Primo Levi on human nature and surviving Auschwitz

I had never heard the name Primo Levi before reading it in an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin. She described this person as ‘a writer who never spoke anything but the truth, who lived a year in Auschwitz, and knew about injustice.’ I was intrigued, but it wasn’t until I came across his name again a short time later in something Anne Lamott said, where, again, he was described as a wise soul and speaker of truth. If two of my most admired authors admire the same person, there’s probably something to that. So I decided to find out what that something was, and I borrowed his book Survival in Auschwitz from the library, only to discover that it was so breathtakingly powerful that I needed to read his follow-up book The Reawakening as soon as I could. His writing is meditative– there is truth, yes, but it is often under the guise of a penetrating understanding of human weakness. Yet he writes without judgment, and in doing so allows his readers to judge for themselves. As he explains,

“I must admit that if I had in front of me one of our persecutors of those days, certain known faces, certain old lies, I would be tempted to hate, and with violence too; but exactly because I am not a Fascist or a Nazi, I refuse to give way to this temptation. I believe in reason and in discussion as supreme instruments of progress, and therefore I repress hatred even within myself: I prefer justice. Precisely for this reason, when describing the tragic world of Auschwitz, I have deliberately assumed the calm, sober language of the witness, neither the lamenting tones of the victim nor the irate voice of someone who seeks revenge. I thought that my account would be all the more credible and useful the more it appeared objective and the less it sounded overtly emotional; only in this way does a witness in matters of justice perform his task, which is of preparing the ground for the judge. The judges are my readers.”

And so, as readers, it is our job to listen carefully and to listen well, for Levi has much to say, and ours is no small task.

At the beginning of Survival in Auschwitz, he writes that he knew he had to survive if only to let the outside world know what happened:

“The need to tell our story to ‘the rest’, to make ‘the rest’ participate in it, had taken on for us, before our liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with our other elementary needs. The book has been written to satisfy this need: first and foremost, therefore, as an interior liberation.

[…]

We are in fact convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not positive, can be deduced from this particular world which we are describing. We would also like to consider that the Lager was pre-eminently a gigantic biological and social experiment.”

He goes on to describe the human psyche in a way most of never consider, that survival is not just based on having a goal but that even the moment-to-moment petty disturbances act as something to which our minds– and our survival– can cling:

“Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.

[…]

It was the very discomfort, the blows, the cold, the thirst that kept us aloft in the void of bottomless despair, both during the journey and after. It was not the will to live, nor a conscious resignation; for few are the men capable of such resolution, and we were but a common sample of humanity.”

However, once Levi and the others reached the camp, the devolution of their spirits was swift, and the toll it took was immense:

“Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.

[…]

Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself.”

In fact, the image that comes to Levi’s mind when he thinks of the atrocities that happened in Auschwitz is that of the man who has lost himself:

“They [the Muselmänner] crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emancipated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen.”

But though the Muselmänner may have lost himself completely, no man remained entirely whole. Survival in Auschwitz did not reflect just one human characteristic that some may have had and others didn’t; it reflected all the ways we as humans are willing to sacrifice in our determination to live. It was a rare person who didn’t have to stoop below his own morality in an attempt to save himself.

“Many were the ways devised and put into effect by us in order not to die: as many as there are different human characters. All implied a weakening struggle of one against all, and a by no means small sum of aberrations and compromises. Survival without renunciation of any part of one’s own moral world– apart from powerful and direct interventions by fortune– was conceded only to very few superior individuals, made of the stuff of martyrs and saints.”

And yet, similar to the idea Levi brought up in the beginning about happiness and unhappiness, he brings up another interesting part of human nature that we may overlook in easier circumstances: the phenomenon of having something to feel fortunate, despite being mired in misfortune.

“Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know that this evening it is your turn for the supplement of soup, so that even today you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium — as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom — well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.”

Thankfully for us, Levi never had to resort to touching the fence or throwing himself under a train. Before his second winter and amidst the deepest doubts that it would ever happen (“Do you know how one says ‘never’ in camp slang? ‘Morgen früh‘, tomorrow morning.”), the Russians liberated the camp, though this doesn’t mean it ceases to haunt Levi.

“Because one loses the habit of hoping in the Lager, and even if believing in one’s own reason. In the Lager it is useless to think, because events happen for the most part in an unforeseeable manner; and it is harmful, because it keeps alive a sensitivity which is a source of pain, and which some providential natural law dulls when suffering passes a certain limit.

[…]

It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits for his neighbour to die in order to take his piece of bread is, albeit guiltless, further from the model of thinking man than the most primitive pigmy or the most vicious sadist.”

No one should have to experience that, should be forced to reach a place to have figured that out. And yet he did. Millions did. For what? What possible explanation could there be for such a time in our history? Levi tells us that it is better not to understand.

“Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify.

[…]

We cannot understand it [Nazi hatred], but we can and must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard. If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again. Conscience can be seduced and obscured again– even our consciences.

[…]

Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions….

[…]

It is, therefore, necessary to be suspicious of those who seek to convince us with means other than reason, and of charismatic leaders: we must be cautious about delegating to others our judgment and our will. Since it is difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it is as well to regard all prophets with suspicion. It is better to renounce revealed truths, even if they exalt us by their splendor or we find them convenient because we can acquire them gratis. It is better to content oneself with other more modest and less exciting truths, those one acquires painfully, little by little and without shortcuts, with study, with discussion, and reasoning, those that can be verified and demonstrated.”

Who could resist admiring such a man?

On Twinsters and dreams

The other day, I watched the documentary Twinsters on Netflix. It’s about two Korean adoptees who were separated at birth and had no idea they were twins. All their paperwork from Korea omits that fact, and even their foster parents in Korea had no idea. One was adopted by an American family with two older brothers (biological sons of the adoptive parents), and one was adopted by a childless couple in France. They found each other (unintentionally) with the help of YouTube and Facebook, and then they became like normal twins, with their own language and way of being together. It was sweet and had no agenda for or against international adoption (allowing me to keep my stance and still like the movie).

But the end got a bit heavier and hit me to the core: the twins traveled to Korea for a Korean Adoptee Conference, and during their trip they met the women who had fostered them when they were infants before they were adopted. The twin from the States had met hers the previous year, but it was the first time for the French one to meet hers. The impact it made on her was profound: she had been raised as an only child and felt that she only started existing the day she was adopted, that no one loved her or even cared whether she existed before then. Having now met her foster mom she suddenly realized that she did exist before and that people did love her and want her in the world. She was crying, and I was crying.

She said exactly what I used to say when I explained what I did as a foster parent (in my head, at least, back when I was doing it): that I was an unknown, never-to-be-remembered-yet-essential part of the babies’ lives and that no matter who loved them after me and whom they would credit with their lives, I was filling that small portion with love and care; it’s just that they would never know it. So for the girl to recognize it, it was as if she was recognizing me and what I had done for babies like her. It was what I would want them all to realize, that there was never a point in their lives when they weren’t known and loved.

Yet the very night I describe all this to my little sister and boyfriend, I have a dream about the little girl I fostered who felt most like a daughter to me, the one I tattooed in the form of an elephant onto my side. In this dream, I was her caregiver again. We played in a living room, and she had some words that she could say now. We were tentative, re-acquainting ourselves, but my love was just as strong. I adored her. I ate something and went to sleep and woke up a little while later, realizing I had someone else to take care of and that I hadn’t fed her or put her to bed. I walked down the stairs, my heart in my stomach, and I saw toys and trash strewn around, as if a two-year-old had been left to her own devices and what was left was evidence of my negligence. I heard her crying and went into the messy living room to find her lying on the floor amidst all the junk in her own pee. Her diaper was beyond full, and she was so exhausted but so uncomfortable with hunger and piss that she hadn’t been able to fall asleep. I knew then that I would never be forgiven, and I picked her up to hug her, holding her close to me. I changed her and put her down to sleep, but she couldn’t sleep in her crib, either. So I just decided to hold her in my arms and walk around until she did fall asleep. She had gone quiet by the time the sun came up.

I still can’t shake the sickening guilt.

There is an inextricable link between my feeling like what I did as a foster parent was of incalculable importance and feeling like I failed in truly living up to that. It doesn’t matter how it evens out logically. It is just something that’s there, inside, leaving me raw whenever it’s touched.

I guess this is where I could write about what it all means, what exactly I feel and the root of all this sadness. Maybe it’s just too personal for me to do that, or maybe it sits too closely to the nerve that causes such pain and leaves me so drained. What I can say is that the most meaningful experiences of my life have never been easy to describe or categorize. I know foster parenting certainly isn’t. But rarely has someone put it into such resonant terms as the adoptee in the film, and rarely have I felt so affirmed. I may have unresolved emotions, but that is only because life, as long as we are living it, will continually and frustratingly be unresolved as it unfolds. I don’t have closure, so I have dreams. I’m just grateful to realize that I will occasionally have more than that.

 

James Baldwin on race

What is there to say? I have nothing to add to the conversation (and in fact think there are already too many voices competing for attention), and I’m not sure where I’d begin even if I did. Things are sad; though, as many have pointed out, they are not new. I do believe something is happening, that there is a rising up, a wave of revolution, that has been shaking up the foundations and is getting big enough to really do something, but I don’t know how to show my support without looking like I want the spotlight. So I will use someone else’s words to do the speaking, and who better than those of James Baldwin– one of the sharpest, most perceptive thinkers and artists who have ever existed.

The situation of a very racialized America is too often diminished to statistics and to neighborhoods to stay away from. It is not humanized; it is not understanding. It is seen as a problem to be dealt with that never seems to go away.

This is why his [the Black man’s] history and his progress, his relationship to all other Americans, has been kept in the social arena. He is a social and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence; it is to be confronted with an endless cataloging of losses, gains, skirmishes; it is to feel virtuous, outraged, helpless, as though his continuing status among us were analogous to disease– cancers, perhaps, or tuberculosis– which must be checked, even though it cannot be cured.

It pains me to think that this next part is true. It shames me to know that in so many ways it is.

Time has made some changes in the Negro face. Nothing has succeeded in making it exactly like our own, though the general desire seems to be to make it blank it one cannot make it white. When it has become blank, the past as thoroughly washed from the blank face as it has been from ours, our guilt will be finished– at least it will have ceased to be visible, which we imagine to be much the same thing.

No matter how far we may go to escape the horrible chasm we’ve caused by placing so much on the difference between races and so little on the efforts to truly see each other, we will still be caught on the edge with no bridge to get us across.

One must travel very far, among saints with nothing to gain or outcasts with nothing to lose, to find a place where it does not matter– and perhaps a word or a gesture or simply a silence will testify that it matters even there.

What are we doing to each other? Why do we try to ignore the past? Are we really that deluded that we think our future can be any better, doing what we’ve been doing?

Negros are Americans and their destiny is the country’s destiny. They have no other experience besides their experience on this continent and it is an experience which cannot be rejected, which yet remains to be embraced.

Our dreams are not strong enough on their own. They need more than good intentions. We need to stop obliterating each other and expecting Black people to obliterate themselves for the sake of superficial harmony.

… we will set our faces against them and join hands and walk together into that dazzling future where there will be no white or black. This is the dream of all liberal men, a dream not at all dishonorable, but, nevertheless, a dream. For, let us join hands on this mountain as we may, the battle is elsewhere. It proceeds far from us in the heat and horror and pain of life itself where all men are betrayed by greed and guilt and blood lust and where no one’s hands are clean. Our good will, from which we yet expect such power to transform us, is thin, passionless, strident: its roots, examined, lead us back to our forebears, whose assumption it was that the black man, to become truly human and acceptable, must first become like us. This assumption once accepted, the Negro in America can only acquiesce in the obliteration of his own personality, the distortion and debasement of his own experience, surrendering to those forces which reduce the person to anonymity and which make themselves manifest daily all over the darkening world.

We have so much work to do.

Justification for couchsurfing from The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer

Over the weekend, I read Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking, which (as her writer-husband Neil Gaiman put it) is part memoir of her life as an artist (from street performer to singer/songwriter) and part manifesto of her belief in the power of asking and all that it entails (giving, receiving, listening, seeing, gratitude). It was addicting.

Because the book was so rich with insight and experience, to write about it all in one post feels either too overwhelming or to simplifying. It would do the book (and Amanda) a disservice. So I am focusing on a sliver of the book here, and if I decide to write more posts on other portions, I will do so.

As a touring musician, Amanda has relied heavily on the generosity of her fans for anything from food before a show to a place to stay the night after one. Her descriptions of her couchsurfing experiences and her explanations for choosing them over staying in a hotel struck a chord in me– I have relied on the generosity of complete strangers to house and even feed me during my travels, and I love how much trust can grow when given the opportunity. There is nothing like sleeping in someone else’s house to make you aware of both the differences between you and others and of all that connect you at the same time.

Couchsurfing is about more than saving on hotel costs. It’s a gift exchange between the surfer and the host that offers an intimate gaze into somebody’s home, and the feeling of being held and comforted by their personal space. It’s also a reminder that we’re floating along due to a strong bond of trust, just like when I surf the crowd at a show, safely suspended on a sea of ever-changing hands. It can feel almost holy, looking at somebody else’s broken shower nozzle, smelling the smells of a real kitchen, feeling the fray of a real blanket and hearing the crackle of an old steam radiator.

In such an unfamiliar yet homey environment, the creative mind can find sources of inspiration that aren’t available in the well-known corners of one’s own home or even in the clean bareness of a hotel. I vividly remember the feel of the various bedrooms and living rooms I’ve stared out the windows of and how easily I could picture myself in new situations and in different lives, as if the change of scenery was not just the reason for a change of mood but also for a change of being. The empathic shift of perspective that couchsurfing invites can be drawn from long after the surfer leaves and can act as a much-needed catalyst for a formerly stale imagination.

Staying in your own home can be corrosive and stifling, especially for creative work. The surroundings can smother you with the baggage of your past and the History of You. Staying in a hotel can be a blissful blank slate. There’s no baggage, just an empty space onto which you can project anything. But staying in a stranger’s home can inspire like nothing else. You get to immerse yourself in the baggage of someone else’s past, and regard someone else’s mess of unsorted books piled up in the corner of the living room.

But aside from the fertile soil for creativity and relationship building that is couchsurfing, it also comes with plenty of awkwardness and uncomfortable moments, which Amanda touches on in a passage that made me laugh out loud with how true it is:

It’s not always all rainbows and unicorn bedsheets, though. Couches come with people who own couches. Sometimes people just aren’t good at the dance, and can’t tell when the performers need to stop socializing. In those awkward situations, you smile wearily, edge politely towards your toothbrush, and make the best of it, hoping the hint will be taken. I will hug you. I will love you. I will genuinely admire your kitchen cow collection. But when it is time, please let me go the fuck to sleep.

While my memories are almost entirely positive (or awkward), people often express hesitation and even fear when I bring up my couchsurfing experiences and intention to have more. Is that safe? What if something bad happens? They could steal from you or hurt you or rape you or something! And they’re always right– something bad could happen. I could get hurt or raped or stolen from. It’s never a guarantee that I nothing bad will happen ever, but especially when I trust someone during my most vulnerable moments, like sleeping on their couch and showering in their private bathroom. Yet, just like Amanda writes in her book, trust isn’t trust without the risk, without my choosing to trust while knowing that my choice could go one of two ways: well or terribly. And Amanda’s advice for when it goes terribly is perfect:

There’s an inherent, unspoken trust that happens when you walk through the door of your host’s home. Everybody implicitly trusts everybody else not to steal anything. We leave our phones, our wallets, our laptops, our journals, and our instruments lying scattered around our various mini-couchsurfing campsites. To my knowledge, I’ve never had anything go missing. I’m often asked: How can you trust people so much? Because that’s the only way it works.

[…]

When you openly, radically trust people, they not only take care of you, they become your allies, your family. Sometimes people will prove themselves untrustworthy. When that happens, the correct response is not: Fuck! I knew I couldn’t trust anybody! The correct response is: Some people just suck. Moving right along.

It also sometimes happens that the hosts have far less than the guest, and the discrepancy can be uncomfortable, if only because it doesn’t feel fair that the one with more should be relying on the one with less. But instead of guilt, which invalidates the host’s generosity and fails to acknowledge the profound gift that it is, Amanda writes about gratitude, which serves to humble the recipient and place the gift of generosity at the forefront of consciousness in such situations.

How is this fair? I thought. These people have so little. I’m being treated like royalty by a family living in poverty. It wasn’t guilt that I felt; that would have been an insult to their generosity. It was an overwhelming gratitude, more than I knew what to do with.

Of course, you get more than just graciousness when you couchsurf.

Things you get when you couchsurf that you don’t get in a hotel: The rattling sound of pots and silverware in the morning. Bathrooms with ratty, beloved mismatched towels. Leftover birthday cake. Dark hallways humid with the smells of baking. Looking at the weird shit people keep in their medicine cabinets. Cats to pat, who are at first standoffish then decide they love you at four a.m., when you’re finally asleep. Walls of Elvis plates. The recaptured feeling of having a sleepover party. Dodgy electric blankets. A chance to try on hats. Morning coffee in a wineglass for lack of enough cups. Children of all ages and temperaments who draw pictures for you. The ability to make your own toast. Record players. Wet grass in the backyard sunrise, where the chickens are roosting. Out-of-tune pianos and other strange instruments to fondle. Candles stuck to mantelpieces. The beautiful vision of strangers in their pajamas. Weird teas from around the world. Pinball machines. Pet spiders. Latches that don’t quite work. Glow-in-the-dark things on the ceiling. Late-night and early-morning stories about love, death, hardship, and heartbreak. The collision of life. Art for the blender. The dots connecting.

It’s hard to explain what compels me to continue to couchsurf after years of doing it, but it always boils down to connection and tightening the web of trust that is often invisible to those who haven’t experienced it. Amanda Palmer captures it brilliantly in The Art of Asking, which I would recommend reading for these reasons and more, wholeheartedly.

On international adoption and the need for reform

“Everyone has their own personal reasons why they need an infant girl under two,” one adoptive mother reflected in Kathryn Joyce’s book The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption. To put in more sobering terms, however unintentional their effects may be, hopeful families have created a demand in a market that pressures countries to provide a supply that might otherwise not exist— in this case, children.

Adoption advocates cite statistics of the number of orphans around the world in need of families. The number itself isn’t so important— considering it has only increased over the years, it is inaccurate, and not nearly as many are adoptable as that number suggests— so much as the rhetoric itself that is used to support it. Firstly, these ‘orphans’ are seen as parentless, homeless children facing a host of sordid circumstances if a loving family— preferably a well-off, Christian family from a developed nation— doesn’t save them. In reality, the term ‘orphan’ means different things around the world, and rarely does it mean a family-less child. More often, orphan statistics include children who have lost one parent and ‘vulnerable’ children who live in poverty; even when a child has lost both parents, they usually have extended family that cares for them. Conversely, orphan statistics do not include street children who are outside of census data and who might legitimately benefit from family care. As Kathryn Joyce so eloquently put it,

This narrative of adoption as child rescue usually drowns out the more critical interpretation— that adoption is an industry driven largely by money and Western demand, justified by a misguided savior complex that blinds Americans to orphans’ existing family ties and assumes that tickets to America for a handful of children are an appropriate fix for an entire culture living in poverty.

Secondly, the rhetoric of adoption advocates is largely the Christian, biblical rhetoric of being adopted into God’s family and of caring for orphans and widows (James 1:27). While there’s nothing wrong with believing that God’s family is an adoptive one and that believers are only a part of it because God’s love accepted them as his adopted sons and daughters, this is not an imperative that God’s believers then go overseas and take children out of their homes/families/cultures to bring them into their own. The James 1:27 verse calls for caring for orphans and widows— the ‘and’ here is important because orphans don’t have to be (and indeed, perhaps shouldn’t be) separated from their mothers or taken from their birth places to be cared for. It is a general call for caring for vulnerable children and their vulnerable families (widowed mothers, unwed mothers, impoverished families, etc.), something that can be done outside of adoption. David Smolin— a constitutional law professor at Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama—astutely describes it as Kathryn Joyce summarizes and quotes below:

Not only has the Christian adoption movement displayed willful ignorance of the long-standing problems in domestic and international adoption, Smolin said, but its ideology— fixated on the symbolism of adopting children into new families and how that mirrors the Christian conversion experience— explicitly exacerbates the problems. ‘It is not merely a matter of doing the right thing for the wrong reason, but quite often that of doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason,’ he wrote. Seeing adoption as a divine mission leads people to embrace an industry in which they routinely spend $20,000 to $40,000 to adopt a child without being willing to spend several hundred dollars to preserve the original family. Taking children from the poor becomes a normalized standard practice, justified by the sense that adopters are emulating god. A truly just orphan-care movement, he said, would be a poverty alleviation movement.

That’s not just a humane principle, Smolin said, but for Christians, a biblical one as well. The Bible’s James 1:27 call, Smolin repeats, urges Christians to help widows and orphans together, as a unit. But many people find it both more appealing and easier to assist children alone. Smolin calls that ‘the biggest mistake that runs through the whole movement: a discarding of the adults and a willingness to sever any connection the child has to adults other than to the adoptive parent.’

Because international adoption has been allowed to flourish in several countries (before it so often causes the crash that follows corruption), families will often offer their child up for adoption in times of crisis— such as having inadequate means to provide for them— as a first resort. The problems with this are multi-fold, not least of which is the fact that these families rarely understand what adoption is: that it means they will not see their child again and that they most likely won’t be supported financially by their child going overseas. It is also problematic because nothing is solved— the ‘orphan crisis’ only expands as supply strives to meet demand (there are far more families waiting to adopt children than there are adoptable children in the world). As UNICEF’s Susan Bissell put it, “a complex and persistent development and poverty crisis has been transformed into a crisis solely about the poor’s vulnerable or orphaned children.”

The focus on the adoptive parents’ rights eclipses any rights (or even recognition) of birth mothers and sometimes even of nations themselves. With the sense of entitlement and ownership adoptive families often feel towards the child they want to adopt, they don’t understand why they can’t just have him/her (especially with the misinformation of an ‘orphan crisis’ infiltrating adoption talk) or why certain rules might be in place. Again, Susan Bissell of UNICEF responds, “If you really want to help children and you really respect the sovereignty and democracy and good governance and the rule of law that we enjoy in our home countries [in the West], why wouldn’t you want the same for other countries?” And as Korean-American adoptee and advocate Jennifer Kwon Dobbs says, “Speaking in the child’s ‘best interests’ has too often become a segue to speaking about the children as if they belong with foreigners.”

It is important that prospective adoptive families look critically at their role in the ‘orphan crisis.’ The corruption and human trafficking that results from the adoption demand is not easy to take in, but it has to be done. “For too many parents seeking to adopt, the stories of coercion or unnecessary or failed adoptions— stories that reflect the unintended harmful consequences of Americans’ good intentions— amount to information they don’t want to know,” Kathryn Joyce writes. The ends do not justify the means.***

But what is the alternative? The answers are many. Kathryn Joyce ends her books with some suggestions (and warnings):

Would-be adoptive parents must reassess the conception of adoption that has for decades been informed by the myth of heroic Western parents saving ‘orphans.’ For adoption to become a more ethical system, everyone engaged in that system must understand that for most children growing up in poor communities, the answer is not adoption but rather sustainable development, that the best interests of the child don’t always mean a family with more money, that Western parents are not so uniquely qualified for parenthood that any untrained couple can take on three or six or ten new adoptees and make the children’s lives better than they had been before, and that approaching the difficult task of raising children from another culture who may be traumatized from whatever causes brought them into adoption will require more than food, shelter, and love.

Adoption may be a wonderful outcome for many families and many children, but much more often than we acknowledge, this win-win scenario is not the case. Well-meaning people can enable tragedy with their good intentions or lack of understanding of what an adopted child needs. For adoptions undertaken without preparation, for serial adopters who may be attending to their own emotional needs rather than those of the children they adopt, or for those driven by a sense that adoption is a good deed— or a biblical calling— for which they will be rewarded, the outcomes are often painful. And as those secondary adoptive parents who have picked up the pieces of failed adoptions can attest, for the child a bad or an unnecessary adoption can be worse than none at all.

The Child Catchers is an elucidating and thorough look into the world of adoption, one that I would highly recommend for anyone interested in educating themselves in this field of study. So much of the book covers in-depth stories and statistics of the harms and blind-spots of the adoption movement, but the last two chapters provide a hopeful glimpse of what could be: one chapter on Rwanda and how tightly and ethically they are managing their adoptions, with a focus on building a domestic child care system of fostering and adopting, and one chapter on South Korean adoptees, birth mothers, and unwed mothers becoming advocates for adoption reform and cultural acceptance of family diversity in South Korea.

For anyone interested in what adoption reform looks like, below are some links to just a few of the several organizations mentioned in Joyce’s book.

Ethica — “An independent voice for ethical adoption”

Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform (PEAR)– “To provide a voice for prospective and adoptive parents”

Pound Pup Legacy — Working to promote “the safety and well being of children in care. To this end we document cases of malpractice and corruption and offer support to the victims of the ‘dark side of child placement'”

Better Care Network— Works by “fostering collaboration, research and information sharing on family strengthening and alternative care, and advocating for changes to national and global policies to improve children’s care situations”

Korean Unwed Mother’s Families Association (KUMFA)– “Advocates for the rights of unwed pregnant women, unwed mothers and their children in Korea. KUMFA’s goal is to enable Korean women to have sufficient resources and support to keep their babies if they choose, and thrive in Korean society.”

 

***As an added caution, it’s important to be wary of voluntourism, especially when considering taking short-term mission trips to orphanages. The harm it causes to the children in these institutions to experience abandonment repeatedly by visiting Westerners far outweighs the emotional satisfaction the visitors feel by having gone. Moreover, be careful when doing labor projects not to do things that locals could do for a wage and usurp their opportunity to earn a living. If you feel the need to do projects, be sure to work alongside a local organization (like a church) that has a grasp of the community’s needs and work towards meeting those so that when you leave, the local church or other organization receives the credit and the community is left with something they needed and couldn’t provide solely on their own.

Ode to a Training Manager

All summer, they had prepared us for our jobs.  We were told that our directors would have little time for us, that we would need someone to be our go-between with them, that we would be but mere bugs to the giants that were to be our bosses.  I prepared myself for that; I expected no emotional returns for what I gave and therefore didn’t plan on giving much.  I would be respectful and humble.  But I would not be friends with this person.  Who could be?

Then came the week we were to meet them, the last week of summer as we knew it.  We would fly, drive, ride the train to our sites across a country that does not make it so easy to do any of those.  We didn’t know when we’d see each other next, and we had been trained for a job with people whom we had not met.  And here we were, standing in a big line across the room from another big line made up of our new supervisors– the most important people in our jobs-to-be, yet the most enigmatic.

One by one, they called our names and theirs, and we met in the middle in a sort of procession of which neither was sure of the steps.  More names, more awkward greetings with all eyes watching.  Soon enough my name was called, and as I walked up, I saw a woman in tennis shoes– in contrast to the heels most of the other women were wearing– walk up to me with her arms open.  It was the only hug a supervisor gave to a volunteer that day, and that hug was mine.  I haven’t forgotten it.

She and I didn’t speak too much during the three days before we took the train to my new home.  She wasn’t confident in her English; I wasn’t confident in my Mongolian.  Neither of us seemed the type to fill the air with words anyway.  We weren’t uncomfortable.  We just were.  I attributed it to her being my supervisor and to the beginning of a relationship in which I would not see much of her.  Little did I know what my life would be like…

It turns out she wasn’t my director.  She was my ‘supervisor,’ but her role in my school was the training manager.  The director– also the landlord of my ger— was nice and responsive to my needs, but she was, as they had told us, much too busy for my day-to-day quibbles and questions.  That’s what the supervisor was for.  If I had a work-related question, I’d ask her; if I needed more wood for my fires, I’d tell her.  I’d go to her with ideas for projects, and she’d come back with her own.  She made them happen, too, without which my work record here would have been quite bare.

And it turns out she was much better at English than she originally let on.  I barely spoke a word to her in Mongolian because she understood me so well in my native tongue.  Our relationship didn’t take long to move from acquaintances to familial, with her being a maternal, aunt-like figure in my life.   She told me of her life, of the lives of other teachers, of the goings-on in school.  I never felt judged, and she always shared freely with me.

At some point in my first fall here, she invited me over to her home.  I think it was for me to show her something on her computer, but she ended up feeding me dinner and talking with me.  That night, she asked her husband something quickly before turning to her calendar and telling me that I would visit her home once a week.  From then on, I went to her home for lunch every Sunday afternoon, sitting in her apartment, watching her daughters play, talking with her.  She and her husband even took me to his work so that I wouldn’t have to pay for a shower at the public shower house.  During her spring cleaning, she gave me several items of clothing she simply didn’t want anymore.  She was– and has only become more so– my guardian.

When my life went to pieces on a small-scale this winter by having problems with safety and security, by becoming homeless for a brief time, and by feeling useless at work, my supervisor came to the rescue.  She didn’t swoop in heroically or coddle me.  She merely did as she does, and things fell into place.  I moved into her old apartment that her family had serendipitously vacated just a month earlier, and she became my new landlord.  She worked out times and places at work for me to get some projects done.  And she continued to invite me over every Sunday for dinner.

She no longer comes to work because she is on pregnancy leave; her baby is due in early June.  I leave mid-July.  My time with her is quickly coming to an end, yet I feel like I owe her so much for all she’s done for me here.  If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be here anymore.  I would have given up, would have packed up and gone home.  But here I am, quite content in my new home and filling my time with those consistent visits to hers.  She is the person I will miss the most and remember the fondest.

So, whatever anyone says, I know now that I made a friend in this person I was told would have no time for me.  She was both my go-between and the last word.  The respect between us was mutual, and I would risk my emotions for the connection we share.  For as little as I may be, she made me feel like I’m not.

Speaking of the New Year…

The Lunar New Year just passed.  The Old Lunar Year was replaced by a New Lunar Year.  This one is called the Year of the Snake (as I wrote in my last blog), which happens to be my year because I was born in a year of the snake.  I would warn you all that this is the year I will really get going, the year I do BIG stuff because it’s MY year, but it hasn’t started on an auspicious note.  So I will tell you all about its start instead.

The ending of the Old Lunar Year was pleasant enough: my friend Chris visited me from his home in the capital of UB for a few days, during which we took turns napping on my twin-sized bed, ate from the limited selection of restaurants in my town, and otherwise spent time how we would if we were in his apartment, which is to say, we read, checked our emails, and talked occasionally.  I think we both would say it was a visit well-spent.

On his last day there, we took the train together to UB so that he could go home and so that I could get on another train in UB for my host family’s home up north.  The train from my soum to UB is 15 hours, and the train from UB to my host family’s is 10 hours.  After 25 hours on the train, I was picked up by my host father (Aav) and taken home, where my host mother (Eej) told me we would be going to UB the next day to her mother’s.  Feeling only slightly cheated of information that could have prevented my spending so much time traveling, I went to bed, determined to enjoy what I could of the experience.  (Having my four-year-old brother narrate his actions on the Lego Star Wars video game he was playing in my room helped with that.)

We spent much of the following day going to my Aav‘s parents’ home in our town and to my Eej‘s brother’s.  Only late in the afternoon did we get on the road in a packed microbus for the capital.  I was wearing my Eej‘s coat because, although oversized, it apparently looked better than my own fitted coat which was covered in coal soot.  Also, my Eej had given me some of her own non-insulated, undersized boots for me to wear to UB because mine were ripped and dirty.  Ger life is hard.  Just look at my clothes.

Despite the discomfort of sitting half on the seat and half on the air beside the seat, the micro ride wasn’t so bad.  Until the micro broke down.  The five hour ride took about 8 hours because the gear shift stopped working, so after a couple hours of trying to fix it, we had to drive in first gear the rest of the way to Grandma’s (Emee’s) apartment.  The woman in the passenger seat had already traded boots with me by then because either a) her empathy is beyond comparison, or b) my misery is not well-veiled.  It could be both.  Regardless, I arrived to Emee‘s with fairly thawed feet.

After they made sure I was fed, my Eej made up a bed for me in the apartment’s one bedroom, the space I would be sharing with my Emee and my Eej‘s only sister.  The rest of the family would spread out in the living room.  As the first one to go to bed, I was woken up around midnight by a bright light and much grunting: Emee was now getting ready for bed.  And clearly my comfort was not on her priority list.  Honestly, I just wanted to stay out of her way because I don’t think she’s ever paid me back for a major misunderstanding that happened over Pre-Service Training two summers ago.  First, there was the pinky leg massage.  She seemed to like that, though, so I consider myself acquitted for any cultural faux pas I committed at that time.  However, not much later, there was a second much more serious offense.

Allow me to digress:  I was in my room (two summers ago) when Emee walked in, carrying what looked like a notebook.  It had a stamp on the front and words in Cyrillic that didn’t mean much to me at the time because I was still learning my alphabet.  She was saying a word that sounded like, ‘Kart!  Kart!’  I thought she might be practicing a surprising knowledge of English by saying an accented, ‘Cut!  Cut!’ but simply didn’t have to materials to carry out this request herself.  Just to make sure I was understanding correctly, I made scissor-cutting motions with my hand, raised my eyebrows inquisitively, and asked, ‘Cut? Cut?’  She nodded.  I took the card.  She left my room.   I took out my scissors, wondering how she knew I even had some, and started cutting.  But before I did, I noticed that the stamp on the front of this item looked pretty official, and official things should not be cut sloppily.  So, I proceeded to cut it like I would a credit card: into small, thin slivers.   And then I went on with my life.

The next day, Emee was yelling something to me from the kitchen.  I had no idea what she was saying, especially when she started drawing rectangles on the kitchen table, so my sister had to come in and translate, which, in our pidgin language, meant looking up words in the dictionary and pointing.  The first word she pointed to was the one for ‘card.’  Yea, I don’t know what she’s talking about.  I don’t have cards.  And the second one was ‘hospital.’  Right, what hospit….  And this is when I realized my mistake.  She hadn’t been practicing any English, and she certainly hadn’t asked me to cut anything.  She had simply been telling me in Russian that she what she was holding was a card.  Her hospital card.  (At least I was right in thinking it was official.)

My eyes got big.  I looked from my sister to my Emee to my trash can.  I pulled out bits of the paper I had cut and asked, ‘Do you mean this hospital card?’  My sister gasped, Emee looked upset, everyone stood aghast.  They ordered me to bring it into the kitchen.   I bundled up all the slivers I could into my arms and carried it like I was walking a death march, putting it carefully onto the table, afraid that I could start crying at any moment.  No one breathed.  As I straightened back up, my Emee let loose loud, undeniable laughter, allowing everyone else to giggle what they had been holding in.  I laughed, too, but still felt incredibly guilty.  Later that day, when no one was around, I saw my Emee weeping at the table alone, and while I hoped beyond all hope it wasn’t my fault, I still have no idea what the reason was for her tears.

For this reason alone, I will allow my Emee all the ‘misunderstandings’ and ‘cultural faux pas’ she can muster because maybe I am partly to blame for her bad back and leg.  So, last week, after much ado, she finally went to bed in our shared bedroom, but she was up before anyone the next morning, when the light came back on, more grunting ensued, and things started falling at my feet and hitting my head.  I really don’t know why she was throwing stuff, but even if she was only getting even for my cutting up her hospital card, I could live with it.  She left soon, and I got to sleep in in peace.

The rest of the day went uneventfully.  People grazed on food, the cousins played games on smart phones, and it felt more-or-less like holidays spent with my family back in the States.  I liked the feeling.  My sister, Eej, and I took a bus from UB that evening back to our home, where I slept my last night there before heading back to UB the next morning.  I only had to return to fetch my embarrassing coat and boots.  And I also just wanted to say goodbye to my parents without feeling rushed.

While I got to spend two nights in UB, more in one place than I had spent in the previous week, I still had to leave UB relatively soon to head back south.  A trip that I had intended to be low-key and low-stress was actually the opposite with all the back-and-forth and on-and-off of public transportation there was, but I don’t regret going.  I spent the time with people who have meant something to me in my time here, and I was taken care of the whole time.  If last week at all resembles the rest of this year, then I am in for a ride.  But if I’m in good company, I won’t have to worry.

Back to the Real World

Whatever that is.

During a Skype conversation the other morning, I mentioned that–usually– I’m supposed to be at school by 10, which sometimes (often?) means I get there by 11 or so.  Mongolian time, of course.  I’m integrated.   But the response was a laughing, ‘You’ll have a hard time when you get back to the real world.’  Ha, ha.  Funny, funny.  But then I thought about it:

The real world?  What is that?

I’ve been of the opinion for some time that we as humans have an amazing capacity to adjust.  We adjust to the strangest or most uncomfortable circumstances because we have to– that’s just what we do.   When my sister and I traveled around Ireland, we got used to the transitory nature of living.  When I was in grad school, I got used to staying up late reading and writing papers and waking up early to make it to work before I had to be in class before I had to volunteer before I had to stay up late reading and writing papers.  When I moved to Mongolia, I got used to waking up early to make a fire to stay warm, to wearing ten layers of clothing to bed and to school and to the outhouse, to not having work to do after work (and sometimes during).  Things become normalized where before they were ridiculous, strenuous, unharmonious to our previous lives.  Where we are at the moment is the realest of real to us.  It is our world because– aside from our memories from the past and our visions of the future– it’s all we have.

So, would that not make it the real world?

My question stems from this: when I get back to what the questioner considers the Real World, I agree that I will have to make some adjustments.  For example, making it to work on time and (lamentably) earlier than I’m used to going now; staying at work later than I do now (even after dark!); being held accountable for work I do in a way I’m not here (am I, here?).

And yet.

I will also (probably) not have to leave my place of residence with enough time to walk through sand and glass and open construction sites to make it to my work; I will not have to make it home from work in time to make a fire to thaw the water that may have frozen while I was gone; I will not have to sleep in long underwear with a fleece jacket under 2 fleece blankets inside a sleeping bag zipped over my head underneath a camel hair blanket under another fleece blanket under a normal comforter just to stay warm through the night; I will not have to ask others constantly to buy my water so I can wash my hands and clothes and dishes, or my wood and coal so I can make those fires; I will not have to translate everything I hear in my head nor translate everything in my head that I want to be heard.  And work!  Having work that I feel competent doing, that I feel understood doing, that I feel is needed and called for and supported by someone… yes, I will welcome that.  I will wake up early.  I will speak in my native tongue.  And I will do something.  There will be challenges in that there Real World.  But, boy howdy, I’d be darned if they are any more challenging than what feels so real to me in this here world I’m living in.

So maybe life is just transitioning from one world to another, but I don’t think that makes any of them less real.  Each has its struggles, but, so far, I’ve found ways to deal with them, if not to overcome them, with every new turn and with every unexpected shift.

I guess all I’m saying is that, well, I’m here, so let me be here.  When I get there, I’ll do my best to be there.  But there’s no point in rushing, and there’s not much more point to comparing.

The real worlds.

That feels better.

Classroom Doodles

When I write, it’s usually inspired.  Not inspiring necessarily, just sparked by an event that happened: inspired.  I try to hone into the special moments, the ones that make me think, or cry, or smile, or wonder at the absurdity of it all.  But I haven’t written in a while (logically reasoning that I haven’t been inspired in a while) because it just seems like nothing is different anymore.  Everything’s the same.  I walk the same path, and the same boring things go on.  At least, that’s what I told myself.  But maybe I just got lazy.

Throughout this first school quarter,  I ‘co-taught’ English classes twice a week with my English teacher friend at the private school (I say ‘co-taught’ because it’s still her class; I just stand there and smile as I hear, ‘My father name Ganbold.  I am… 7… no… 17 years old.  I like play basketball.  I can… drive a car.  I can’t… smoking.’).  I can’t say I was ever too eager to do this, but I wanted to help my friend who is overworked and overpressured to have foreign teachers work with her.  I am foreign.  I am not a teacher.  But I help.

So here I am in a 4th grade class, dodging the two-toned ‘HI’s and the gawking stares as we all wait for class to begin, when I see in the far corner in the front row an eternal, tooth-bearing, wide-as-I’ll-get-out grin from one of the students.  (I say ‘eternal’ because it was there when I arrived and there when I left, and it was there the whole time in between.)  This smile was directed at me, and it had a different quality than the rest.  It didn’t take long for me to realize that the smile’s owner greatly enjoyed his lessons and that he had cerebral palsy (or something with similar characteristics).  When the teacher asked for volunteers to introduce themselves, his was one of the first hands to go up.  When the teacher asked for the whole class to sing songs, he sang out, loud and proud.  When he would lose the games and sit down, he would practice his English– singing the ABCs, telling me his father’s name, whatever– and smile.  I was so happy that no one made fun of his labored speech, and he did everything so cheerfully that it was hard not to smile with him around.

Already, I was in a good mood.  It didn’t matter to me that these kids didn’t remember the English words for ‘age’ or even ‘is.’   They were fun.  My face wore a genuine smile the whole time.  Even when I saw a couple kids in the back row drawing, I thought, ‘Look how creative this group is!  Boy, they are really something.’  And I’d continue to smile.   Between activities, one of the doodlers made his way up to me to give me what he’d been working on– a drawing of a Mongolian town with the various buildings labeled– and made his way back to his seat as his peers gave jealous stares.  It’s true, I thanked him.  And I smiled.  But I tried not to make a big deal out of it by setting it on my lap and pretending to pay attention to the task at hand.

Eternal Grin couldn’t bear it.  He started flipping furiously through his notebook for a blank page, and when he found a suitable one, he ripped it out and started writing.  Because I was watching through my peripheral vision, I couldn’t see what he was writing, but I saw him flip the page over and start over on the opposite side.  Then– still smiling– I saw him reach forward.  I looked and took what he was offering me: a white page with the word, ‘Hi,’ carefully written on one side and an ‘H’ started on the other.   I thanked him quietly, smiled wide, and gave him a thumbs-up as I mouthed the word he wrote.  The class went on and ended, and– smiling– I bade farewell to my new friends, sending a special wave to Eternal Grin.

Inspiring, that’s what that was.  I had been inspired.  It’s not the kind of thing that happens to me everyday.  Maybe I should get more classroom time (not likely).  Or maybe I should just sit in front of the private school, waiting to make young friends (creepy).  Or maybe I should just be more aware and present in the activities I’m already involved in (possible).

Regardless, this moment had broken the usual monotony: I couldn’t stop smiling the rest of the day.

How to… [China edition]

I took a break.  I left Mongolia and braved the border crossing I can see from my ger to travel for a couple weeks with my sister in the land called China.  It was unknown territory, the stuff of legend.  But I did it.  And just to show my goodwill, I’m sharing the lessons I learned while doing it.

Be careful out there.

When someone offers you their baby

Take it.

[This is an opportunity for their child to be in the arms of a foreigner, not for the foreigner to kidnap a Chinese child.  It’s all for their benefit.  You are here for them.]

When you’re done drinking out of a plastic bottle

Hand it to an old, disheveled person on the street.  They usually like this sort of thing.  Actually, they usually approach you, asking for it.  Roaming elderly: It’s the new wave of recycling.

If you don’t know what it is

Eat it anyway.  This is called open-mindedness.   Also, cultural integration.

[Think: green pea popsicles; roast duck ‘barticue;’ stinky tofu; thousand year old eggs; red bean ice cream/ pancakes/ rice/ tea]

When they point their camera in your direction

They’re taking your picture.  Because you’re foreign.  And therefore trespassing.  Or interesting.  Or at the mercy of all those who can speak this language in which you can only say, Thank you, and Hello, and Don’t want.

When a woman yells that you’re going the wrong way

Follow her.  It doesn’t matter if she’s right, or if you can’t understand anything else she says.  It’s all part of the experience.  And she may very well know more about your destination than you do.  In fact, she will call her friend who will get on the bus at your destination to tell you you’ve reached it.  This is called social networking.

When you’re exhausted on a city bus

It’s ok to fall asleep.  And when your head repeatedly nods against something stable, let it.  Only when you regain consciousness will you realize that it was the dude-to-your-left’s shoulder your forehead kept hitting.  Just pretend you don’t notice your makeup marking his black shirt by looking out the window and ignoring his presence.

When you’re complimented

Say what you think is the modest form of gratitude.  Which is actually a stupid form asking where someone is from.  And when I say stupid, I mean saying one word twice, the word that means, where, or from.  Neither of which you ever knew you knew.

When you get to the border

Impress your new American friends with your Mongolian language skills, when you ride across in a jeep that has luggage in the engine, on the hood, on the roof, around, under, and on you.  And with your climbing skills, when you get to your hashaa that now has a locked gate.  And with your capacity for trust, when you get to your ger that has no lock at all.    It’s the hard-core version of being cultured.

When a man on a stopped bike is examining his penis

Is it rude to watch?   Because you do anyway as you walk by, and nothing seems to be perverted about the situation or out of the ordinary about his demeanor, aside from his genitals being visible under a lamplight in a dark alley.

But that’s China for you.