This past March, my son Nicholas Hiep missed a week of first grade. He had a fever that shot up and down but never quit, and so his pediatrician sent him to get a chest X-ray. Nick was cheerful, throwing kung fu punches in the halls of Mount Auburn Hospital; I was cranky, missing more work.
Nicholas turned to me with a wicked grin. “Me oi!”
That’s “Hey, Mom!” in Vietnamese.
A white woman sitting nearby gaped at me—I’m tall, blue-eyed, Julie Andrews in a scruffy leather jacket—then Nick.
“Is this the hospital where they called me Noojin?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “That was Children’s.”
“Why did they say Noojin?”
Nick knew this story, so it wasn’t a matter of verifying the facts. When he was a baby, he’d had swollen lymph nodes under one armpit, probably a reaction to the TB vaccine he received in Vietnam. Soon after returning to the United States, we took him to Children’s Hospital in Boston. At that time, his health-insurance card was still under his Vietnamese surname: Nguyen. The physician’s assistants always called out “Noojin.”
“Lots of Americans don’t know how to say Nguyen,” I whispered.
“But you do. We do.”
“That’s because we learned.”
For an English speaker, “win” approximates Nguyen, one of the most common yet elusive of Vietnamese names. Maybe Nick thinks we’ve cracked a secret code. He told me recently that Nguyen Thanh Hiep is his true name.
At these moments, I’m sure my husband Rob and I are doing something right. Like many international-adoptive parents, we work hard to incorporate our son’s birth culture into our lives. For years, we’ve followed the formula for what’s sometimes called “culture keeping”: celebrating the main holidays from Nick’s birth culture; buying ethnic artwork, clothing, or food; spending time with other international adoptive families, perhaps going to a “culture camp” for a few days each summer.
Some would say I take it to extremes. I enrolled in a Vietnamese language class the year before Nick’s adoption in 2002. Last fall, I signed up for another course that meets five days a week. At the same time, I found a Vietnamese tutor for Nick.
In December, Rob and I took Nick on a trip to Vietnam, his first visit back to his birth country. But just weeks before we left, we found ourselves with a child melting down, who was terrified we’d leave him there, afraid we’d be disappointed if he didn’t like it. “I don’t want to go to Vietnam!” he howled. “I don’t want to go to Vietnam! I…don’t…want…to…go…to Vi-et-nam!”
It was then that I thought maybe I’d gone too far. Was I doing this more for myself than for Nick?
I know the caveats. He was too young; it’s normal for a first grader to be contrary. All true, and he often infuriated me in Vietnam. I was proud when he told people his name in Vietnamese, but I never felt at ease. We were on public display more than in any American hospital hallway. I worried for my boy when saleswomen fussed over the long rattail in his hair, fingering it, saying he was “lucky.” I kept wanting to hug his tense little face against my chest.
Since our trip, I’ve talked to people inside the adoption community and out: other parents, adoptees, social scientists, Vietnamese Americans. Going overboard can be worse than doing nothing at all, so I wonder and fret: How much should I push cultural activities onto my son? How much of his birth culture is it healthy for him to keep as he grows—and how much is confusing or harmful, a kitschy pastiche that will leave him permanently unmoored?
In 1999, close to four hundred Korean adult adoptees met in Washington, D.C., at a three-day event known as The Gathering. A research study, published the following year by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a nonprofit advocacy organization based in New York, surveyed 167 Gathering participants about their sense of identity. More than a third said they had identified as Caucasians growing up—until they figured out they weren’t.
“I felt different and alienated and alone,” goes one typical quote from the study. Another said, “[I was a] freak—I tried not to think about it.”
In recent years, the push to standardize culture keeping has been spurred in large part by flak from this older generation of international adoptees. Unlike in years past, when children brought to this country were expected to meld in with the dominant culture, today’s adoptive parents are told very explicitly by adoption agencies that they need to “do culture” for their children.
A few decades ago, international adoption was about humanitarian aid—period. The granddaddy of agencies, Holt International in Eugene, Oregon, got its start in 1956 with Harry and Bertha Holt’s Christian fervor to help Korean war orphans. In the mid-‘70s, children endangered by the aftermath of the Vietnam War made their way to America through Operation Babylift. The press, churches, and nonprofits involved all trumpeted adoptive parents as noble do-gooders.
Today the philanthropic line alone doesn’t cut it. It’s considered harmful to adoptees, who rightfully don’t want to grow up feeling grateful for food and shelter in the U.S. Many adult adoptees have begun speaking out about the racism their white parents didn’t acknowledge and the loss of birth families and culture.
Take this quote from a 2009 survey by the Adoption Institute of five hundred adult adoptees: “Going to Korea changed my perception … When I returned home, I loathed white people. I grieved the loss of being around others who looked like me and I took it out on the white people around me.” That’s enough to pour cold water on any adoptive parent’s dream of a smooth and harmonious blending of cultures.
Many adoptees express raw anger, especially when they’re young adults. Others come to terms and even celebrate their dual identities. In both cases, however, the internal conflict is clear. Hollee McGinnis—aka Lee Hwa Yeong—a Korean adoptee in her thirties, says she had a lot of pride in her heritage as a child, “but it shriveled right up when someone called me a ‘chink.’” Her adoptive family was always supportive, she’s quick to add, but she grew up in a “Caucasian” town north of New York City.
She describes one emblematic trip to a Korean restaurant when she was twelve. Her parents and older siblings were the only whites in the place; nobody else was speaking English. McGinnis says her family looked at her “as if suddenly I’m going to remember everything about Korean food and know what to order. It was just funny being placed in this situation, feeling very awkward, very uncomfortable, but also enjoying kimchee.”
McGinnis, director of policy and operations at the Adoption Institute and lead author of the 2009 study, is married to another Korean adoptee. Together, they have a one-year-old son. She laughs when talking about her son’s white grandparents and how confusing it must seem to him.
Plenty of McGinnis’s peers are less amused by such tales. In memoirs, on Facebook, and in Yahoo groups, adult transracial adoptees often hit back at adoptive parents (or “APs”) who won’t listen to their pain. Yet as McGinnis points out, we only hear from the ones who care about losing their birth cultures. “There’s a group of adoptees that don’t care squat,” she says. “The vast majority of adoptees are doing the dance—putting on Asian culture, taking it off, figuring it all out.”
The crucial factor for adoptees seems to be whether their adoptive parents ignored their racial difference when they were children. A number of adoptee memoirs describe birth-parent reunions and cultural reconnections, but these writers—like McGinnis, who reunited with her birth family in 1996—didn’t all start the identity quest feeling traumatized. White parents who told kids that “color doesn’t matter” or “that woman who abandoned you is not your real mother!” were probably denying a whole lot else about their children—a tip-off that bad parenting was the culprit, not a lack of culture keeping.
Meanwhile, the media chatter on about international adoption when, in reality, it’s in sharp decline. In 2008, the immigrant orphan visas processed by the State Department had dropped by twenty-four percent since the peak in 2004. Most adoption experts believe the downward slide will continue. China is releasing far fewer children for adoption, and the waiting period for prospective parents can be over three years. Vietnam, Cambodia, Guatemala, and several other countries are now closed to U.S. adoptions.
Yet international adoptive families take up far more space in the zeitgeist than is warranted by actual numbers. The sum of U.S. international adoptions over the past twenty years comes to about 300,000 children. That’s in a country of 300 million people. Not chump change, but also not the “explosion” often cited by journalists or social scientists.
Nick is growing up American, and during our trip to Vietnam he clung to that like a barnacle. But as the months have gone by, I can see he absorbed something while there of Vietnam, too. He is both; he is neither.
In a photo from our trip, Nick crouches on one knee at the edge of Hoan Kiem Lake in downtown Hanoi. His hands are crossed in another kung-fu move. He’s not exactly smiling. He wears a long-sleeved striped shirt and dirty running shoes, which don’t identify him as American, but his pose does—his direct gaze at the camera, his back to the gray lake and misty sky and ruined Thap Rua—the Turtle Tower.
Then again, his gaze may be what my boy brought into the world. When I first saw baby Hiep, cradled in a nanny’s arms at five months, he stared right back at me. I’d expected him to avoid eye contact, to be scared of the hulking white people. I thought he’d cry or shriek. Instead he just stared with his big dark eyes, and I knew he was mine.
What you don’t see in the picture of Nick and placid Hoan Kiem are the lanes of screeching motor scooters around the lakefront park. That ethereal mist in Hanoi? An inversion layer of pollution. Nick crouches alone, without us, without any of the Vietnamese who daily use the park for tai chi or badminton or idling. I wonder what he’ll think when he looks at this photo as an adult. Will he condemn us? Will he remember how he howled, “I don’t want to go to Vietnam!”? Will he understand how uncomfortable we all felt?
There’s now an ocean of information available about how to “bring culture home,” to paraphrase a recent Adoptive Families magazine article. Starting in the early 1990s, when countries like China, Russia, and Vietnam required adoptive parents to travel overseas to meet their children, the focus of adoption literature has shifted to celebrating the birth cultures of adoptees.
Families with Children from China (FCC), which began with a few adoptive families in New York City and Seattle, now lists parent-support groups in all fifty states and in other countries. And since 2000, many more culture camps have sprung up from coast to coast. At these camps, adopted children of specific heritages spend a few days together making paper dragon heads, learning a bit of Chinese or Kazakh, performing in talent contests. Often the whole adoptive family participates in a sleep-away weekend.
Catalyst Foundation, a humanitarian organization in Northfield, Minnesota, opened its first Vietnamese culture camp in 2001. Thirty-four Minnesota families attended. Now Catalyst runs an East Coast camp as well. Executive Director Caroline Nguyen Ticarro-Parker says attendance at both camps has shot up, averaging eighty to one hundred adoptive families at each location.
Our family went to a Catalyst camp north of Boston in 2007. We still wear the green T-shirts with stylized dragonflies and “VIETNAM” in block letters. I loved watching crowds of lean brown children running around the cafeteria or dodging actual fireflies outside. But I also remember sitting in an auditorium with all those kids and their white, gray-haired parents, feeling disconnected. A few days of educational fun didn’t seem like enough.
Ticarro-Parker says that eighty percent of the families who attend Catalyst camps think going there once a year constitutes culture keeping. Like many other Vietnamese Americans in their early forties, Ticarro-Parker left Vietnam right before the fall of Saigon in 1975. She’s the adoptive mother of twin eleven-year-old daughters from Vietnam, and her husband is white. For culture keeping to be real, she says, “it has to be a part of your life every day—it can’t just be an event.”
But some adoptive parents still assume that their children will be untouched by racism because they’re growing up in a white household. At the Catalyst camps, parents now get their own sessions about racism. Yet at one of the first, Ticarro-Parker reports, “we had parents walk out, [saying] ‘this will never happen to my child!’” Why not? “‘Because my child’s white.’” Ticarro-Parker snapped right back: “‘No, she’s Vietnamese!’”
At its most superficial, celebrating birth cultures has spawned a mini-industry of stuff to be bought—jeweled red threads and ladybugs, adoption-day cards, child-size Vietnamese ao dai (traditional fitted robes and pants), non (conical hats)—all available at the camps or online. In Ho Chi Minh City in December, I shopped in the tourist stores along tony Dong Khoi street, ticking down my list of gifts for friends back home, allowing Nick to buy a paper snake on a string, a Year of the Snake T-shirt. It felt like a forced march to consume rather than a means to forging cultural connections.
“I have seen more families bring home cartloads of items from where they went,” says Elizabeth Vergo, a social worker in her early seventies who conducted our pre-adoption home study seven years ago. Before she retired from MAPS Worldwide, our adoption agency in Boston, she was director of adoption training.
“I think Chinese-adoption people do too much—because it’s available, every town has a Chinatown—it’s sort of simple,” she adds. “I know families who are ten years home and still having Chinese New Year’s together. Did anybody ever ask those children [what they wanted]?”
McGinnis of the Adoption Institute puts it this way: “Now I worry that we expect the girl adopted from China will be interested in all things Chinese. How much are we pushing the racial stereotypes onto our kids?”
For many Americans, other countries are cool, of course. It’s fun to buy a green coconut to drink from a sidewalk vendor in Saigon, to climb Mayan pyramids, to flirt with new traditions like the Lunar New Year. God knows, I’m not immune. But often our desire to explore “amazing” developing countries around the globe is self-serving. The heritage we white parents chase doesn’t have much to do with Asian Americans, for example, or the big buzzing conundrum of contemporary China and Vietnam.
When sociologist Heather Jacobson talked with China-adoptive families in the Boston area in 2002, many reported making trips to Chinatown in search of “authentic” immigrants rather than connecting with assimilated Chinese Americans. In a recent phone interview, she said some of these mothers said, “I want the real thing.”
In her 2008 book Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference, Jacobson analyzes research she conducted with forty China- and Russia-adoptive families around the same time Nick came home with us. Families adopting from China in the 1990s saw themselves as “pioneers,” she says. But since then, Jacobson has observed “solidification” of culture keeping. Newer adoptive parents have an attitude that seems to say, “‘It’s kind of all set up for me, and I don’t have to make any decisions about it—I can access it when I want to and not.’”
Jacobson, herself the mother of a four-year-old daughter, sees culture keeping as part of today’s intensive-parenting juggernaut. Many middle-class adoptive parents, over-worked and overly invested in their kids, feel relief that “there’s this ready-made avenue to do culture,” she says. “ ‘Here’s the way you can do it, it will be fun!’ ”
But feeling relief that you don’t have to think about it gives me pause. Jacobson and other observers point out that white parents often celebrate a child’s birth culture in lieu of dealing with a child’s race. They want a formula, not daily dissonance.
While some harried adoptive parents grab for Culture Lite, others leap way overboard. Culture keeping often carries the whiff of the helicopter: Little Lily has to be in a lion-dance troupe and be trilingual by the age of ten and play the piano, or else—what? She won’t get into Harvard. She won’t be happy.
The problem with pushing anything on kids, be it music lessons or birth culture, is that they may end up hating what’s good for them. Many adult international adoptees say they wish their adoptive parents had pushed them to learn their birth language, for instance. Not knowing Korean or Vietnamese makes it harder to communicate with birth parents, or to get beyond the tourist gloss. It’s a mantra I’ve taken to heart. Yet healthy separation may mean it’s better for adopted children to do such learning on their own. Many adult Asian adoptees report diving into identity quests when they first leave home for college, with their white parents no longer hovering.
The other problem is that culture keeping for many adoptive families is also cultural creation. Beyond the simplistic—strewing your house with red lanterns—it can turn bizarrely convoluted, as adoptive parents struggle to both affirm a strange land and deny its problems. In the past ten years, a steady stream of social scientists like Jacobson have been studying international adoptive families, particularly through interviews in the China-adoptive community. What they reflect back is rarely flattering.
Take this circa-2001 story:
For my daughter’s baby-naming we hybridized something from a baby boy’s thirtieth-day celebration that we saw in a Zhang Yimou movie: Villagers passed the baby through a giant, donut-shaped, decorated steamed bun, so we had a bakery make us a giant donut-shaped challah and passed her through at the end of the naming ceremony to much delight and applause.
Crazy parent or lovingly involved? The story appears in anthropologist Toby Alice Volkman’s Cultures of Transnational Adoptions, a 2005 essay collection she edited. Volkman got the donut-challah pass from a Yahoo group contact. Volkman is not a disinterested observer; she and her husband adopted a daughter from China in 1994. But like any good feminist social scientist, she’s fascinated by how families construct themselves. You could call the challah-pass creative, but when white families make up the cultural rules, there’s an element of self-righteousness, too, as well as acquisitiveness. Americans pick and choose their ethnic affinities according to personal taste.
Others would argue that international adoptive parents aren’t as wacky as they used to be. “In the beginning there was a tremendous sense of adventure,” says Susan Caughman, editor-in-chief and publisher of Adoptive Families. Her peers “were very in love with Chinese culture and thought about keeping it alive for their children. No one saw that it would become quite the phenomenon it became.”
Caughman and her husband adopted their now seventeen-year-old daughter from China in 1991. Caughman was a founder of one of the first FCC groups in New York. With her daughter presently looking at colleges, she has come to think of culture keeping as something that happens in developmental stages and which can’t be forced. “Once they’re eight or nine, it’s kind of over with you managing it,” she notes.
Before our trip to Vietnam, Rob and I had decided not to visit the orphanage outside Saigon. We’d assumed Nick wasn’t ready for it. But just before we left Boston, Nick asked if we could see the orphanage when we got there. I scrambled to arrange a visit over the Internet, and failed; maybe I wanted to fail. Nick shrugged it off, but on this slippery ground, I don’t trust myself. I’ve since realized that he and I were on separate trips. Mine was nostalgic, fixated on our intense bond; his was attuned to the mysterious loss of his other family.
On our last night in Ho Chi Minh City, we walked through the glittering streets of the tourist district. Le Loi was thronged with Vietnamese shoppers, Christmas lights worthy of Times Square, and panoramas of Styrofoam snow. Children in diminutive Santa outfits posed with fake snowmen for pictures. So did Nicholas, in his T-shirt and shorts, making a face because he knew we wanted a happy smile. After dark, it was eighty-plus degrees. We waded through lanes of honking scooters, me tightly gripping my son’s hand.
“Mom,” he said when we returned to our hotel. “What if you don’t like the country where you were born?”
I felt weary. “It’s okay. Isn’t it good that you’re American?”
He didn’t look convinced.
Homeland trips are the latest vogue in extreme culture keeping. Families travel back to a child’s actual country of origin—sometimes referred to as the “Motherland”—and for better or worse, become culturally immersed. Adult adoptees, particularly from Korea, often make return trips without their adoptive parents. What’s different for the younger generation is that these tours have become adoptive family affairs.
As the Chinese daughters of the ’90s have come of age, so have various group tours, usually priced to include at least one adoptive parent. The cost of a two-week tour with two parents and a child can run as high as $13,000 a family, depending on airfare. Visits to orphanages often cost extra and require special permission.
It’s here that parents may confront the limits of controlling painful experiences for their children. Our own two-week stretch in Vietnam was valuable for us all but not the romance portrayed in travel brochures and by some tour operators. Once we arrived, Nick got over his initial fears. But his favorite thing, he still claims, was watching hours of cartoons on the Disney Channel in our hotel rooms.
The journey back can stir up unpredictable emotions, says Iris Chin Ponte, a post-doctoral fellow at Tufts University in child development and head teacher at the Eliot-Pearson School of Child Development. Ponte joined five adoptive families on return trips to China as part of a research project. The children, eight to eleven years old, were interviewed separately from their parents, and there were telling differences between what the kids and adults said.
Most parents thought the trip “was more wonderful than they could ever have expected,” according to a chapter by Ponte and two co-authors in the forthcoming book Home to Homeland. Parents were aware of their children’s mixed responses. One girl said the place where she’d been abandoned “was all dark and spooky.” Her mother concurred: it was “very difficult for both of us.”
Yet of their orphanage visit, the same mom said, “My daughter didn’t have the experience of someone absolutely delighted to see her…. I was so angry for her—she didn’t get what she needed.” Her daughter seemed far happier: “I got to see the director and somebody that took care of me that had some facts about me when I was little.”
These are complex reactions, but that’s the point. The experience of being abandoned in a developing country, and then folded into a wealthy American family, is complex. If we’re honest with ourselves and our kids—and I think we have to be—culture keeping is not about happily resolving the conflict between two worlds. It’s about allowing a child to feel whatever she feels and accepting the dissonance.
When I told Vergo, our social worker, about Nick’s ambivalent response to Vietnam, she said, “You don’t superimpose something on him that he isn’t comfortable with….You get this little ball of rebellion.”
Vergo knows that a family like mine doesn’t fall under the “Happy Caucasian department,” in her tart words. But from her psychotherapeutic perspective, my son’s feelings should set the pace.
“Once the child is able to verbalize where he or she came from, it’s a conversation,” Vergo says. “It’s no more than that. If the kid doesn’t have anything more to do with where they came from, fine.”
At its best, culture keeping is as much about adoptive parents learning to live with duality as their children. For families able to afford them, homeland tours do spark healthy conversations. Trips sponsored by foundations like Catalyst and Our Chinese Daughters include service programs in which tween adoptees do volunteer work in-country at orphanages or building sites. Yet regardless of the merits of these programs, children “need to be brave,” says one Chinese adoptee quoted in Home to Homeland. “There are ready kids and not-ready kids.”
What’s missing for most international adoptive families back home in the U.S. is a connection with other adults who share an adoptee’s heritage. We white parents often have a hard time bringing people of color into our lives as friends and mentors to our kids. But expanding our social networks and comfort zones is what we need to do, according to Asian American researchers like McGinnis and Ponte.
Ponte grew up in Belmont, a white-bread suburb near Boston, and is biracial; both her parents were immigrants, her mother Chinese, her father Portuguese. But she looks Chinese American and radiates such energy that the first thing you notice is her mouth—full and always in motion. At thirty, she’s a one-woman advertising campaign for a program she calls the Laohu Girls Clubhouse.
At the Clubhouse, now located in the basement of Ponte’s house, three different age groups of Chinese adoptees meet every two weeks during the school year. The girls paint and draw Chinese scenes, discuss everything from racism to training bras, and just spend time hanging out together. The program started in 2001, when several adoptive moms asked Ponte, then a graduate teaching assistant at Tufts University, to run it.
Today, the oldest members are eleven and used to one another and to Ponte, but it wasn’t always that way. When the then-toddlers first saw her, Ponte says, “they looked at me, they looked at each other, they all started screaming…. They thought that their adoptive parents were leaving them with me. Here I was, a young Chinese American, and it was hysteria. It wasn’t typical crying of separation, [it was] much more raw and guttural.”
Over the years, Ponte has developed a curriculum that’s based on what the girls want to talk about. Sometimes they delve into longings for their birth parents. What it means to be Chinese American is always on the table.
At the beginning of each meeting, parents join the girls in the Clubhouse to go over the day’s discussion and art project. Then the moms—and it’s mostly moms—head upstairs to Ponte’s dining room to talk among themselves. Parents do the organizing and funding, but they don’t take on teaching a culture not their own.
What seems to make the biggest difference to adoptees, recent research shows, is being with people who look like them. The Adoption Institute’s 2009 study, “Beyond Culture Camps: Promoting Healthy Identity Formation in Adoption,” makes clear that dealing with racism has to be a part of any culture-keeping agenda. Three-day camps or ethnic restaurants—the most common ingredients of culture keeping—even birth-language lessons—were not what helped participants most. They cared about getting information from real sources: reading posts by other adoptees on the Internet, regular contact with role models of the same race, traveling to their birth countries.
As Ponte points out, the thirty-plus girls and their adoptive families involved in Laohu Clubhouse are “highly selected.” She’s often asked by other moms and dads, “‘Why are these parents pushing this whole Chinese thing?’”
“You can’t change the skin you’re in. I think that it’s better to prepare than not,” Ponte says. “It’s the lack of control that sends these kids and families into tailspins.”
Bolat Alexander White, twelve going on thirteen, sits across the table from me in a Pink Floyd T-shirt at Upstairs on the Square, a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He’s hunched forward across the remains of our lunch, nervous about this interview. His mother, my research assistant Deborah White, is running an errand to give us time alone. But he’s game.
Alex was born in Kazakhstan, and Deb adopted him when he was six years old. They now live in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he goes to school with lots of other Asian kids. Alex reports that some of them don’t consider him Asian enough. Last year, he says, a group of Vietnamese kids wouldn’t let him sit at their cafeteria table.
“Most of the time I feel like an American,” Alex says. “Ten percent I don’t, because of all the kids’ opinions—that ten percent is me being Kazakh and white.”
Alex is biracial, although he looks Asian. His luxurious black hair frames his round face. His voice only grows animated when I ask if he wants to return to Kazakhstan. “Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely to visit.” He smiles.
Deb says she has tried to introduce Kazakh culture over the years, but that Alex had no interest until the movie Borat and Sacha Baron Cohen’s mugging prompted him to start defending where he was born. He calls Deb “my absolute mother.” Yet when he first came to the U.S., she tells me later, “it was like being held hostage. He had wild temper tantrums.”
Now he eats with us at this white-tablecloth restaurant, smiling, squeezing his mother’s shoulder. Deb’s freckled white skin and slate blue eyes betray her Irish ancestors, but she and her son have the same square bodies. It’s tempting to note their physical similarities, the family mannerisms they share.
“Sometimes I really wish I was Russian or American.” Alex hesitates once more. “It’d be easier for people to figure out who you were.”
Thirteen-year-olds are rarely at home in the world, but Alex displays an ability to live with cognitive dissonance that most adoptive parents have yet to attain. He’s not revealing everything to me and his mom; he’s telling us what we want to hear. But I can see he honestly wants to belong, and Deb is honest enough to let him do it his way.
Alex is clearly thriving, and it fills me with hope for Nick. You could say this is just another story of a mom learning not to micro-manage—and I am learning. But when you adopt a child of a different race and from another country, there’s an important twist. The racial discontinuity is always public. People point to families like ours and think of Brangelina and the United Nations. For us, the private realm of family life is not so private, and our successes and failures as parents play out on a broader stage, even if we aren't Madonna.
So I guess I'm struggling in public, too. I’m still taking Vietnamese. I’m woefully behind in my class, unable to decode sentences more complicated than “I want to go shopping.” But I love an intellectual challenge. I’m stubborn as hell. And I want to crack the secret code like my son, even if I’m beginning to see it’s one I’ll never really break.
A funny thing happened when we returned in January from our trip to Vietnam. I set up the next appointment with Nick’s Vietnamese tutor, though he would have none of it. I forced him through another session, until his young tutor wisely called a halt. She grew up in France with her Vietnamese parents and now speaks at least three languages. She didn’t learn Vietnamese until she was nine, she reassured Nick—and me.
Almost as soon as we stopped the tutoring sessions, my boy started asking me to call him Hiep. Now he yells “Me oi!” in public places, just to see how I’ll react. The other night at dinner, he said he wants to go back to Vietnam next year.
I still push him. We meet once a week with two Vietnamese American families. All the kids get a mini-language lesson, run by our friend Chi, a former elementary school teacher. Nick gets lucky money in red envelopes for Tet. Sometimes he puts on the áo dài he chose in Hanoi, especially if he wants to play martial artist.
He’s my son, on his very own planet of one. Last week, he talked about hexagons, all the geometric shapes he’s learning about in school. “I wish I could make my own shape.” He smiled to himself. “I’d make a Saigon.”
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