Somewhere Between

Last night Chris and I went to see this movie.  It's playing one more time, Friday evening at 7 p.m., at the Art Museum if any Cleveland folks are interested in seeing it.  It's not the sort of movie that's going to find a casual audience--it's playing in very limited venues going around the country and it's the sort of thing you have to make a real effort to see, at least until it's released on DVD/Blu-Ray.  I recommend it very definitely for folks who've had or are considering the adoption experience, and especially who've adopted from China because it specifically features Chinese adoptees.  But not without a few reservations, or at least a few observations.

First, though, I have to confess to being occasionally cowed by the thought of trying to provide my daughter with a sense of culture and cultural identity that I don't myself have.  I do my best--she attends Chinese school and does not love it (much like one of her friends here, not adopted, is forced by her Greek-heritage mother to attend Greek school which she mostly hates, heh).  We celebrate Chinese New Year.  And we try to direct her attention to at this point positive and interesting information about her native country and her heritage.  That isn't always easy when you consider that when China appears in the news, it's usually not in a flattering light.  (And don't even get me started on campaign rhetoric, which thankfully is over for now but will very predictably return.)  But the fact is none of us except Thalia are Chinese or were raised around any of it.  So we do the best we can with what we have. 

Aside from the cultural challenges, the fact is that there's very little chance that Thalia will ever have complete and accurate information about the circumstances of her birth or the first months of her life.  I'd give her that if I could, and if she wants to find things out some day we'll do our best to help her, but the fact is I have next to zero information myself.  And what I have may or may not be accurate.  According to the information I was provided, she was left in a cardboard box, in jammies with a blanket, by the gates of a middle school in Maoming.  She was found there and brought to this institution.  She was given a birth date of November 30, 2003, which was the day she was brought in. They estimated her to be only hours old based on the state of her umbilical cord.  11/30/03 may or may not be her actual birthday but at least in her case--again, assuming that what I was told is true--it's close.  For one of the girls in this movie, she really has no idea when her birthday is and in fact she acknowledges that she's probably in fact older than what official records claim her to be.  That girl's abandonment story is more harrowing even than Thalia's because she was old enough to remember what happened.  It's not a nice story, but it's a gripping one.

To the extent that I have criticisms of the movie, they are mostly that these girls' experiences are perhaps not typical of adoptees.  Their adoptive families range from well off to *really* well off.  One girl travels back to China with her family every single year.  Look up online some time how much flights to China cost.  And in fact they all travel a lot.  We want to take Thalia back to China as well, but frankly it will probably be once and that's it.  One girl attends Phillips Exeter Academy, another the Nashville Performing Arts High school (although at least that's a public school).  Nobody who adopts internationally is poor (all countries have at least some minimum income requirements of adoptive parents), but I would guess most of us are not *that* well-heeled.  Moreover--SPOILER ALERT--one of the girls goes on a search for her birth family that turns out, at least in how the film was edited, to meet with improbably easy success.  If Thalia were to embark on something like that I can't imagine that she'd find anyone; we're talking about a city with more inhabitants than Los Angeles (and yet it's only the 7th largest city in its own province--that's how incredibly populous China is) and she has next to no information to go on.

But maybe these are minor points, because in many ways I imagine these girls' experiences to be very typical, at least in ways that matter most to the filmmaker.  The movie is about the girls' attempts to find and forge their own identities in a world where their identity is not simply a fact taken for granted the way it is for most of us.  The movie ends with one of the girls, Fang, describing her ideal world of forging her American and her Chinese heritages together.  She describes it as "Fangtopia."  And then she concludes a bit wistfully by saying, "But there is no Fangtopia.  There's only the world."  It's sad, but it's oddly hopeful at the same time.  She knows she's different, but she's figuring out ways to make herself OK with that.  Because she has to.