The process of transnational adoption is transplanting one culture into another other, creating this cultural diffusion that the adopted child typically has no say. There’s often an erasure of birth culture, customs, and identity, which is typically not the fault of the adoptive parents, but rather a culture that requires assimilation for survival, America prizes individualism that acquiesces to assimilation. American culture is often traced back to ideas of freedom, opportunity, and democracy. This culture, or at least the cultural phenomenon known as the American dream, is an outlier, as its cultural relevancy spans beyond America itself. N knew his American dream: start a family, own a business, and glorify God.
Finding himself in a city in South Asia, N was thrust into a culture that was so opposite to America. The poverty was excruciating. The treatment of women was abhorrent. Militia lined the city. The water was murky and smelled. Bombs went off in city squares. Nothing seemed American. Except the American dream, which had made its way to the Embassy in his country.
The land of opportunity, and the American dream, had just become mine.
“What will she be in America?” an Embassy official asks. He expects the child to become a white person’s slave. “She will be anything she wants. A doctor, a lawyer, whatever. She can do what she wants,” N responded. The land of opportunity, and the American dream, had just become mine. My dad spoke it into existence.
When N arrived back in the states, his perception of Americans changed. Americans never realize how lucky they are to be living “the dream.” The dream of hot showers with clean water and cheeseburgers that can be made on command. “I’m not rich,” he thought until he came home to a 4-acre plot with a shop, a home, with a wife and a new daughter who had the ability to work and vote. His dream became intentional gratefulness.
There is this idea that transnational adoption means that the birth culture and the adoptive culture share no connections. But the Embassy official knew about the American dream before my father stated it. Shop owners who told my parents that “all Americans live in palaces” knew the American dream. My birth parents who left me on the orphanage doorstep knew the American dream.
The cultural bridge between my birth parents and adoptive parents is the American dream.
N is…
- 55 Years-Old
- Male, Cisgender
- White
- Baptist
- Working Class
- Straight