Race

This is a picture of my maternal grandfather in his WW I uniform. His eyes were the color of water. He was a first generation American; his parents were born in Sweden, and left that country poor and hungry at the turn of the century. They came through Ellis Island with thousands of other Swedes with the last name Swanson. I tried to locate them in the Ellis Island registry but gave up when, after an hour, I was only on first names beginning with "A."

When I was in law school I spent an evening riding in a patrol car with a City of Seattle police officer as extra credit for Criminal Procedure. The officer was Asian, and offered that it bothered him when people asked him where his family is "from." He explained that his ancestors were Chinese, but came to America in the early 1800's to build the railroads. The officer was born in the U.S., as had been five or six generations before him. No one has ever asked me where my family is "from."

The adoption agency we're using requires that families adopting a child of another race - in our case, Chinese - consider the child's feelings when others ask about the child's ancestry and when the child is old enough to inquire about it. We had to attend workshops and read materials about how a black or Asian child may likely feel growing up with people who don't look anything like the rest of the family. The agency required us to sign a statement to the effect that we promise to expose our Chinese daughter to her heritage, and the statement required us to enumerate exactly what resources in our community we might help us with this. Fortunately, Seattle has a huge Chinese population and there are many ways to celebrate Chinese holidays, to take classes in Mandarin, and to participate in the arts so that our daughter will know what her culture is like.

There are no guarantees, however, that she'll be interested in her culture. The agency related a story about one family who adopted a boy from Korea. They dutifully enrolled the little boy in all things Korean: marital arts, language, cooking, etc. The adopted child could not care less about the Korean culture, yet their biological child became obsessed with anything Korean. We don't intend to make our home a Mandarin home. We will wait until our adopted daughter expresses an interest in her culture before we become immersed in it. What we wish for her, fundamentally, is that she knows she is loved, and that she is an American.