Adopting Histories, Theories and Other Stories by Miles Tokunow

Wesleyan University

The Honors College

Adopting Histories, Theories and Other Stories by Miles Mitani Tokunow Class of 2010

A thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors in Anthropology Middletown, Connecticut

April, 2010

Table of Contents.

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Acknowledgements

I want you to know that Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m smiling while writing this: To my families, Mom, Dad, Teo, Lara, Marina, Molly, Pepe You are love and support. My academic mothers, Gillian, thank you for seeing and listening to me Prof U, thank you for showing me how to be a storm My Mellon Family, Krishna, Renee, thank you 200 Church, 200 College, 202 Wash, the dancers, the musicians, and all those in between and Tala. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s so much more than gratitude And Greta.

For my families.

Introduction:

Introduction: The skin of my forearm slowly gets stretched across the hardwood floor. My body is contorting upwards, my face planted on the ground, ribs spiraling while my legs slowly inch their way to my chest. My eyes are closed and I can hear my breath underneath the tumbling guitar drone. While my body collapses on itself like a rung-out piece of cloth, I imagine the water flowing through and around my body. I’m imagining the way that my cells came together and remembered to create an arm and a heart and not misplace them. I, like the rest of the class, was imagining the process of my birth starting off as eggs. This was one of the movement exercises in Eiko’s course called Delicious Movements. She is half of the avant-garde performance group, Eiko & Koma. In the course, students study the literature, film, and history of the atomic bombing and aftermath in Japan as well as practice the sometimes excruciatingly slow movement style that she and her partner created, Delicious Movements. I took this course my freshman year and was the teaching assistant the subsequent year. This exercise called ‘Egg’ followed a discussion about readings on the Minamata disease.1

The Minamata disease, in essence, was mercury poisoning the run-off of a corporate factory that polluted the ocean. It affected the fishing town of Minamata and resulted in 9

As we continued our slow micro-movements about our fetal development, an image came to me different from the ones I was shown in biology classes. I saw myself as an egg inside my birthmother as a fetus.2 I felt the movement of my birthmother’s birthmother, as she walked the streets of New York, pregnant with my mom, and my mother subsequently with me. After the cells developed, remembering where to form what, a flash of light passed over me, back and forth images of my mother’s and my own births. Those blinding lights, the discomfort of noise without the filter of skin and womb, she and I both felt it and I knew at that moment- that we were one and the same. For me, this was a seminal moment in my self-development. But also, this moment represents the crux of my thesis: an autoethnography about transracial adoption, identity construction, the body and relatedness. Transracial adoption as the foundation of study lends itself to many interconnected discourses within anthropology. Like any form of adoption, transracial adoption as a practice questions assumptions about legitimate forms of family while bringing the discussion of nature and nurture (or the biological and the social) to the forefront. Transracial adoption takes that nature/nurture discussion and intertwines race and racial constructions to complexify the arguments. The image that came to me during the Delicious Movement’s Egg exercise complexified my understanding of my own adoption and its biology. The image that I felt while I was moving was akin to Russian Matryoshka dolls, which are a set of hollowed dolls that fit into the numbing, weakening and paralysis of the limbs of almost an entire generation. The disease was passed on to children from their mothers during pregnancy. 2 It is scientifically proven that women are born with all of their reproductive eggs for the rest of their lives, unlike men’s constant regenerating of sperm. 10

each other. Inside each doll is another smaller doll. In the image I received, I figure myself within Greta within her mother like these dolls: autonomous individuals inside of each other. The experience reconceptualized my biological relation to my birth family in opposition to the assumed relation based on the transmission of genes and DNA. Rather, my experience showed me that our relatedness is based in the idea that we both hold and fill each other as fully formed subjective beings within our respective biologies. In order to fully develop and articulate the theory of relatedness that followed from this insight, I found that I needed to write autoethnographically. In many ways, the practice of people creating kinship and forming relatedness is deeply intimate. These processes of creating relatedness occur in the intimate stories we share with each other as well as the intimacies of our daily actions, and of our nesting biologies.

Just as the mother bathes the child she diseased through her womb, my mother and I need to go back to the water together to heal each other. .

Setting the Space Race

I am adopted. My birthmother, Greta, gave me up for adoption at birth, just as her mother did with her. Unlike Greta, I never spent time in foster care, but was placed with my parents from ‘the beginning.’ My mother, Jane, is white – the culmination of an estranged Irish mother and black-sheep Jewish father. She is a nurse midwife. My dad, Susumu, is Japanese. He’s a sound-mixer for film. I have one brother named Teo who is five years older than I and is the biological son of our parents. My parents decided to adopt when they found out they couldn’t become pregnant again. My light brown skin, curly brown hair and facial features make me look multiracial- a mixed black kid. I don’t know what race or ethnicity I am. Growing up in a Latino enclave in Los Angeles with an El Salvadorian nanny, I was close to and affected by many different ethnicities. Without a biological idea of race to define me, I constructed my racial identity with the different ethnicities that influenced me. It was only my third week of Wesleyan when I was walking uphill on Church Street to my modern dance class that my idea of racial identity changed. I

was walking toward the sunseting horizon, enjoying the newness of college when a car passed by: “GO BACK WHERE YOU BELONG YOU NIGGER”

A tired woman’s voice yelled at me from the passenger side of the car darting away. Shocked, confused, could I even understand what just happened? It was only second time in my life that I was put in my racialized body. The following years at Wesleyan, I tried to claim the race that was projected on my body. Through my stories as a transracial adoptee, I hope reconfigure race in the body. Adoption Similar to the way adoption is placed in the back seat within family planning, the practice of adoption is also overlooked by many anthropologists studying kinship today. With the advent of new reproductive technologies, more and more feminist scholars have gravitated towards theorizing the family and the body within this context, leaving once again the bastard child that is adoption in the backseat of interests, desire and importance. Signe Howell (2001) recognizes this fact as well when she writes, “unlike the new reproductive technology, adoption-whether transnational or not-has received little anthropological attention (major exceptions are Modell 1994; Fine 1998). I believe that the study of adoption has several important contributions to make to the study of kinship precisely because, as a process of procreation, it is nonbiological” (203). I think it is worthwhile to note Howell’s language- nowhere else have I come across adoption labeled as ‘a process of procreation.’ Frankly, I was taken aback when I read this. Procreation had been so engrained as a naturally biological act for me, I had never imagined calling adoption as such. Looking up procreation in the

Merriam-Webster dictionary, I found my definition of the word open up: procreate: to beget or bring forth (offspring: propagate (or reproduce as an intransitive verb). Other definitions were to cause to continue or increase by sexual or asexual reproduction, or to cause to spread or to be transmitted. With that said, I am my adoptive parents’ son. They brought me forth and I reproduce them, taking from them their fears, worries, some aspirations, and perspectives, their histories and interests. My anthropology is my mom and my art my dad. The importance of studying adoption is its ability to challenge and expose cultural perceptions of kinship and identity. In the words of theorists Jill Deans and Judith Butler (2001), “the performance of adoption has the power to reveal and redirect social forces that shape ‘legitimate’ kinship in the U.S.” (85) This is a goal of this thesis. In their quote, Butler and Deans use the phrase ‘legitimate’ kinship to refer to David Schneider’s seminal works, American Kinship: A Cultural Account (1968) and A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984). In his works, Schneider uncovers American conception of kinship and family as based in bloodrelatedness, and later exposes American anthropologists’ cultural biases about kinship through the study of the Yap of the West Caroline Islands. For the Yap, as for other societies, kinship is based on “hard work” and not biology. Schneider concludes that Western anthropologists had been imposing their cultural framework on other societies and debunks the idea that kinship is inherently constructed through biological-relatedness. The anthropological study of

American adoption is important to further complicate our own ideas of family and kinship. The majority of academic literature on adoption has been written by adoptive parents (Pertman, ; Bordo, ; Simon, 2000) . Once familiarized with the practice, the parents of adoptees bring adoption to the discussion of kinship. I take issue with the fact that most theoretical contributions about adoption have been written by adoptive parents. With only two exceptions- Betty Jean Lifton in (psychology) and Janet Cartsen (anthropology), the analytical perspective of the adoptee has not been documented. Rather, adoption literature from the perspective of the adoptee is relegated to memoir. My project is an intervention in the literature of adoption and place of the adoptee’s perspective and voice that subverts both memoir and anthropology. I have also found that many adoptive parents who write about adoption highlight the good aspects of adoption (Bordo: 2005, Pertman: 2002). While the dissemination of the positive side of adoption is important to combat its history of secrecy and deceit, their words can be taken as problematic. Bordo writes, “Actually, I’ve come to believe that there are distinct advantages to children in not being related to their parents” (232). She then reflects on growing being told she was ‘just like her aunt’ and feeling as thought there was “an immutable family script in which I was destined to play a predetermined role” (232). While Bordo’s argument is valid, she overlooks the fact that many adoptees are still raised with the influence of normative ideology that privileges biological relatedness. Honestly, I feel the same way she does, I just don’t know who those people are. In

her statement, she also undermines the possible comfort that is in knowing, and having a biological script to follow. Thus, her statement, to me, risks trivializing the adoptee’s experience. I feel that my work is important in adding the analytical voice and perspective of the adoptee to the discussion of adoption and relatedness. Not just as an adoptee but also as a transracial/black/mixed adoptee, I write my story to redirect the few studies of adoption towards transracial adoption. In the US as in many other European countries where adoption is a common practice, transnational adoption has been a fully embraced practice. From the numerous articles in celebrity gossip magazines about Angelina Jolie and Madonna to films to PBS adoptions specials, transnational adoption has entered the popular imaginations as a part of family values. This emphasis on transnational adoption in the US completely absolves both academic and popular discussions about transracial adoptions. If in Norway a major reason for transnational adoption is a lack of adopt-able babies in Norway, that is far from the case in the US. With plenty of children (mostly black and or mixed with black) being put up for adoption and already in foster care, the trend to adopt transnationally has greater implications. The practice of transnational adoption can be conceptualized as colonial vestige of ‘Othering.’ While exotic and exciting, transnational adoption is also a means of ‘helping out all those poor countries with their problems,’ completely ignoring the fact that within the US, that same paternalistic/philanthropic desire can be met too. Foster care kids (as with the generalized and stereotyped idea of black youth) are viewed as troublesome. Those within the system are neglected and deemed outcast, while

orphaned children of ‘the third world’ are let into family houses. Historically, underneath this trend also lies the assumption that Americanization is for these children. They can become like us, in a much easier process than trying to whiten black children. I will show in the next chapter how this continues ideologies set in moment in the history of adoption legislation in the U.S.

With my project, I want to bring the academic discussion back from the transnational setting to the US. While some people are writing about the black foster children being transracially and transnationally adopted by Canadians, I want to tell my story to understand some complexities of adoption here that are being ignored in academia. Secondly, I hope to contribute to new forms of engaging with conceptions of kinship and identity construction. How much has my self-defined fragmented self been created through fragmented relationships? And how are these constructions represented in, felt by, or inscribed on my body? Lastly, I want to continue to delve deeper into the relationship between the personal and the political, and all the levels and scopes in between.

Stories

The title of my thesis highlights the importance of stories and narratives in my life as well as, I hope, the lives of others. Firstly, the title sets up the idea of adoption in my thesis: ‘Adopting.’ My favorite definition of the verb ‘to adopt’ is

to “take up and practice as one’s own.” It can refer to the ways disciplines adopt new methodologies as well as the way families adopt children. Both fieldwork and childrearing are practices. The statement also suggests a break from traditional forms of kinship and personhood as biological – everything is adopted for the adoptee. In other words, everything is social or nurture. The idea is that we create ourselves through our interactions with everything around us- that’s what makes us who we are: a perfect example of the postmodern ‘individual.’ For me, this is the importance of studying and understanding the perspective of the (transracial/transnational) adoptee. The title also emphasizes a crucial idea in my thesis: that stories forge relatedness. The placement of ‘other stories’ in the title, “Adopting Histories, Theories & Other Stories,” destabilizes the first two categories. Histories and theories are reinterpreted and reconfigured as stories that forge connections as well. Histories are narrative stories that we write, enact and experience. They give meaning and context to the world around us and show our place(s) within said world. We tell and write histories of society and geography to explain who we are or how we came to be; these are like the stories that parents tell their children. Theories can be described as beliefs or explanations of the world, our reality and/or ourselves. Theories, like histories, give meaning and context (or frameworks) with which people can engage with their world. In my title, they are collapsed into stories as well. Theories are both the stories we tell as well as the way we tell our stories. To me, biography is both history and theory. All are stories that forge connections and make relatedness.

In keeping with the title of my thesis, the chapters that follow are separated into three sections: Histories, Other stories and theories. The first chapter is a weaving of the histories of my family and the history of ‘the family’ through the lens of adoption in America. The second chapter, ‘Other Stories,’ focuses on my own life and my stories as a transracial adoptee to destabilize race, the body and relatedness. The last chapter is an introduction to my multi-media dance performance as an intervention in anthropological discourse. I organized the thesis as a means of communicating with my reader. For me, the living subject, the narrator and author, and the three chapters collapse into one: the boundaries don’t exist. But, in order to present my work and my life to others in a coherent and whole ethnography, I have had to separate the themes by chapter. The chapters are distinct only to explicate and elucidate how they deeply inter-connect. The themes stretch across the boundaries of each chapter because each chapter is a necessary predecessor for the next. The history section gives a multilayered context to my own stories. My stories take those histories and explicate their interconnectedness while providing the fleshy experience needed to ground my theoretical contributions in the final chapter. Like my research, like my life, I want this text to be a journey.

Histories “You’re about to wreck your future running from the past/ you need to slow down, baby.” – India Arie While trying to stress the importance of video recording to my grandmother at Thanksgiving this year, my father tellingly turned to me and said, “this is your history too, this is part of you too…” In writing this historical section of my auto-ethnography, one question interferes with the ease of writing ‘a history.’ The question for me is, where do I start? I pose the question in the form of spatiality because that is how I have been taught to conceive of time: as a timeline. Somewhere on that timeline lies a point where I start, where I begin. In elementary school, the point where I started was my birth, my birth date. While this can bring up certain philosophical questions about the certainty of time and reality before and after our deaths, I choose to believe that I started before I was born – but where? When? How far back in time do I have to go back to understand my related self? Once again, where do I start? In Edo era Japan, where my father’s father’s father’s father was a member of a samurai clan? But what about the lesser-known history of his mother’s side? Do I start in Odessa, my mom’s better-known geographical point of beginning? Or do I start in the legislation of adoption in America, which is enmeshed with industrialization and immigration? Or do I start in the scenes of my imaginations – of my imagined family and plantations and cane fields and the African Bush? Within this endless mobius strip of questions, I choose to write my history. A history that is composed of all of these histories. I pick the histories that tell a story and the stories that tell the history. Imagine a lanyard, or strings, or a DNA strip. A pulling together of these disparate but equal compositional strands. 26

The trajectory of this chapter is ordered to defamiliarize the constituent histories of the individual’s heritage. To start these histories, I begin with my nuclear family. I first trace the lineages of my mother’s family, as she, according to Sherry Ortner (1974), is the person most responsible for passing down the generational and cultural information that composes family history. Next, I write the history of my father’s family. Both of these sections start with my brief account of their history and their email responses to me when I asked them about their childhoods. After presenting my nuclear family history, I contextualize their experiences with a history of ‘The American Family’ and how social movements and legislation in the 19th and 20th century changed the idea of what/who constitutes a family. This section ends with the process of my adoption. By detailing the ways families have been expanded, I move on to the history of my babysitter, Marina, who raised me until I was seven. While my older brother calls her a Godmother, I continue to tell people that she’s “another mother to me.” In continuing to pull the strands that I feel construct me, I write the histories of my biological parents. The histories that I present are mostly based on memory. Sherry Ortner’s (2003) ethnography of her high school class, New Jersey Dreaming, also relies heavily on memories. My work shifts the significance of history to cultural biography. This shift is represented in the titles of each history. I use the way I address each of my family members as the title of each history for two reasons. Firstly, I use the titles to evoke the intimacy of the family histories. While I blur memory and history, this level of intimacy is important for my critique of

relatedness because of the intimacy of our relationships. Secondly, the titles are meant to reposition myself into my familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s history to make the statement that these histories are always in dialogue with me. I present the strands of history as memory, biography, stories and living, breathing entities.

Hi Mom

This picture is a family portrait of my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s paternal extended family. My mom is second from the left in the front row. She is in between her twin brothers and in front of her parents.

As my mom told me at the only family reunion I have ever been a part of, “Multi-culturalism is built into my family.” Her paternal grandparents were from Odessa, Russia, where Marcus worked as a tailor for the Russian Navy. They came to America fleeing the Cossack pogroms. After arriving in the US, her father, Al was born, the second youngest of eight. Of the eight children, my grandfather, who died before I was born, was the only child in his family to refuse to be bar mitzvah-ed and the only one to marry a non-Jew. (Proof of my mom’s multiculturalism.) He was the “black sheep” of his family. Most of his brothers and sisters went to college and became professionals, but he did not have a college degree. The woman he married, who also died of lung cancer before I was born, came from a protestant mid-western family, whose roots trace back many generations, eventually to Irish origins. My mom’s family all got in one car and drove to Los Angeles from St. Louis in 1948. Moving into the Silverlake community of East Los Angeles, they were surrounded by mostly lower middle class, white, leftist families. There, they could abide by their beliefs. Both my grandparents were Communists in their young adult lives, which classified my mother as a “red diaper baby.” My mom then went to public elementary and high school. She was an avid reader but had no intention of going to college, as her father encouraged her to find herself a good husband. Behind both of their backs, her mother sent in an application for her to UC Berkley. My mom decided to go, and fittingly majored in anthropology during the 60’s.

A family portrait of my mother’s family: (clockwise starting top left) Her brother Don, her brother David, her father Al, her sister Sue sitting on the floor, her mother Dorothea, and my mom Jane. The following written piece is a direct quote from my mother, as she responded to an email in which I asked her to describe her life growing up. “ questions jane tokunow <jtokunow@earthlink.net> Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 3:14 PM Reply-To: jane tokunow <jtokunow@earthlink.net> To: Miles Tokunow <mtokunow@wesleyan.edu> “Hi Sweets,

Sorry I didn't get to this right away.

To me, so much of my childhood was colored by two facts, my father had a furious temper that would erupt without any rhyme or reason and the second is that he had 3 long term mistresses during the course of my parents 40+ yr. marriage. Each one was about 10 yrs in duration. My dad was very warm, emotional, and brilliant, but also very insecure. The roots of it all went back to his family he was considered the black sheep of the family; he was the only one of 6 sons in a Jewish family not to get bar mitzvahed and the only one to marry a non-Jew. He was one of 8 kids- 6 boys and two girls. Unfortunately for him, he was born after there were 5 boys already and his parents finally got the girl they wanted, my aunt Shirley - and then he was followed by another girl, the baby, my aunt Ruth. By the time he came along, my grandparents didn't want any more children and they didn't want any more boys for sure. I heard that he was sometimes locked in a closet as a little boy, but don't know if that is true of not. The six above him - his 5 brothers and 1 sister- were all born in Russia and he was the first to be born here in America. So he was truly an unwanted child. My mother, who people have often commented to me, was the most feminine person they have ever met, was also warm, but very serene (kind of like Marina). She had a very happy childhood until her mother died at 7yrs. and her father gave her and her younger brother - my uncle Frank- away to live with her mother's sister, my great Aunt Clara and great uncle Fred. My Uncle Frank is my only living relative of that generation - he lives near my sister in Mendocino and is 88 yrs. When my mom was 17 yr., her uncle Fred "started chasing her around" was the way she put it. At that point, she met my father who was 7 yrs. older than her. They say he kidnapped her to take her dancing all night long on a Mississippi river boat. They actually met at City College in St. Louis and what united them was their attraction to each other, but also their love of politics and social justice. My mom got pregnant with twins - your uncles Don and Dave so my parents married when she was 19 and he was 26yr. and by the time my mom was 25 yr., she had 4 children. The family dynamic was my father was really an emotional roller-coaster, extremely abusive verbally and he was a bully - very demanding. My mom spent a lot of time trying to placate him. A lot of the time, I remember my mom crying related to whatever my father was doing with the mistress. I once asked my mom why she

didn't leave my dad and she said that she had 4 young children and no education, had never worked, so how would she support them? So you could say she felt powerless and trapped, although she also passionately loved my dad. They had kind of a sizzling relationship where I think the romantic and sexual connection was important to both. My mom thought my dad was really handsome and sexy. Once when Bachan was complaining about Gichan (which she did frequently but in a cheerful manner), I also asked her why she didn't leave and she gave a very similar answer. She said that she was afraid that she would lose her children. One thing Susumu [my father] and I agree on is that we had loving mothers - they really gave unconditional love (didn't really matter much what we did or achieved, they loved us.) and "difficult" fathers. Very self-centered dominating narcisstic dads. (but Gichan wasn't scary the way my dad was) Really, I think that the kids in my family spent a lot of time being afraid of my dad. The emotional atmosphere was charged - very volatile and wild. I felt like missiles were flying in the air and there were land-mines around emotionally so I just tried to duck and cover. My older brothers were really rough and tumble. The kids did have a sense of solidarity and I felt also protected by my older brothers. My sister Sue was more robust than I. The 4 of us were very loyal to each other and had lots of adventures together. So it was a loud noisy environment with my father ruling the roost. He believed that men had the right to dominate women and children. It all seems so long ago now, but all the kids hated my dad when we were growing up and even into our 40's, the kids would tell stories about various awful things he had done to us as kids. We felt loved by my mom. As I have told you, there was a great value on education, but a double standard. Boys should be educated, but girls shouldn't be smarter (or even as smart) as their husbands. They should marry smart men. Women were supposed to be beautiful and sexy and my father considered me neither (I was very thin, no boobs as a kid and had thick glasses- so you can imagine.) so that has led to some of my insecurities or lack of confidence. Since my father always presented my mother as sweet but not very bright, it took me until I was 25 yrs. to realize that my mom was incredibly smart. Whereas my dad didn't think it was important or good that I go to college, I think my mother felt passionately that I should because she always told me that if I went to college, I wouldn't be trapped and need to depend on a man. She could get as far as the idea of education, but she didn't think of work as important to women. Somehow college was supposed to save us, but we weren't supposed to work? (not

feminine, but also my mom really loved her kids and she thought it was harmful to kids when the mom was away working.) Both my parents were passionate about social justice. They were Communists for a while before moving to California. My mom had been arrested for trying to integrate a restaurant with some other people - she was just 19 yrs. old and that was more than 70 yrs. ago - twenty years before the civil rights lunch-counter sit-ins, which were in the 50's. My mom had a great sense of fair play and justice. She was also not materialistic, though my parents loved art, music and architecture. So, I don't think they had any racism (in fact worked hard against it), but did have sexism and also some mild homophobia. If you believe so strongly in separating the gender roles and think that men should be the boss, then of course that can move into homophobia which challenges some of those stereotypes. Despite my father's temper, he was also a very warm and emotional person with a great sense of fun and adventure. I think the value I have on fun and adventure comes from him. Thinking back on my childhood, the times we grew up in also influenced us. Birth control wasn't a reality until the 80's (when I was already 40) or 90's and abortion was illegal, and there were few economic opportunities for women. When I was of age to go to medical or law school, those students were 99% male.(and probably white male) Now those schools are 50% women and very diversified. You were supposed to be married by the time you were 21 yr. and stay married. (I don't think there was any divorce in my family before my generation.) Still, the 60s, when I went to school, was a wonderfully open time. I am tired from writing such a long email - is this what you wanted or more about "family dynamics." Maybe, I can write something shorter and more to the point. All my love, mammers.â&#x20AC;?

Hey Pops

This is the Tokunow family tree that no one from our family can read. My father was born in Amache, Colorado, a transient now non-existent town. It was an internment camp. My father’s family is of Japanese descent. My grandfather, Tom, “Gichan,” Kazuto Tokuno was born in Japan and married his wife, my grandmother, “Bachan,” there. She, however, was born in the state of Washington and was sent to Japan at age fifteen. Their marriage was a traditional

arranged marriage. Gichan was fifteen years older than Bachan. Before getting married, my grandmother only saw my grandfather on one occasion and had never spoken to him. They were married for 70 years before my grandfather died at age 103, during the spring of my freshman year. Before WWII, my grandfather owned a nursery in Orange County. They lost all of their property when they were sent to the Amache Japanese internment camp in 1942. It was there that my father was born, the youngest of three sons. “One of the great tragedies of their lives,” says my dad, was that his older brother, Ted, got polio in the Camp at age six. Only one other person in the camp, a seventeen year old girl, contracted it. The two were sent to a Catholic hospital in New York City and my father’s family did not see Ted again for a year, until my grandfather was finally allowed to visit him. After the internment, they moved to New Jersey where both my grandparents worked in a nursery. They would visit Ted on the weekends. Both families were from Hiroshima, and they lost many relatives in the atomic bombing of the city during WWII, a place of entry for me into Eiko’s Delicious Movements course. After Ted left the hospital, the family headed westward to California. They moved back to the place where Gichan had owned his nursery, now taking staff positions in someone else’s nursery. With the family intact after their internment and as a result of Ted’s Catholic hospitalization, they started celebrating Christmas and Thanksgiving despite their Buddhist beliefs. My dad, like my mother, went to public schools all his life. He played football, was quite popular and curbed his creative and artistic interests in the mini-mall cookie-cutter suburbia that is Orange County. He followed in his

brothers’ footsteps and went to a UC school, but instead of studying engineering like the two of them, he majored in architecture.

This is a collection of photographs that my father assembled for his dad’s 100th birthday. The top left picture is a portrait of his dad, Gichan to me, Tom legally. Clockwise, the next picture is another portrait of him on his motorcycle. The next is a portrait of the whole family, Gichan, his wife, Bachan, my uncle Ted, my dad, and my uncle Larry. They are at an orange grove that Gichan worked at. The last is of Gichan and his wife. What follows is a history that my father wrote in the third person for a job and that he sent me as part of an email correspondence, in which I asked him to describe growing up. It was written in 2008. “Susumu left high school to go to Berkeley in the 1960‘s,

during the Free Speech Movement, the Vietnam War Protests, Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests and San Francisco Hippies. He graduated in Architecture and went on to the MFA film program at UCLA, making films on Cesar

Chavez, filming in the Ambassador Hotel during the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and in Chicago during the police riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention. But working with the Rolling Stones on “Gimme Shelter” in 1969, and the subsequent murder, made Susumu re-examine his role and responsibilities in filmmaking. He began teaching film production at Cal. State Univ. Humboldt, Oberlin College and while directing a Warner Broth. Film Workshop at Cornell, he moved to Guyana, he co-founded the Victor Jara Film Collective and organized a new political party “The Working People’s Alliance”. The government’s assassination of poet, writer, Walter Rodney, forced the collective to leave immediately, smuggling out documents and film to later make “The Terror and the Time: Repressive Violence in the Republic of Guyana”. Starting again back in LA, Susumu working as a location soundmixer, has recorded both Hollywood music films like La Bamba, Mambo Kings, and Bob Dylan’s Masked and Anonymous, and non Hollywood films like David Lynch’s Straight Story, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere. Still working on documentaries, he went to Nicaragua in 1977 during the dictator, Somosa, later filming the Sandanista’s struggle against the Contras, and then again with Bianca Jagger, filming Nicaragua after democracy. He went to Iran during the 1979 Revolution for PBS, to Cambodia with Daryl Hannah “on human trafficking”, to China during the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre; to Holland and the World Court, for the film “Darfur Now”; to Tibet before the Chinese crackdown; and on the Ken Burn’s documentary on the National Parks….coming back and filming in the World War II Japanese relocation camp at Manzanar….still surviving.”

Making the Family

As Stephanie Coontz (2010) states in her essay entitled “The Evolution of American Families,” there is no universal definition of ‘the family’ (33). While it is certainly true that different geographic cultures, as well as a single culture at different times in history, define their conceptions of family differently, I argue that these cultures are also not in themselves monolithic. Today and throughout the history of the United States, there have been multiple examples of different family structures within different segments of society. The stories of my parents’ two distinct childhoods is a prime example of how families can at once reproduce and challenge the idea of family in a singular historio-cultural context. While there is no universal or monolithic idea of the family, Coontz (2010) points out that the definition of ‘family’ is largely created by those in power and is often in opposition to the arrangements of people with less power in society. The family arrangement that my parents and their families constructed themselves against has changed over time. Coontz (2010) traces the idea of

family back to 18th century European nobility who linked family and economy. Families were not restricted to biological relatives but also included servants and boarders who all lived in a common residence. This idea passed into the colonial U.S. Property became the key for social hierarchy and designated the nuclear family for ownership and inheritance but still necessitated the work of servants and slaves. As the market economy shifted from subsistence/farm work to industrial work, the role of the family underwent changes too. This shift created larger distinctions between work and home, in which middle-class women became the center of the cohesive unit of family life and middle-class men worked outside of the house more. The demands of 19th century industrialization shifted the characteristics of the family as well to smaller families with a greater emphasis on biological relatedness. Coontz (2010) states that marriage became an institution based more on love than economics. Middle-class children were exempt from working on the farm or factory, in direct contrast to the wave immigration and child labor in the mid to late 1800s. Thus, the shift to â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;the modern familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; was different for different classes and groups of people in the U.S. However, Coontzâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s history of the American family at this influential time is incomplete. By focusing on the institution of marriage, which by the 1920s had outlawed interethnic marriages, she misses a seminal moment in the construction of families; the first legislation on adoption is passed in 1851.

Adoption History

Adoption has a history that can be traced to folklore, myth and legend. Although I am not going to attempt to write an entire history of adoption, I would like to mention that within two of the most foundational ideologies of Trans-EuroAmerican societies lie stories of adoption. In the bible, Moses is ‘adopted’ by a pharaoh, while in ancient Greek mythology, Hercules is a hero and also an adoptee. Amusingly, it was actually within the first two minutes of watching the Disney version of Hercules that I first realized his story is a story of adoption. The film opens with Hercules’ first song, entitled Where I Belong, in which he realizes that he doesn’t ‘fit in’ with his family. In tracing a history of adoption in America, most scholars begin with the passing of the first law that addressed adoption. I will also start with this event, but not without mentioning that both interfamilial and extrafamilial adoption were already a longstanding practice within black communities in the American South.3 In 1851, Massachusetts became the first state to pass legislation specifically about adoption. This seminal legislation served to legitimize and institutionalize the practice of adoption in America. The Massachusetts law was followed by a Pennsylvania law in 1855 and by 1929, all existing states had laws about adoption. As Judith Modell (1994) has noted, the first law passed without much

This Southern practice, termed “informal transfers,” was the result of the tearing apart of biological families through slave auctions (Perman, 2000: 16). 42

debate, which she interprets to mean that the social political stage set up the law as an obvious necessity. In Adam Pertman’s (2000) description of the social climate that produced this first legislation, poverty and disease in 19th century American urban centers were the foundation. In essence, he argues that the laws were a response to children living in the street (read: homelessness but also street gang life). As Pertman (2000) emphasizes, “The hardships of the Industrial Revolution, accompanied by a huge influx of immigrants, left so many children homeless in the early nineteenth century that public demand grew for providing improved care.”4 Judith Modell (1994) views the passing of this legislation as a demonstration of the states’ vested interest in protecting the parent-child relationship in adoption arrangements (24). Both the state and the public felt that the family was the best institution for children. The state, with public support, affirmed that the reproduction of the middle class family structure was the best outcome for American society’s valuable asset, its children. The legal practice of adoption in America is predicated on the idea of the family as it answers the question: what is in the best interests of the child? Although the state purported to take the child’s perspective, it instead entrenched and further normalized ‘the family’ as socially fit for their white middle-class institutions. In summation, the creation of the Massachusetts law gave power to judges to construct what they considered socially acceptable families. One of the major issues that accompanied the legalization of adoption was the question of money, specifically inheritance. The question of inheritance and

Perman, 2000: 16. 43

property within this early legislation demonstrates the common confusion of newly formed kinship without blood ties. While certain states allowed adoptees to acquire land from their adoptive parents, many states made it nearly impossible; inheritance was allocated only to ‘natural/blood’ children. Judith Modell views this example as another paradigmatic sign of the centrality of adoption’s question: what is in the best interest of the child. As she explains, the fact that natural children were favored over adopted children in inheritance law proved that, “adoption in America is for the child’s sake and not in order to ensure the transmission of property” (25). Once again, adoption law reifies the middleclass’s image. While still protecting the privileging of blood relationships in the economic realm, the state suggests to the working class that the middle class lifestyle is necessary to the development of children. Adoption, in their rhetoric, is not only a gift to the middle class families because it normalizes them, but also a gift to the working class because it gives their children the ‘acceptable’ middle class lifestyle. To further normalize the white middle class family, adoption has always been shrouded in secrecy. Although it was legal to adopt and bring nonbiological children into a family’s home, the shared ideology of American kinship at the time was based in biological relatedness. Being adopted was legal, but it wasn’t okay. Thus, social workers and judges tried to simulate the traditional family through visual relatedness, a process within adoption called ‘matching.’ The process was meant to keep the adoption a secret for fear of tainting the

desired picture-perfect-family. In Adam Pertman’s words, “They could pass as ‘real’ families’ (30). Not until the Minnesota Act of 1917, did the institutional procedure of adoption formally incorporate secrecy. It was the first legislation to seal adoption records. Pertman mentions that infertile married couples relied heavily on visuality for social acceptance: women stuffed their shirts with pillows, social workers delivered babies in the night (quite like the story of the stork) and babies were matched to look like the couple (30). Adoption was covered up, secretive and sealed to maintain the importance and normalcy of blood relations. Transracial adoptions in the U.S. started in a trajectory similar to that of American adoptions. American adoptions, as I mentioned earlier, were a response to an influx of immigration to the U.S. and to the urban industrialization that led to homeless children and thus laws for adoption. Most scholars say that transracial adoption was the result of World War II, after thousands of children were left homeless in Europe and Asia. I agree that this is the genesis of transracial adoption but it begs differentiation. The common image of transracial adoption today is that of Asian or black children adopted by white families, and these adoptions do comprise the majority of transracial adoptions today. However, while not all transracial adoptions of Asian children are international, the bulk of them are, which classifies them as transnational adoptees, whereas African American (black) adoptees adopted by non-black families in the U.S. are solely considered transracial. As it pertains more to my thesis, I will focus on transracial adoptions that occur strictly within the US, a type of adoption that didn’t gain

popularity until the 1960’s. Transracial adoptions at this point were a one-way street. As Patricia Jennings defines transracial adoptions; “[I]n theory, transracial adoptions refer to the adoption of a child of one race by parents of a different race. In practice, Whites are overrepresented as foster and adoptive parents of children of color” (560). Starting in 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) started a campaign speaking out against transracial adoptions. William T. Merritt was the president of NABSW5 at that time. The NABSW’s position on transracial adoption is succinctly stated in one of Merritt’s testimonies in front of a Senate Committee, in 1985: We are opposed to transracial adoption as a solution to permanent placement for Black children. We have an ethnic, moral and professional obligation to oppose transracial adoption. We are therefore legally justified in our efforts to protect the right of Black children, Black families and the Black community. We view the placement of Black children in White homes as a hostile act against our community. It is a blatant form of race and cultural genocide.

While NABSW’s efforts to legally stop white families from adopting black children, their work was effective on the level of the social worker. ‘Matching’ undertook a whole new sense of visual distinction: race. For that reason, social workers who agreed that white families couldn’t provide children of color the cultural survival skills as people of color kept ‘adoptable’ children in foster care. The counter groups who were pro-transracial adoption felt that what was best for the child was the experience of living a white normative familial household. The president of the North American Council on Adoptable Children (NACAC), on behalf of the organization, is quoted as saying; “ We believe that every child has

National Association of Black Social Workers 46

the right to a loving, ‘forever’ family of his or her own.” By 1985, transracial adoption was a legal form of adoption in every state (Simon, 139).

My parents both left their fields of study for film and met each other in Los Angeles in the editing rooms of a documentary studio. After six years, they married and had Teo, my brother. Five years later, after numerous failed attempts to have another child, they decided to adopt. Susan Bordo, a feminist scholar, has a similar story to that of my parents. As she (2005) states in the first line of her article about the process of adopting her daughter, “I am one of those babyboomers who “forgot to have children.” This statement is potent in its relevance. The first issue brought up is the idea that peoples can be grouped on a histiotemporal basis. My parents, both born in 1943, fall into this generational grouping. They are baby-boomers, who likewise, “forgot to have children” (32). This quote is humorously telling of an important generational shift. Sociohistorical changes in traditional gender roles led to the idea that someone could forget to have children. The idea being that it is natural (but social because it can be forgotten) to make a biological family, which reveals the residual kinship values from a previous dominant culture. When reflecting on her ideas of motherhood, Bordo realizes how the dominant culture influenced her: “Adoption never occurred to me; my fantasies of being a mother were completely entangled with the desires to be pregnant, give birth, and reproduce our flawed but precious line” (32). Motherhood, to her, was attained through biological reproduction. Her

fantasies about family and motherhood show how the normalized becomes the desired. In part because of the adoption legislation, the image of the normalized blood-related white middle class family sustained across generations. So, in a post WWII U.S.A., a post-1950’s America, women started pushing back marriage (read: starting a family, read: having children) on their lists of priorities. First in importance was becoming a professional. My mother’s biography is a prime example of this historical shift.

My parents both left their fields of study for film and met each other in Los Angeles in the editing rooms of a documentary studio. After six years, they married and had Teo, my brother. Five years later, after numerous failed attempts to have another child, they decided to adopt. Susan Bordo , a feminist scholar, has a similar story to that of my parents. As she (2005) states in the first line of her article about the process of adopting her daughter, “I am one of those babyboomers who “forgot to have children.” This statement is potent in its relevance. The first issue that it brings up is the idea that people can be grouped on a histiotemporal basis. My parents, both born in 1943, fall into this generational grouping. They are baby-boomers, who likewise, “forgot to have children” (32). This quote humorously indicates an important generational shift. Socio-historical changes in traditional gender roles led to the idea that someone could forget to have children. The idea being that it is natural (but social because it can be forgotten) to make a biological family, an idea that reveals the residual kinship

values from a previous dominant culture. When reflecting on her ideas of motherhood, Bordo realizes how the dominant culture influenced her: “Adoption never occurred to me; my fantasies of being a mother were completely entangled with the desires to be pregnant, give birth, and reproduce our flawed but precious line” (32). Motherhood, to her, was attained through biological reproduction. Her fantasies about family and motherhood show how the normalized becomes the desired. In part because of the adoption legislation, the image of the normalized blood-related white middle class family sustained across generations. So, in a post WWII U.S.A., in a post-1950s America, women started pushing back marriage (read: starting a family, read: having children) on their lists of priorities. First in importance was becoming a professional. My mother’s biography is a prime example of this historical shift in gender roles. When my mother was admitted to college, she had already ascended beyond the educational (and class) boundaries of her mother. As a result, my mom did not know what to do when she graduated. So she followed in her brothers’ footsteps and continued her education. After three years at UCLA, she received her Master’s degree in Anthropology but didn’t end up getting her PhD. While she wanted to continue her education, a professional job offer in educational films was too enticing. My mom’s decision to prioritize her profession and education is an example of the way womanhood had changed. As I alluded to earlier, my mom’s history has to be contextualized with class and cultural capital. Each of her decisions to postpone making a family gave her more opportunity to accrue cultural capital. Furthering her education and

focusing on developing her career in a profession were parts of her class ascension. Similar to the shift to the nuclear ‘modern family’ in the late 1800s, the baby-boomer’s new configuration of womanhood was not wholly true for the entire generation. Rather, the majority of people who participated in the shift and who constituted the ‘baby-boomers’ were middle or working class and white. Sherry Ortner’s (2001) ethnography, New Jersey Dreaming, studies her high school class as a representation of the multiplicity of the baby-boomer generation. In her ethnography, Ortner uses Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of distinction, habitus and cultural capital to explain the trajectories of the different social groups in her high school, linking her classmates’ personal stories to the politics of the time. It can be deduced from her ethnography that my parents, despite their different geographical and cultural upbringings, reached a certain middle class lifestyle through the cultural capital they accrued through their similar educations. The connection between class, cultural capital and my parents is crucial in contextualizing their histories. My mother’s placement of value on education and professionalization made her middle class because the concurrent women’s liberation movement changed what constituted middle class womanhood, replacing domesticity and maternity with independence and professionalism.

Another result of the shift in womanhood occurred in the form of the family as an institution. In the 1950s, most unwed white women were encouraged by social workers to give up their children for adoption. Some studies have concluded that since the mid-1970s, over 95% of unwed mothers have kept their

children. Katarina Wegar (1997) attributes this statistical change to the influence of the Women’s movement and the shifted image of womanhood. She also links this change to transracial and transnational adoption. As I have mentioned before, that shifted image is of a white woman. Likewise, adoption has always privileged white middle class normalcy as the true beneficiary of the child transaction. Transracial adoption in the 1960s and 1970s replaced the working class white children of immigrants with the children of working class black and American Indian mothers/families. Thus, one of the results of white women’s new womanhood was the destabilization of the normalized and naturalized image of blood-related family. The making of a family still favored middle class values, but the image of family now could be expanded to look differently. Another expansion of the family was the result of the professionalization of women. Studies show that, in 1991, almost two-thirds of women with children worked outside of the household. While women still created families, their roles within the family changed. My mother was one who continued to work when I was born. My father also worked, so we became what Judith Stacey (2001) calls a ‘postmodern family.’ With both of my parents working, a live-in nanny was brought into our family, and as part of my family, I will continue this chapter with her history. I will then share the strands of history in my biological family.

Hola Marina

This photograph is of my brother, Marina, Molly (Marina’s daughter), and me. It was taken in 1996. Around the time that transracial adoption became popular in the U.S. and that my parents were studying at Berkeley, 20,000 miles south east of Los Angeles, Marina Llamas was born to a family of six. In the evening’s humid heat in July, 1963, a midwife helped Catalina Fuentes give birth to her fourth child, second daughter. She named her “Marina” after her husband’s mother. Like many other families during the early 50’s, Marina’s family came from two rural

parts of El Salvador. Her father was from Cabañas, and mother hailed from Zacatecoluca. The two met while her father was working as a tractor driver for a farm just outside the city center. They settled in Apopa, where they started to make their family. Marina dutifully finished high school while she performed the maternal household chores that she was assigned: cooking, cleaning and taking care of her siblings. After school, she studied for three years to become a nurse/assistant, a profession her mother and father felt was appropriate. Many times, listening to her stories, I remember Marina giving me her gentle smile and reciting the phrase “You know Latin parents…” She now uses this phrase as I push her to let her own daughter have middle class experiences, like traveling. Marina is a mother to me. On October 15th, 1979, the left-wing militia, FLMN, staged a coup d’état against the corrupt governmental leader, Humberto De Villas. Marina was just finishing high school and about to begin studying to be a nursing assistant. As the civil war progressed, jobs became increasingly sparse and salaries fell. With the encouragement and support of her mother, Marina left her studies for what she and her mother felt would be a better life for her. On December 8th, 1984, a date Marina says she’ll always remember, she left her immediate family to live and work with an aunt in Mexico. Marina had struggled with the idea of moving, for her family and work was in San Salvador. To her, San Salvador was her life. She didn’t want to leave it, but her decision was driven by her mother’s desire for a better life for her daughter and her family. With the economy getting worse and her profession’s

pay level getting worse than it already was (for women still weren’t supposed to work for a living), Marina was enticed into a new life that began with a paid trip and a visa for her to go to work as a housekeeper with her aunt. She was greeted by her aunt at the bus station when she arrived in Mexico. The air was cooler, and inside the waiting car was the boss whose house she would clean. I had never known much about this time in Marina’s life because the part that I remembered was her fleeing. I had an image of a younger Marina climbing over a Spanish Mission style fence and running away. This winter break, she told me a little more about why she felt like she had to leave. While the work was fine as expected, living with her aunt became unbearable. The two shared a small house behind the house they cleaned; they shared one bed and one bathroom. Within such a close space, it was hard for Marina to be around her aunt who was always drunk. As we talked, Marina looked up at me in her always polite manner and I realized that I should stop taking notes. She tilted her head to the right while leaning over the kitchen counter. She squinted her right eye and let the words come out with her breath, “she wasn’t nice when she drank.” I didn’t ask anymore. It was enough for me to feel a tickle behind my eyes when she said that in September of 1985 she escaped to Los Angeles where she knew a friend of her sister. Staying with her sister’s friend in East LA, she got a job the day after she arrived through that same friend, working downtown. Again, she lowered her voice and told me she worked in a factory for a year. I couldn’t help but think of the images of Nike factories in Guatemala in the 80’s. After a year, she, again, had to move in haste. On a warm afternoon, the husband of a recently made friend

came to pick her up and take her to a new place to live. Packing all her belongings in plastic grocery store bags, Marina left to live with a friend with whom she felt safe. After moving residences, Marina found work through another friend. Rosa, a warm round-nosed rosy-cheeked older womanly friend of Marina’s, cleaned people’s houses in Silverlake. She had heard that the family friends of one of her clients were looking for a babysitter. Those family friends were my family. And that baby was me. Marina interviewed at my dad’s house, nervous that she “barely knew English.” My parents offered her the job on the spot because, as my mom reminisces “she was so nervous but always the same warm kind person she always has been… I don’t know she just felt right, like family.”

Hello, Greta

Greta has never shown me a family portrait.

This picture was taken when Greta was 23 and given to my parents to have for me. It took six years for Greta Langmead to legally have the name that she has now. She was born in a hospital in Massachusetts to a single mother who, according to one social worker’s research on Greta’s family, was named Hazel. She was born the eighth of nine children in 1964. Left in the hospital, Greta never met any of her biological family. Her journey to the Langmead house was a difficult one. Bouncing around from foster care to foster care, she was instantly taken back to that emotional place when she showed me the social worker’s physical, mental and emotional evaluations this past summer. She said that ‘they just didn’t treat you right there.’ In those different houses, with the same gray shag rug and dimly lit somewhat malodorous living room, Greta developed an independence that was more an act of survival. She told me she didn’t like to play with the other kids. In multiple reports, they called her “spoiled.” We never really talked about this time in her life much. Judith and James Langmead adopted my mom around her sixth birthday. She had already been living with them for a year as a foster child in temporary placement. She became one of seven children who all donned the last name Langmead, some of whom were biological children and others adopted. When she was adopted, she was given the opportunity to choose her middle name, which she picked in honor of her new older brother, Eric Alexander, Alexandra. Growing up in the Langmead household was the closest Greta got to her ideal familial setting. The kids had their individual problems, but they had fun together. Every night, the whole family ate dinner together at the dining room

table. Nestled in the comfort of the Northeast, the house was well kept and always grew with each expansion of the family. Greta’s dad, James, loved her deeply and gave her a lot of attention. This, in her opinion, is why tensions arose between her and her mother. In high school, during a brief period when the family moved to Connecticut for James’ work, Greta and Judith fought constantly. Yelling, pushing, name calling in the middle of the living room downstairs, crying upstairs in her room, helping with dinner, and doing her homework constitute my picture of what life was like for Greta, with six other kids battling their own issues around her. When my mom was collecting information about my biological history, she found out that Greta’s favorite subject in high school was Mathematics, and that she liked English and French but failed Science and didn’t like Economics. Greta had always been interested in maintaining a healthy body through balanced food consumption and physical movement, and her main activity outside of school was gymnastics. The paper that my mom took these notes on was in a manila folder that I found this summer. The folder carried the documents of my adoption, including my birth certificate, court documents, the lawyer’s letters to my parents and the hand-written page of all the information my mom found out about Greta and her family. At the age of seventeen, Greta graduated from high school and decided to move to New York. There, in the beginning of the 1980’s, she lived in an apartment on the east side of mid-town Manhattan. She went to school briefly studying fashion business at F.I.T. and worked in fashion retail. At the time, she worked for high-end jewelry and fashion stores where she was successful in part

because of her natural beauty. She was a looker, and was constantly the object of sexual attention of men around her but wasn’t promiscuous. Men called her ‘a tease’ for being so beautiful and a ‘prude’ for not being interested. After eight months in New York, she met a man at a gymnastics studio. Jerry was a few years older than she, was a shorter Jewish man from New York and was married. They had an affair, and he was her first love; they would go out for dinner and try new health-conscious restaurants. He would take her shopping and buy her expensive gifts spuriously. She says he knew how to take care of a woman. They were together for four years. He broke up with her and left her deeply heartbroken and depressed. Jerry was the man she thought she was going to marry, or rather wanted to marry. She had to find a new place for herself, while still working retail at the store, Robert Morrison. She was extremely depressed at the time and moved into a room with a nice mixed family. During this chaotic time for her, she was sleeping with a Puerto Rican man whom she didn’t have much of a relationship with beyond the physicality. For both of us now, he is nameless, as are the other people in her life; the family she lived with, the friends she stayed with and another man with whom she had one sexual encounter. Sometime in either late march or early spring, she found out she was pregnant. She was struggling in New York and needed to get out. She decided to move to Los Angeles. Knowing no one in Los Angeles, she moved into a hotel room near the airport. She started working in retail again. One day, while at a natural food store, a man stopped to talk to Greta about her pregnancy. Somehow, Greta told him

that she did not know anyone and that living in the hotel was hard. He on the spot offered her an empty room in the office building he worked in. She took it. While traveling in and out of the building, she became friendly with one of the security guards, who took a vested interest in her pregnancy. He helped her get medical care for her first visits to the doctor and the sonograms that showed her that her child was a boy. One day, he asked her what she was planning to do. She said she was thinking of putting me up for adoption. He caringly told her that he knew a lawyer who worked on child placement. She thanked him profusely and decided to meet the lawyer, Elaine Fisher. They set up meetings together to make sure everything went well with the pregnancy, as well as meetings with potential families for her son. One family was a wealthy black family, another was my parents, a middle class mixed family, and the last family was a white couple who weren’t as economically stable as the other two, but were ‘so loving,’ and deeply wanted a child. Greta didn’t make her decision until she went into a seventeenhour labor. Calling Elaine up to tell her that she picked my parents, Greta was confronted with an unexpected worry: my parents had to agree to accept me. After an hour of horrible anxiety and labor pains, she got a call back from an elated Elaine: they said yes, and Greta, alone in the hospital, asked her to ask my mom to be there with her. At 6:36 in morning on January 8th, I was born and put into the hands my mom, Jane. Greta, drained from such a long labor, was just glad I was healthy. She held my hand and signed the rights over to my mom so that my mom could take me out of the hospital. She left the hospital the next morning.

Dear Birthfather,

As I was traveling through the Brisbane airport, I stopped in one of those magazine/snack/book stores and picked up a book with a striking cover. There was a quote by Dick Bruna, a Dutch children’s book author/illustrator, in this book of portraits and quotes by Andrew Zuckerman, about passing on knowledge through generations. It read; “ If you put very few things on a page, you leave lots of room for the imagination.”

Other Stories “Are we real social scientists who seek to discover the invariate truths of social existence? Or are we real story tellers who seek to recreate for our readers the texture of social life…” Paul Stoller (151)

I can’t look at this picture without thinking about how perfect we look. It’s almost as crafted as an Abercrombie ad. Sunny California, smiling faces. I also can’t deny that I do love this photo of the family, but it hurts to know that this is the image that was sent to the woman who couldn’t be near babies for six years after my birth. Sunny California, smiling faces. Without knowledge of who that child would be (read: black child), this photo has a transtemporal essence. Was this taken in the ‘60s? Two weeks ago, I found out this was my parents’ birth announcement. It is the family portrait, and you probably wouldn’t think that that baby was adopted.

Constructing Me “I never paint dreams or nightmares, I paint only my own reality.” –Frida Kahlo “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” — George Orwell, 1984 E. Valentine Daniel’s ethnohistorical poem The Coolie is exactly that. It is an anthropological poem. Having written about tea plantation workers in Sri Lanka, called ‘coolies,’ for over 25 years, Daniel’s ethnohistorical poem serves a purpose that wasn’t met in his previous work. For one, the poem serves as a response to George Marcus’ and Michael M. J. Fischer’s call for experimental ethnography, although he states that this was not his initial impetus (254). Rather, it was “serendipity,” as he was working on a double project: one part, an oral history and ethnography, the other part, a written history (255). In writing the ethnography from his collected oral histories, Daniel found that writing in verse brought out a truth that was conveyed in the oral histories yet was lost in prose (255). He states, “ Social scientific prose does not merely overshadow or repress this affective truth in its secondary status but may even kill it” (255). Lost in analytical prose were the emotions that are immutable from the experience of history. Just as Valentine’s poetry is a viable if not a necessary compliment to ethnography, so Laurel Richardson’s (1994) short essay “Nine Poems:

Marriage and the Family” is a statement about the times in which we are writing ethnographies. Following the postmodernist/deconstructionalist critique of the authority of ethnography, Richardson believes that the doors have been opened to challenge what constitutes ‘ethnographic.’ Instead of using narrative prose, she writes nine short poems about marriage and the family. For her, the job of the ethnographer is to retell ‘lived experience’, which is not always organized along a singular plot line narrative (8). Thus, a lyric poem has the capacity to evoke a ‘truer’ representation for the reader, a representation that allows the reader to not only read, but also feel the experience. Richardson’s short essay, written in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography by a leading contributor to the discussions about writing and representation, and leading scholar E. Valentine Daniel’s ethnohistorical poem, legitimize the pursuit toward and explicate the necessity of working outside the purely narrative ethnography (2008). Lastly, in The Taste of Ethnographic Things, Paul Stoller (1989) agrees with performance artist Joseph Beuys’s idea of what understanding is. He states that, “Beuys believed that understanding is multileveled, encompassing imagination, intuition as well as rational thought” (149). His incorporation of the imagination as a critical aspect of understanding is an idea that is shared by anthropologists like Kirin Narayan (1993). For me, poetry and nonlinear narrative allow for a new form of reading ethnography. The space and the revaluing of what isn’t explicit becomes part of the act of understanding ethnography. Different writing styles and usages of space within this section are meant to recreate the fleshiness and cloudiness of the

lived experience and to give the reader an impression of the different senses of time that are inherent in lived experience.

The following chapter is comprised of autoethnographic stories about being adopted. As I have just detailed, the form of this chapter is experimental, creative and blends analytical writing with prose, poetry and photography. These multilayered writings are my interpretation of anthropologist Claude LeviStrauss’ idea of thick description, a form of ethnographic writing analysis that adds complexity and density to our understanding of social events. In order to theorize the subjectivity of the adoptee and write the adoptee’s story with thick description, I have to break from the traditional forms of narrative and present a montage, a collection of writings disparate and overlapping. The narrative doesn’t fit within linear writing, rather it is presented in pastiche, as a collage, a remaking, a re(as)sembling of me and of my life as a transracial adoptee. I begin the section with my college admissions essay as an example of a tightly packaged and coherent self-presentation of my life as a transracial adoptee. The essay is the linear narrative of racial construction that needs to be complicated. Identity construction, like ethnography, is messy and cannot be confined to boundaries of the page. The montage of writing that follows the essay seeks to deconstruct the essay’s simplistic view of racial identity, the self, the body and the family.

My college admissions essay: In a world where people are constantly grouped into categories and labeled by appearance in race, sexual orientation, socio-economic status and religion, it is hard to be anonymous; it is hard to say “I don’t know” to one of these questions. I am racially anonymous. I was adopted at birth by an Irish Jewish mother and Japanese Buddhist father of one- Teo, my brother. My birth mother whom I still talk to and see, is also adopted, but, unluckily, was put into multiple foster homes and never was able to contact or meet her biological parents. It’s bad enough she doesn’t know her racial history, but when I ask her anything about my birthfather, she always responds with ambiguous statements that lead me further into not knowing or even having a family history or race. As I have grown up, I have been able to identify myself with different races and cultures. I sometimes feel obliged to confuse people when they ask me what my race is. Though I don’t know the true answer, I often answer them by telling them “ I am Jewish, Japanese, Black…” then I add in a couple others; ranging from Costa Rican to Brazilian to Samoan. I feel blessed to have this “disadvantage” because it has allowed for me to embrace and identify myself with all of the races and cultures I have just mentioned. By not knowing or having a race, I almost start with a clean slate, and am able to pick and choose from those that accommodate with my personal beliefs. I also feel like I can relate to most other cultures because my mom is white and Jewish, my father is Japanese, I live in a Hispanic neighborhood, where one would be lucky to find a waiter that

speaks English, and also because I am enrolled in a predominately white school, where my peers usually throw me in the pile of few black kids at the school. At first sight, most that I’ve come across have mentally placed me in their folder labeled “Black”. After observing my actions and dress and speech, they realize that their observations of me don’t match any of their predetermined stereotypes that are evident in all the others that look like me in their “Black” folder. Since I still look my skin color is that of milk chocolate, I am replaced into another folder labeled “Oreo”, a person that is black on the outside, but white on the inside. So am I an Oreo because my skin is close to being black and I listen to rock, speak proper English and wear clothes that actually fit me? No, I am what I am, I am Miles. I feel like it is my duty to break people’s stereotypes and make stop trying to label others based on unimportant categories. What really matter is what is inside. Because I have had this hardship to overcome, I have developed into a independent person that has to approach life with an open mind. But wait. Am I black? Am I white? Am I Indian? I don’t know, and most people might believe they know but they, in all actuality, don’t know either. I might fill in a bubble of a SAT that says I am black, but I do that because my mom wants me to, because my chances of getting into college will be better, because I am told to do so. In November of 2003, my school took me to a Diversity conference called SDLC, student diversity leadership conference. A large part of this specific diversity conference was splitting up into smaller groups determined by our identification with race or sexual orientation called affinity groups, in which, we were allowed to pick which group we wanted participate in. On the first day, I remember listening to all the different groups that my leader called out and whispering to my friend after each different category, “ I could go there…”. I decided to go to the multicultural group because if I were to be categorized as anything I would want it to be that. So people introduced themselves and said their racial makeup (99% black and white) and usually story about how they have to act differently with their white friends and black friends. At that moment, I started to feel bad because of my realization that none of those kids could relate to me and my conflict. After intense thought about this subject, I accepted the fact that most people will not be able to relate to me and thought that that made me special and also was forced to become more independent and approach life with an open mind.

Process…

In response to a lifetime of being adopted, giving myself the time and space to think through my life. See, for many reasons- I was never one to tell my story, I was a listener- that’s what I called myself, a listener. So, after my brother left for Amherst college, every night I would have dinner with my mom, the two of us, sometimes we ate something quick at home but mostly we ate out for dinner. My mom still says it today with the same disappointment that she did ten years ago: “I just got too tired to cook, I’ve been cooking for forty years now, and I just got too tired.” She wishes she taught me how to cook, my brother Teo learned, but I think

it makes perfect sense that I didn’t get taught- her story, our story, certainly parallels the greater social trends of “the baby boomers.” After refilling my glass yerba mate bottle with water, an act signified by social capital emerging from “green” neo-liberal politics and ‘alternative’/counter-hegemonic health sources. I realized that I need to write my mom’s history right now, then I remembered I need to write Greta’s history, then I remembered I need to write my history. writing histories, herstories. theirstories, ourstories. Interweaving stories like the Belizean women did my cornrows. ugh. the politics of hair as an adoptee, while not as important (socially) as women’s hair; it was a site of tension. maybe should I write about that later? or now? the wallpaper of my computer is a picture of me my brother and my childhood best friend Michael (who has since passed away.)

This is the picture in the background of my computer

Looking at myself, besides my happiness I see socioeconomic class. race and socioeconomics. see, this was the day I came home from Costa Rica, a trip organized through my private high school, Harvard-Westlake. I was able to go because my mom, with her middle-class ideology and know-how, worked the school for financial aid to let me go on the trip. My friend Michael never left the country. I’m smiling, curling my upper lip because of a trampoline accident I had –my lips were too big: in fifth grade we played spin the bottle and Emily Knecht the girl whose mom was a CEO at paramount productions and father was a therapist wouldn’t kiss me because my lips grossed her out – she ran away when I tried to kiss her and I was embarrassed to the point of pain, not discomfort but pain, I was the only non-white person besides Aaryn Costello, but my first memory of her is seeing her come to school in a limo throwing candy out for the little kids at school. and she wasn’t black. she was beautiful. and rich. Emily ran when I got up to kiss her, and I got so embarrassed I made a joke of it. I emphasized my lips, made them the biggest and ugliest they could be and crossed my eyes chasing her. it hurt a lot but people laughed. to many of the white people I was close with, my lips were entertainment. token, real, weird, funny. Also, my hair. (just a quick note, I thought – oh that’s so tangential, and completely unrelated to my thesis, but it’s all connected to me) but first my shirt. a vintage tee shirt I bought from the second hand clothing store in my neighborhood. we called it el cheapio, but it was actually named Bonita y Cheap. I started going there to

save my parents money, it was only natural; they always complained and argued about it, mainly my mom asking for money from my dad to pay for Teo and my education or travels or more child support. so I thought, if my dad only spends a little on my clothing it will go to other things so they don’t fight as much. five years later it became a trend and el cheapio was bought out by a gentrifier who doubled and sometimes tripled the prices. Echo Park. but looking at the shirt on me, I see class- the thought-process behind the consumption and the accepting parents to deviate from normalcy. the ability to not want and exercise the not want. not strive for, not show, but differ. That’s middle-class, that’s baby-boomerbaby.

also, my hair. from one ghetto to another. from echo park to Crenshaw, from echo park to woodland hills. from what used to be squatted Mexican homes to what used to be the watts riots. from EXP territory to CRIP territory. but it wasn’t that simple. traveling to get my hair done was a little more complicated. For Los Angeles, I like the term bubbles. it’s so easy to stay within one’s socioeconomic, ethnic, and/or racial enclave (bubble). for my trip. although I lived in this predominately Mexican/ El Salvadorian neighborhood with plenty of gang activity. I lived in my house. we drove a car to school. I stayed in my bubble comforted by middle-class culture and ideals from our house to our car. the barber shop or hair salons were, in the words of anthropologist Anna Tsing, sites of friction, where our bubbles

bumped into each other – while the bubbles didn’t pop, I’m not exactly sure (how could I be?) what form our interactions took: made one large bubble, or joined together but still with a thin layer between them like soap suds. The first memory I have of getting my hair done was in the fall of 1998. I was eleven and in the sixth grade. I had just cut my rat-tail, which was a product of me emulating what I saw in my brother. my hair was a little longer and I was tired of having the same medium sized Afro, at the same time my hair started to curl tighter as I entered puberty. to be honest, I can’t remember why I wanted to change my hair. I do remember it being my mother’s idea to get twists. She was working as a nurse in hospitals at the time. she worked long shifts and I remember waiting in afterschool care hours after it had closed with Tavi, one of the afterschool assistants. I almost liked it that way, so no one would see the kind of car my mom owned, a golden brown boxy Nissan Stanza. (throughout high school, we would get into fights about her dropping me off at bat mitzvahs, school performances or the movies – I habitually jumped out of the car while it was moving a block before we got to our destination) at the hospital, she worked with some black women from whom she got the idea to twist my hair. We left our house, the house that my mom built with the help of cousins and friends. it’s funny to think of this memory because in previous autobiographical writings I’ve mentioned that my childhood memories are always sunny, maybe because of Los Angeles, maybe because they were during the summer or maybe because of the dream-like quality of memories, but in this memory I remember it being dark, the sun was setting or just set, the entire memory. so, we set off, in that car that I

despised so much to what seems now after becoming familiar with the streets of Los Angeles either the san Fernando valley or Alta Dena, both have large pockets of poverty and black people. after driving on indistinguishable five lane highways and a couple or busy streets, we park the car facing uphill. we parked on the same side of the street. It was a parlor, similar to the one I’d always gone to, Supercuts which was located in a mini-mall with Bristol Farms, a predecessor to Whole Foods. In the parlor were three black women, one working on another’s hair and the other in a chair next to them talking amongst themselves. my mom called before we left the house-to make an appointment. when we showed up, I was viscerally ashamed. my body tensed and became extremely nervous. wearing parachute pants and an oversized vintage polo – I didn’t feel like I fit in. it’s not that this was my first time being in a predominately black space, I had gone to public school in New Haven with lots of black kids, but they weren’t my friends really, they were poorer and some were in foster care – I didn’t see our similarities, I just felt bad for them. Ricky and Steven only wore white tee shirts and jeans and had 13 other siblings, Leeza was the tallest person in our class but I hated her because her mom was our teaching assistant in 2nd grade and was the meanest person I had ever known. Of course there were the basketball games, but I wasn’t good- so I never played – I was better at soccer.

It’s funny; At that time, I always used to play around in the mirror

making silly faces contorting it in new different ways or maybe I was fascinated by it because it was the only face I knew that looked like it or maybe I thought I was some sort of alien being I don’t really remember anymore. It’s an embarrassment. to me at least, it felt like it shouldn’t be that way. this kind of embarrassment, shame, was acute only in moments like these – and always more pressing with my white mom than with my Japanese dad. “that’s your dad!” exclaimed the women braiding my hair at Millennium Barber Shop. I went there to get cornrows to look like Allen Iverson and only knew of Millennium because my friend had bought And 1 shoes that came with an Isaiah Rider (former-Laker) guide to LA and that was the place he got his done. I was always too embarrassed to ask any of my black friends where they get their hair cut, or where to get braids – so Millennium became the place I claimed expertise, “oh yeah, I always go to Millennium” but in actuality, I just didn’t know any other places. twists dreads cornrows cornrows cornrows cornrows cornrows but I always got my hair cut at Supercuts

Black moms at Harvard-Westlake saying I couldn’t wear my hair like thatit was disrespectful.

Now it’s time to write your mom’s history. Tell her story. The bits and pieces you recall, you remember, these are your words not hers. what do you remember, how do you remember? or do I check my message that Greta left me yesterday morning? two days later I checked the message she told me she saw cornel west speak and he was the best orator she had ever seen she hopes I’m well and she loves me a shot runs through my body, starting from the vibrations “I love you” through my head down into my heart, it was like a porcupine of bright light traveled down my being and poked a million holes into my heart. it rushed out, and I sank further into my bed. that was amazing, I should write about this. Thinking about it now, thinking about it now, my heart races, but I can’t even locate it that way – it’s my chest. my treasure chest. this part of me, my secrets, my holdings. I try to stow them away, like on an airplane, because aren’t we always traveling?

But this beating, this beating, it. my hands quiver trying to write, they look fragile, I don’t need a mirror to see the anguish, my confusion, I already feel the

heaviness of my left eyebrow and the pressure between my lips the corners of my mouth pressing towards center, the bottom lip stoically lifting my saddened top lip, my molars feel like two rugby teems of equal strength – still pushing, their knees locked, still pushing, they’ve forgotten why they’re even there. my back pains lower center, so I take the moment to relax, arch my back and exhale, loosen my jaw. I think I’m done. I can call her back, two days later. and yet twenty minutes later, my body is still nervous, maybe trembling, shhhhhhhh like the trees clapping. on the inside, only to myself does my body share it’s constant flickering, buzzing, fluctuation, tremors, just underneath the surface, you’d only be able to see it in my eyes. I’m lost and I left a message. I saw a good performance too.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;an adopted child can learn to resemble his or her parents, to grow up in their image, not just under their guidance.â&#x20AC;? (Modell, 1994)

Teo and me at Uncle Kaz’s house for Thanksgiving, 2002

Don’t we look like brothers? If my skin was a shade lighter, I don’t think there would be any question that were are brothers. I choose to place the photograph with Judith Modell’s quote to ground her theory in experience. Teo, as the biological child of my parents, is the image of our parents. In so many conversations with extended family members, relatives dissect each other’s physical attributes: ‘he has your nose and his father’s chin!’ While not limited to either my or multiethnic children’s experience, often two families claim their image in the child’s features: ‘that’s the Irish in him!’ While I only share that

experience when with Greta, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve always been told how much I look like my parents. Teo is the image of my parents. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t we look like brothers?

On name: After two failed attempts to send my financial aid off , I had to rush to a small private postal service that was still open in little Tokyo. - I walked over from kinko/fedex and gave the female there my package and she looked at my name and asked me where it comes from (she mispronounced it too) what ethnicity and I said it's Japanese, my father is Japanese. then she looked at me hard. and looked down, it made me feel uncomfortable she did some more computer work and then looked at it again and asked me what my mom was and I said white... Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m adopted. OH! that makes sense - he's Japanese and she pointed to her co-worker who is half Japanese half white and she said everyone is mixed around here. it didn't console me, I didn't like how she put me on the spot with all those assumptions. oh yeah and she questioned Tokunow being Japanese I told her to take off the 'w' that my grandfather put it on when he came over. she called my mom American and I told her my dad was too, Japanese American. she was half Hawaiian half Filipino. but in moments or scenarios like that I just want to break down her stupid ideas. that I couldn't be Japanese. but no thinking about it, maybe I can't. no, that's silly - she was silly and in the wrong not me. ugh, categories. well, that wasn't fun, I think about what my dad thinks about my Wesleyan friends who have come over, Julius is on his way. all my friends being p.o.c. I wonder if he thinks it has to do with my project. which it kinda does linking to a pride/ a place of being able to claim identity.

On name: Out on the shingled balcony of my room at my mother’s house, I set up my video camera, pressed record and started to look through my mom’s manila folder with the heading “Miles’ adoption papers.” It took me two months of being home to build up the courage to ask her where she thought it could be. While she watched some house renovation show on TV, I no more than ten feet from her nervously went through my drawer in the large gray file cabinets. Sifting through old drawings of video games I created, poems about nature from fourth grade , and high school report cards, I found my adoption papers. Without saying a word or even opening it, I went upstairs to my room, closed the door and exhaled. This was it, I thought- my papers. I knew I had to film it. I proceeded to the balcony. Slowly reading aloud almost every word, I periodically took breaks to watch the clouds migrate. They looked like sand dunes in the sky. On my first legal birth certificate my name was Baby Boy Langmead. Six days later, it was changed to Miles Mitani Tokunow. Miles after Miles Davis and Marcus, my mother’s grandfather, Mitani after my father’s father’s best friend who came from Japan to the USA with him, and Tokunow after my father. My mom once told me during high school that I could have been named Michael, the name Greta pushed my parents to name me. Michael, like my childhood best friend, Michael, like my only black male friend, Michael, like the saint, the basketball player and my cousin. How differently I would have been, no? I am Miles Mitani Tokunow. Am I not my name? Whenever I tell people that I could have been Michael, they tell me ‘No way! You’re definitely a ‘Miles’’ or ‘that would be weird, you’re so Miles.’ When I first read, “Name: Baby Boy Langmead” I couldn’t help but wonder how that effected me, if it did at all. Officially being named without a name- default, gender confused for sex, last name of my mother. How foreign it was to see me, written on paper, as someone else – with a different name. Without the comfort and stability that my name – Miles, gives me. Names are a double-edged sword.

Like labels, they carry meaning, identity and can be a source of great empowerment. But they also confine us, box us in out of necessity - am I really my name? Or am I my body?

Expectations look for information about peer influence and if it's part of a societal disconnection or u know? you know? at home. trying to write and do work is a lot harder than I thought so much is going on that I need to/ want to do at school at here I feel like I should be going back now to school to do this work that I need want to do Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m thinking about e xpperectationsoniotns expectations after going to yoga class with dad and Beth at Larry Rogow's in Hancock Park, rich suburb enclave in the middle of Los Angeles, everybody's in the industry, I guess I am too

after eating Vietnamese with dad and Beth in Atwater at this new chic hip minimalist Asian cool spot white lesbians eating young family who's not in the industry here? I went home wanting to do work and read I watched TV instead too tired too pooped Teo and I watched Bruce almighty in it Jim Carrey b/c he feels his world isn't going right and could be better than god is given the chance to be god after messing things up by trying to make his life something that it wasn't he surrenders to god (Morgan Freeman) and meets him up in heaven (hit by a car) there, God tells him: God: Bruce… You have the divine spark. You have the gift of being able to bring joy and laughter to the world. I know. I created you. Bruce: Quit bragging. God: You see? That’s what I’m talking about. That’s the spark! (from http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/b/bruce-almighty-scripttranscript-carrey.html)*

*probably illegally. but that's the Internet right? is the law fair anyway? took a break. so I like Bruce am someone who can make people smile I can make people laugh make people feel comforted feel listened to I am good at being a nice guy being the good guy but I learned over this summer at a coffee shop in eagle rock with a woman adopted like me Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been driven by peoples expectations of me people's wants I am the nice adoptee who gives everything to everyone that's why you like to talk to me. that's my spark. but that hasn't been who've I wanted to be always it's something I embrace and hate I remember the first time I saw prodigy they embodied they enacted they were what I desired for myself it was angry and scary and the antithesis of my life thus far it was the first time I understood that there were other configurations

not only for myself but for black people it created a terrible tear in my identity isn't what we really want the hardest and most scary... to carry through with huh but what about my gift? ever since prodigy I’ve struggled to figure out how to where to store that image that I so desired... but why? Those are the dark things the ones the ones that I try to forget I’ve been struggling with this for so long I keep it under the bed so we can sleep well tonight I quit my job as a senior interviewer in part because it was expected of me "of course I would be a senior interviewer" that's why I’m here - to be a senior interviewer. because I can love anything and sell it well

A photograph of one of the black members of British rock group, Prodigy

do the origins of these expectations even matter? what do I do with them now that I know I am this way IN PART because I am adopted so do I keep that in my back pocket should I fight against it all the time? sometimes? say - okay, that's that? what is the significance of origins?

My mom has always told me she just knew we were meant to be together. She was the first person to welcome me into this world and claimed from that moment that ‘destiny’ had played its role. Growing up, she would occasionally play the song that she said was ‘my song’- Paul Simon’s “Born at the Right Time.” At the time, I thought the song was written for or about me. It wasn’t until sharing this personal song with a close friend in high school who replied, ‘oh yeah dude, I love this album.’ Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to me to that point that the album/song wasn’t made for me. Afterwards, I went home to look at the CD booklet just to make sure the visual representation of myself actually wasn’t in there. My name wasn’t in the dedications nor the thank yous. In her study of the rhetoric of adoption, Susan Bordo demonstrates how adoptive parents replace what isn’t ‘natural’ as ‘destined.’ She notes that “some adoptive parents speak passionately about immediately feeling that this child was meant to be theirs”(232). To her, this shift reinforces the idea that connections between kin are ‘natural. ’ In essence, it naturalizes adoption. Make it so it was meant to be, like a blessing. A blessing. For me, being ‘blessed’ made me question my agency. The rhetoric certainly led me to speculate about cosmology. Because of this double randomness of adoption; being born to the person we’re born to, and being placed with the family that we’re place with, are adoptees more likely to believe in extrahuman forces? Or do they gravitate towards genesis solutions more actively? What does it mean to feel blessed? But I also think about what my life would have been if Greta chose one of the other families to whom she was thinking of giving me.

Isn’t the blessing also the curse? Naturalizing my mom’s and my relationship denaturalizes my own body. Forgetting difference, becoming invisible – there were sparking moments in high school when I would remember that I didn’t look like the people I was talking to. It was a naturalized relationship to me.

Relating to Airports:

It’s a funny thing walking through the Milwaukee airport, dressed in blue Keds, tan Dickies, a button up plaid shirt buttoned to the top and green hoodie. I have a plastic yellow ring on my middle finger, a thick unkempt beard, tired eyes and a green army backpack and black brief case in hand. As I pass two black women who have TSA uniforms on, hairs straightened, a little bit over weight, both lightskinned, I smiled and faced two curious thoughts in my head: black people in Wisconsin? – that’s interesting… and a more self-conscious inquiry – I wonder if they laugh at me, “oh alternative black.”

It’s a funny that this process occurred in an airport, as it was the site of a seminal moment in my racial identity formation. As many times as I've thought about this moment, written this moment, confessed this moment to people, it is still just as fresh in its haziness. Indeed. By that time in my life, I had traveled so much, I felt comfortable, if not confident in airports. Starting as a baby, my parents flew with me overseas to China, Japan and Bali to visit my dad on the set. By the time I was seven I began flying by myself, going between my

divorced parents houses after my mom started midwifery school at Yale. In one of our most recent conversations, Greta told me that apart from not telling her about their divorce, my mom didn't even tell her that we had moved across the country. Out of frustration, I wanted to challenge her: why should she? what would have you done? I didn't say anything, I felt bad for thinking it anyways. I was walking in an ambiguous airport, it really could be any airport in between the two ocean coasts. At the time, I was either 11 or 12, no longer in need of those minor passenger 'wings,' coming out of the terminal to get to my connecting flight. The airport seemed somewhat dark. With headphones on, I passed the usual configuration of rows of seats, specifically designed for minimum comfort. I was listening to The Pharcyde, "Otha Fish" I think, or maybe it was another rap/hip hop group. It was hip hop, I remember because of the way my head bounced to the beat as I walked through the familiarly unfamiliar airport, amongst a sea of unknown faces, mostly white, at all different stages in their lives. I was wearing some sort of baggy clothing, my hair in a tangly, semi dreaded afro mess and a slit shaved into on of my eyebrows. I was curious, thought it looked good and edgy, and told people at school the next day that my brother did it to me while I was sleeping. How could I ever want to deface myself? With a backpack on, I passed a little boy in one of the waiting areas of the terminal. I was on the main pathway, head bopping, listening to my music, exuding over-confidence in my strut, hoping people would look at me with desire or awe. this little boy was white, maybe blond. we saw each other, eye to

eye, when at that moment we saw each other, he ran behind his mother's legs. my confidence, like a force field, shattered and broke open, letting confusion and pain into my image. stay strong I said, keep strutting, wipe off what just happened like dirt off your shoulder. But I was hurt, injured and now in a neurosis of my own mind: I never wanted to scare children I thought, I thought I wanted to be on a children's TV show, how could I? I wanted to cut my hair off, take back the slit in my eyebrow and diffuse any form of threatening identifiers. I chose not to be black. I chose not to be a black man. I chose not to be a black man.

I hate that memory.

airport as a site of liminality and rites of passage The airport, as a site of liminality is perfect as a metaphor for adoption. Rather, it seems perfect that the airport serves as the site for such a seminal moment in my life. The airport is representative of the blurring distinction between familiar and unfamiliar. When and how does the familiar become unfamiliar? Or when and how does the unfamiliar become familiar?

“This is the first time I’m recording… today is November 5th, 2008.”

100

I watched the election in the common room of the dormitory for which I was the Resident Advisor. During the election, I periodically talked to my mom on the phone. During our conversation after finding out that Obama had won Pennsylvania, I shared with my mom my mixed feelings about him. The worry that seeped into my feelings about Obama harkens back to one moment earlier in the year: sitting in the second row in Daniela Gandolfo’s Anthropology of Cities course, a white student walked in the class a few minutes late with black shirt with Obama’s face printed stretched over the whole front of the shirt. At that moment, I knew he wasn’t a person anymore – he was a legend, he was the embodiment of his campaign slogan, he wasn’t one human, he was the answer. I was afraid of that. And that kid’s shirt made it all the worse. My mom also asked me how I felt about him being Biracial. Specifically, she wondered if I saw myself in him: was he a role model. Nope. He didn’t phase me, I used my analytical skills to make sure I didn’t fall into what was expected of me. My mom always called biracial for reasons I could only guess. We hung up. I watched the rest of the election and after hearing his name called as the next president, I blined straight into my room. Closed the door. Cried a little bit. Turned on “I was a Lover” by TV on the Radio. I danced sang, and wrote in my journal. Two hours later and TV on the Radio’s “Tonight” playing, I took a shower, set up my video camera and started my journey.

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“I was listening to TV on the Radio, listening to “Tonight” and yelling, and screaming, and dancing, jumping up and down, pounding my chest, stomping my feet, clapping. Um, and I would come up with my own lyrics as well and you just going through my head and one of my thoughts was this um… you know I kind of thought about Michael and thought about Gichan and I thought about this family that I don’t know, that I don’t have. I was thinking about how much, how far we’ve come… (mumbling) it’s just so wild how well and how good it feels to fall into it as opposed to you know (right hand punches left twice) fall into this idea of hope and his, his, his trajectory is um uhhh his schema, if you will, just fall into that is so easy to and it feels so good to go with the flow. But truly I was thinking about how if my ancestors could see me now I would hope that they would be so proud to be able to see me, do this, do this right now as a theory in a certain sense, as an art… I think they’d be so proud that I am where I am and that we are where we are… hm, it’s kind of funny, I was talking to my mom… things were going well, Obama had just won Pennsylvania so I was like ‘whooaa it looks like he’s going to make it.’ My mom was talking to me and she was like ‘as someone who is biracial or multiracial, do you think that… do you kind of… do you see yourself in him, but not really, she didn’t ask that but she you know she was alluding to that,’ and I said you know not really and I’m just kind of happy about his politics ummm and I think that he is going to be absolutely wonderful for the position…”

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I remember that image so well. The picture is in Sepia, which is funny to me because I used to think that my mom’s life was in black and white like all the pictures we had. It was an image of slavery in the south, the images I get from reading Their Eyes Were Watching God or The Color Purple. Images of a woman with a scarf over her head. Brown, leathery face. Wide nose and dry lips. Her stare is piercing the camera lens, my vision. She is intense but proud. the camera pans out and we see she’s on a farm with others. They’re tired. And all facing forward. It’s not spoken because they need no sympathy but they did what they did so for me to do what I am doing. I see this image, this sequence as a photograph maybe because I’ve seen it in one of the photography books my mother bought me: “you dad and I always thought you had an incredible eye for things” She has also always thought that my keen eyesight and observation comes from having genealogical roots in a hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa: “you ancestors must have been great hunters.”

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Qi Wang and Jens Brockmeier (2002) have written about how autobiographical understanding is embedded in cultural beliefs, values and practices. In fact, they discuss autobiography (the remembering/telling of one’s own story) as a cultural practice, one through which cultural values are upheld and reproduced. They show demonstrate that what we remember to tell in the stories of our self is a ‘culturally bound’ act. Wang and Brockmeier’s main study is done through interview and survey comparing white Americans and ‘native’ Chinese college students’ earliest childhood memories. The two psychologists conclude that Americans ‘typically’ ascribe to a ‘culture of autobiography’ in which we view our memories of ourselves as a drama/film in which we cast ourselves as the protagonist. As they state, ‘American memory has the individual highlighted as the leading character of the story,” (49) which by no means is a universal concept. Nor is it a monolithic ‘American’ ideology. I do, however, agree with Brockmeier and Wang in their assertion that this form of autobiographical remembering is crucial for a certain “social affirmation of the self as an autonomous entity.” (52) Thus, the act or enacting of autobiographical remembering is embedded in social cohesion. It is a way of proving that one belongs, through their story, as well as a way to reproduce and uphold those cultural values and practices.

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And even Even as we were breaking up I still tried to analyze and contextualize all that occurred around me All of the deep breaths and the way your voice sounds over the phone, Acoustic digital binary ones and zeros reflected from a satellite orbiting earth I am adopted Even as we were breaking up and I was crying I was thinking about how Liz Falletta on the other end of a black metal mesh table outside the designated coffee shop for our “Adoptees in LA support group” meeting told me that she thinks adoptees have hard times in relationships And even while I was silent looking at the door, listening to you tell me why you hated me I didn’t want to fight you I didn’t want to hurt your feelings Even as I tear your heart out I want to be courteous I said to myself, if she needs me to be the asshole that she wants I’ll be it and won’t say a word I didn’t want to fight Let me live up to your expectations When you forced the monkey wrench to the screws around my lips I told you “I wish it were that simple” There’s always so much grey And there’s always multiplicity I hate being the one who doesn’t share their emotions Writing this I remember, this is why autoethnography is so hard for me You shouldn’t have had believed that I wanted to spend the rest of my life together? Postmodern fluid identities and contradictions

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I am adopted I’m just a child like I want to be a firefighter someday Dream dream dream Imaginations are real But they also change Maybe that’s the “commitment” problem And I wish that my tears were louder than the metallic drone of these fluorescent lights Then you tell me that I’m always silent when we talk Yes, I still love you Yes, I am breaking up with you Strange to open this poem with even Because all I do is feel odd and unbalanced My dance is slanted Crooked toes and bent neck I can’t smile and tell you that I’m fine But I am still adopted And even I wish this weren’t so (even/odd)

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"Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought." - Audre Lorde

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of Relating to Bodies "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create." -Albert Einstein Judith Butler, in her essay on Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, states, “the body is understood to be an active process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities” (521). Written in 1990, Butler’s essay defines the body against the Foucaultian body as inscribed. Foucault’s idea of bodily inscription, which is found in The History of Sexuality Vol. I, claims that, “the body is a site of culturally contested meanings,” for which Butler begs the question; “Is ‘ the body’ ontologically distinct from the process of construction it undergoes?” (602). She then relates an underlying current in Foucault’s ‘body’ to Nietzsche, which problematically constructs the body as a blank page, a tabula rasa. Instead she, borrowing from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, figures the body as an enactor of culture and history. The body is a site of creation, performance as well as reproduction. The body cannot be taken viewed apart from its cultural and social history, but it rather is an active site through and on which these histories and theories are engaged. The following short vignettes are not cultural snapshots in the Levi-Straussian meaning, which to me, should instead be

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envisioned as x-rays, detailing the inner social structures at play. Rather, the vignettes are more like disparate pictures in a dusty old box that highlight of the complexities of the everyday life as experienced through, lived by and on and related through the body.

“Are we real social scientists who seek to discover the invariate truths of social existence? Or are we real story tellers who seek to recreate for our readers the texture of social life…” Paul Stoller (151)

Skin: Sitting on the couch next to Sarah, I am reminded. Early afternoon, sharp fall air, the colors of the leaves are starting to become muted. We’re waiting for all of my files and applications to transfer from my old Mac computer (four birthday and Christmas presents combined worth) to my new Mac computer (four essays, a 3.4, and three letters of recommendations to get into Mellon Mays Fellowship worth). During our hour and a half wait, we played games, laughed, made music, talked about our classes. At one point, she turned to me, placed her hand gently on the side of my neck. I didn’t take notice until she started a little excavation, the caress became a slight rubbing, an inquisitive and curious sign – hm, that’s not usually there. I use my eyes to confirm, giving Sarah a side glanceyes, she’s noticed it. Just like I had about ten years ago. “the discoloration?” I asked her, she, shaken out of her focus by my words, nods still inquisitively. “yeah, when I was in high school I used to tell people I was going to be white

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when I was thirty” clown. It’s easier to share those things with people than the moment when I first found it. In eighth grade, one night when brushing my teeth after taking a shower after basketball practice, I gave myself a thorough inspection. Throughout my time since I can remember, one of the only times I had to myself, or rather with myself was in front of a mirror, either after showering or brushing my teeth. Since high school, I’ve prided myself on how infrequently I look at the mirror. These times in front of the mirror, in front of myself, I spend them making faces, trying to understand how it is I look to others. It was a lab. A lab for experimenting new faces for other’s entertainment as well as a lab for probing my own perception of self. It was there, then, that I noticed the discoloration on my neck, hidden in its wrinkles close to my clavicle. White speckles taken place of my light brown skin in a patch no larger than my thumb. It made my skin look like paint. That’s how I saw it. Like this is where the paint chipped away. My real skin color underneath, peeking out. That’s why I told people I would be white later in my life. My skin became less natural – it looked dirty. I tried rubbing to see if it would come off like that little patch. Then I thought of an imaginary father, replacing the black one I saw desired. Maybe he was white. A new body, face, color in the sea of red that was the image I had of Greta’s life before and while was inside of her. She said it was chaotic. To an eight year old, that was imagined as hell.

Body hair:

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On June 7th of 2009 I distinctly remember my morning rituals that by their repetitive nature go unnoticed, un-reflected upon. Waking up at my dad’s house in the bed that I’ve slept in since a child, now with my heel slightly dangling over the edge, I felt an anxious need to get up, get to work on my thesis. I peed, washed my hands and started to brush my teeth. While brushing in small circular gestures and staring at the freestanding sink, I ran through my anxieties of research – ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I need to do more research based reading, qualitative stuff, not the performance theory- I don’t even know how I’m going to use it anyway!? Actually I should start off with reading some autoethnographic work to better understand what I should be writing – field work, I guess.’ As I kept brushing, I shifted my gaze towards my dad’s circular little magnifying mirror that’s usually used for shaving or make up. In the frame was a close up of my chest; one nipple, my light brown skin, and the hair that comes out of it. Continuing to brush small circles of Colgate on my teeth, I studied those hairs. They had a rhythm and movement to them like the ocean. I noticed how they curved, some longer than others, and the rambunctious ones that go against the grain. I thought – they look out of place, but maybe they just have new or different insight into the life on my chest. It was as though this were the first time I saw those hairs. Once again the unnoticed came to a focus – how these hairs get here? What history do they contain or come from? All of a sudden, images of a hairy father came to mind – then knowing he is either black or Puerto Rican, I imagine a Puerto Rican man in a white tank top, chest hair teeming over the tophe’s at a small dining table in the kitchen reading the paper. A layer of sweat

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covering the skin underneath his hair gives him a slight shine; he’s definitely in PR. Those hairs always were a marker of my difference. For my first girlfriend, they were used to further separate us from our respective ethnic groups that we didn’t feel we fit into – “you’re too hairy to be black” she said to me during one of our long phone conversations. For my friends at school, they were used to justify their racist jokes after lacrosse practice – “Miles doesn’t mind, he’s not really black… “he’s not hairy like hooks (the other black friend in our circle), it’s too wavy” they concluded for themselves. For my other high school girlfriend, they were used to differentiate me from her other black boyfriends, “No, they’re cute and soft… I like them.” She said, lying in bed, running her hand over them. If I wasn’t too hairy, I had the wrong kind of hair. At least, not the kind that would label me black. Just like my hands, my complexion, my face, my basketball game, my personality, my hairs were too soft. Too soft to be black

It reminds me of one of the older Italian women in Mariella Pandolfi’s essay “Memory within the Body”. She states, “My history is in my body.”6 AND LEAD TO GRETA FROM BODY HISTORY AND EGG EXERCISE

Pandolfi, Mariella. “Memory within the Body,” Beyond the Body Proper (2007). 464. 112

Constructing Greta Written May 15th, 2008 at 2:53pm, approximately three weeks after I did the egg exercise in Delicious Movements, the file name is, birth.doc: Great Langmead was born on a day I don’t know in a place I don’t know. Every year she would buy my presents and send them to me wherever I was. She used to send puzzles. And her cards were always painfully thought out. Today is mother’s day and my excuse is the fact that I don’t have working cell phone with all of my numbers in it. Tomorrow I’ll email her asking if she could call sometime late this week. I might tell her some things and I’ll listen to her probably more than she’ll listen to me. My hands are frozen. Incapable of writing more. This is my life, my lifeline, the water that I swam in before knowing light, that same darkness I’ll meet when I turn into sunshine. And I’ll like it all that way. On January 8th, I was brought into this world by a woman whose own birth was more painful than the ghosts trapped in their own throats. Words spilling out without a river to carry the message. Blank stares and empty silences.

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To me, the course of Greta’s and my relationship is heavily entangled with our respective histories. Our histories tell us who we are, and how we are supposed to be. Our stories create our habitus, they create our class. The stories that I have always known were those of my parents. It is also through the transmission of these stories and values that I become their son, for stories bind us to people and places. And what relationship would we have if I rejected their histories? On the other hand, I am supposed to be Greta’s son because of our blood relation. The pain and agony from in the previous passage is a direct result of my understanding of relating kinship. We didn’t share any stories like I did of my parents. I didn’t know her history, the transmission was lost. But after that egg exercise, I knew that she was my family, she was my mother; only it was in a way that wasn’t offered to me through story or biology. Here are the stories that we do share, these are the ways I constructed Greta…

I haven’t called Greta in a week I haven’t called Greta in two weeks

I haven’t called Greta in three weeks

I haven’t called Greta in four weeks

I haven’t called in five weeks

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Six weeks Actually, it’s been three months now. We haven’t talked since fall break. Since I broke my own heart. Get over it miles. It’s time you do more than think about yourself. It’s for us, this is a project that requires perseverance. Keep going, going far. I need to call her, she’s trying to send me my birthday card that was 6 days ago. I haven’t called her back. I will today/tonight. Let’s make sure I can sleep twelve silences before earthquakes break open the hearts of our children and pregnant women smoke chimney parties on the block mud people crab legs eyes closed closet space place face taze me bro. STOP IT ALL. KNOCK IT OFFF. Time time time to move on. Stop blinding it, no more stomping souls. I do know what’s best, but do I want to listen? THIS IS FOR YOU, THIS IS FOR MORE THAN YOU TOO. Go to the water to soften your sharp edges. Sea glass. “Okay” I replied to her question, “call me when you get in?” We had just hugged outside of the George Washington University Hospital, where I would take the subway to the bus station in DC. She was slightly dressed up for a psychology experiment at the university for which she got $30 compensation. I was wearing my navy blue cords and plaid shirt buttoned up to the top and vans sneakers. Over this past fall break, I went to D.C. to spend time with Greta and try to incorporate her view into the process of my thesis writing. After the trip, I sank into a slight depression about our relationship and my project. I stopped writing and never was able to transpose my ‘field’ notes into prose. The notes that follow are from that trip. They are intimate and emotionally raw. The space between the disparate notes reveals our conflicting histories. The passage starts with the notes I wrote when transcribing the notes from paper to computer followed by my fall break experience which starts with my phone calls to her telling her that I was going to take the bus to D.C later than expected because of a midterm I was writing. Afterwards, I called her again to tell her that I missed the later bus and had to wait another hour to catch the next bus, which again I almost missed. From that point on in the notes, a jumpy yet understandable and rich narration is developed. Fall Break. yeah right. break from what. what I noted for my future self, now. 10.24. 2009.

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WRITE ABOUT PHONE CALLS, first delayed (noticeably disappointed “what’s the deal” second, from whole foods, want anything? I got you a candy bard… [laugh] aw, that’s great but I’m fine. see you later (stumble) tonight – see you soon (she replies) these inexplicable moments of looking out, just feeling in my chest and tears begin but no image just the blurry site of vision, ran to the bus thinking maybe it’s not meant to be; something’s holding me back (remember PERU, (try to make sense of this world)) bus, sweating, went okay; I spilled a lentil on my sock and imagined Greta’s disapproval. [writing in transit] Maryland drivers are horrible. get off of highway, looks just like LA to me at a red light two gas stations taco bell McDonalds and checker j____ each side GOT INDIAN FOOD got off at the wrong stop, misread text. go to Vienna call me from Dun Loring another reason why I feel like everything is holding/ trying for this not to happen.

I wait alone piece.

listening to the slight howling of the elevators, kind of like a solo tuba guilt, ashamed.

GETTING INDIAN FOOD too – wait maybe she wants to feed me, mother and I’m being self-centered, by thinking feeding me would be a hassle. my not doing/finishing my paper was also a throwing a wrench in her plans for the weekend. supposed to have a whole other afternoon/night together. GONE. imagining myself saying I got a quick bite to eat like a slap in the face to her. 10.25 I’m feeling kind of weird and I think it has to do with my initial worries about doing the project. I’m our(?) thinking, constantly trying to notice and remember. notingwhen she talks about presents b/c she expresses/enacts her motherhood (through/ by/with) gift giving on birthdays. or noticing how we both share not looking into people’s eyes when nervous. the same head down. speaking from the side. and the couple surreal moments when I’m not seeing how tired she looks or the {turn page, left page} stuff in her teeth, trying not to look at her breast. there are those surreal moments when I look at her and think of mirror images. is that what I’m looking at, then this morning looking @ myself in the mirror – I looked different my face is longer, I don’t see the similarities anymore, BUT I do too- me drumming on my leg, she does it too – next morning (today) she did it again. Even me writing right now feels strange, and ethically wrong 

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private/public  ME WRITING HER DOWN. like an anthropologist in the field, in hir/in his white male’s tent. the place were staying is like Nicole Chabot, commuter/residential community w/ nothing but condos/apartments, silly lawns and parking lot street that are the ventricles to this (Gandolfo class term for suburbanization) AND I AM SO HAIRY talked about - mom not taking us to DC - people mag story about kidnap/news story hate Mexicans (UNIVERSITY/SCHOOL AS LIMINAL) - Prisons – her family – post graduation - careers – how to succeed (steps) – yoga/art – D.C. - maps (my literacy w/them vs. her not) and {page right} it’s just been weird. MADE EGGS THIS MORNING making same I don’t except for dishes domestic abuse (cycles)/ incarceration prison industrial complex)  fatherless homes CLEANED THE HOUSE FOR ME. Today. TRAIN AIR& SPACE BITE TO EAT AFRICAN ART Washington/Lincoln memorial – Indian food – U Street – train home BUT IT’S ALL COLORED W/ DISAPPOINTMENT. there was a moment on the train when she was talking about a man she met who had just traveled Central America, when I just wanted to crush her. she was up against the window and physically and intellectually go off on her. it was mean. that happened a couple of times of embarrassment. the person whose house I’m staying in doesn’t know I’m her son. I don’t care about .C. or have any patriotism, never have…, I just want to be with her honestly but I imagined doing that and it’s not good. maybe we can tomorrow. {turn page, left page} DISENCHANTED. she kept saying we’ll come here next time like my mom does and I sometimes want to crush them, but I let them have their dreams. D.C. isn’t that great either. U- Street was cool but not enough messiness here. (later I called it tension) classism, racism, xenophobia stubborn NOT EASY TO GET ALONG WITH  not everyone wants to talk to us. even more hear you. – Allison “you jack ass, c’mon” to the train driver.

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I feel as combative w/ Greta as I am with my mom. proud/embarrassed I knew so many books. very defensive about living here. SO clean. if I say it reminds me of LA or NY or whatever it’s some defensive better than. I don’t know it’s hard and I felt like an anthro – where’s the real stuff not this boring tour/ small talk about DiCaprio’s role in Howard Hughes movie I want to talk about you and me. but weren’t we the entire time telling each other our perspectives on the world showing how we know. {right page} I don’t want to think about the rest of the day. I really wanted to break all the cases of the African Art Museum and let them rest. let them rest finally. you know? we didn’t say goodnight but I asked to talk about my project and what not. she said yes. -one moment in Indian restaurant, coming down stairs she looked like Erica -stumble on introduction to Yinka not w/ Casey morning 26. CRABBY WAKE UP W/ HER, NICE TO ALLISON – like how hard that is for my mom. repeated pattern. but I don’t want to acknowledge it. TODAY. GEORGETOWN (ALMONT CROISSANT) CANADIAN EMBASSY, ARCHIVES WHITE HOUSE, BEN’S CHILLI, WHOLE FOODS- HOME. oh wait! this is her telling me about her life. and me telling her not so much but her telling me/ constantly talking to me is informing me of her life not in the explicit {turn page, left page} way I want but all her xenophobics and quirks and hard to get alongs peculiarities are her informing me/ showing me her story. AND ALL OF MY OBJECTIONS AND HARD CRITICISMS AND PATIENCE IS MY INFORMING HER OF MY LIFE. I might be too hard (harsh) (Indian, you know) what if you find something you don’t like? showing my papers after listening to Eckhart Toll (just looked phony) she only made pop can I be honest with her? references and I gave piercing eyes. I’m mean but I did listen to her stories but all the pop stuff I say I don’t care in my own way Bluntly I don’t/didn’t {right page} know about that. she on defensive oh, okay/// nut the pop stuff and family stuff and gross generalizations and astrology (horoscope) it’s 2am. I’m going to sleep. I hate being this way, so negative. hearing her story was nice, I was pretty cold. I gave her the same eyes intense all weekend. people looked at me b/c of my eyes this weekend. a moment with map of M|HER (me over her) W. H . DRUM PEACE wonderfully inspiring

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can’t argue with her so defensive like I was w/ divorce “you really are a child of divorce. “ “ “ “” “” “ “ “ “ “ “ “ it’s really [waaaack] not true. __ and divorce we argued a lot of things: LA, NY, DC, there will be blood, Madonna, colorblind, Obama peace prize, appropriation, etc. when she was talking I thought I’m over my moms. I want to find my dad. {turn page, left page} parade me around like mom: trophy always telling people when I go in all the books I know. Fell asleep w/ pen in mouth, drool coming down. 2nd bad/disorienting dream. maybe cat outside. shit is weirding me out. my favorite part. Scared/farted really and that’s the most human I saw her. BAD DREAMS B/C of NEGATIVE THOUGHTS b4 sleeping Every time I reread these notes, I’m paralyzed with the intense emotions from that time. I keep thinking about class, education and cultural capital. We were so defensive with each other, there was a competition there. We argued so much. The arguing was similar to the arguing I do with my mother, which is a result of our different perspectives on issues as informed by our educations and life stories. Mostly my mom and I argue about what I think is problematic. And Greta and I argued about the same things, for example, the African Art Museum. She so thought it was beautiful. And I agreed with her, but deliberately wanted to share my criticism that I’ve learned from my time at Wesleyan. While I attribute the conflict with my mom as a generational education difference, I think of Greta and my tension as related to class.

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To reiterate and remember, adoption has always had undercurrents (or at times overt waves) of middle-class, patriarchal privileges. During the first legalization of adoption, birthmothers were usually working-class and many of them were recent European immigrants. As the twentieth century progressed, less available poor white babies were being born and racial integration became the law, transracial adoptions gained momentum. With now working-class American Indian and black women the target of what was deemed unfit motherhood, middle-class white families continued to benefit from adoption practices. Transnational adoption follows in this trend. Thus, built into the foundation of adoption practices is a middle-classed ideology that so often dictates normative codes and behaviors that are in turn upheld by the practice of adoption. Within these codes are moral judgments that deem deviance immoral. I recall this history to show the constructed perspective that has taken part in shape of my relationship with Greta. I do not suppose or attempt to show that Gretaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s decision of giving me up for adoption is a product or internalization of these middle-class standards of family life. Rather, it is only to show how the classist history of adoption and its process complicates my relationship and interactions with Greta.

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This is a scanned letter sent to my mother from the lawyer that set up my adoption.

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I remember the first time I met Greta. It wasn't the first time I had ever seen her, because she had sent me a picture of her in one of her presents for me. My mom asked me if I wanted her to send one, so I could know what she looked like. I think this was during the time when my mom had moved Teo and me to New Haven while she attended Yale's school of Midwifery. Whereas Teo was more grounded in Los Angeles with all of his friends, father and life there, I was only seven years old and, as my best friend’s mother once said, easily 'go with the flow.' This hazy and gray time (it was gray because Teo and I spent the summers in LA and the most exciting part of living back East was the snow days and the blizzard of 1996) because it was usually gray outside and the apartment we lived in was a grayish blue. It was a time when I had a lot of contact with Greta. She would send me gifts for all occasions. Sometimes they were cards with beautiful art on them, sometimes there were pop-up Christmas cards and the puzzles. My parents told her I enjoyed puzzles. Even when I still only had an ungrounded idea of her (she was my mother?), she gave my presents. Wait. I’d like to reflect on this crucial moment that I just discovered. Who was she, who was Greta when I didn’t have her picture? Within Euro-American culture, visuality is so favored, it

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in turn becomes what anchors our experience. Before knowing what she looked like, was Greta like my birthfather to me now? Amorphous, brown-skinned, and beautiful? She was poor but I accepted the presents. How could I not? She was my mom. She is my mom. My saying that she was my mom fits in with Anthropologist, ______,’s work on adoption and the ways it changes kinship. Her focus lies in the idea that adoption severs the connection and creates a new a mother. Signe Howell calls this process a kind of ‘birthing’ in which adoption creates disparate states of family and life. Greta was my mother when she had me, but when she ‘gave me up’ I stopped being her son. And yet, her gifts and cards suggest otherwise.

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Also, where does monetary transactions fit into the discourse of ‘the best interest of the child?’ Did Greta really ‘give’ me up?

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What did Greta look like to me when I didn’t know? While I can’t remember that time in my life, I can remember moments bare and fuzzy of my looking at that first picture she sent. It wasn’t that she looked like me, or that I looked like her. Rather, she was where I came from. She embodied the beginning of my story at that time. In my room alone, the grayness around me, painted hardwood floors below, I looked at the picture of her for the first time. Also in the frame of my memory is my mattress pad on the floor- a Japanese practice my family adopted. On the bed, I remember those white sheets with the small flowers and fruits made of colored geometric shapes. When my mom washed them she would find out that I had been biting off parts of the foam mattress pad. She would yell at me. In my senior year of high school, I was taught Freud and had decided that I had an oral fixation because I was never breastfed. Looking at the picture of her, I felt that I had started from her which was settling despite the recurring image of a red, dark, chaotic hell. But she was in the middle. Frazzled, looking over her shoulder, with her hair blowing over her face. I saw myself in her, because somehow I knew that mother is where people come from. My mom was in midwifery school. I don’t think I ever held that picture up next to a picture of me. Her green suite, next to the Laker’s banners, I now know that it was a trade show. But she looked like an executive to me. I didn’t know if she was beautiful, in any way. She was distressed, hair frazzled. Maybe she is fine without me as powerful business woman. She probably wouldn’t have been able to achieve all that she has if she kept me. I had to wonder…

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My mom, with a slightly delicate and caring face, would look down at me, furrowing her eyebrows and say, “ You know Miles, you can meet Greta whenever you want to, whenever you are ready…” At the age of eight, I took my mom up on her offer. She told my dad and they arranged for the whole family to meet her at my dad’s house.

The haze, that haze.

How do I recall this memory – it’s almost like the haziness that surround the newborn when seeing the hospital lights for the first time.

Nothing seems clear, every image’s boundaries leak into the next like the atoms that bind solids somehow came a little loose.

There was a warmth in the sunlight as it was making its rounds around the front porch and tansu. My memory is suffused with my fantasies of meeting my family. Did we all greet her at the door? Did I open in alone? Isn’t that how I imagine it going to be for me; face to face with my father at the door, then led in and through a house filled with relatives greeting me. Everywhere I look, more people are revealed to me. It was probably me and either my mom or dad because I do remember that front door with the Japanese welcome character cloth drapped over the window of the old oak door. I remember how slowly it seemed to openslow motion like the movies. The slight breeze behind her, and the sun lighting

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her body from the back. She smiled. I was polite and smiled back, welcoming to her as she entered our house. Did I hug her then or when we said goodbye ? I can’t remember. We sat down around the living room, me, my mom, my dad, Greta, and my brother. My dad made some tea and brought out some cookies. After sometime, my mom asked me if I wanted to have time alone with Greta. And I said yes, both wanting it and feeling like it was expected of me. So we sat there, the two of us, looking at each other for the first time. That was the first time we had touched since I was born. She asked me about school and my friends, and the only thing I remember asking her was about my birthfather. I remember asking her that one thing because it wasn’t my question alone: my mom so heavily encouraged me to find out. So, I asked her, both of us at the corner of the table. She told me that it was a chaotic time, that a lot was going on in her life. I imagined it as hell.

This past summer while doing my research for this project, Greta told me that my mother gave her hell about my birthfather.

After that first meeting, she kept sending me presents and cards in the mail. We talked on the phone maybe once or twice a year. She was and wasn’t there. The second time I met her was on a family trip (the only one that was Teo, me and my mom, as opposed to the usual trip with our dad). I was in between fifth and sixth grade and had recently become aware of my class position. We were driving to South Dakota to do some camping. She was living in Las Vegas at

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the time. When we got there, we checked into our cheap motel that smelled bad and went to look around, gamble a little bit (my mom letting me and my brother pull the crank when no one was looking), and we met up with Greta in the late afternoon, maybe after work. We met at a gazebo and talked for a while then went to have dinner together. I made a joke to go to ‘Hooters’ for dinner. I remember because of how uncomfortable I felt after saying it. Instead, we ate at a less-risky cousin of Hooters, Chilli’s. It was a place Teo and I have always like to go to since living in Hew Haven. After that dinner, which I have no recollection of besides the place, we dropped Greta off at her apartment. She’s never learned to drive, never felt it was necessary for her. The apartment complex was a cookiecutter suburban design. Large pools of black asphalt that connect like rivers and ponds, white lines to make distinctions: this is where you park. Curving pathways and little spaces for grass. The apartments are split up with four units in one building, two on one side, two on the other, with small walkways that lead people to their cars on each side. Besides her somewhat stark living room that bore few pictures and left exposed the depersonalized off-white walls, the image that stays in my mind is the little patch of grass that she had in front of her apartment.

We left, went back to the gross motel, went to a waterpark the next day, and continued on our way to South Dakota.

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Sometimes I forget that you are my motherâ&#x20AC;Ś

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Las Vegas was the epitome of immorality to me. Still today, the city’s slogan is “What happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas,” and constructs itself as a place of liminality and thus transgression. Why else would I say suggest going to Hooters? As a child, I conflated her with Las Vegas because she lived there. She was immoral and I felt comfortable transgressing with her. While I would have thought it, I wouldn’t have actually suggested going to eat there without Greta in with us. The small parcel of grass wasn’t the garden my mom made with Teo and me at our house. Also, the only people in my life who wore nail polish were the girls at my school.

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High School. While I was in high school, Greta lived in Santa Monica. She would still send cards for all the holidays. Although we were 45 minutes away from each other, there was a distance between us that allowed for her to continue her card sending. We rarely saw each other, and would go through dry spells without communicating for over a year. Once again, while she was close in proximity, we were far from each other emotionally. She expressed her love for me in those cards and an occasional letter. I often contemplated how I should love her back, but I didn’t even know her birthday. Over the course of our relationship, I’ve bought her one Matisse address book that I thought was beautiful at the gift shop of the modern art museum in LA, LACMA. I never sent it to her though; it’s still wrapped up and hidden away in the closet of my room at my mother’s house. We spoke on the phone sometimes and I liked it usually. It was a relief to talk to her. I took certain solace in our conversations throughout high school. I even thought to myself that she was like a big sister. I could openly talk to her about my girlfriends or the parties I went to or what I thought when I got stoned. She filled in that gap that my mom couldn’t fill- she was too much of a worrier, some call it being uptight, while others call it caring. During these conversations, I would bring up my birthfather on the very occasion. We never talked about her past. I imagined it as hell and thought it wouldn’t be nice to bring

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up. She mostly told me of the current issues in her large Langmead family, we talked about TV and movies too. Sometimes during these conversations, I imagined what life would have been like being raised by her. I would erase my friends, my family, my house, my experiences abroad, and my school and replace it with apartments, the kids down the block, the two of us struggling, and a public school and poor education. But we were happy, happy to be together.

It hurts me to remember. To hear myself inside of me coming out. It hurts to remember because it brings it all back, am I not so different from that seventeen year old version of me? It hurts me to think back with these new eyes, thinking about class and cultural capital, yet still holding on to that idealized happiness. Kinship is belonging and what made the trip to D.C. so hard was feeling that I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t belong. After confessing my heart-broken feeling about my trip to D.C to some friends and reviewing my notes from the trip, I still wanted to be and knew that I was related to her. I felt like such an anthropologist- constantly trying to take note of our dynamics, what we did, how I felt and what we talked about. I engaged with her as if she were my informant. My grasp of her as my mother was fading. We reproduced certain dynamics that we have with our families, but it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t the same. I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t connect to her stories. As her son, I wanted the stories because stories are what bind me to my family. As her anthropologist, I wanted the stories to be able to analyze how we try to create our relationship. I soon

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found out that I failed to question my position. I failed to think beyond my ideas of relatedness and anthropology.

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To close this chapter, I’d like to share one more memory of Greta and me. During my tenth grade year, Greta and I started talking again after going some year and a half without any reciprocated communication. At this point in my life, I regularly smoked pot on the weekends. Consequently, I began getting interested in Buddhism and starting meditating daily. My interest in these new philosophies and practices became a point of departure for one of our first conversations. I remember telling that I had begun to meditate. Her response was calm but her attention to my words expressed her interest and excitement. She, trying to hear my story, couldn’t help but share that she had been going through similar things. She had also begun meditating and we smiled on our opposite ends of the telephone. We, excitedly, had something to talk about in common that was less banal as popular culture like television shows or movies. This, as I mentioned earlier, is one of the ways our backgrounds have resulted in the differencing of our pursing interests. But, to me and to her, this shift that occurred in both of us, our movement towards Buddhism and meditation didn’t equate to a mere common interest. To us, it was an aligning. She was my mother, but I didn’t know how. In a social context, she enacted the role of an older sibling to me. So, she was my mother because she gave birth to me. The only thing we shared were genes and the fact that we both watched the Golden Globes, the latter having no maternal or familial significance. But the fact that we shared the blood and both experienced a shift in our lives at the same time was spiritual. We were still connected, I was still part of her lineage, but not in a social nor in a biological deterministic sense. We were the

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Russian dolls. We are ourselves and yet connected to each other through our not our physical bodies, but our spiritual bodies. To reiterate, our bodily connection is not the assumed relationship of genetic disposition (i.e. receding hair line at a certain age), but rather a bodily experience that transcends our social and physical boundaries. Throughout our disparate contacts with each other, there are multiple moments that I can recount that share a similarly strange shift in our lives. Some of these simultaneous occurrences are shifts in practices while others are shifts in perspectives. How is it that we grow together without any of the traditional or assumed relations with each other? I bring up this question, less so to conclude this chapter but rather introduce the next. Ending this section open and in question allows for the section to flow into the next. It provides the stories and experience for â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;And Theories,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; in which I will explore the epistemological underpinnings of Anthropology and provide an argument for and introduction to my dance performance. My question for the next chapter is: How does the agency, experience and position of the adoptee challenge or push the limits of ethnography and/or anthropology?

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And Theories As a clarification, the title of this final chapter is called “And Theories.” I chose this title to represent this element of my thesis for two reasons. The chapter concurrently concludes my contributions to theories of relatedness while introducing the live performance of my thesis. As you might have already been able to tell, none of the artificial boundaries of my thesis prevent spillage between sections. To me, history, theory and stories weave themselves in and throughout each delineated section. Yet, this chapter will focus on social theory in anthropological discourse. To introduce my dance performance, I need to present to, the importance of adopting theories across disciplines as it pertains to ethnography and my experience as an adoptee. The title as well contributes to an understanding of my dance. As a fellow anthropology major once said in one of Akos Ostor’s classes, “I think about theories as tools to better understand and make sense of our…” and I can’t remember if he said reality or life or social context etc. His loose definition of a theory is one that I also employ. Theories are, at once, these abstract and concrete THINGS. They are an intangible shadow world that floats above our heads as well as in the pain we feel when we rub the skin on our necks to verify our insecurities. As Kirin Narayan (1993) quotes 138

Dorinne Kondo, “the specificity of… experience…is not opposed to theory; it enacts and embodies theory.” (681) My biological family apart from Greta is theoretical. They help me engage with the world in concrete ways as well as provide me with a field of potentials and possibilities. While I create imagined histories of our family through the images of Toni Morrison’s novels, pictures of Greta and I depict the shared features with which we engage with the world. They too are a shadow world over my head and in my skin.

The initial impetus for incorporating performance in my thesis was a seed planted in me during a meeting with Prof. Ulysse. The final work for Prof. U’s Contemporary Anthropological Theory course, a class I took the first semester of my junior year, was to write an ethnographic project proposal. I wrote a very disappointing proposal for my time with the project (starting the summer before the class). After winter break, I came to talk to her about the reason why my project seemed lackluster. In honesty , I didn’t know if I could do it, whether or not I even wanted too. I was scared of the magnitude of my project and felt somewhat estranged from it – do I really want to do this or is it because people are expecting me to/ think I should? I was confused and scared that I wouldn’t be able to do the project. I wanted to retreat back into my comfort zone of theorizing

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music. I remember , Prof. U behind her desk, listening carefully to my distressed words, behind her a postcard read: “what would happen if we were always conscious?” After my semi-rant that sounded like a stressed monologue akin to those of children in the movies after they commit some immoral action, Prof. U, in a quick response, as if she had known what to say the whole time, retorted, “why can’t you do both?” a slight pause to check my understanding – I think my eyes sparked a little but I was still in the mud of my own stresses. She then followed, “…what about music of adoptees? Or.. “ she went on until she saw the muck lifted from my body. My creative juices started flowing again, and I through out some ideas that I don’t really remember anymore. She ended by telling me- “never say you can’t do something…” The decision to create the dance performance, was to explore different ways of knowing and different ways of showing. As Dorrine Kondo (1995) states, “theater presumes no cult of expertise or arcane jargon,” and can differ from reading a text “on multiple levels” by “engaging multiple senses” (62). Due to the emphasis of the project on the body and affect, an embodied presentation that can communicate the visceral is a necessity. Thus, the two forms fill in each other’s gaps – how does one dance liminality? How does one write from the perspective of the hip? By combining the two epistemologies and forms of representation, I present myself as a whole subject in both body and mind to the bodies and minds of my audiences. In Paul Stoller’s chapter, “The Reconstruction of Ethnography” from The Taste of Ethnographic Things, he briefly details two vignettes that serve as a base to explicate the paradoxical complexities and problems of anthropology’s best-

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claimed contribution to academia, the ethnography (1989). One of his first questions about the problems of ethnography reads, "If we transcend the limitations of the Western empirical tradition, whatever that may be, what remains?” (130) He proceeds in this chapter by introducing a history of anthropological thought as a system built from multiple European and American theories. He explains Foucault’s episteme as that which “governs what we see, what we think, what we say and what we write.” He goes on to quote Foucault about the foundational epistemological paradox:

Not only are the human sciences able to do without a concept of man, they are unable to pass through it, for they always address themselves to that which constitutes his outer limits. One may say of them what Levi-Strauss said of ethnology: that they dissolve man

To explicate this notion of erasing the human within the human sciences, Stoller traces this problem to Plato and the ancient Grecian notion of Objectivity, Knowledge and Truth. Building off the Grecian philosophy, the source of structural limitation that is embedded in ethnography is rooted in Saussure’s study of signs, signifiers and linguistics as a system that structures our ideas of knowledge and truth. Claude Levi-Strauss builds off of Saussure’s theories for anthropology’s ethnography: he found that culture in itself is a system OF systems. His study was to take cultural snapshots that would ‘dissolve man’ in order to see the Objective Truth in the structure of human cultures. Autoethnography emphasizes multiple voices and perspectives to reposition the human and the self within anthropological texts (Ellis, 2004). Even with intimate

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accounts and personal narrative woven into theory and cultural history attempted to keep the ‘human’ in the concept of the adoptee. Where my ethnographic work does ‘dissolves the man’ does dissolve the adoptee is in my trip to DC. In our interactions, in the way I chose to remember our time, I stripped her of her ‘humanness,’ for she had become the ethnographic understanding and truth I was searching for…

In his attempts to imagine a new ethnography, Stoller finds that it’s necessary to redefine Truth. As we ethnographers, writers, academics, scientists are made to accept our own habitus, we must also try to redefine our notion of knowledge. Stoller quotes Derrida’s critique of Western philosophy; “knowledge is not a systemic tracking down of truth that is hidden but may be found. It is rather the field of ‘free play,’ that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble’” (140) While this critique doesn’t dissolve the limitations of ethnographic thought, it does open the door to James Clifford’s idea of partial truths (1986). Stoller, like Clifford, ends his writing with a plea for anthropologists to, “describe others as people and give them a voice in our discourse… write ethnographies as multilayered texts that communicate to a number of audiences…[and] acknowledge in the text the presence of an ethnographer who engages in dialogue with his or her subjects” (140)

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In an attempt to answer Stoller’s call and possibly re-answer his original question, I’d like to engage in what Gillian Goslinga has called the fetishization of the social. Her essay specifically calls for academicians to deconstruct the notion of “the social,” which to her has replaced Nature as the dominant hegemonic force of academic discourse (2009). In order to fully understand my subjectivity as an adoptee, it is necessary to subvert this academic hegemony. The way that I have framed the dance performance subverts ‘the social’ in two ways. First, I propose the perspective of the body. The ‘social’ experience is a powerful theory that has been constructed in a way that focuses on mental cognition. Much has been written about the body from the perspective of the mind. My dance performance, through Butoh-inspired improvisational techniques, is a way to present how the body writes. The second way my dance performance moves beyond the social is by focusing on spirituality. To conceptualize, theorize and understand the experience of ‘the adoptee’ and relatedness, one needs to emphasize the role of spirituality. I use the word spirituality to connote an extra-humanness. It is a force outside of the control of humans, outside of the constructions of the social. My feelings of being ‘blessed’ and the way I relate to Greta as my kin, as my mother is based spirituality. To present this spirituality in my thesis, I had to present the work in a fully-embodied live setting. I think Butoh-founder Kazuo Ohno (2004) explains this idea best: Words, of course, do their job, but I think dance can say a lot more. We enter an entirely different world as soon as we delve into our souls. […] Differences in time and space exist between these worlds. For me, there is another dimension close by, a timeless dimension inhabited by ghosts.

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Lastly, my reason for creating this dance is for my body: it is truly my only felt and known connection with my birthfather, this exploration of and through my body is, in itself, my journey. Searching for these traces, which might not be apparent to me, my visual eye and cognitive mind, but rather are able to be explored through my body. My dance is spiritual. My dance writes itself and speaks for itself. The process of uncovering my family is deeply embedded in the curves of my eyes and the strength of my bones. My family’s knowledge and history is passed on to me through my body. My performance is at once a paradox. While it is a clear and legible presentation of my search for my biological parents, it is also the continuous process and act of searching for that family. To me, this dance is akin to Daniela Gandolfo’s ethnographic approach in her book, blending the analysis and presentation of the research as well as show you the fieldwork notes. Or, Sherry Ortner’s New Jersey Dreaming, in which she similarly blends the two boundaries of ethnographic research and presentation. This site of merging presentation and exploration is truly at the heart of the importance of performance. To me, these works further confuse the idea of ‘the field’ in Anthropology. Am I taking the audience member to the field through thick description or do they physically experience it as I am? The stage is just as much ‘the field’ as it is ‘the stage’ in my thesis. In summation, my attempt to answer Stoller’s question about the limitations of Western thought both calls for a need to complicate what constitutes

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truth. For the adoptee, for me, the body, soul and process must have a place in academic understanding of our experience.

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