The Fighting 44s

Were your parents too poor to support you, even when they worked three different jobs in a futile attempt to keep their baby? Were your parents too young to handle the responsibility of raising a child? Was one of them dead, leaving the survivor with too much of a burden to raise you?

And suddenly you’re new on the market, and you get snatched up through a jumble of papers and legal documents by a couple of Anglos thousands of miles away.

You’re an adoptee, bitch.

So what defines your pitiful existence now? What is your sentence?

A life of white-washing cultural influence.

So what can you do? You can sit back and let it happen, and I’ve seen this too many times. Or you can rise up against this influence and take a good, hard look at yourself and those around you. I have recently begun to understand the chains that held me, and I’ve broken them. I’m no twinkie, bitch. I’m an Asian-American now.

You might be wondering, “Whose fault is it that Asian adoptees get caught in this cultural landslide?” In my experience with other adoptees, which has been extensive, I’d have to point my middle digit to both the parents and the child.

I have seen three kinds of adoptive parents.

Aggressors: Parents who want nothing to do with their adoptive child’s culture and force white culture down their kid’s throat. These parents try to keep their children’s lives as white as possible. The family uses such terms of endearment for their children as “China doll” or “little geisha,” an ironic perversion of their Anti-Asian practices.

These parents are also prone to believing that their child receives no discrimination from other whites, but rather, discriminates against whitey. Eventually, the adoptee ends up with one of two potential personas: Cracker-washed cultural isolationist or Asian-American martyr, willing to die in an attempt to stop transracial adoption.

Passives: Parents who don’t really care which “ethnic-path” their child chooses. They usually end up sending their kid to a little “Korean culture camp” or something like it in an attempt to demonstrate that they really do care about their child’s ethnicity when they usually have little real interest at all: just some vague sense of obligation. These parents are also prone to saying “I don’t see you as Asian.” Really? Did this happen before or after you flew me out of Korea?

Now, passives actually do recognize the kinds of discrimination their kids experience, but usually do little to nothing about it. Why? Because they don’t want to disappoint their children: they don’t want their poor kids to realize that they have no idea how to solve their problems.

Eventually, 99% of these children become a pile of fucking twinkies, a result of the predominantly white environment around the adoptee. While this passive attitude could potentially open the door to Asianess, the overabundance of crackers will usually nullify this potential, destroying any type of ethnic influence. The result? Conformist bastards who reek of sellout, too weak to stand up for who they are. It’s fortunate that this effort to assimilate usually fails. It’s unfortunate that these twinkies go running back to whitey for some more. Bullshit can look yellow too.

Reverse-aggressors: These parents have the opposite principles of the aggressors and try to instill them just as deeply into their children. You will be Asian, no questions asked. By 10, you’ll be fluent in your native language. You will learn principles of deep respect, and rather than seeking out your birth culture later in life, it will be forced upon you from the beginning.

While this attitude has its own problems, reverse-aggressors may be the ideal kind of parents from an adoptee’s perspective: but there aren’t enough of them to meet demand. The few children who are raised this way may even emulate the adulthood of a traditional second generation Asian-American child.

Overall, the worst, most common aspect of Asian transracial adoption is the loss of cultural identity and depth. What usually results is a load of cracker-washed conformist dipshits who end up marrying the people who oppress them.

So how will you play the cards you are dealt?

Will you stand up for your ethnicity? Will you support the discrimination you’re slapped with daily? Will you whore out, just to fit in? Will you destroy all crackers in your path?

Whatever you do, do not simply conform. Think your shit through. Then you’re a 44.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 11th, 2004 at 5:37 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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