The Agony of Diversity

Diversity Is Our Strength, but the NYT keeps running op-eds by adopted Asian women about how much they hated being diverse.

From the New York Times opinion section:

I Was Adopted From China as a Baby. I’m Still Coming to Terms With That.

Sept. 15, 2024

By Cindy Zhu Huijgen

Ms. Huijgen, a Dutch journalist based in China and a former adoptee, wrote from Beijing.

As early as I can remember, I wished I hadn’t been Chinese.

I hated my unruly black hair and my eyes, which marked me as a foreigner in the Netherlands, where I grew up. I went to bed at night hoping I’d wake up with blond hair and blue eyes like the other Dutch kids. Sometimes I tricked myself into believing this had happened — until a mirror reminded me where I came from.

I was adopted from China as a toddler in 1993 by white Dutch parents who couldn’t conceive on their own. I grew up in a deeply Christian small town where, every week, dozens of people — all of them white — paraded past our house in their Sunday best on the way to church. It was about as far as you could get — physically, culturally, ethnically — from China.

I don’t blame my adoptive parents for the sense of alienation I grew up with. They did their best to give me a happy childhood, and I love them very much.

But, as a professional writer, it’s not like I’m going to pass up my only semi-interesting story — how psychologically horrific was my childhood — out of regard for them.

But when China confirmed earlier this month that it would end most adoptions by foreign parents, a wave of relief washed over me, followed by suppressed anger.

Anger at whom? Your fellow Chinese for being so callous as to make little provision for their surplus Chinese girl babies? Or Christian white people for taking the babies in and raising them lovingly?

It’s a pretty general pattern in recent generations that adoptions by kindly white Westerners eventually lead East Asians to decide that their culture is cruel to unwanted babies and we shouldn’t let the round-eyes show us up anymore with their greater human charity. So East Asian countries, like South Korea a generation ago and China recently, get around to banning overseas adoptions and setting up institutions to deal with their baby problem internally.

But of course, the NYT op-ed page is not in the business of complimenting white Christians for helping raise the moral standards of non-whites. C’mon …

The number of Chinese children placed with overseas families since China opened up to international adoptions in the early 1990s has been estimated at more than 160,000. Around half of these kids went to the United States. The topic is usually discussed from the adoptive parents’ perspective: How it allowed them to start families, how they rescued these orphans and now how the sudden ban leaves applicant couples in the lurch.

Far less attention is given to the darker side of these placements and their impact on adoptees.

Eh, as an op-ed addict, I’ve read hundreds of dramatic, emotionally tortured essays by adoptees like this blaming their uncomfortable adolescences on being adopted. In contrast, I’ve read very few by adoptees saying, “You know, being adopted was fine. No big complaints. Being a teen isn’t easy for anybody, but my teen years were okay.”

There are two obvious contradictory explanations for this imbalance. One is that most adoptees suffer the torments of the damned from being adopted, pain that they’d never have felt if they weren’t adopted.

The other possibility is that essays about how being adopted was, you know, not too bad and seemed like a pretty reasonable deal all around are much more boring than the more cliched kind we see all the time, so they get written less and published even fewer times.

China’s strict one-child family planning policy, introduced in 1979, forced many Chinese parents to give up babies. These were usually girls, because of a traditional preference for male heirs. A profit-motivated overseas adoption industry cropped up in response, in which human lives were sometimes bought and sold.

Obviously, the white capitalists were the villains in this, not the Chinese communists.

For many like me — plucked from our home cultures and raised in countries where we didn’t quite fit in — the search for who we are and where we belong has been lifelong and full of discovery, as well as confusion, regret and loss.

As we all know, Race Does Not Exist. Nature is nothing, nurture is everything. So how come the theme of this op-ed is how the author would have been much happier growing up in her own race’s culture?

Well, that’s easy to explain. As everybody knows, white people are evil. So white’s see skin deep differences and torment the superficially different:

I was one of the first nonwhite kids at my primary school in Alblasserdam, a tidy little Dutch town. Some classmates would kick my bike, trying to break it, because, as one boy put it, “a filthy Chinese does not deserve this.” The ubiquitous, indispensable bicycle is a symbol of the Dutch nation, and to them, I wasn’t Dutch enough for one. I heard adults say “slant eye” and saw them use their fingers to pull up the corners of their eyes.

Even in my extended family, I sometimes felt like an intruder. …

I went home in tears and pleaded with my parents to take me to China.

They took out a second mortgage on our house to afford the trip, and in 2003, at 12 years old, I was back on my native soil. To suddenly find yourself among your own kind has a powerful effect; I finally felt the sense of belonging that I had sought for so long. Now it was my parents who stood out. Strangers would stare at the two white people accompanying a Chinese child.

How do you like diversity now, mom and dad?

… On Sept. 5, at the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s daily press briefing, conflicting emotions swirled inside me as I nervously raised my hand to ask a government spokeswoman about reports, then still unconfirmed, that international adoptions would be stopped. When she announced that what had essentially become a legalized form of child trafficking was indeed now over, it felt cathartic.

But any relief I feel is tempered by knowing that China’s government will probably never fully acknowledge the system’s abuses. I’m still angry — at the fraught legacy of the adoptions, at the enduring focus on prospective parents’ feelings instead of the children’s and when people imply that I should be grateful for having been adopted. …

Cindy Zhu Huijgen (@czhuijgen) is a Beijing-based correspondent for the Dutch daily newspaper Trouw. She is the author of “Dit Is Ook China” (“This Is Also China”), a memoir of her adoption experience and life in China.

These kind of op-eds, whose numbers are legion, come with an implicit message: Diversity is painful to nonwhite minorities. (Is it painful to whites? Why do you ask? Why do you care about white children? What kind of racist are you?)

So, the only conceivable solution is to overwhelm white majorities in places like the Netherlands with nonwhites in a Great Replacement so that the whites suffer the agony of diversity.

Update: commenter PE Bird points out the Chinese government’s announcement of its ban on foreign adoptions was graciously stated:

We express our appreciation to those foreign governments and families, who wish to adopt Chinese children, for their good intention and the love and kindness they have shown.

Hopefully, this will work out for the best.