalates, Opper seems to pull back and even gloss over certain pivotal incidents, like a falling out between Avery and her parents that results in her moving out for a period. Opper barely addresses an abortion Avery decides to get when an unwanted pregnancy threatens to impede her track career. In fact, this part of the story is so glossed over that I wasn't entirely sure that it happened.

In the end, Avery's coming of age—and to terms with the fact that she may never meet her birth mother—feels undeserved though still inspiring. Perhaps the fact that Opper has a personal relationship with the family (she was one of Avery's teachers in middle school) can account for her trepidation in handling such sensitive issues. But her reluctance does take away from the moral lesson of the film: that adopted children need to stand by those who've cared for them and showed them support every step of the way, which, in this case, is Avery's unconventional but extraordinary family.

Written by: Caitlin Graham, March 30th 2010

Off and Running

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Directed by Nicole Opper

First Run Features

Off and Running is a very non-traditional coming-of-age story told in a way that deftly conveys one young woman’s unique situation as well as more universal themes. Filmmaker Nicole Opper was afforded intimate access to her subjects, which enabled her to invite the viewer to take a sensitive and warm perspective as the events unfold.

The film’s central subject, a high school track star named Avery Klein-Cloud, is honest and likable. Her story, though specifically about interracial and intercultural adoption, asks questions that many young adults often don’t dare ask aloud. Avery introduces us to her family of white Jewish lesbian mothers and adopted brothers from multi-racial backgrounds during the Jewish festival of Chanukah. At the start of the film, she speaks very matter-of-factly about her decision to attempt to contact her birth mother during her junior year of high school. The significance of this year will be clear to those who have attended school in the U.S.—this is the year that standardized tests and sports results can affect college choices and scholarship options— not a year to be taken lightly. Avery begins to feel the strain, yet perseveres in her quest to find out more about her biological family and reconcile this aspect of her identity with her, at first, seemingly incongruous upbringing.

Along the way, we get to know her adoptive mothers and adopted siblings who all share a similar ‘tell it like it is’ vibe when speaking about serious issues with warmth and humour. Avery meets her old friends from her Jewish elementary school in scenes that further contextualise her upbringing. Filmed chats with another adopted young woman of colour raised by Jewish parents are natural and open—inviting the viewer in and allowing us to experience something we might never have seen otherwise. We also see Avery training for and competing in track meets supported by her long-term boyfriend, and getting to know African American culture with a group of high school friends. She is truly a professional and takes her sport seriously.

What makes this story all the more poignant is that her desire for more contact with her birth mother thwarts her progress in athletics and is detrimental to her relationships within her family. Although there are unexpected developments in this story, Opper maintains a strong, real narrative that shows a complete picture of the desires and feelings on all sides in this family. Opper’s choice to conclude the story the following autumn during the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah is culturally and narratively satisfying.

I found myself empathizing with everyone, which is a testament to the director’s craft. Each of Avery’s brothers shares opinions about her quest, and though one brother is a Princeton freshman and the other is a second-grader, Opper affords them equal screen time in well-framed sequences. Avery’s mothers receive the same fair treatment, and disagreements on screen never feel voyeuristic or melodramatic. There are many television shows aiming for this level of intimacy and family drama. All pale in comparison to Off and Running. Opper has done a great service to this genre, allowing me to reinvest in it as an audience member.

The film looks good as well—kudos to director of photography Jacob Akira Okada and editor Cheree Dillon. Thankfully, there is no voice-over narration, or even excessive exposition: occasional captions show the passage of time. A sympathetic and unobtrusive soundtrack by Daniel Bernard Roumain gives the film even greater depth. Home movie footage and a few still photos provided by this very honest and dignified family round out the story visually.

Feminist? Yes. This is a true story about a young, Jewish, African-American woman who knows her own mind, stands by her decisions, and learns from her mistakes. Unusually, but very successfully, Avery Klein-Cloud co-wrote the film and has actively supported the production process. I’m sure others who see this original documentary will join me in routing for Avery’s and the film’s continued success.

Written by: Chella Quint, February 16th 2010

Same Sex, Different Politics: Success and Failure in the Struggles Over Gay Rights

admin — Fri, 01 May 2009 20:25:00 +0000

By Gary Mucciaroni

University of Chicago Press

Gary Mucciaroni’s Same Sex, Different Politics offers a useful, though ultimately limited, account of the LGBT rights movement. Trained as a political scientist, Mucciaroni’s interests lie in the varying degrees of success and failure over LGBT public policy issues. He questions why certain policy issues (such as adoption) fare better than others (most notably marriage equality). Unlike studies that focus on individual policy areas, Mucciaroni’s text is an attempt to comparatively analyze multiple policy struggles in order to arrive at broad conclusions about the current state of the LGBT movement, as well as to identify new directions/methods with which to approach LGBT activism. As such, Mucciaroni charts six individual policy issues alongside and in relation to each other: military service, homosexual conduct and sodomy laws, adoption, marriage and partnership, hate crime legislation, and civil rights.

Using a variety of social science resources and extensive quantitative data, Mucciaroni deftly charts the contradictions that emerge through the comparative analysis of individual policy concerns. For example, he identifies an inherent disconnect in (seemingly) widespread public support for anti-discrimination legislation in venues like employment and housing, but stronger opposition to marriage equality and military service.

While Mucciaroni’s text is definitely groundbreaking in terms of its comparative methodological approach, its circumscribed focus on public policy, juridical process, and legislation disallows any discussion of the larger cultural, social, and ideological controversies that underlie public policy initiatives. What emerges is an argument that continually and uncritically reifies the legal system as the primary venue for bringing about social change, with little acknowledgement of the cultural work that necessarily needs to occur alongside policy struggles. Indeed, for a book that claims to concern itself with the material realities of family, discrimination, sex, and relationships, Same Sex, Different Politics remains utterly disconnected from the communities it seeks to represent.

Written by: Ashvin R. Kini, May 1st 2009

Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering

admin — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:34:00 +0000

By Suzanne Kamata

Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing

Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering is a collection of essays by twenty different women who are all raising children in a multicultural environment. The children in this book mainly fall into three categories: they are of mixed racial heritage, they are being raised in a country to which their parents have immigrated, or they have been adopted by parents from another culture. Being multiracial myself and having been raised in an army town where interracial relationships, foreign mothers, and multiracial children are fairly common, I was interested to see what Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering had to say.

Overall, I found the stories in the book to be very hit or miss. Some were moving and touched on issues that multicultural families sometimes face. One stand out is “Fade to Brown,” the story of a woman of mixed race who worries how her daughters’ differing skin colors (one is light, the other dark) will affect their relationship with each other and their cultural identity. It’s an insightful story, dealing with real concerns and specific problems that many people of mixed race can relate to.

Other stories in the collection are less on target. For instance, “Dr. Bucket in Bishkek” has nothing to do with raising children in a foreign country or culture. Instead, it is an amusing tale about an English woman’s experiences while being pregnant in Kyrgyzstan. While it makes for a good fish-out-of-water story, the essay has little to do with the central theme of the collection. Many of the stories were also centered more on how the mother was reacting to the family’s environment or circumstance instead of focusing on the children. These stories were more about bad marriages and personal prejudices than about mothers coping with unusual situations.

My main problem with many of these stories is that due to the way they were written, they just did not feel real. Don’t get me wrong—the writing is good, but it’s all very fanciful and poetic, making the work seem more like fiction than a relating of real life events. Instead of flowery prose, I would have preferred straightforward accounts of the obstacles and triumphs these mothers have encountered. In the end, Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering is worth a look for the better stories, but be prepared to have to wade through the bad ones as well.

Written by: Victoria Kroeger, April 28th 2009