We who have adopted transculturally in this time frame, whose children are not yet grown, or if they are, have much to learn from transcultural adoptees who have gone before us. They have walked the path our children are walking, and things are not so very different now than they were then. One has only to read the recent article on baby selling in China to know that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Who would have thought that baby selling would crop its ugly head more than once in China? In the past, yes, but in modern day?

For transcultural adoptees, our lives are written in pencil. Everything you think you know about yourself can change in an instant. Bryan Thao Worra

Jae Ran has also spoken about the ‘ambiguous loss’ associated with transcultural adoption.

It’s hard to pin a loss down if it keeps changing; if one knows very little about one’s early life; if paperwork is swagged in fabrication (and one believed it vs. knowing it is fabricated and telling it thusly); if one finds that what one always believed turns out to be a fairy tale; if one hears stories of other adoptees who learn the hard way what one might not want to find out about one’s own beginning paperwork; if one can hardly imagine differences in culture and reasons lost in history because one is so inured in the culture of the adopted country.

Do those of us whose lives are written in ink have any understanding what it might be like to live in the paradox of a life written in pencil? Do we know how to help our children face these truths from early ages to adulthood? Can we sit in the paradox with them, as another adoptee has said.

If you would like to know more from the standpoint of transcultural adoptees, or if you were adopted transculturally, you might like to know about International-Adopt-Talk @ yahoogroups. com. Adoptive parents there are willing to learn. It is one of the lists I started.

Karin

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