The Help - a response half-adoption, half-memoir

I am not reading a whole lot right now.  Which is to say, I am reading 4 books simultaneously and not making much quick progress on any single one of them.  Plus, sports season has started so I have 2 soccer players and 1 baseball player to shuttle around to 8 practices and games each week!  So until I can actually get through a new book, let's explore a few of my recent reads. 

We read Kathryn Stockett's The Help for our local FCC Bookclub.  Our FCC Bookclub usually reads something pertaining to adoption or Chinese culture, so this was a refreshing change of pace.  To be honest, one can only commiserate over adoption and China so much before one wants to scratch one's eyes out.  I emailed my thoughts to the group, as well as a few others who I thought might be interested.  I wasn't blogging at the time and just wanted to get my thoughts down before they escaped, so the writing is not as polished as I'd normally like a blogpost to be (like most of my posts, honestly.  Who has time for perfection?).  Here are those initial thoughts, lightly edited:

I think that whomever selected the book must have intended for us to explore race relations and history.  Besides it is a good, fast read.

One simply can’t compare being Asian in America to being black in America.  Even in the most racist pockets of rural Kentucky, I always knew that somehow being black would be so much worse.  Being an Asian adopted into a white family helped to take a little edge off the racism.

That said, there are many parallels between the experiences written in The Help and those of my generation of adoptees.

I keep thinking about the lines that Minny and Abileen talk about.  How the lines aren’t real, they are only taught to us in our heads and we can choose whether to abide by them or not.  Children don’t see the lines, they are taught.  As minority adopted children, we didn’t see those lines between ourselves and our families – we only knew they were who loved us and we loved them back.  When Mae Mobley colors herself black, it felt like a punch in the gut to me.  Of course we see ourselves as likenesses of those we love the most – adopted Asian children see white, Mae Mobley saw black.  Isn’t that why we Christians take such a literal interpretation of being made in God’s likeness?  So we grow up in this world believing we are just like the families whom we love the most, until the world teaches us differently.  One day, yes probably around the age of 8 or 9, we are taught that there are color lines.

And like Abileen in the book, we children of color must swallow our daily humble pie.  The white families are our benefactors.  We are so completely dependent on them for love, security, and validation.  So even when we are treated like saved orphans, we smile and say “thank you ma’am.”  Into adulthood, even as we are marginalized and dismissed, we are expected to say “thank you ma’am.”

What is most resonant, though, is when the help’s stories are told.  The maids see their own stories as mundane, everyday life.  They believe that no one would be interested in their stories, that nothing can be changed.  It is just their lives, and what good does it do to speak out?  As it turns out, the telling of the truth for truth’s sake is their first impetus.  It is addicting.  And then, telling the truth so that future generations may live a different truth, this becomes a very real possibility.  These women, they burn their own houses down around themselves.  They speak the words that are so hard to admit – how they love, how they ache.  Bitterness, joy, rage, it all tumbles out.  Because that is what truth does.

I can’t imagine how hard and cathartic it must have been for these women to tell their long-suppressed truths.  And yet, I can because that is why I wrote the blog.  Truth-telling, thinking you can change something, it becomes addicting.  And while the experiences of internationally, trans-racially adopted children might not belong in the same chapter as the 1960’s civil rights movement in the history books, they take on particular significance when they are the experiences of our own children and ourselves.

The white women.  Of course, the white women.  The Benefactors, the ones in Power.  How telling that a black woman’s story must be told through a white conduit in order to be heard by other whites.  Or that an adult adoptee’s story is typically brought to AP’s through other AP’s.  The maids, and the adult adoptees, seem unable to garner their own credibility without the permission or acquiescence of a white person.  How telling, the range of responses by the white women.  Some were heartened to recognized as the “good ones.”  Some were furious to be called out in truth for their actions.  And some could not even recognize themselves in their own narratives.  How easy it is to superimpose that same template onto the AP community.  How troubling that the white women would be surprised at the complexity and richness of the maid’s experiences.  Troubling that they could not see past their own viewpoints and experiences to understand that completely alternate realities existed right under their own noses.  So much cognitive dissonance, so much justification.  Sounds familiar.

I don’t pretend that the adoptee experience comes even close to being black in America, especially through the long, troubled history of civil rights (or lack thereof).  But there are lines.  There is truth.  There is power.  There must be conduits.  There is oppression, there are untold stories, and there is so much self-deception.

Let me add that around the age of 8-9, I became aware of a great many things.  Before that age, life was bliss.  We had everything we could possibly want.  My parents were like gods.  I was unquestioningly accepted and loved.  My mom says that I have an old soul, and I think it was around 8-9 that I became an old person.  I started to see the little fissures in my perfect little world.  My mom was not perfect, nor was she an impenetrable shelter.  The world could hurt me in the stealthiest ways, adults couldn't be trusted to be kind, I was not like all the other kids.  I began to see and understand the qualities that differentiate people from one another - feelings, responses, actions.  I spent much time contemplating.  I was in the 4th grade trying to make sense of a world whose reality was so unlike my insular early childhood.

This reminds me of something I wrote last year.  One of my earliest memories, because I have so few early memories, is from the 3rd grade.  This was a short-lived attempt at memoir-ing:

I am on the school playground, winding my way from the swings to the monkey bars. The sunlight feels like bathwater on my skin, like steam in my lungs. It is not yet summer, but already the Ohio River Valley is heavy with heat and humidity. My shorts stick to my legs, and my straight black hair clings to my neck.

“Hey Raina!” I hear a classmate calling me. I freeze.

“What happened to your nose? Did you run into a wall? Is that why it’s so flat?” He pushes his nose down with his thumb, turning his hands over upside down to simultaneously pull the corners of his eyes back. “How come you’re a Chink? How did your parents get a Chink baby? Are you adopted?!”

My mind is racing. I am deflecting arrows. I am not there, no one can see me. No one can say things that poke and stab at my fragile 8-year old heart. I summon a retort. “Oh yeah?! At least my parents picked me! Your parents were just stuck with you!”

I run to the monkey bars. There are no tears in my eyes, only the sting of a hot, burning sun.

That afternoon, I ride the bus home in silence. I don’t like talking to the other kids; they are raucous and rowdy. All they want to do is have fun, while all I want is to get to my bedroom, to be alone. Off the bus, I march in my short little steps up the big hill to our house.  I watch my sister race ahead, her long black ponytail flopping in sync with her backpack.  Sweat runs down my temples.  Mommy opens the front door for me while cool, conditioned air rushes across my damp skin.  I toss my backpack into the hallway and beeline for my bed.  Plopping down, squeezing my eyes shut, I push the boy’s jeers aside and try to conjure a very different image.

I create the memory of a woman holding my hand. She is saying goodbye, pinning my name to my shirt. In this fabricated memory, I am 22 months old, watching my mother walk away, down a long dirty street in the middle of a bleak foreign country. What is the name of it again? Oh right, Korea – whatever that means. She is leaving me because she loves me, that is what Mommy said.  I think that is a strange way to love someone.  I am squeezing my eyes harder now, trying to hard to look around in this memory. Where is the scenery? Are there other people, and do they look like me? Do I feel loved, or simply lost?

It is hopeless, there is no remembering. I don’t know anything about Korea, except that it is not China and so it must be a crappy little country in Asia that nobody cares about. I wish Mommy would show it to me on a map. I wish I knew where I came from. I wish I could remember just something, anything, about that last day I had with that other woman. But it is gone, and all that I have now is the memory of a boy calling me Chink. 

At dinner, Mommy asks me how my day at school was. “Fine.” She asks if anything is bothering me. “No.” I am sullen and quiet, as always. No, Mommy, nothing is wrong. Everything is fine.

***
23 years later, I call Mom on the phone. “I have to tell you something. We didn’t want to tell anyone until we were closer to travel, but we’re ready now. You’re going to have a new granddaughter. We’re adopting a little girl from China!”

Mom is thrilled but a little taken aback. “That’s wonderful! Another grandbaby!” She later asks me, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m just curious. You already have three kids, why are you adopting?”

I hesitate. I don’t know why. What can I say? It’s just another way to have a kid. It’s how I came into my family so it seems natural to build my family through adoption. I don’t know.

How can I not know?

Incidentally, my oldest daughter is 8.  My second daughter turns 8 next month.  I hope their truth is very different than mine was.