Adopted Kids Learn Their Culture

Last Saturday at the Falls Church Community Center dozens of families gathered to celebrate the biggest holiday on the Vietnamese calendar, Tet Nguyen Dan, the Lunar New Year. With parents looking on, dozens of children and toddlers, dressed in the traditional ao dai, played together, ate a variety of foods, Asian and American, and took part in a dragon dance, meant to bring good luck with the changing year.

What made this event unique was that all the Vietnamese-born children present had been adopted.

So, while the kids took part in the activities, observing their cultural roots, the parents broadening their awareness of Vietnamese culture at the same time.

In fact, while all the adoptive parents of the Vietnamese children there Saturday were celebrating a fundamental part of their child’s identity of origin, the occasion also served as a reminder that no matter how much the children integrate into their new families, they will always face having to understand themselves as a product of two different cultures.

While international and cross-cultural adoption holds many challenges for parents and children alike, it is also an prospect that offers tremendous opportunity for kids who would otherwise be abandoned and for parents who may never otherwise have a family.

Still, raising an adopted child, especially one who comes from a different country, is a balancing act between acknowledging a child's birth culture and his or her role as a permanent part of a new family.

In order to get assistance in understanding this balance, some families have created their own communities.

The celebration Saturday was hosted by just such a group, the Washington Metropolitan Area chapter of Families with Children from Vietnam, a nationwide organization that brings together parents with adopted Vietnamese children, for the purpose of providing support for the parents and cultural identity for the children.

Two people that have become enthusiastic participants in the group are John Cullather and Kathleen Brown, adoptive parents to three year old Claire Xuan Cullather.

Like most who eventually adopt, it wasn’t a first choice for the couple. The two met and married later in life than many, both products of the "career before family" mentality. Both enjoyed professional success, but also meant it wasn’t until John was 43 and Kathleen 40 when they tied the knot.

But while waiting before starting a family left them more able to support children, the delay made it much harder to actually build a family. Much to their dismay, Brown encountered complications, including infertility issues and then several miscarriages. For this couple, fully prepared to open their home to children, the kids weren’t coming.

Discouraged but unwilling to give up their dream of a family, they started to look into adoption. After studying the options they eventually decided on international adoption. Often, adopting infants within the U.S. requires that the couple be interviewed by the birth mother. After years of trying to give birth, Cullather and Brown were wary about the rejection they feared in the domestic adoption process, especially given that their ages could have turned off many mothers.

The international scene presented similar restrictions, with some countries not allowing adoption by parents over a certain age. But the couple was eventually able to find success with the adoption program in Vietnam.

“Vietnam chose us more than we chose it,” Brown said.

As well as allowing older parents, the system in Vietnam is less centralized than countries like China, which has a single adoption system, meaning that paperwork can get processed much faster by the regional state systems. This was important for Cullather and Brown, who wanted a child that would still be an infant when they got it.

The couple applied for the adoption, filling out the stacks of paperwork, and was finally accepted, receiving the call on a Labor Day. Before long, they were in Vietnam, holding their daughter for the first time.

Then, over the next two weeks, the new family traveled around the country, learning what it could about the country that had given it such a chance. Then they all flew back to the U.S., ready to start a new life.

As they began the journey with their new daughter, the new parents learned that raising an adopted child provided additional challenges to the daunting task of child rearing. They had to face the prospect of teaching their daughter about Vietnam while worrying about making her feel welcome in their family here.

Starting off, Brown was concerned with the physical differences between them and their child. “At first I was hyperaware of the fact that she looked different,” she said. “But I don’t even think about her being Asian anymore.”

Still, Brown and Cullather didn’t want to diminish the fact that their daughter was Vietnamese, and they wanted to make sure that she will always aware of what that means. As a part of pursuing this education process, they joined FCV, looking for advice and companionship in raising a Vietnamese child.

Over the past three years, both parents and daughter have made adoption and Vietnam a constant part of their life, something they celebrate and study.

“I look at it more as an enrichment opportunity,” Brown said. “An enriching experience for our entire family, not just Claire.”

Robin Allen knows a lot about what Brown and Cullather went through. She has a long relationship with international adoption. For 22 years she worked with the Barker Foundation, a Washington area agency that facilitates adoptions and provides references and support for adopted parents.

She spent eight years in international adoption prior to being elevated to executive director, a position she held for 14 years, before starting a private consulting business. She is mother to two adopted children from Colombia.

With the Barker Foundation, Allen worked constantly with parents trying to understand and work through the challenges that adoption brings.

She said that adoptive parents of international children usually take one of two approaches in dealing with their child’s birth country.

“When they adopt families go down either one path or the other,” said Allen. They either really emphasize their child's culture of origin or try to work past the fact that their child has a dual ethnicity. “They tend to see it sort of as a black and white issue,” she said.

Allen said that hesitancy in teaching a child about their birth country is often the result of parental concerns about the stability of the family. Rather than seeing it as a way to study something with their children, some parents are afraid that by teaching them about another culture they are undermining the connection between child and parents.

Others, Allen said, are concerned that if the topic of adoption comes up, they might be asked a question they can’t answer, such as why the child was given up for adoption in the first place. But instead of feeling like they need to know it all, Allen said that it is enough simply to discuss the subject, and even wonder together what the answers could be.

Still, while the initial decisions to promote the birth culture is up to the parents, once children have reached a certain age, it is important to let them take charge of their own cultural studies, she said.

“Parents should be ready to follow their child’s interest or lack of interest,” she said. Children will become interested at different times, some very focused on it, and others less so.

Brown and Cullather, for example, noticed that Claire shows interest at times in her adoption. Recently, when Brown asked Claire to pick a book to read, she chose a story about adoption. Also, Claire takes special pleasure in sharing and talking about the pictures her parents took when they saw her first time in Vietnam.

Other kids often show less enthusiasm early, or their enthusiasm is inconsistent, but Allen said that parents shouldn’t be concerned in either case. By the age of nine, if the child still shows little interest to their birth culture, it might be a good time to do, what Allen described as, “fishing trips.”

Starting conversations about how their birth parents might influence the child’s interests can bring out thoughts a child might feel nervous about sharing, and imagining who their parents might be provides invaluable identity discussions that could be important when they start facing tougher questions later in life.

It is during adolescence that adopted children often start seriously confronting their relationship to their birth parents. For all children, adolescence is a time when they start wrestling with who they are, and the addition of a second family and a second group of influencing factors make the whole process more complicated for adopted kids.

Later, if they go to college, many face yet another transition. At home they would have become accustomed to people understanding that they’re adopted, and are used to seen as such. But in college, when students and faculty aren’t familiar with their history, the adopted students can find that they are suddenly treated as they are outwardly perceived, rather than how they see themselves.

But Allen also cautioned that it is important not to interpret all developmental issues with adoption. “They say adoption offers a very handy coat hook,” Allen said. There are times when both children and parents will blame adoption for problems and tensions, when in fact it is a standard part of growing up.

She said that each person will have a unique response and it is important for the parents to remain in close communication with their children in order to discern whether their issues are part of normal maturing or whether they’re wrestling with specific adoption issues.

While families in the FCV have been doing their best to introduce their children to Vietnamese culture, they have also been made aware of another avenue that can provide an introduction and invitation it, the Vietnamese American community.

The Falls Church area is home to one of the largest populations of Vietnamese in the United States, and the Eden Center, located at Seven Corners is the Vietnamese business and cultural center for the entire eastern seaboard.

A part of that community, the Vietnamese Cultural Society of Metropolitan Washington, makes seeks to preserve and share the cultural traditions of Vietnam.

Brown remembers hearing about the organization and decided that if willing, they could be a great asset in teaching the children about Vietnam and perhaps feeling more connected to the culture.

Quang Le, Vice President of the Vietnamese Cultural Society, said that the purpose of the organization’s mission is to keep the culture of Vietnam alive in America, and sharing it with children adopted from Vietnam is a special opportunity.

Le believes that the most profound conveyors of culture are language and food. Even as some second generation Vietnamese lose the language, he said that they always come back to the food. The Society also teaches language classes in Vietnamese, something that Le is eager to share with the adopted children from FCV.

This warm reception from the Vietnamese community is counter to what adopted children sometimes expect from their native culture. Allen said that many adopted children are often nervous about visiting their home country, or working with people raised in the culture of that country, because they feel they don’t know things they should.

But Le said the Vietnamese community here is excited about welcoming adopted children. “For me there is that special bond,” he said. “They are in no way pariahs.”

In fact, as FCV has grown, adopted children have grained more and more acceptance from the Vietnamese community, both in the U.S. and abroad. They were invited by the Vietnamese Cultural Society to take part in their fall Harvest Festival, and members were also recently invited to visit the Vietnamese embassy.

Allen pointed out that the relationship with the Vietnamese community is a wonderful way to break down some barriers between the adopted kids and their country of origin. And she added that the group itself provides a place where Vietnamese children can truly be among their peers.

She talked about one conference where she worked with a group of people adopted from Korea, all of whom had grown up without knowing any other adoptees. She said that they talked about how, even as they grew accustomed to their status as adopted, they never felt wholly comfortable in either America or during times when they returned to visit their native Korea. But at the conference, as they mingled with other Korean adoptees, many said that for the first time they felt like they were among their peers.

Knowing that, whether they focus on their culture, or just show a passing interest, one of the best things any parent can do is simply to make sure their children are not alone in their situation. It's a task the FCV has perfected.

Brown and Cullather hope that they can bring to their home some company for their daughter, someone to share the adoption experience. While there is presently a temporary moratorium on adopting children from Vietnam, the couple still hopes it can add another face to the family portrait soon.