Transracial and Transnational Adoption

By: Valerie Milano

PBS begins a three part series tonight in an effort to raise public awareness and examine the issues involving adoption, more specifically transracial and transnational adoption. With the many roadblocks involved in American adoptions, more and more children are being adopted from over seas. As of 2001, more than 1.5 million adopted children are living in the United States and since 1992 when China changed their regulations, many of these children are from China.

POV Wo Ai Ni meeting

August 31, the series begins with the airing of Stephanie Wang-Breal’s  “Wo Ai Ni (I Love You) Mommy”, documenting Donna Sadowsky’s adoption of 8 year old Fang Sui Yong. Donna and her husband Jeff’s family already includes 2 biological sons and another Chinese adoptee, and she explained from her experience, “I think there needs to be a lot more reform as far as adoption goes in the United States. The foster-care system needs an entire revamping. In our case, we just felt that we wanted to adopt a child from China. We knew that there were so many children that were languishing in orphanages. The one-child policy makes it very difficult, and that was just a personal decision that we made.”

The film starts with Donna’s visit to China, where Sui Yong lives with her loving foster family. This family feels she has a chance for a better life and more opportunities in America. For the next 18 months, the film follows the struggles of this 8 year old being renamed and relocated to a new country and integrate into a new Jewish family from Long Island.

The second film in the series, “Up and Running”, (Nicole Opper) airs

This is the story of Brooklyn teenager Avery, a track star with a bright future. She is the adopted African-American child of white Jewish

on September 7 and investigates a time in the life of African American high schooler, Avery Klein-Cloud, adopted by a white, Jewish lesbian couple. Opper had been Avery’s teacher in junior high making the idea of the film comfortable for her and the family, “When she asked my parents if she could film, it wasn’t really that hard of a decision for me to make because I already knew her. So I was actually relatively comfortable with the idea.”

Having grown up in Brooklyn with her adopted brothers, she had quite a wonderful childhood, running track in school, a boyfriend and preparing for graduation. The film follows Avery as she begins to take the light-hearted ribbing from her friends a bit more seriously about the fact that she is quite out of touch with her African American heritage. With the support of her parents, she communicates with her birth mother. Still feeling out of touch, Avery surprises her family and the crew by taking a downward spiral, only to learn many deep and important lessons along the way. In her own words Avery told me in an interview: “I’m a combination of everything. I was raised Jewish, and I’ll always be Jewish. But I can’t say I’m just African-American. I’m kind of a mixture of both. I can fit into both communities and feel comfortable now at this point. There was a point where I didn’t feel that way. So my identity is who I am and who I make myself to be. I’m an individual. I’m not necessarily defined as a Jew or as an African-American.”

Deann Borshay Liem - POV "In The Matter of Cha Jung Hee"

“In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee,” premiering on October 14^th continues the story of the adoption of the filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem, which began with the documentary “First Person Plural”. “First Person Plural” told the story of Cha Jung Hee’s good fortune of being adopted from a Korean orphanage only to find out her identity had been switched with another 8 year old girl, also from the Sun Duck Orphanage. The realization she had actually been Kang Ok Jin raised many more questions and the need to find the answers. Deann returned to Korea, having left in 1966, in search of Cha Jung Hee, and explained “I sort of went through kind of the typical process that most adoptees go through when they go to Korea to search for a birth family, except in this case, I was searching for my “other”, I guess. I went first to the orphanage and I discovered that they had each of mine and my siblings’ entry records or intake form, and they also had Cha Jung Hee’s intake form, and it was on that intake form where there was a picture of Cha Jung Hee that was quite different from the picture of Cha Jung Hee that I always had. So that was sort of the twist on the story.”

Most adoptees probably question who they are on some level and wonder about their biological parents, but for the transracially adoptees, questions are more compex. Borshay Liem said, “I sort of had to learn, kind of like Avery in some ways learn or relearn what it was like to be an Asian, an Asian American. But I think because of our racial and cultural difference with my family and because I was older and actually had recollections of my birth family, I think that was a large measure, part of the impetus for searching for my birth family.”

Life is a process and there are defining moments along the way. Avery said, “The film definitely helped me get through what I was going through on my own. I’m not sure if it helped with my birth family because that’s something that hasn’t exactly healed yet. I don’t think it will heal for a long time, but the film itself definitely was a healing process for me to get through what I was going through.”