CASE IN POINT

I was further thinking about the topic of the various levels of naivety here and I suddenly remembered an experience I had tried to block (for the staggering and, ultimately dangerous nature of its naivety) from Thursday (4/5). I was giving a class on American television to my Puppy Dog Crush’s class. I was showing them what American TV is like and I decided to show them VH1’s Best Week Ever as it was broad enough to cover most things teenagers are watching while working on the passive voice (something the students had learned the week before, have been having a difficult time with and I had assured them was VERY important in American speech).

The episode I showed had a segment on Angelina Jolie’s adoption of her Vietnamese son and I was explaining the word “adoption.” Most of the other classes had no idea what the word was and the one that sort of understood the concept essentially recognized it as a modified baby theft.

However, I was not at all prepared for what greeted me in my Puppy Dog Crush’s class. I explained adoption and he and his classmates clearly understood; shocked and appalled that any parents would have a child they didn’t want. (Abortion is a fairly common method of not-discussed birth control; condoms are growing in popularity, though still quite stigmatized as something you only use when you think your lover is disease ridden while there are huge billboards advertising “Pain Free Abortions!”; it’s a bit of an adjustment for this post-Madonna “Don’t be silly, put a rubber on your willy” kid)

Horrified he declared, “Maybe they do that in other countries but we don’t do that in China. No one in China would ever give up a baby.”

His classmates nodded their head in agreement and there I stood watching the bobbing heads of all these privileged students whose parents are working so hard and spending so much for their children to have a global education but the less comfortable sides of things still do not exist for young adults.

Instead of telling them that their country is in fact one of the first stops on the global, international adoption list and that all the major hotels in the area hold “adoption weekends” every weekend where they bus in the children to meet their adoptive parents at the end of the Chinese-side of adoption process, I paused to reflect. Every weekend brunch I attend with my friends from West Egg (and I go to about 2 a month) that samples the brunches at all the international hotels in the area is always punctuated by the heartbreaking march of confused, nervous little children through the lobby to the cautiously euphoric parents awaiting their angel. I watch the mothers hold back (to varying degrees of success) their tears. I watch the fathers (to varying degrees of success) bite their lip stoically. I watch the children tremble, believing they should trust what everyone’s been telling them (that they’re lucky and going to a better place) but unsure what to make of these people who look nothing like anything they’ve ever seen before much less “Mommy” and “Daddy.” And the swaddled babies just kill me.

I never know what to feel about that moment. I’m gleeful that parents willing to go through so much finally get to have a child. I’m brokenhearted these children, so unconventional and fragile to begin with, will be taken to a world beyond anything imaginable to have to rebuild their broken life yet again. It’s such a difficult thing for me to watch that it’s now the unspoken understanding that I get the seat least able to see the lobby.

So there I stood, being assured “horrible” things like adoption never happen in this utopia by teenagers who should know better. And I wonder who benefits from that sort of lie? Clearly it is a choice made by parents to shield their child and I have no intention of violating a parent’s decision about what is right for their child but I wonder how this child who is clearly being groomed to live internationally will cope when all these unsavory truths about their home come to light. No one wants to destroy the bubble of safety of a child but there comes a point when propagating said bubble simply becomes dangerous. Adults are much worse at coping with massive change than children with supportive home lives.

And so I did all I could do. I said, “Okay, but there are other countries that put children with parents who desperately want to take care of them. These children get to have a safe home with parents who love them and Angelina Jolie is one woman who takes care of children when their birth parents cannot.”