Adopted The Movie

Kay Johnson has done groundbreaking research on abandonment and adoption in China. In Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son, Johnson untangles the complex interactions between these social practices and the government’s population policies. She also documents the many unintended consequences, including the overcrowding of orphanages that led China to begin international adoptions.

Those touched by adoption from China want to know why so many healthy infant girls are in Chinese orphanages. This book provides the most thorough answer to date. Johnson’s research overturns stereotypes and challenges the conventional wisdom on abandonment and adoption in modern China.

Joyce Maguire Pavao understands the many perspectives that come into the complicated process of adoption, and she works to make the process comfortable for all participants. As a pioneering and nationally recognized family and adoption therapist, Pavao argues eloquently in The Family of Adoption that there are predictable and understandable developmental stages and challenges for every adoptee. Pavao feels that adoptive parents, as well as teachers, therapists, and all those who work with children, must come to understand these developmental stages as normal-often challenging, but normal.

Full of wonderful stories that give insight into a wide variety of adoption issues, and now updated with a consideration of recent developments, The Family of Adoption is a powerful argument for the right kind of openness; it is truly the most insightful and healing book on the adoption shelf.

Cherie Register drawns on her experience as the mother of two Korean-born daughters and interviews with adoptive families to illustated the special challenges multicultural families face.

The voices of adopted children are poignant, questioning. And they tell a familiar story of loss, fear, and hope. This extraordinary book, written by a woman who was adopted herself, gives voice to children’s unspoken concerns, and shows adoptive parents how to free their kids from feelings of fear, abandonment, and shame.

Filled with powerful insights from children, parents, and experts in the field, plus practical strategies and case histories that will ring true for every adoptive family, Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew is an invaluable guide to the complex emotions that take up residence within the heart of the adopted child–and within the adoptive home.

Although difficult to read because of the emotion it evokes in all members of the adoption triad, it nevertheless rings true and can be a great help in acknowledging, understanding, and validating the wounds created by the trauma of separation between mother and child. This understanding can help all members of the triad. It can provide validation for the experiences and feelings of adoptees, who have often felt misunderstood; it can bring solace to birth mothers, who have long been denied the truth of their loss; and it can be a source of information for adoptive parents, so that they can better understand and respond to their children.

Can White parents teach their Black children African American culture and history? Can they impart to them the survival skills necessary to survive in the racially stratified United States? Concerns over racial identity have been at the center of controversies over transracial adoption since the 1970s, as questions continually arise about whether White parents are capable of instilling a positive sense of African American identity in their Black children.

Shared Fate has become a classic. Continuing to challenge a pervasive mystique about adoption, the important second edition belongs in every library and with every adoptive family. Based on research with more than 2,000 families, this pioneering work on modern adoption emphasizes open communication as the key to successful resolution of the adoptive family’s unique role and tasks. Its findings have stood the test of time. Although new forms of adoption have emerged and become numerically dominant, the book’s findings remain pertinent.

This book introduces readers to the history of adoption in the United States, the many problems inherent in past and present adoptions, and the happier alternatives that both preserve families and protect children. Inspiring readers to get involved in family preservation, this guide presents numerous ways for average citizens to make a difference in the lives of vulnerable parents and children. Also included are tips for social workers, doctors, and other professionals who counsel expectant mothers and at-risk families. “Unlearning Adoption” will revolutionize the way America views adoption.

(From the Publisher) This is an honest and insightful book that is at once very personal and universal to all transracial adoptive parents. The authors tackle the very real issues; emotions, responsibilities and joys transracial adoption asks us to take on. As a transracial parent of grown children myself I wished I had had this book when they were young. insights. As a professional anti-bias educator I appreciate the authors’ insistence that parents face the realities of racism in the US. Through a stimulating combination of enlightening anecdotes and wise analysis, Inside Transracial Adoption is an indispensable resource for people planning to adopt, for parents currently in transracial families and for professionals working with transracial families.-Louise Derman Sparks, transracial adoptive parent and author of Anti-bias Curriculum and Teaching/Learning Anti Racism

Who are the new families that are appearing on city streets, in suburban malls, and at Fourth of July celebrations? The parents, in their 40s and 50s, are obviously Caucasian, and their very young daughters are obviously Chinese. This book is about these new “American & Chinese” families that are being formed through the mechanism of international adoption. The first survey of bicultural Chinese-American children, based on personal experience and rigorous research, documents these adoptions and examines their implications for American society. This book will be of great use to couples considering or living with adopted Chinese children, professionals in social welfare and education, and scholars and other researchers involved with American multiculturalism.

How has a nation gone from peaceful coexistence to genocide? How does social status affect your health? Why are teenagers willing to kill themselves in hazing rituals in order to belong to a fraternity or social group? How do terrorists learn not to care about the lives of those they attack? US AND THEM gets at the heart of these profound questions by looking at their common root in human nature. Politics, culture, and economics play their parts, but its the human mind that makes them possible, and thats the focus of US AND THEM. Were not born with a map of human kinds; each person makes his own and learns to fight for it. This is a crucial subject that touches all of our lives in ways both large and small, obvious and subtle. Human-kind thinkingwhether beneficial or destructiveis part of human nature, as David Berrebys brilliant book reveals.

Sixty short stories and poems reveal the sometimes heartbreaking, often affirming tales of adoption. Written from the point of view of birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees, this unique anthology spans nations and cultures. Includes works by Isabel Allende, Charles Baxter, Edward Hirsch, Alison Lurie, Joni Mitchell, Alberto Rios, Mary TallMountain, and others.

Imagine being adopted, and growing up six thousand miles from the land of your birth, always wondering what your birth mother was like. Imagine being told that your birth parents died so your new parents could raise you to be an all-American girl. This is the story of Sarah Thorson, who discovers the truth about her birth when she is nineteen.

Sarah’s story begins when she drops out of the University of Minnesota and, more by happenstance than design, decides to study in Korea. As the summer progresses, Sarah becomes more and more intrigued by her Korean heritage, eventually discovering the truth about her adoption: her birth mother did not die in a car crash. With the help of two remarkable men, Jun-Ho Kim, a Korean hoping to befriend Americans, and Doug Henderson, a Korean American struggling with his mixed heritage, Sarah embarks on a crusade to find her birth mother that leads her to a deepening involvement with the culture, language, and people of Korea as she opens windows into the mysterious circumstances of her birth.

The stories of Sarah and Kyung-sook are told side by side: will they find each other?

A leading voice in America’s Asian community tackles what it means to be Asian American in contemporary America.

Writing in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, Cornel West, and others who confronted the “color line” of the twentieth century, journalist, scholar, and activist Frank H. Wu offers a unique perspective on how changing ideas of racial identity will affect race relations in the twenty-first century.

Wu examines affirmative action, globalization, immigration, and other controversial contemporary issues through the lens of the Asian-American experience. Mixing personal anecdotes, legal cases, and journalistic reporting, Wu confronts damaging Asian-American stereotypes such as “the model minority” and “the perpetual foreigner.” By offering new ways of thinking about race in American society, Wu’s work dares us to make good on our great democratic experiment.

Jacobson tracks race as a conception and perception, emphasizing the importance of knowing not only how we label one another but also how we see one another, and how that racialized vision has largely been transformed in this century. The stages of racial formation–race as formed in conquest, enslavement, imperialism, segregation, and labor migration–are all part of the complex, and now counterintuitive, history of race. Whiteness of a Different Color traces the fluidity of racial categories from an immense body of research in literature, popular culture, politics, society, ethnology, anthropology, cartoons, and legal history, including sensational trials like the Leo Frank case and the Draft Riots of 1863.

Helping a child understand his mixed racial background can be daunting, especially when, whether out of honest appreciation or mean-spiritedness, peers and strangers alike perceive their features to be “other.” Drawing on psychological research and input from over fifty multiracial families, Does Anybody Else Look Like Me? addresses the special questions and concerns facing these families, explaining how we can best prepare multiracial children of all ages to make their way confidently in our color-conscious world. From the books and toys to use in play with young children, to advice on guiding older children toward an unflappable sense of self, Does Anybody Else Look Like Me? is the first book to outline for parents how, exactly, to deflect the objectifying attention multiracial children receive. Full of powerful stories and counsel, it is sure to become the book adoptive and birth parents of different races alike will look to for understanding as they strive to raise their children in a changing world.

In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Ann Fessler brilliantly brings to life the voices of more than a hundred women, as well as the spirit of those times, allowing the women to tell their stories in gripping and intimate detail.

Adoption is both sweeping the nation and changing it, accelerating our transformation into a more multicultural and multiethnic country and helping to redefine our understanding of “family.” Adoption Nation is essential reading for adoptive families, for anyone contemplating adopting a child, and for everyone touched by this extraordinary cultural transformation.

(from the Prologue) [Tann]’s legacy has endured into the twenty-first century, and the vast majority of America’s six million adoptees are still legally denied knowledge of their roots, even after they become adults. Many can’t find their birth parents or learn potentially life-saving information about their family health histories.

But finally, fifty-seven years after Georgia’s death in 1950, adoptees are escaping her influence. In a dramatic legislative and court victory in 1999, people who had been adopted in Tennessee won access to their original birth certificates and adoption records. Since the passage of the Tennessee open adoption records law, adoptees have won similar legal battles in twelve other states. They won’t stop until Georgia’s legacy is eradicated throughout the nation.

Georgia accomplished all that her victims are fighting to undo through boldness, cunning, and the exploitation of her time and place. I began my research by studying the environment in which she had operated, paying a visit to the site of her orphanage on Memphis’ Poplar Street.

This compilation of the best thinking about adoption by both historical and current authorities reveals a vital, ever-changing practice affecting the lives of millions of people around the globe.

International Korean Adoption: A Fifty-Year History of Policy and Practice explores the long history of international transracial adoption. Scholars present the expert multidisciplinary perspectives and up-to-date research on this most significant and longstanding form of international child welfare practice. Viewpoints and research are discussed from the academic disciplines of psychology, ethnic studies, sociology, social work, and anthropology. The chapters examine sociohistorical background, the forming of new families, reflections on Korean adoption, birth country perspectives, global perspectives, implications for practice, and archival, historical, and current resources on Korean adoption.

Intercountry Adoptees Tell Their Stories reflects the thoughts and experiences of adult transracial adoptees. The authors conducted in-depth interviews in order to understand and examine the adoptees. The men and women interviewed in this study offer the readers a detailed and personal glimpse into their worlds. They represent a range of positive and negative adoption stories and describe the complexities of ethnic identity formation.

Before A.M. Homes was born, she was put up for adoption. Her birth mother was a twenty-two- year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with children of his own. The Mistress’’s Daughter is the story of what happened when, thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her.

Homes, renowned for the psychological accuracy and emotional intensity of her storytelling, tells how her birth parents initially made contact with her and what happened afterward. This brave, daring, and funny book is a story about what it means to be adopted, but it is also about identity and how all of us define our sense of self and family.

You must have seen one-they’re everywhere. Photo blow-ups of Hollywood star Angelina Jolie and Zahara, the child she adopted from Ethiopia, both beaming. “Saved by a Mother’s Love”-it’s People’s cover story. Zahara, we’re told, is thriving. Nothing is said of the grandmother who tried to keep her, broken ties, loss. Adoption is a win-win. Right?

Healthy white infants have become hard to locate and expensive to adopt. So people from around the world turn to interracial and intercountry adoption, often, like Jolie, with the idea that while growing their families, they’re saving children from destitution. But as Outsiders Within reveals, while transracial adoption is a practice traditionally considered benevolent, it often exacts a heavy emotional, cultural, and even economic toll.

Moving beyond personal narrative, these transracially adopted writers from around the world tackle difficult questions about how to survive the racist and ethnocentric worlds they inhabit, what connects the countries relinquishing their children to the countries importing them, why poor families of color have their children removed rather than supported-about who, ultimately, they are. In their inquiry, they unseat conventional understandings of adoption politics, ultimately reframing the controversy as a debate that encompasses human rights, peace, and reproductive justice.

Secret Daughter is a deftly drawn and moving portrait of a childhood spent in two very different worlds: one white, one black. In 1957, when June Cross was four years old, she was sent by her white mother to live with a black family in Atlantic City. Her mother, Norma, had left June’s abusive father, a comic in the well-known black vaudeville duo Stump and Stumpy, and gave June up when it became clear that her dark-skinned, kinky-haired child could no longer “pass.” Within her adopted family, June struggled with her identity as the black radicalism of the times collided head on with her family’s more traditional ideals. Summer vacations were spent with her mother, now in Hollywood and married to F Troop TV actor Larry Storch. For many years, Norma, afraid that Larry’s career would suffer if anyone discovered the truth about her illegitimate daughter, told friends and reporters that June was adopted. Secret Daughter, which grew out of Cross’s Emmy Award-winning documentary, traces this thorny story with poignancy and skill. It is both a vivid snapshot of race relations in America and an inspiring journey of understanding between a mother and daughter.

The first collection of poetry, fiction, and personal narratives ever written exclusively by Korean adoptees. Edited by Tonya Bishoff and Jo Rankin, this book explores issues of adoption, identity, race, and sexuality. Born in one culture, raised in another, assigned new names and families, 30 men and women write of their experiences.

Korean adult adoptees speak out in this anthology. Through memories, reflections, and poetry, adoptees speak to the range of issues that accompany adoption: feelings of belonging and difference, self and other, culture and accomodation, love and loss. We now know that it is in late adolescence and young adulthood that many adoptees move full-tilt into struggling with these issues. These writings offer a wonderful tool to help adoptees move through the process.

First published a decade ago, it is still the book that motherless daughters of all ages look to for understanding and comfort and that they press into each other’s hands.

Building on interviews with hundreds of mother- loss survivors, this life-affirming book is now newly expanded to reflect the author’s personal experience with the continued legacy of mother loss; now married and a mother of young children herself, Edelman better understands how the effects of mother loss change over time and in light of new relationships.

A work of stunning courage and honesty, Motherless Daughters is a must read for the millions of women whose mothers have gone, but whose need for healing, mourning, and mothering remains. It is a timeless classic.

Proclaimed an instant classic upon its hardcover publication, The Lost Daughters of China is at once compelling and informative. Journalist Karin Evans tells the story of adopting her daughter, Kelly, who was once one of the hundreds of thousands of infant girls who wait for parents in orphanages all over China. Weaving her personal account with extensive research, Evans investigates the conditions that have led to generations of abandoned Chinese girls and a legacy of lost women.

With a new epilogue added for the paperback edition, this book will appeal to anyone interested in China and in the emotional ties that connect people regardless of genes or culture. In the words of bestselling novelist Amy Tan, The Lost Daughters of China is “not only an evocative memoir on East-West adoption but also a bridge to East-West understanding of human rights in China.”

My name is Jeong Kyong-Ah. My ancestry includes landowners, scholars, and government officials. I have six siblings. I am a citizen of the Republic of Korea. I come from a land of pear fields and streams, where people laugh loudly and honor their dead. Halfway around the world, I am someone else.

Jane Jeong Trenka and her sister Carol were adopted by Frederick and Margaret Brauer and raised in the small, homogeneous town of Harlow, Minnesota—a place “where the sky touches the earth in uninterrupted horizon . . . where stoicism is stamped into the bones of each generation.�? They were loved as American children without a past.

With inventive and radiant prose that includes real and imagined letters, a fairy tale, a one-act play, crossword puzzles, and child-welfare manuals, Trenka recounts a childhood of insecurity, a battle with a stalker that escalates to a plot for her murder, and an extraordinary trip to Seoul to meet her birth mother and siblings. Lost between two cultures for the majority of her life, it is in Korea that she begins to understand her past and the power of the unspoken language of blood.

• Jane Jeong Trenka has a blog. Read Jane’s Blog>>

One day she was Kim Ji-yun, growing up in Seoul, Korea. The next day she was Catherine Jeanne Robinson, living with her new American family in Salt Lake City, Utah. Twenty years later, Katy Robinson returned to Seoul in search of her birth mother-and found herself an American outsider in her native land. What transpired in this world-at once familiar and strange, comforting and sad-left Katy conflicted, shattered, exhilarated, and moved in ways she never imagined.

A Single Square Picture is a personal odyssey that ascends to the universal, a story that will resonate with anyone who has ever questioned their place in the world-and had the courage to find the answers.

• Katy Robinson writes for the New York Times Relative Choices blog. Read her articles>>

In the past three decades, the number of interracial marriages in the United States has increased by more than 800 percent. Now over four million children and teenagers do not identify themselves as being just one race or another.Here is a book that allows these young people to speak in their own voices about their own lives.What Are You? is based on the interviews the author has made over the past two years with mixed-race young people around the country. These fresh voices explore issues and topics such as dating, families, and the double prejudice and double insight that come from being mixed, but not mixed-up.

The race for the presidency is on, and Sameera’’s dad is a contender. Sameera’’s looking forward to some cool campaign perks: hobnobbing with celebrities, meeting smart and hunky young voters, and getting a total makeover. The makeover succeeds in making her look more polished, but some of the campaign staffers aren’t content to stop there. They think the candidate’s dark-skinned, adopted daughter could hurt his chances if she doesn’t “try to be more American.” As the pressure builds, Sameera is forced to choose: Will she hide behind a fake persona or speak up for her true self?

Kimchi and calamari. It sounds like a quirky food fusion of Korean and Italian cuisine, and it’s exactly how Joseph Calderaro feels about himself. Why wouldn’t an adopted Korean drummer—comic book junkie feel like a combo platter given:

(1) his face in the mirror

(2) his proud Italian family.

And now Joseph has to write an essay about his ancestors for social studies. All he knows is that his birth family shipped his diapered butt on a plane to the USA. End of story. But what he writes leads to a catastrophe messier than a table of shattered dishes—and self-discovery that Joseph never could have imagined.

Seven-year-old Lena is going to paint a picture of herself. She wants to use brown paint for her skin. But when she and her mother take a walk through the neighborhood, Lena learns that brown comes in many different shades.Through the eyes of a little girl who begins to see her familiar world in a new way, this book celebrates the differences and similarities that connect all people.

Jim Limber Davis was rescued from an abusive guardian by Varina Davis when he was only five years old. Jefferson and Varina Davis welcomed him into their home, the Confederate White House, as one of the family, and Jim lived with them until the fall of the Confederacy.

When Union soldiers invaded Richmond, Virginia, they captured Jefferson Davis. Later, they kidnapped Jim Limber in Georgia and spread cruel rumors that he was Jefferson Davis’s slave. This true story provides a glimpse of how Jim was accepted as one of the Davis’s children and reveals their family’s love and compassion for him.

In this beautifully rendered tale, a young boy eagerly anticipates the arrival of his new sister, who is living in China and waiting to be adopted by his family. As the weeks pass by, his excitement builds until, one day, the family receives a photo of the new baby. How wonderful! but they must wait until May to go to China to meet her and bring her home. in honor of this, the family decides to name her May. And then—at last—the waiting for May is over, and they are finally able to bring their new baby home. timely and meaningful, this beautiful adoption story captures the anticipation and immense joy of welcoming a new baby.

In I Love You Like Crazy Cakes, Rose Lewis and Jane Dyer told the heartfelt story of one woman’s adoption a baby girl from China. These sentiments are brought to life again in this touching portrait of birthday celebrations and unforgettable moments between a mother and her little girl: from joyous hugs for a new puppy, to quiet nights gazing at the stars remembering a faraway family. Capturing the richness of both Chinese and American cultures, Every Year on Your Birthday is a poignant tribute to the growing bond of love only a parent and child can know.

When Lucy comes home from school with a family tree assignment, she asks her parents to write her a note to excuse her from the task. Lucy’s adoption from Mexico makes her feel as though her family is too “different,” but her parents gently and wisely challenge Lucy to think some more about it and to find three families that are the “same.”

Lucy wins her bet with her parents in a surprising way and ends up creating a family tree that celebrates both her past and present. This is a wonderful book for exploring family diversity and what constitutes a family. Two pages at the back of the book offer further suggestions for parents and teachers, with new approaches for the traditional family tree project.

Based on the authors’ own story, this lively picture book is about one family’s adoption of a little girl from China. soon to be named Claire. The story is told partly from the perspective of the girl’s older brother. As the book begins, Mommy and Claire are having fun putting together Claire’s scrapbook with photos, papers, and bits and pieces that show how the family went to China to bring her home.

Sweetly and sensitively told and accented with big brother’s journal entries about the impending trip and meeting his new sister, Just Add One Chinese Sister does a great job of depicting the warm, intense, and anxious feelings of becoming a different kind of family. The expressive watercolor artwork is a total delight.

Racial discrimination is cruel—and especially so to younger children. This title encourages kids to accept and be comfortable with differences of skin color and other racial characteristics among their friends and in themselves. A First Look At… is an easy-to-understand series of books for younger children. Each title explores emotional issues and discusses the questions such difficulties invariably raise among kids of preschool through early school age. Written by a psychotherapist and child counselor, each title promotes positive interaction among children, parents, and teachers. The books are written in simple, direct language that makes sense to younger kids. Each title also features a guide for parents on how to use the book, a glossary, suggested additional reading, and a list of resources. There are attractive full-color illustrations on every page.