Overview

Scope note: this territory has a literature written largely by the adoptees inside it, and it does not fit in one lesson. Treat this as orientation. Expect to read further, seek consultation, and consider referral or co-treatment.

Intercountry adoption shares most of its clinical ground with transracial domestic adoption, for intercountry adoptees of color placed in white families. Lesson 6.1 covers that shared territory. What follows is what's specifically different: country, language, and the experience of learning about placement-era practices as an adult.

Kendra Rosati, a Korean adoptee, described being told all her life that she was just like her blonde, blue-eyed sisters, and knowing she wasn't, and praying at night that she'd wake up looking like them. That's the shared piece. The rest of this lesson is what sits underneath it.

Country and language loss

The adoptee was born in one country and raised in another. They usually don't speak the language of their birth country. The food, holidays, references, and daily rhythms of that country weren't how they grew up. Many describe not feeling quite at home in the country that raised them and not at home in the country they came from. The literature calls this the between-cultures experience, which is shorthand for something specific: their cultural literacy is in the adoptive country, their visible body is from the birth country, and the surrounding world reads them differently than they read themselves.

What the adoptive family did shapes the loss. Some made substantial efforts, including heritage camps, language study, celebrations, food, and relationships with adults from the birth country. Many adoptees describe those efforts with appreciation and complexity at once: heritage camp was meaningful and it also marked their difference; language study introduced them to words they may have spoken before and cannot recall; the culture arrived as a curriculum rather than through daily life.

Other families made little effort, or actively assimilated the child. Some adoptees were given new first names that replaced their birth names, were told to forget the language they spoke at placement, or had their birth culture treated as background information rather than as part of who they are. The clinical material there includes the cumulative effect of cultural erasure inside the family.

Age at placement changes the weight. An infant placed at six months has no conscious memory of the country. A child placed at three or five or eight remembers food, language, faces, places, sometimes specific people, and the adoption may have included a sudden discontinuity in language, environment, and relationships that they had little capacity to process at the time. Adult clients placed at older ages may carry material from that transition they've never put into words.

Language is its own territory. An adoptee who doesn't speak their birth language may experience it as a barrier to their own culture. Learning it as an adult is possible and meaningful, and it doesn't recover what childhood acquisition would have given. Grief about language often surfaces at specific moments: realizing they can't speak with biological family in their first language, can't read documents from their birth country, or need translation for the references they want to reach.

Learning about placement-era practices

Some intercountry adoptees discover, in adulthood, that adoption practices during their placement era included documented irregularities: falsified paperwork, questionable consent, and in some cases trafficking. The discovery changes the conditions of their own story, usually without resolving them. A client may not be able to learn whether her own placement involved any of it, which means the uncertainty is the material.

A clinical picture from this territory: an adoptee from Hunan, China, placed as an infant in the 1990s, reads an article about documented trafficking from her province during her placement era. Three weeks later she's read everything, joined an online group of other Chinese adoptees processing the same material, and arrives saying she doesn't know who she is anymore, doesn't know whether her parents knew what they were part of, and doesn't know whether her birth mother relinquished her or lost her.

The useful first move there is usually to slow the work down. She's been doing intense self-directed learning and is now overwhelmed. Something like: what you're describing is substantial, and the information you've found in the last three weeks has changed the conditions of your own story. That gives her permission to be in the discovery period without rushing toward what to do about it. Where it goes next is hers.

Keep — one-page takeaway

Scope note: this territory has a literature written largely by the adoptees inside it, and it does not fit in one lesson. Treat this as orientation. Expect to read further, seek consultation, and consider referral or co-treatment.

What's specifically intercountry

• Country loss. Born in one country, raised in another. Often not at home in either, in the specific way the between-cultures experience describes.
• Language loss. Usually no fluency in the birth language. Adult learning is meaningful and doesn't recover childhood acquisition. Grief surfaces at contact with biological family, at documents, at references needing translation.
• Culture as curriculum. Heritage camps and language study can be meaningful and can simultaneously mark difference. Expect appreciation and complexity together.
• Cultural erasure. Replaced birth names, being told to forget the language, birth culture treated as trivia. The cumulative effect is clinical material.
• Age at placement. Older-age placement means actual memory, and a sudden discontinuity in language, environment, and relationships the child couldn't process at the time.
• Placement-era discovery. Falsified paperwork, questionable consent, trafficking. Learning this in adulthood changes the conditions of the story, usually without resolving them. The uncertainty is often the material.

In the room

• When placement-era material lands, slow the work down. Self-directed research often outruns the client's capacity to absorb it.
• Name that the conditions of their story have changed. Don't rush to what they should do about it.
• The adoptee community for their specific country of origin is often the most useful referral available.
• Most of Lesson 6.1 applies here as well for intercountry adoptees of color in white families.

Continued considerations

• What do you actually know about the placement-era practices of the countries your clients came from?
• How would you sit with a client whose central question can never be answered?
• Sit with this: what does it mean to lose a language you can't remember speaking?

↓ Download this takeaway (PDF)