Re: She still doesn't look Jewish
- From: "cindys" <cstein1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2007 15:40:02 +0000 (UTC)
"Eliyahu" <lrooff@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1173366203.060289.314390@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Mar 8, 4:39 am, "Lee Ratner" <LBRat...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:-----------
On Mar 7, 11:08 pm, "Joel Shurkin" <jshur...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
There are plenty of American Jews, of course, who do not "look
Jewish." And grappling with identity is something all adopted children
do, not just Chinese Jews. ...
I think most experts in adoption recommend that adopted children
be raised in their own culture now. Jews, regardless of affiliation,
seem to ignore this recommendation and raise their children as Jews.
Those "experts" seem to think that other cultures have the same values
as we do when it comes to adopting orphans and unwanted children. The
fact is, many Asian cultures have no tradition of adoption, especially
if children are the unwanted offspring of "undesirable" members of
their society, and those children would have ended up on the streets
or worse if left in their own culture. It's especially bad for
children of mixed race in Asia. We don't realize how incredibly racist
most Asian nations are when it comes to non-Asians. I have a good
friend who is Korean-American and who considers herself very lucky to
have been adopted by Americans. As she discovered while trying to
search for her Korean mother (unsuccessfully), had she grown up in
Korea as a half-Korean, half-white child, she wouldn't have been
allowed to attend school, wouldn't have been able to find a job or a
spouse, would have been a social pariah, and about the only source of
employment open to her would have been prostitution.
Bingo. Exactly. And it's not only the mixed race children of Asian countries
who are not permitted to go to school, can't find a job or a spouse, and who
are social pariahs. In Korea, it's also the children who are the result of
an unplanned pregnancy between two unmarried full-blooded Koreans. In Korea,
the attitude toward "born out of wedlock" children is similar to what was
the attitude in the USA in the 1950s. It's shocking. It's a scandal. The
*unwed mother* typically disappears to another town to a give birth in a
home for unwed mothers, surrenders the baby for adoption, returns home like
nothing ever happened, and prays to God that a potential future husband will
never find out about this. If a future husband were ever to find out about
this, she would never be able to get married. And very few Korean men are
willing to become stepfathers to children fathered by other men.
Sometimes, these unwed mothers hang onto their children for a few years.
Then, along comes a potential husband, and the mother surrenders her child
at that point. Sometimes, if the child is a girl, the mother will keep her
and take her to work with her (to the factory or housecleaning jobs). Since
the (sexist) philosophy is that boys more than girls need an education,
mothers are more inclined to surrender baby boys at birth (for the sake of
ensuring that someone will provide an education for their sons). It is for
this reason that (in contrast to the Chinese adoptions), there are more baby
boys than girls available for adoption from Korea. When an unwed mother
signs the paperwork and officially surrenders her baby, this is the best of
all circumstances for the baby. Sometimes, babies are simply abandoned on
the steps of the orphan home, and this is the saddest situation of all
because in South Korea, if the birth mother does not sign the paperwork to
surrender the baby, the baby can never be adopted by another family (on the
basis that the biological mother can theoretically return at any time to
reclaim the baby). These children grow up in the orphanage, get some
education, and then are out on their own to find employment in factories or
as street cleaners or cleaning ladies. Additionally, Korea is a totally
paternalistic society. A child's entire future (his job, wife, etc) rests on
his paternal lineage and who his father is. If a child "has no father," he
also has no future. Well, enough said...
Best regards,
---Cindy S.
That said, I do think that children adopted from other nations or
cultures should be taught about their historic ancestry and culture
while growing up. Even if they don't give a hoot about it now, they
may find as adults that they wish they'd learned about it earlier. We
don't let our kids decide what other things we will teach them as they
grow up, so why should we feel that they have some special wisdom when
it comes to deciding about teaching them about their own ancestry?
(In the case of Korean kids, I think there's a certain feeling of
pride to be had in knowing that one's people, for instance, invented
the printing press and movable type over two centuries before those
"advanced" Europeans came across the idea...)
Eliyahu
.
- References:
- She still doesn't look Jewish
- From: Joel Shurkin
- Re: She still doesn't look Jewish
- From: Lee Ratner
- Re: She still doesn't look Jewish
- From: Eliyahu
- She still doesn't look Jewish
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