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CULTURES OF Transnational Adoption
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2005 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-3576-4
Chapter One
Going "Home" Adoption, Loss of Bearings, and the Mythology of Roots
BARBARA YNGVESSON
An angel with no face embraced me And whispered through my whole body: "Don't be ashamed of being human, be proud! Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly. You will never be complete, that's how it's meant to be." -TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER, "Romanesque Arches"
In the world of intercountry adoption, two stories predominate: a story of abandonment and a story about roots. In the abandonment story, a baby is found in a marketplace, on a roadside, outside a police station, or in the "tour" of an orphanage; alternately, a child is left by its mother at a hospital or is relinquished or surrendered to child welfare officials, a social worker, or the staff of a children's home. After passing through the hands of social workers, lawyers, and/or orphanage staff, and perhaps in and out of hospitals, foster homes, and courts, this child may ultimately be declared free for adoption, a process that requires a second, legal separation that constitutes the child as a legal orphan. Similarly, a mother who relinquishes her child to state agents must consent to the irrevocable termination of her rights to the child. In internationaladoptions, the child will also be separated from its state of origin (a procedure that in some nations involves sealing the record of this severance and altering the child's birth certificate) so that it can be connected to a new family, a new name, a new nation. The child is given a new identity. It now belongs in a new place.
This story of separation is a story about loss and the transformation of loss into a "clean break" (Duncan 1993, 51) that forms the ground for starting anew. The clean break separates the child from everything that constitutes her grounds for belonging as a child to this family and this nation, while establishing her transferability to that family and that nation. With a past that has been cut away-an old identity that no longer exists-the child can be reembedded in a new place, almost as though she never moved at all.
Even as this legal story of separation is the official ground for constituting adoptive identities, another story competes with it in both law and adoption practice. This other story was a persistent counterpoint to the movement for "strong" adoptions that prevailed at the Hague Conference in the early 1990s (Duncan 1993) and was incorporated into the Hague Convention as children's right to the preservation of their "ethnic, religious and cultural background" (Hague Convention 1993). The preservation story implies that there is no such thing as a clean break and underpins the search movement in domestic adoptions, the debate over sealed records, and the movement in the United States to keep adoptions open (Yngvesson 1997; Carp 1998; Verhovek 2000). In this story, identity is associated with a root or ground of belonging that is inside the child (as "blood," "primal connectedness," and "identity hunger") (Lifton 1994, 67-71) and is unchanging. But it is also outside the child in the sense that it is assumed to tie him or her to others whom he or she is like (as defined by skin color, hair texture, facial features, and so forth). Alienation from this source of likeness produces "genealogical bewilderment" (Sants 1964, cited in Lifton 1994, 68) and a psychological need for the adopted child to return to where he or she "really" belongs.
The story of a freestanding child and the story of a rooted child appear to be mutually exclusive and are associated with different adoption practices. The former is associated with race and other forms of matching that are intended to produce "as if" adoptive families that mimic natural ones (Modell 1994). Even in international transracial adoptions, where race matching is impossible, adoption practices in the 1960s and 1970s emphasized complete absorption of the adopted child into the new family and nation (Andersson 1991). By contrast, the story about roots is associated with the recognition of adoption as a distinct family form (Kirk 1981) and involves acknowledging (even underscoring) the differences between an adoptee and his or her adoptive parents, constituting the adoptive family as a site of tension because of its inclusion of a child who "naturally" belongs to another person or place.
Both practices are versions of a familiar and powerful (Western) myth about identity as a matter of exclusive belonging and of belonging as a matter of "an active proprietorship" (Strathern 1988, 135). In the clean break version of this myth, the adopted child is set free from the past (constituted as "abandoned" or "motherless") so that he or she can be assimilated completely into the adoptive family. In the preservation story, on the other hand, the child is imagined as a part of his or her birth mother or birth nation, imagined as being constantly pulled back to that ground.
In what follows I propose an alternative to the narrative of exclusive belongings as a way of thinking about the connections between adoptive parent and child, adoptive family and birth family, and sending and receiving nations. This alternative begins with the lived experience of adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth parents-that no one of them is freestanding vis-à-vis the others but that there is a pull toward the other parent, the other nation. The pull back is an effect of the closures and cutoffs of adoption law and has materialized in the practices of open adoption, roots trips, searches, and so forth. These trips and the reunions to which they sometimes lead reveal how compelling the myth of the return can be. But they also unsettle the idea that such journeys of self-realization are likely to produce completion for the adoptee, or that they constitute a "journey towards wholeness" (Lifton 1994). Rather, as Elspeth Probyn (1996, 114) suggests, "bringing forth beginnings can result in a loss of bearings."
This loss of bearings involves the discovery of a self both familiar and strange, of a "me" and "not me," a pull to the adoptive parent at the very moment one is in the arms of a birth mother, a pull toward the birth mother at the very moment that she is embracing one's child. The identity narrative and the concept of a child or a parent as a "part of me" are inadequate for capturing the contradictions of desire that constitute this state "in-between being and longing" (Probyn 1996, 35). Neither do they capture the movement-the "desire for becoming-other" (5)-that is part of the search for a root of belonging and that is provoked by the experience of seeing someone who "looks like me," by touching the native soil of an adopted son, or by the realization that there is a connection, not an unbridgeable gulf, between oneself and the birth mother of one's child. Each of these moments provokes "yet another journey" (Saffian 1998, 301-2), an opening rather than an experience of closure.
Roots trips reveal the precariousness of "I am," the simultaneous fascination and terror evoked by what might have been, and a longing for the safety of home. They materialize an unfathomable moment of choice, when one life that might have been was curtailed and another life that exists now came into being: "Why just me? It feels very strange. One wonders, 'What would have become of me if I had remained there? Who was I during the time I was there?'" (Sarah Nordin, interview, 22 August 1999). Such moments interrupt the myth that the legal transformation to an "other" was free-that the child simply came home to a site of love where he or she always belonged-revealing instead the cost of belonging (and of love), its inseparability from the birth mother, the orphanage, the courthouse, the agency, and the histories linking nations that give children to those that receive them. But they also interrupt the myth of the return as a form of completion or fulfillment in which one can find oneself in another (be consumed by an other) at a place or point of fusion, of "immanence regained" (Nancy 1991,59). Rather, interruption "occurs at the edge, or rather it constitutes the edge where beings touch each other, expose themselves to each other and separate from one another" (59). As Jean-Luc Nancy suggests, this edge that both connects and separates is where beings "come into being" (61).
The roots trip described below explores these issues, focusing on the experiences of adoptive parents as they seek to fill a gap in the belonging of their adopted children; the complex emotions of adoptees as they are pulled between a familiar self and an unknown other; and the position of adoptive parents as witnesses to the "labor of mourning" (J. Benjamin 1995, 113) in which their children (and the parents themselves) are involved. My analysis here is based on participant observation and on interviews conducted in 1998 and 1999 with adults adopted as children in Chile and with the Swedish parents who adopted them in the 1970s and early 1980s. I also interviewed staff members of Stockholm's Adoption Centre and Chilean adoption officials. This work is part of a larger study of Swedish international adoption in which I have been engaged since 1995.
Return to Chile
The Greek work for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. -MILAN KUNDERA, Ignorance
In April 1998 I accompanied a group of twelve Swedish families (nineteen parents and sixteen children ranging from ten to twenty-one years of age) to Santiago, Chile, on a roots trip organized by Stockholm's Adoption Centre (AC). No one in the families spoke Spanish, and because I am fluent in both Spanish and Swedish it was agreed that I would serve as one of the three interpreters for the group. I had lived in Santiago as a teenager but had not been back since that time, and in many ways the trip felt like a return to roots for me as well as for the adopted children.
The adoptions had taken place during the middle years of the Pinochet dictatorship, and for the parents this was their first visit to Chile. Some of them had adopted other children from countries such as Thailand or El Salvador, where they had journeyed to fetch their child. As I discuss below, such trips are charged, often difficult moments for adopting parents and many consider them a key piece in the work of transforming themselves into their adopted child's "real" parents. Tense political relations between Sweden and Chile during the 1970s and early 1980s-Sweden was a place of refuge for a significant number of Chileans who fled their country during Pinochet's dictatorship-meant that children adopted from Chile at that time were not picked up by their adoptive parents but rather arrived with escorts.
To complicate matters further, Swedish adoptions from Chile ended in 1991 under strained circumstances. A new adoption law introduced in Chile in 1988 as a result of concerns about child trafficking changed the relationship between AC's representative in Santiago and the tribunals in southern Chile that were responsible for approving international adoptions. Chile was one of Sweden's principal sending nations between 1974 and the early 1980s, with the number of adoptions exceeding two hundred annually in the late 1970s and remaining in excess of one hundred annually until 1985. In the late 1980s, Swedish adoptions from Chile dropped off steeply, and after 1991 they stopped completely.
Marta García, head of the adoption division of SENAME (Servicio Nacional del Menor), Chile's child welfare office, explained to me in an interview on 15 April 1998 the circumstance behind the ending of Chilean adoptions to Sweden:
Before 1988, the Swedish Adoption Centre had its representative here and [the system] worked very well through an arrangement involving direct coordination with the tribunals [family courts], especially those in the south.... The babies were transported from the south to Santiago, and in Santiago they were placed in the care of the Adoption Centre, an institution which always guaranteed excellent care for the children: seriousness, transparency. No fault with the Swedish Adoption Centre, none! They had good foster mothers, good social workers who were in contact with the families, everything. But everything was very easy, also. The babies came to Santiago-almost all were from Temuco-and were entered in the civil register in Santiago with the names of the adoptive parents, with Swedish surnames. So everything was very easy for them.
When SENAME was established in 1988, I had to deal with AC's representative in Santiago and we had many clashes trying to make her understand that things had changed and that now the business of international adoption was to be regularized.
The tensions surrounding Swedish adoptions from Chile are suggested in García's observation that the processing of Chilean babies for adoption in Sweden was "very easy" for the Adoption Centre. Her comment hints at the complications that, in her opinion, should surround the conversion of a child, who is assumed to be by nature Chilean, into a Swedish child, while tacitly acknowledging the power of state officials to effect such arbitrary conversions-the babies were simply "entered in the civil register in Santiago with the names of the adoptive parents, with Swedish surnames." The "Chilean child" thus in effect disappeared before it even left the country.
García's unease gestures toward the implicit assumption that underpins such transactions in children: they can only take place if the Chilean and the Swedish child are treated "as if" they are directly exchangeable for one another-that is, "as if" they are the same. Clearly, the child who might have grown up in Chile and whose mother was compelled or perhaps "chose" to relinquish, abandon, or place her child for adoption is not "the same" child who grows up in Sweden and whose mother was unable or chose not to give birth to a child, or who adopted a Chilean baby for political, humanitarian, or other reasons. The exchange is only possible, however, if this knowledge is bracketed. The adoptable child is treated "as if" it were not a material object that bears traces of its passage in the world but rather a "sublime" object that can "endure all torments with its beauty immaculate" (Zizek 1989, 18). The sublime object is treated "'as if it were made of a special substance over which time has no power'" (Sohn-Rethel 1983, cited in Zizek 1989, 18). It was this assumption and the seeming transparency of transactions that obscured it that were disturbing to Marta García, no less than the concern that some foreign adoptions were set in motion by money, or that there was a clandestine network of caring women through which the movement of babies from Chile to Sweden was occurring.
By contrast, for Swedish parents who adopted from Chile at this time the ease of the transaction was part of its appeal: there was little delay, the children were very young, and the parents assumed that there was little of their child's developmental history that they were missing. The only thing needed to complete the child was his or her "culture," something that could be passed on through stories, albums, and eventually visits to a distant land with its exotic tastes, smells, and customs. For Swedish parents, the ease of the transaction eased the process of the baby becoming their own child.
(Continues...)
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