The road to the house was long, dark and noisy. Very little was visible except for the dusty tunnel of illumination created by the headlights. I could see the scattered lights of nearby houses but they seemed dim and insignificant. What stood out to me most was the noise. Even at thirty miles per hour, the crunching of the tires against the rock road was so loud, I could barely hear K on the phone. I wanted to describe the scene to him, but all I remember saying was, “Oh my god. When does it end?”
We’d arrived late after overshooting our destination and ending up near Fort Worth. I felt ragged but wired after the long drive from NC. I was excited to see everyone, but couldn’t push away feelings of arriving as the guest, the near stranger, the intruder. This was their home, not mine. Almost ten years had passed since the last time I’d seen my dad and his new family. So much had changed while I’d been away. I’d changed and changed again.
I’d traveled this road many times before as an 18 year-old. Dad had bought land in the area not long after we’d moved back to Texas from Nebraska. When time allowed, I’d come out to help build the barn or whatever project he had going on at the time. I moved to Irving before he built the house and only visited three or four times after leaving Texas to live in Florida. I’d missed almost all of my new siblings’ childhood. New sister #1 had magically turned 18. New Twin Brother and Sister were 15.
A few years ago, Dad sold the land and the house they’d built in favor of building a new house on the neighboring property. I didn’t really have much of a history with the old place and none with the new one. It would be my first time to see the new place with my own eyes. Time had gotten away from me. The years had flown by so quickly but thinking about all that had changed drove home just how much time had passed. I was going home, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt more lost and disoriented. Displaced again.
As we continued down the road, my dad in his car leading the way, me in the middle and my friend following in the moving truck, the grinding seem to get louder. Somehow it added meaning to the moment. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I felt that as I traveled further down that road, my chances of going back were slowly being ground away. And I wanted to go back. It was as if I were being escorted to a prison cell after so many years of being on the run. I’d escaped this place only to be brought back blindfolded with my hands tied.
We talked about the monsters within. I don’t remember at what point or why we switched topics from what a relief the cool, evening breeze was after such a brutally hot day to our inner demons. The time just before the sun disappears has become my favorite part of the day here in Texas. I’d forgotten how hot it gets here.
When the sun starts to set, it’s difficult to tell whether it’s morning or evening. For a moment, time seems to stand still. The difference between the two being as the sun rises, my day is ending. As it sets, I’m at my most active. Josh and I are night people, you see. We work (and play) at night and sleep during the day.
It was the only night off we had together, a night for monsters to come out and play. It helps to let them out once in a while or else they get restless and try to escape. The really nasty ones will even try to take over if they’re pent up too long. Needless to say, it’s safer to let them out at night, when most of the population is indoors. That way there are fewer witnesses to see just how strange night people can be.
I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that night people are a bit off just for being night people. You have to be to work the night shift especially if you prefer it – which I do. Though there does seem to be two kinds of night people. There are those who are by circumstance and become odd as a result of adaptation and those who were already weird and desire the graveyard shift because of their nocturnal natures.
Josh seems to be of the latter group as well which is probably one of the reasons we get along so well. The funny thing about Josh is that some would say he’s more scary during the day than he is a night. I’ve often thought to ask him if that’s why he prefers the dark of night, but felt it might offend him. Luckily, he’s not too easily offended or perhaps he just keeps it inside until it’s safe – like the night we decided to introduce our demons to one another.
I tease him when I can get away with it. Such a big, ugly beast with hair that eats people. I know what others see, but I see something else. He teases me, too. The beautiful girl made of tiny. But I don’t feel beautiful. I see myself the way others see him.
“If I were beautiful,” I once told him, “People would love me. I’d be rich and happy. Not here, working my ass off on some night shift job. There must be something terribly wrong with me.”
He looked empathetic and sad for moment. I saw recognition in the deepening blue of his eyes. Demon meet Demon. Then he smiled, “…or with everyone else.”
And then I let the tears come. It was night and only he would see.
It’s been a long time since I’ve considered trying to write. There’s too much to digest and the day leaves little energy to do much more than crawl into bed. After working nights and taking care of the kids and everything else during the day, my body runs out of energy hours before my brain. The result is me lying in bed with my mind racing minutes before I fall asleep – chaos before oblivion.
I’m trying to sort it all out, still trying to make sense of it all but am beginning to wonder if there is such a thing as “sense” to any of it. The move itself defies common sense. The resulting changes make even less sense. The same is true for the things that didn’t change.
I know I’m being vague, but hey, it’s been ages since my last blog post. I’m out of practice. Taking things in small doses and writing in even smaller doses is the order of the rest of the year, I think.
Overall, we’re all okay so far. It has been a difficult adjustment, but some remarkable things have happened. Again, I send out huge balloons of love and thanks to all those who helped to get us here.
To this day, us first generation transracial adoptees from Korea and Vietnam are generally referred to as ‘war orphans’ in the media and by people we encounter on a daily basis, as if it is a self-applied term of endearment. The main assumption is that we were rescued from a tragic past and handed a hopeful future. The public was reassured that we were not going to look back and puzzle together the facts behind our orphan status.
Yet, this is exactly what we are doing. And at every turn, we are admonished for daring to not only question the historical interpretations of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, but also other people’s motives and methods for transporting us out of our birth countries. Americans acknowledge these wars without taking any responsibility for the unintended consequences. They ask us, “Where would we be without them?”
In response, we ask one searing question that few people are willing, or even prepared, to answer: Who made us orphans in the first place? In order for us to have gained our second parents, we had to lose our first parents.
Yes, people can say that we were saved. But, we’ll be damned if we let them have the last word.
What the Holts and Operation Babylift have taught Westerners is that in order to justify the act of taking small brown bodies from their countries of origin and raising them in their own image all you have to do is reduce the child’s circumstances to one of two alternatives: “leave to rot” in an inhumane orphanage or raise up in a “loving family” where with time and material excess everyone will forget and be the better for it. These two historical events speak to a disturbing pattern exhibited by Westerners toward developing countries. With a mixture of good ole paternalism and a pinch of racial superiority, and under cover of civil wars, social upheavals and economic instability, they extracted us without any sense of irony that Western countries had a big hand in triggering these crises.
Praising us as Asian angels borne from cargo holds and cardboard boxes, we were never expected to look back and think about our lives before adoption, much less about our countries of birth. The American flags we were given upon assuming citizenship were supposed to blind us with star-spangled magnificence. It is only within the past decade that many of us have become wise to the racial self-hatred that had been instilled in us and have questioned the multiple loyalty tests we have been forced to take in order to prove our legitimacy in the eyes of our fellow Americans.
The pitiful footage of children in orphanages and then triumphant arrival in foreign airports has remained the same despite the changing of the years because the main adoption themes are replayed over and over with the same tune playing in the background. It is not a mistake that adoption agencies, adoption advocates and adoptive parents still refer to the legacy of the Holts and Operation Babylift in the most glowing of terms because it is yet another instrument for Americans to prove their generosity of spirit and can-do attitude to themselves. Like the Bertha Holts and Rosemary Taylors of yore, American wanna-be parents assume the role of well-meaning world citizens who also want to save thrown-away orphans from hell-hole countries.
Currently, Vietnam is experiencing similar social and economic growing pains as South Korea did during the 1970s and 80s. Korean children were the hot commodity in international adoption up until many adult Korean adoptees put the South Korean government’s feet to the fire and made it acknowledge the mass production aspect of its adoption policies. With many more legal and monetary barriers in place in South Korea, Westerners turned once again to Vietnam and enjoyed unfettered access to Vietnamese children, especially infants. In early 2008, the U.S. State Department investigated a growing number of inconsistencies in the documentation of children’s orphan status and reports of child trafficking. This led to a halt in adoptions between the U.S. and Vietnam in September of this year. But, much like the attitude exhibited by Americans in 1975 when Operation Babylift commenced and they were criticized for seemingly taking advantage of a bad situation, many prospective American adoptive parents today are incredulous about the charges of official corruption and baby selling. These children only need a home and a loving family, they plead. Who would ever deny them that?
In the adoption arena, legends were made out of the names Harry & Bertha Holt and Operation Babylift because they typify many Americans’ assertions about this country’s boundless goodwill and moral superiority over its supposed “enemies”. Nevermind that these legends serve to disregard factual inconsistencies, inconvenient truths and unsatisfactory conclusions. Prominent personalities in the international adoption movement, i.e., Bertha Holt and Rosemary Taylor, have become household names. Their stories and accounts have become irrefutable and their official stories have solidified into unchallengeable testimony. Honest investigation of the facts behind their stories is unwelcome and discouraged.
Bertha Holt is characterized as a kind and pious old woman who only wanted the best for the children of Korea. From proxy adoptions to Holt International Children’s Services, thousands of Korean children have been told that they have Bertha and Harry Holt to thank for breaking down racial barriers and normalizing international adoption in American society, as well as their privileged lives today.
In the same vein, the protagonists of Operation Babylift are credited with saving thousands of children who otherwise would have grown up in a postwar communist dictatorship where food shortages and other deprivations would have condemned them to certain death. OBL was considered such a singular feel-good event that, to this day, the media remind Americans that it is “the one good thing that came out of the war.”
A cottage industry involving annual commemorations and permanent memorials, as well as reunions between adoption legends and adoptees themselves, has become a fixture on the nation’s calendar. Much like legend-building, the remembrances aim to convince the participants that they represent a larger mission and purpose. Adoptees are to absorb the message that enormous amounts of compassion and ingenuity on the part of the U.S. were used to “save” them and they each owe a debt of gratitude to everyone who made their lives possible. There is also the implied threat that to question the reasons and actions of one’s benefactors is to put one’s own life in question.
Operation Babylift has become a redundant closed-loop system of mourning, remembrance, gratitude and redemption. It is celebrated as an isolated, unilateral humanitarian gesture. Ironically, by remembering OBL in such a way encourages the so-called “Lost Children of Vietnam” to forget the causes and effects of the Vietnam War and leave unexamined their own adoption stories that were vitually gift-wrapped and handed to them.
With a rusty dull blade, I make a small incision and cut counter clockwise around the protruding flesh on the right of my chest. Knowing that they will be gone in a few short moments supersedes the excruciating pain that is coursing through my traitorous body. I saw hard and fast that sounds reminiscent of [...]
