Red threads vs. RAD, Part Two

I realize I spent a lot of time on the toilet issue in my last post, but it bugs me that American parents complain so much about cultural differences when they’re in China. It’s a pet peeve. When I’m in China, I won’t be among those who visit MacDonald’s, Walmart, Pizza Hut, or the Hard Rock Cafe. Sorry if this comes across as self-righteous. It’s just that we’re asking these little girls to give up everything they’ve ever known, come home with us to a strange place, with strange customs and even stranger food, to adapt completely to living in the west, and we can’t survive two weeks outside of our middle-class, American comfort zones? Um, that doesn’t work for me.

Let’s not even get started on the subject of haggling for bargains in Chinese shops when they make less money in a month than we do in a year. Some day–the way things are going–China will own us. Until then, get your suburban-dwelling, Starbucks-drinking, SUV-driving meekness on.

Now, to the topic of cultural appropriation. I am suspicious of people raised in a middle-class, JudeoChristian tradition suddenly turning to Buddhism, embracing Zen, hanging mandalas, dream catchers and kokopellis on their walls, Tibetan worry beads in their car, or the yinyang symbol on their person. Perhaps their motives are pure, but does that really matter if the end result is a sort of self-indulgence, a cross-cultural dabbling, suspiciously available only to those of sufficient means? Too often these sorts of material and emotional appropriations–dare I say, adoptions–are represented as thoughtful, as enlightened, as groovy. Are they? Are they really?

I must point out that this suspicion is largely self-directed. Three years ago we bought a ranch in the high desert of Arizona that used to be a religious retreat, owned before us by an eclectic spiritual organization. There are several miles of trails, leading to shrines of various religious persuasions, where they used to hold healing or transforming ceremonies. We love the property because it’s beautiful, at the foot of a beautiful mountain (that used to be a volcano), and has great hiking trails. I was nervous about the idea of maintaining the rest of it, given that a bunch of white people living in the inner mountain west don’t seem to qualify as particularly Hindu-Buddhist-Zen-Native American, no matter how earnest the previous owners were or how curious we might be. I will say it’s been a regular course on comparative religions. I like the learning part of living here, but it’s daunting to be a caretaker of such a complex space.

My 19-year-old stepson, D., and I have talked some about cultural appropriation. He wears his hair in dreadlocks, listens almost exclusively to reggae music, sports a red-yellow-green pendant around his neck, and can quote Haile Selassie. He has never been to Jamaica, and he had a typically white, middle-class, suburban–though not totally orthodox–upbringing. Yet he has immersed himself in the African-Caribbean cultural experience that is reggae. He also has some tattoos representing Chinese characters. His white skin and hair have appropriated these markers of color. When I questioned him (not exactly using this language) about whether he is appropriating a culture that doesn’t really “belong” to him, whether his choices might to some degree represent a colonizing impulse, he necessarily defends them. But, then again, I can’t really blame him. I love wearing Native American Indian turquoise jewelry. Is that a cultural appropriation, a colonizing move? Or is it just pretty? an aesthetic thing? I’m not sure. It honors the culture, right? Right?

I cringe at the idea of dressing my Chinese-American daughter-to-be in Chinese silks, kimono-type layette sets, or T-shirts with Asian characters on them. I am hyper-aware of buying a diaper bag made of Chinese fabrics, even though this probably would have been my first choice if I had had a biological daughter. Even though my adopted daughter will be Chinese, this expression of her Chineseness would seem to be more for me than for her. It doesn’t seem to be the same as encouraging her to ask questions about her birth culture, enrolling her in Chinese language classes (or other Chinese cultural classes), or taking her back to China when she gets older, which would all benefit her. Asking her to play The Part by loading her up with Chinese symbology seems more about me than her. I don’t know. Does it emphasize that she’s special in a positive, self-empowering way? Or does it mark her as special in terms of difference, as “exotic” and therefore available for our (western) consumption?

These are some of the hard questions I think about when I think about adopting internationally. While the story of the Red Threads is a lovely one, I suspect (as is the case with most of our myths) that it serves to gloss over some of these harder truths. And I want to go into this experience with my eyes wide open.

One of the other hard truths about international adoption is RAD–reactive attachment disorder, which I may actually get to in the next post. ‘Til then.