Adoption Microaggression Bingo!

A LIFE NOT LIVED

Author: 

Jenny Na

Photos by: 

Mihee-Nathalie Lemoine

It always starts in the eyes. A question formulated in the back of the mind that works its way up to the surface until it practically begs for escape. They want to know what you are.

I've spent a lifetime trying to answer that questioning gaze and have failed on so many levels. That's what happens when the package doesn't match the contents and everyone, mostly me, feels as if they've been sold a false bill of goods. 

When I look in the mirror, the person staring back is a strange Korean I don’t always recognize as myself. She has brown skin, small almond eyes and dark hair, which doesn’t match the image I have in my head of a girl with pale white skin, round eyes and dark reddish-brown hair. Though she has receded a bit over the years, I can’t seem to shake her off. She’s always there, lurking in the shadows. I manage to forget the Korean woman as long as nobody mentions it, but they always do. Whether the question remains unformed and locked in the eyes or comes spilling out as sound, it echoes in my head long after the encounter simply because that other girl just won’t go away.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt comfortable in my own skin, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped trying to make it work. Growing up as a Korean adoptee in rural Minnesota, I was almost always the only Asian around and the boys on the playground made sure I knew it. Here in Korea, I can slip through a crowd virtually unnoticed until I open my mouth. And when I do, I can feel the awkwardness of who I am return.

I return to these questions now because summer is the season of adoptees, interns and fellows in Korea. Every year around this time, hundreds of hyphenated Koreans make the trip here from the Western countries where they’ve grown up, live or go to school. We are returning in ever larger numbers and many more of us are staying. We’re choosing to make a life here despite circumstances that can be at once joyous and devastating. There is joy in the sheer number of discoveries large and small, and devastation in the amount of damage it can do to identities-in-progress.

I’ve seen enough friends – adoptee, mixed Korean and kyopo – take this journey to wonder what it is that makes us return, and to ask why we stay. Or maybe, with a tenth year here on my horizon, I wonder why I’m still here. Home, though, is an ambiguous concept for me and I’m not sure that I know where it is. Before coming here, I made my homes in Minnesota and New York, with a short stay in France. But I’ve never really felt like I belonged anywhere and I’ve always felt like there was something missing.

I came to Korea because I also felt that there were pieces of myself that I could only reclaim by coming here, to see where in the landscape of Koreanness I might belong. I didn’t have many illusions about it, but in the back of my mind I desperately wanted it to fit.

Still, I avoided it for a long time. It was like a box I didn’t want to open and my upbringing had shown me that sadness, frustration and loss were all part of the package.

Body of identity

People often ask how or when I knew I was different and if I knew I was adopted. To me, the answer is obvious, because the majority of people around me had always been white, including my family. I had two Caucasian parents and a Caucasian brother who was my parents’ biological child and I spent my childhood and adolescence in majority Caucasian communities of less than 3,000 where Asians were scarce or nonexistent.

The defining feature of the town where I lived the longest was the decaying main street that stretched for a sleepy block down a cement road past buildings that were either crumbling remnants of the town’s 19th century past or cinder block constructions that look like they were built in the '70s. The town was populated by proud immigrant families of Polish, German and Scandinavian origin, and by others of ambiguous descent.

I tried for a long time to play “white,” but it seemed that no matter where I went — and until I could drive, the boundaries were defined by where my bike would take me — there was no escaping my difference, whether I chose to acknowledge it or not. But I knew. I knew something was off because of how everyone always looked at me. The color of my skin, the slant of my eyes, the impossible straightness of my hair betrayed me every time.

I grew up with this definition of my physical identity encasing my being like a straightjacket, even if it didn't match my own growing recognition of my racial identity.

I also grew up in an era where parents, including mine, were taught to assimilate their adopted children, which meant that you ignored race, identity and adoption and pretended that your child was just like you. As long as no one talked about it, you were somehow shielding your new arrival from the knowledge that she was different.

In junior high and high school, difference of any kind equals social death. So I as I got older, I did the only thing I could think of: I tried like hell to erase it.

I had my mom, who had once been a beautician, perm my hair. It took two bottles of permanent solution and two hours in plastic curlers for it to stick. I also had her thin my hair with thinning shears so I could be like a girl in my class who had the thinnest, blondest hair I'd ever seen. On the rare occasions when I went to the beauty parlor for a "real" haircut, the ladies would comment on how long and thick and lustrous my hair was. How exotic. 

I tried to make my eyes look bigger with makeup, though I never could seem to get the beauty tips in the magazines (which were for white girls) to work for me. Neither could I make whiteness come out any of the tubes of mascara that my aunts gave me for an endless number of Christmases and birthdays.

No matter what I did I wasn’t comfortable with who I was trying to be. But I kept trying.

Just when I thought I'd fooled everyone, especially myself, into seeing me as white, there was always something else reminding me of the deception.

At church, my dad would introduce me to new arrivals as his daughter and I instantly felt like a fraud. I could see the look of surprise before they could conceal it with a belated bit of “Minnesota nice.”

For a couple of years, my mom sent me and my non-adopted brother to a culture day camp, where for one day of the year we took classes in Korean language and fan dancing, dressed in hanbok and ate Korean food. I tried pretending I was Korean, to see what it felt like, but it was a costume that never fit and one that I shed as soon as we got home. My mom eventually took me to Korea and later taught me how to make bulgogi so I could compete, in full hanbok, at the state fair. But things like these only increased my desire to be recognized as white and I wanted to avoid the questions that I was learning were safer to suppress.

It wasn't like there weren’t Korean adoptees in our school. Minnesota has the highest concentration of adoptees in the United States and our school had at least five that I can remember. I avoided them all, because I wanted to be white, and being with them reminded me that I wasn’t. Although I did have a short-lived friendship with one of the adoptees in my grade, we never talked about being Korean and especially not about adoption. Eventually we drifted apart, as all kids do at that age. But I also believe it was easier for me to let the friendship go because as long as we were together I was part of an Asian “we.” On my own, I could keep up the pretense that I was not.

Instead, I hid in the safety of the theater, where no one questions the act of trying on different identities, even if it was that of a Jewish woman named Blanche or a German girl named Liesl, and that's where I stayed until college. 

All of that was okay for a while, because I was a model minority – easily forgotten as brown because I was quiet, obedient — and I played the role really well. I got away with it too, or thought I did, until the taunts of “chink,” “Jap” and “gook” brought me crashing back to earth. 

Race relations

In college I met my first real Koreans. They wore their black hair straight, had Korean names and Korean parents, and they seemed to know something about Korea. In my mind, they knew what it meant to be Korean.

I met other people of color there, too, and through them, I saw that pride in race and culture was cool, not something to be hidden, and that I, too, could embrace it as they had: without shame. With them, I could stop pretending to be a different person. For the first time, I could feel that other girl in the mirror start to fade.

Yet it wasn’t like I discovered myself and it stuck. The awakening I was experiencing couldn’t fully protect me from the rollercoaster ride of living between my new self and the one I had lived with for so long.

Back home, family and friends were eager to reassure me that I was one of them. “You're not different, you’re Jenny.” It was a sentiment that at first made me feel good, happy to be accepted, but later made me feel alienated, like an outsider in my own home. In the end, it was a slow and insidious kind of invasion that chipped away at my newly discovered sense of self, erasing me until I was no longer a person but an amalgam of everyone else's view of me. 

How could people not see the difference that separated us, and therefore, not see me? How could my family love me, and not some superficial version of myself, if they couldn't see that we were different? If they couldn't see the people staring at us, at me, wherever we went? In many ways, then, I think I decided to make myself as absent as possible so that the questions might stop and I could once again hear the voice in my head telling them they were wrong.

After school I moved to New York and was happy to discover I could blend in whenever I walked out the door. For the first time, I finally felt free. Even the questions about where I “really” came from didn’t bother me as much, but I do remember getting really angry when a black man asked it on the subway. It sounded like a line, and a really unimaginative one at that, so I threw up my hands and threw the question back, adding just enough sarcasm so he’d walk away with the message that our mutual brownness made us subject to the same question. Maybe it wasn’t enough. In any case, his surprised look of confusion showed me that to him, Asians were always foreign.

To my surprise, that line was a common catcall from men with preconceived notions of the exotic Oriental and what she’d be like. Their sheepish stares and sly attitudes told me the story of their ignorance, but somehow forced another identity upon me. Each incursion erased whatever positive association I was creating for myself as a newly aware person of color, and taught me to see myself as an object capable of little else than the fulfillment of someone else’s idea of who they thought I should be. 

My response was to try defining “Asianness” for myself and for a time I tried being hyper-Asian. I used chopsticks for everything and trekked across the river to the Korean grocery up on 32nd Street and bought kimchi and strange things in packages with writing that I couldn't read. When I got home, I tried to cook the things with varying degrees of success and when it didn’t work I chucked it all and ate the kimchi.

Yet I still avoided the girl from the Korean family who ran the deli down the street. Every time I went into the store for a newspaper or a cake of tofu, she would try to teach me Korean phrases because she thought she'd found a kindred spirit. Her efforts left me feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed because now I was a different kind of fraud, a Korean who couldn't speak a lick of Korean, and I would speed out of the store as fast as I could.

At this point, I was still ignoring my adoptee identity, choosing instead to identify as a person of color and then as Asian-American and Korean-American. But none of those labels really fit. I also tried other Asian identities – Japanese-American, Chinese-American, Filipino-American – encountering each through the lens of literature. I came of race on a steady diet of Tanizaki, Oe, Hagedorn and Yamanaka, and later, Iris Chang, Haruki Murakami, Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri. But when I read my first book of adoptee essays, I was floored. Here were stories of people like me who knew what it was to feel like a white person in Asian clothing and knew what it was to be found out. They had dreams of Korea and I realized that I did, too.

The long road back

Korea wasn't a choice so much as a necessity for me. Deep down, I knew there was something I had to get here that I couldn’t get anywhere else. I had long wanted to fill in for myself the blanks that I had let other people fill in for me. I also felt a kind of despair at not knowing my history; it hung like a weight around my shoulders and pressed against my chest until I couldn’t breathe. What I wanted was to recapture something of what was left behind when I was sent away and construct a history for myself, if such a thing can be done, to replace the one I lost, or rather, never had.

By the time I got on the plane to come here, I had heard enough adoptees talk about their experiences to know that Korea wasn’t a fairytale with a happy ending. I knew some adoptees had experienced the sting of not being recognized as Korean by “Korean” Koreans, but I thought I was prepared for the experience because I had developed another identity as a person of color. I thought it would give me a cushion. It didn’t.

In the early days, I bristled at the cabbies who thought I was Japanese or Chinese because of my stunted Korean and I was shocked at how angry and offended some ajumma seemed when I couldn’t understand their rapid-fire speech. One Korean ajumma I met while traveling on one of my first trips into the countryside gave me a look like I’d done something really horrible to her when I couldn’t follow her terse instructions.

In the States I had felt my physical appearance was deceiving because people thought I was Korean when I felt white inside. Once I started to see myself as a person of color, maybe even a Korean, I thought people would be able to see it, too. Arriving here, I realized that they couldn’t. The same set of contradictions that the promise of my physical appearance seemed to present in the States had followed me here. So I slipped back into old habits – only this time, instead of playing white, I was playing Korean.

When I entered language class I could no longer pretend. 

The Korean language was difficult, but not only because it shares nothing with English. The Korean teachers I encountered seemed to expect, whether subconsciously or not, that I either be Korean or that I be kyopo, people who grew up with one or two Korean parents. Each new word I learned revealed that I wasn’t and it was like peeling skin from an onion, each layer sharper, stronger, more bitter than the next. Sometimes the bitterness became like a weapon turned inward to places I didn't know had been wounded.

I’ve been told that I arrived to the United States with words – my mom once told me that one of them was “omma.” In class, it was hard not to think about the loss of that word and the person it represented. When we did exercises where we talked about our families and our birthdays, saying my American birthday, talking about my Caucasian family – in Korean – felt wrong. 

The third space

After my arrival, I met two groups of people who changed my experience of Korea completely.

The first was a group of dancers who became my surrogate Korean family. They allowed me to immerse myself in Korean culture and I learned much of what I know about Koreanness from them. 

I spent hours in rehearsal, basking in the sounds of a language that was once again, for a short time, my own. With them, I only wanted to speak Korean because it allowed me to reconnect with a part of myself that I previously hadn't been able to access and I felt I was reclaiming something from my past.

They taught me what to eat and they taught me what breathing in Korean is like. They also taught me how Korean I wasn't by correcting and sometimes mocking my evolving baby talk. Then they taught me that none of it mattered: we were all family.

The second group of people I met was the community of adoptees who showed me another space: one where I'm neither Korean nor American, nor Korean-American. It was, to borrow a phrase from one adoptee, a “third space.”

Before I arrived, I had reconnected with an adoptee from the town where I grew up who was the sister of my adoptee friend from high school. She let me stay in her tiny ground level apartment until I had a place to live, and during that time, she took me to palaces, showed me which foods to order and sympathized with my Korea confusions. She was generous with her friends and they soon became mine, too. Like us, they were adoptees, and with them, I could talk about adoption, race and identity – how it had affected us growing up and how it compared to what we were experiencing here. We also talked about how our identities had always been defined for us by other people: by adoptive parents, by agency workers, politicians and “experts.” We sought to be recognized as experts of our own experiences, but we also wanted to move beyond the personal aspects of adoption to the larger system in which it continued to affect so many women and children. We researched the social context in which it arose and the social and political forces that kept it in place. Eventually, we formalized our group and gave ourselves a name, Adoptee Solidarity Korea, and a mission – to advocate for the rights of adoptees and to frame adoption as a social, political and human rights issue. Since then, ASK has worked to raise awareness about the complexities of the adoption system and adoptees’ place in it. Today, we hold public forums on those subjects and we have helped shaped public policy through our involvement in the recent overhaul of Korea’s adoption law that passed last year. We’ve also started a series of mental health forums that we hope will help empower adoptees as they work through their adoption experiences. 

Through the relationships I’ve formed within this community of adoptees, what has become clear to me is that my identity as a Korean is inextricably linked to my identity as an adoptee.

No easy ending

I could pretend that this story has an easy ending, but I won’t. I’ve done enough pretending to know that it doesn’t get me very far. 

I’ve always wanted to be recognized as Korean on some level, because my physical appearance seems to indicate that’s what I should be, and in the back of my mind, I thought I could wash the white away. Being here has sometimes made me feel that I could. But this part of my identity is like an open wound. 

I can no longer pretend to be just Asian, just Korean-American or just kyopo. My experience has taught me that as an adoptee, I lack the familial history and biological ties that seem to ground the people from these other groups. 

In some ways, exploring the Korean part of my identity in Korea has given me a frame through which to finally see myself. However, I now know that I will never lay claim to all of the pieces of myself that I lost when I was adopted, so I will have to go about creating something new.

I still struggle with language, and language learning, and think about what it would be to be completely fluent. I still see women on the train and wonder if we’re related because searching for my birth family is a task of which I’ve only scratched the surface and come up wanting. I believe that I have a birth family out there, somewhere, that I am not a true orphan without parents, but I also know I could be wrong. Part of me still wants to know. There’s a whole set of questions about identity that people with a biological family don't seem to have to ask. They already know they got their smile from their mother, the way they hold their pen from their father. Adoptees I know who have reunited with their birth families talk about the character traits, the physical gestures or the verbal tics, they have in common with members of their birth families. What have I inherited?

Amidst this search for an identity, a place to call home, a place where I feel comfortable in my own skin, are the remnants of a life not lived, of another family I may never know. I also carry with me multiple identities as a cultural Minnesotan, an ethnic Korean and an adoptee, and I know I will move among them throughout my life.

Equal Rights for All: It's Finally Time for Adopted People, Too

Equal Rights for All: It's Finally Time for Adopted People, Too

As our country has focused enormous attention in recent days on the rights of one minority, gay men and lesbians, we continue (alas) to give short-shrift to the decades-long effort to achieve equality for millions of people in another segment of our population: Americans who were adopted into their families.

Change is in the air, however, and a grassroots adoption-reform movement -- akin to the one that led to the marriage-equality cases now before the U.S. Supreme Court -- is growing. The result is that an unusually large number of states -- including Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington -- this year have considered, or are considering, bills that would address adult adoptees' second-class legal status by restoring their right to obtain their original birth certificates. I stress the word restoring because these records were accessible nationwide until the mid-20th Century, when one state after the other (except Kansas and Alaska), began sealing them.

The research is crystal clear as to why that was done -- to protect adopted children, most of whom were born to unmarried mothers, from the shame and stigma of "illegitimacy;" and to prevent these women, who were even more shamed and stigmatized, from obtaining information that they might use to interfere with the adoptive family.

Many Americans today, notably including state legislators, mistakenly believe original birth certificates (OBC's) were sealed for a very different reason -- to keep the promise of anonymity given to unwed mothers when they parted with their babies. A big problem with that belief, in addition to its being historically inaccurate, is that it deprives the affected women of the one thing shown by research to help them deal most effectively with their grief and loss - that is, knowing that the children they created are alive and well.

Other work by the Donaldson Adoption Institute, which I have the privilege to lead, buttresses the point from virtually every perspective. For instance, research on Positive Identity Formation concludes that access to core information, such as OBC's contain, provides important benefits for adopted children's development. Research onOpenness in Adoption finds there are usually gains for everyone concerned, including adoptive parents, when they have more information and contact. And a groundbreaking new report, titled Untangling the Web, recommends that "closed records" laws should be repealed because "the Internet obviates their main contemporary rationale," which is to keep the parties to adoption from finding each other.

So, in the face of so much evidence that unsealing OBC's would do a lot of good for millions of people in our country -- with little or no indication of resulting harm -- why have so many lawmakers in so many states refused to change the status quo for so many decades? From where I sit, the primary answers are mythology, misconceptions and mistaken beliefs, all born during the generations in which adoption was such a deep, dark, dreadful secret that many parents didn't even tell their own children that they were adopted, and the women who created those children were driven underground because out-of-wedlock pregnancy was considered so disgraceful.

It's hard to learn much about secrets, so all sorts of erroneous notions have come to be widely accepted, even by some professionals in the adoption field. So here is the bottom-line reality that I hope everyone, particularly legislators, will take into account going forward: The critics of restoring adult adoptees' right to their OBCs warn that doing so will set off an array of dire consequences -- from ruined lives, to increased abortions, to fewer adoptions. Whether they are right is no longer the subject of conjecture or speculation. Very diverse states from coast to coast -- from New Hampshire and Maine to Alabama and Illinois, from Rhode Island and Delaware to Tennessee and Oregon -- have taken this step, while Kansas and Alaska never sealed their records. So now we can see with our own eyes what calamities transpire when OBC access laws are approved.

The answer, very simply, is "none."

All this information, and far more, is contained in two comprehensive, research-based reports published by the Adoption Institute, "For the Records" and "For the Records II." Additional information is contained in testimony that I have provided on behalf of the Institute in various states that have considered OBC legislation in recent years, for example in Maryland.

Viscerally appealing arguments can be made by anyone, on any subject. Compelling anecdotes and singular experiences can be produced by any side, in any argument. So, in order to form the best possible laws, policies and practices, it is vital that we examine real evidence, solid research, and broad-based knowledge.

Those are the elements that have been placed front-and-center, appropriately, in the gay/lesbian marriage debate. It's long past time for the same to happen during the deliberations in states across our country regarding the right of adopted people to have what everyone else around them assumes as a birthright: access to the simple, essential, unadulterated information about the beginning of their lives.

Follow Adam Pertman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@AdamPertman

Russian Dumpster

Horrifying. It's too bad human beings need a sticker like this.

A Family, for a Few Days a Year

On the front page of the New York Times!

By RACHEL L. SWARNS

Published: December 8, 2012

GUATEMALA CITY — The little boy flies like an airplane through the hotel, his arms outstretched. Then he leaps like a superhero, beaming as the red lights on his new sneakers flash and flicker, while the American couple he is with dissolve in laughter.

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A Bittersweet Reunion in Guatemala

Rodrigo Cruz for The New York Times

Amy and Rob Carr in Guatemala with Geovany Archilla Rodas, whom they have been trying to adopt since 2007.More Photos »

He calls them Mamá and Papi. They call him Hijo — Son. He corrects their fledgling Spanish. They teach him English. “Awe-some,” he repeats carefully, eyeing his new shoes.

To outsiders, they look like a family. But Geovany Archilla Rodas, an impish 6-year-old boy with spiky black hair, lives in an orphanage on the outskirts of this capital city. The Americans — Amy and Rob Carr of Reno, Nev. — live a world away. They are the only parents he has ever known.

They have been visiting him every year, usually twice a year, since he was a toddler, flying into this Central American city for a few days at a time to buy him clothes and to read him stories, to wipe his tears and to tickle him until he collapses in giggles at their hotel or in the orphanage.

Yet half a decade after agreeing to adopt him, the Carrs still have no idea when — or if — they will ever take Geovany home.

“There’s this hope in you that doesn’t want to die,” said Mrs. Carr, who arrived here last month with her husband, more determined than ever to cut through the bureaucracy. “In my heart, he’s my son.”

The Carrs are among the 4,000 Americans who found themselves stuck in limbo when Guatemala shut down its international adoption program in January 2008 amid mounting evidence of corruption and child trafficking. Officials here and in Washington promised at the time to process the remaining cases expeditiously.

But officials and prospective parents say that bureaucratic delays, lengthy investigations and casework hobbled by shortages of staff and resources have left hundreds of children stranded in institutions for years. Today, 150 children — including Geovany — are still waiting in orphanages and foster homes here while the Guatemalan authorities weigh whether to approve their adoptions to families in the United States.

Stalled adoptions are not unique to Guatemala. Concerns about fraud, including allegations of kidnappings and baby selling, have held up American adoptions for months, and sometimes years, from Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan, Vietnam and Haiti. The State Department currently refuses to approve adoptions from Cambodia and Vietnam to pressure those countries to install safeguards so that children with biological relatives who can care for them are not shipped overseas, officials say.

But the problem of delayed adoptions is particularly acute in Guatemala, a country of about 14 million people, which in 2007 ranked second only to China in the number of children sent to the United States.

As officials here have spent months, and then years, trying to distinguish legitimate adoptions from fraudulent ones, many hopeful couples who had painted nurseries, hosted baby showers and bought brand new cribs began to despair as the infants they had hoped to adopt took their first steps and spoke their first words without them.

Faced with a seemingly endless process, scores of prospective parents quietly abandoned their efforts to adopt the children they once considered their own, officials say.

Guatemalan officials said they never intended for the children to remain institutionalized for so long. They say they have had to thoroughly investigate the cases, some of which are complicated by inconsistencies, false documents and questionable stories, to ensure that the children were not bought or stolen from impoverished rural women.

“These are very vulnerable people, who can be easily taken advantage of,” said Elizabeth Orrego de Llerena, president of the board of directors of the National Adoption Council, which is processing the adoption cases once they have been cleared by the child welfare investigative branch. “At times, they have not had the opportunity to make a complaint or to seek solutions.”

Ms. Orrego de Llerena said that the investigations, which typically include searches for biological relatives, were necessary to ensure that children were given up voluntarily.

“This is why, at times, the process takes longer,” said Ms. Orrego de Llerena, who added that her office was committed to finding permanent families for children as quickly as possible.

American officials counter that the process has taken long enough, noting that officials have published notices seeking out birth parents in local newspapers, have encouraged parents to report missing children and have sought out adoptive parents domestically.

They added that anomalies in case files often reflect complicated family situations, not corruption, pointing to instances in which unmarried teenagers and victims of rape and incest have lied about their identities or asked others to hand over their babies to protect themselves and their families from shame.

They say many judges and child welfare officials in Guatemala have delayed approving cases out of fear of increased government scrutiny and prosecution, not because the children should not be approved for adoption.

“I think these investigations have gone on long enough,” said Susan Jacobs, the State Department’s special adviser for children’s issues, who has traveled to Guatemala four times trying to resolve the backlog.

“If no one, after all this time, has come forward to say I want to give this child a home, I think the matches they have made in the past should be honored,” Ms. Jacobs said. “Just decide. Don’t leave these kids forever in institutions. It’s just wrong.”

Desperate for a resolution, the prospective parents have created Web sites and Facebook pages to highlight their plight, made costly visits to Guatemala to maintain their fragile bonds with their faraway sons and daughters, and pleaded with lawmakers and administration officials for help. They found a champion in Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, who has prodded American and Guatemalan officials to focus on their situation.

“It is unwarranted and unnecessary,” Ms. Landrieu said of the prolonged process.

Alejandro Mayorkas, director of United States Citzenship and Immigration Services, has also traveled to Guatemala to try to ease the logjam. Prospective parents hope that an agreement worked out by Guatemalan and American officials will speed the processing of the remaining cases.

But so far, only five adoptions have been made final this year. More than 100 cases remain unresolved, including Geovany’s, without any word of a concrete timeline.

A Test of Patience

In November, the Carrs packed a green suitcase full of socks, underwear, Legos and coloring books for Geovany and flew back for four full days here, determined to make some headway on their ninth trip to Guatemala in five years.

They arrived on a Friday evening at the Grand Tikal Futura Hotel, armed with a letter from their senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, and a plan to meet with their lawyer as well as officials at the National Adoption Council and the American Embassy.

And as they unpacked, they prayed that they would finally clear the last hurdles, even as they worried about the inevitable difficulties ahead.

The Carrs, who have three biological children, adopted their first child — a little girl named Samantha — from Guatemala without a hitch. They agreed to adopt Geovany in December 2007, just weeks before Guatemala closed its program. He was abandoned, their adoption agency told them. A clear-cut case.

They were told he would be home within six months, a toddler who would integrate relatively easily into their lives. They never dreamed that they would be trying someday to assimilate a Spanish-speaking boy who had grown up in an orphanage, or that they would be forced to confront the unexpected mysteries in his past.

Mrs. Carr, 42, who is a stay-at-home mother, and her husband, 43, who is a software engineer, firmly believe that God has called on them to give Geovany a home.

But they still wonder: How will Geovany cope in school without speaking English? How will he adjust to a life that is considerably more free-flowing than the regimented rhythms of the orphanage? And what about the impact of years of institutionalization?

Geovany, who has lived in an orphanage since he was an infant, shies away from hugs and kisses and rarely seeks comfort from adults if he is sad or hurt.

“If somebody had said to me five years ago, would you adopt a 6-year-old boy, I would have said no,” Mrs. Carr said. “There are a lot of pieces of this that do concern me. He doesn’t really know what family really means.”

But during their brief visit, there was little time to mull over such worries. A manager from the Remar Foundation, which runs the City of Children orphanage where Geovany lives, brought him to the hotel lobby on Saturday morning. He hurtled into Mr. Carr’s arms.

For four precious days, Geovany was no longer a child without parents, a face in the crowd among the nearly 300 children at the Remar orphanage. Instead, he was the center of attention as he pored over the Carrs’ family photos and greeted their children and parents in the United States using a video chatting program.

He stamped his feet in the new sneakers they bought for him and played pirates with Mr. Carr, jousting with brightly colored balloons, as they scrambled through their hotel room.

“Cha-cha!” Geovany shouted, slashing his orange balloon sword through the air.

Geovany shrugged uncertainly when asked whether he knew what the word adoption meant. But he spoke with confidence when asked about the Carrs, saying that they were his mother and father who lived in the United States with his brothers and sisters. He said he had never flown on an airplane and would like to try it.

Then he practiced adding their name to his own.

“Geovany Archilla Rodas Carrrr,” he said, rolling the r’s on the surname he hopes to take someday soon.

The Carrs tried to treasure the moments as the time flew by, counting down to the day when Geovany would return to the orphanage and they would have to fly back to Reno.

They alternated story time with Geovany with e-mails and phone calls to their lawyer, their interpreter and government officials, as they tried to set up the appointments they prayed would help them complete their adoption.

The Carrs no longer expect miracles. They know it is possible that they may never take Geovany home. But on this trip, they were determined to finally get what has long eluded them.

“Straight answers,” Mr. Carr said.

At their home in Reno, the uncertainty often feels unbearable.

Geovany is there, but not there. He is an ephemeral presence, peering out of a black frame that hangs on the wall alongside photos of all the Carr children. A group photo of the entire family, with Geovany when he was just a baby, sits on a shelf in the living room.

Their adopted daughter, Samantha, conjures him up in her evening prayers. And he occasionally slips into Mrs. Carr’s dreams or into her mind during the day when someone asks, unknowingly, unwittingly, how many children she has.

Mrs. Carr’s children are no longer surprised when they stumble across her weeping and wondering whether Geovany is sick or scared or feeling abandoned. She cannot help thinking of all the milestones she has missed: the day he spoke his first words, lost his first tooth, took his first bus ride to school.

The caseworkers at their adoption agency advised them several years ago to give up on the process. Even Mr. Carr has wondered at times how long they should continue to wait. In October, as they planned their trip here, Mr. Carr told his wife that he did not think he could do it again.

“I don’t want to go down and visit him and leave,” he recalled telling her before recommitting himself yet again to Geovany. “I said, ‘I’m just ready to quit.’ ”

A Tangled Background

It was not the journey that the Carrs envisioned when they first saw Geovany’s photograph. He was a baby boy in a battered, wooden crib with a runny nose and a missing sock. It was December 2007 and in the midst of completing the adoption of Samantha, the Carrs were studying the pictures of hundreds of children who were available for adoption, trying to decide whether to bring one last needy child home.

Mr. Carr stopped short when he saw the dark-eyed baby with the bare foot. He could not explain the wave of emotion that swept over him. But suddenly he was sure. “That boy needs a dad,” he said, “and I’m his dad.”

So the Carrs accepted Geovany on the spot, without worrying about the identity of his mother or how or why he had been deserted by his biological family. Their adoption agency assured them that the courts had issued a decree certifying that he had been abandoned, and that was good enough.

“We were thinking about bunk beds,” Mrs. Carr said. “We fully expected that he would be home before his second birthday.”

But the case stalled. First, they were told that there was a typo on their power of attorney form. Then in November 2008, they learned that their case was being investigated, because the woman who had given him up for adoption was not his birth mother.

Astonished, the Carrs turned to the only tangible link they had to Geovany’s past, an eight-page abandonment decree issued by the courts, which they had never read because it is in Spanish. To their dismay, they learned that Geovany’s story was not straightforward at all.

His surname in the records was different from the one that the adoption agency had given them. He was months older than they had been told. The court records said that he had been given up for adoption by a woman who had described him as her son. The woman agreed to take a DNA test to prove the relationship, but she vanished before the results came back. The test results showed that the woman was not Geovany’s mother.

Notices were placed in the newspapers calling on the woman, her relatives or anyone who knew anything about the child to come forward. No one responded.

Officials also checked with the national police, who reported that no child of Geovany’s description had been reported missing or kidnapped. Finally, Geovany was formally declared eligible for adoption.

The Carrs were dumbfounded. Who was this little boy? What was his real name? Who was his mother? Who was the woman who had given him up? No one knew.

American officials, who have reviewed all of the pending adoption cases, said that the Carrs’ case was similar to many of the others stuck in the pipeline here, filled with contradictory DNA test results, uncorroborated accounts, sloppy casework and unresolved mysteries.

Maybe Geovany’s mother was an unwed teenager, the Carrs thought, or a rape victim who had handed her child to someone else. If she had really wanted him, would she not have searched for him or visited him?

Those worries faded — only to be replaced by new ones — as the years passed without the birth mother’s re-emergence. In the end, the couple found some comfort in the fact that Geovany’s biological mother, whoever she is, never came looking for him.

“Sometimes you have questions that you don’t have answers to,” Mrs. Carr said. “You just have to keep going.”

She reminded herself of that in Guatemala after she and her husband and Geovany visited their lawyer. She arrived feeling hopeful. She left in tears.

A judge had certified that Geovany was eligible for adoption, but the decree was written up incorrectly, the lawyer said. It was likely that the National Adoption Council would reject it, and the Carrs would have to go back to court to have it reissued.

To make matters worse, there had been some confusion about the length of their visit, and as a result they would not be able to meet with anyone at the Adoption Council.

Geovany, who listened quietly as the legal discussion swirled around him, was somber after the meeting, which took place on a Monday afternoon. That evening, the Carrs told him that he would be going back home the next day.

“To the United States?” Geovany asked.

They shook their heads. To the orphanage, they said.

Mrs. Carr took a sleeping pill that night to ease the heartbreak. She reassured herself that Geovany would be fine. He was accustomed now to their comings and goings and the syncopated rhythms of their dislocated lives.

“It’s much easier for him than it is for us,” she said.

But Geovany did not sleep well in their hotel room that evening. On his last night before returning to the orphanage, he tossed and turned restlessly in his rollaway bed. Twice, they awoke to hear him crying.

How Many More Delays?

Nearly 300 children live in the sprawling orphanage that sits behind a black metal gate in the impoverished community of San Jose Villanueva. Ask Geovany and he will tell you that he was born here, even though the administrators know that is not true. It is the only home he has ever known.

Inside the compound, he shares the top floor of a spare house that bears the name, “The Love of God,” with other abandoned children.

Sofia Villanova, the house mother, was waiting for Geovany to return from his visit with the Carrs. She was bracing herself for the emotional turmoil she said she knew he would experience once the Americans were gone.

“Every time that they leave, he finds himself alone once again; he is sad, solitary, isolated,” Ms. Villanova said. “We try to give him the most support, the most love that we can. But it’s not the same as having parents. It takes time to reintegrate him to the routines of the house.”

The orphanage’s administrators say that none of Geovany’s blood relatives have come to visit him in all the years he has lived at the institution. No one, they said, knows who they are.

But on Tuesday, their last full day in Guatemala, as they settled in for a meeting with officials at the American Embassy who had reviewed their case file, the Carrs learned that the Guatemalan authorities had finally unraveled the mystery of Geovany’s origins. They had located Geovany’s birth mother.

Their adoption, the American officials told the couple, was delayed once again while Guatemalan caseworkers tried to reach the woman, who lives in a remote area. They wanted to give her a DNA test and to interview her to determine once and for all if she had voluntarily given up Geovany when he was a baby.

The Carrs were stunned. Their lawyer had not mentioned a word of this. It had been nearly four years since anyone had brought up Geovany’s birth mother. Geovany, unable to understand the conversation in English, sat quietly on Mr. Carr’s lap.

“My heart just sank,” Mr. Carr said. “Another hurdle. How many hurdles are we going to have to go through to get this kid home?”

Mrs. Carr thought fearfully about the stories she had heard from other prospective adoptive parents, about Guatemalan officials who forced birth families to accept their abandoned children, a charge that Guatemalan officials have denied.

Then she thought of that woman out there somewhere, Geovany’s mother.

“We love him,” Mrs. Carr said finally. “We want him to be a part of our family. But if there was a birth family out there who wanted to raise him, would that be better for him?”

Her shaky voice trailed off.

Geovany and the Carrs wept quietly in the hotel lobby when it was finally time for him to go, and they clung to each other on the bus ride back to the orphanage. But the little boy’s face brightened when he stepped into his house and received a hero’s welcome.

“Geovany!” the other boys shouted. “Geovany!”

Geovany proudly reintroduced the Carrs as his Mamá and Papi and opened his brand new Ben 10 backpack to share his goodies. He offered bites of cold pizza (saved from lunch) to his closest friends, glowsticks to everyone, and displayed the drawing that the Carrs’ daughter Samantha had made just for him.

“This is from my sister,” he told them.

Then Mrs. Carr began blowing up dozens of brightly colored balloons, twisting them into animal shapes and swords, transforming the orphaned and abandoned boys into a motley crew of rambunctious, swashbuckling pirates.

It was dark by the time the Americans finally said goodbye to Geovany and clambered back onto the bus. As they headed back to the hotel, they tried not to lose themselves in sorrow.

The months fly by so quickly, the Carrs reminded each other. Soon there would be Christmas to celebrate and the New Year and their children’s birthdays. And then it would be spring again, time to start planning another trip to Guatemala
.

Project Recognize

Here is where I will be noting instances of orphans, parentless children, adoption, and alternative family formation in popular (American) media.



Books:

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë: The main character, Heathcliff, is an orphan found by Mr. Earnshaw. From wikipedia: Found, presumably orphaned on the streets of Liverpool and taken to Wuthering Heights by Mr Earnshaw and reluctantly cared for by the family. He and Catherine (the daughter and main character) grew close. Their love is the central theme of the first volume. His revenge against the man she chose to marry and its consequences are the central theme of the second volume. Heathcliff has been considered as a Byronic hero, but critics have pointed out that he re-invents himself at various points, making his character hard to fit into any single "type." Because of his ambiguous position in society and his lack of status—underlined by the fact that "Heathcliff" serves as his given name; he has no surname—his character has been a favorite subject of Marxist criticism.


Cider House Rules by John Irving: the entire novel describes an orphanage and hospital, St. Cloud's. The main character, Homer Wells, is one of the orphaned children living at St. Cloud's who has several failed foster placements in Maine in the 1930s. There are many storylines in the novel that deal with orphanhood, abandonment, foster care, and adoption as the orphanage is the first and primary setting of the novel.


Television:


American Dad!: On American Dad!, the wife, Francine Smith voiced by Wendy Schaal is adopted by Chinese parents. From Wikipedia: Francine was born to a wealthy South Carolina couple, Nicholas and Cassandra Dawson. She was abandoned by her birth parents because they were not allowed to bring a baby into first class with them, and so casually left her at the airport.


She spent her early childhood in a Roman Catholic orphanage. She is naturally left-handed but this was literally beaten out of her, with a side of beef (or a mackerel on Fridays), by the nuns working there who saw lefties as "the devil's minions." As a result she took to using her right hand and was conditioned to hate left-handed people.


She was adopted at age 7 by Bàba and Māma Ling, Chinese Americans, who first saw her at 5 years old, but she was too expensive at that point so they waited for the market to fall. She speaks fluent Chinese, and often speaks in it to her parents to disguise their conversations in front of Stan much to his annoyance. Her parents have their own biological daughter, Gwen, who they are ashamed of for being supposedly very attractive but quite stupid (as Bàba puts it, "Imagine a Chinese girl [who] can't do math!") However, Stan makes it a habit of lustfully moaning and proclaiming his sexual attraction to her, much to Francine's calm frustration.


Friends: On Friends, Monica Gellar-Bing and Chandler Bing, played by Courtney Cox and Matthew Perry, respectively, are unable to become pregnant. As a couple, they decide that adoption is the route to parenthood for them. The show chronicles their process of adoption, including an episode where: Monica and Chandler are having a lot of trouble figuring out the adoption process so Phoebe sends them to a friends of hers who have adopted. Monica and Chandler meet them and Monica instantly gets along with the mother. Chandler accidentally tells the child that he is adopted. He then pays the child to not tell his parents but of course, he tells. Their homestudy through the adoption agency is also part of the show, including getting recommendations from their friends, and Joey's sleeping with their homestudy social worker. The show also shows the process of being chosen by birthmother, Erica, played by Anna Faris. In the season's (and series') final episode, Erica delivers Monica's and Chandler's baby, although—to their surprise—she actually had twins, a boy and a girl. Monica and Chandler name the children Erica and Jack (after Monica's father).


Bones: On Bones, FBI psychiatrist Lance Sweets, played by John Francis Daley, is a former foster child who was adopted by an older couple when he was a teen. In the show, he is meant to have experienced a very traumatic childhood, including the display of significant scarring on his back from abuse. His foster care history is often an asset in speaking to children wary of authority, and he often describes his gratitude for his adoptive parents.


The Office: The Office's character, Erin Hannon, played by Ellie Kemper, joined the cast in 2009. Erin's character was in an orphanage, and grew up in foster homes. The show is comedic, so it is meant to be funny when Erin tells her coworkers that "her hair was her room." Her character will comb her hair to cover her entire face, for privacy, in times of stress.


Grey's Anatomy: In Grey's Anatomy, married characters Dr. Derek Shepard and Dr. Meredith Grey, played by Patrick Dempsey and Ellen Pompeo, respectively, have an adopted daughter from Africa, Zola. In the story, the infant is brought from Africa (country unknown) to Seattle Grace Hospital for medical treatment for Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus.


On the same show, Dr. Alex Karev, played by Justin Chambers, is a former foster child. His parents were alcoholics, and his mother had schizophrenia (or some other severe mental illness) and he "grew up in a bar." He was kicked out of 17 foster homes before he was in juvenile detention.


Dr. Josephine "Jo" Wilson, played by Camilla Luddington, is also a former foster child on the ninth season of the show. Her character was kicked out of a number of foster homes until she ended up living in her car (presumably before medical school).

A New Project: Adoption Recognition in Popular Media

Many people think adoption is a small topic. People think adoption is a small issue. But I think that few people genuinely realize how prevalent orphanhood, parentless children, and adoption is today. I don't think that people realize how many families adoption touches. Nor do I think that people understand the impact adoption has, and has had on society throughout the course of human history. Orphans are not just a problem in impoverished, AIDS-stricken African nations. Orphans are everywhere. Orphans, and other parentless children are in every society, in every culture, and much more prevalent that you might think.

So because of this, I would like to attempt a new project. That project is to make a note of every instance in popular (American) media where there is an adoption, or an orphan character or storyline. Because there are so many instances of this, I think the best way to start is chronologically. So, starting now, every time I see or hear a story that involves one of these topics, I will note it here. I'm hoping that this list will help to demonstrate the impact that adoption and alternative family formation has on our culture, without most of us even recognizing it.