I became a mother for the first time in the backseat of a taxi. After my husband and I spent three hours at my son’s orphanage, smiling at caregivers and signing decrees, we climbed into the taxi that was gunning its engines at the gates. Benjamin Quan was thrust into my arms. As we sped off, all I could think was, “What have I gotten myself into?”
During the months that we’d waited to travel to Viet Nam, I did my own kind of nesting. I’m not talking about decorating a nursery, but doing what comes naturally to me as a professor of literature: reading. I pored over tomes about attachment and devoured adoption memoirs, but most of my time was spent reading books written in my son’s birth country.
A Sense of History
My husband and I originally planned on adopting from India, and I spent the eight months that we waited on our agency’s list sampling India’s rich literary tradition. My selections included everything from chick lit, like Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, by Meera Syal, to more substantive books, such as Arundhati Roy’s masterful The God of Small Things.
Then, in a page-turning twist, our agency asked if we’d be interested in a little boy from Viet Nam. We fell in love at first glimpse of his photo, redid our dossier—and I redirected my reading. The sense of history these books imparted was so different from what I learned about Viet Nam from the Web. In The Sacred Willow, Duong Van Mai Elliott traces her family’s—and her country’s—history through four generations, from the French occupation through the fall of Saigon. This personal view of the past, present, and future of my son’s country of birth was a gift, and will be invaluable in helping him understand his origins.
From the Inside Out
Memoirs written by adoptive parents echo my own journey, and memoirs written by adoptees suggest the journeys my sons may take. Yet most of these books describe cultures from the outside looking in. Reading books produced within a culture and heritage gives a different perspective—insider takes on traditions, social customs, religious beliefs, and familial relationships.
Three years after bringing Benjamin home, we began the process to adopt a second child. We decided to try again to adopt from India, so I turned back to that country’s literature, eager to build on the understanding I’d started developing years earlier.
In A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry narrates the story of two tailors whose unexpected friendship with a higher-caste woman transforms both of them—and her. Set in the recent past, the novel ends in a “fine balance” of tragedy and hope, giving a sense of India’s difficult journey to democracy. It’s a view I never would have discovered in a tourist guidebook.
Developing Empathy
Immersed in the joy of becoming a mother, I could have easily overlooked the distressing circumstances that gave me my greatest gifts. Yet the sad truth is that adoptions occur in many sending countries as a result of tragic conditions: poverty, the stigma of unwed motherhood, AIDS, governmental decrees.
After adopting my youngest son, Samuel Saurabh, I discovered Thrity Umrigar’s Bombay Time and The Space Between Us. These stunning novels reveal the difficulties impoverished women in India face.
These books sharpened my empathy for India’s poor and, in my mind, drew me closer to my son’s unknown birth mother. Even though I had traveled to India, it wasn’t until I read Umrigar’s books that I felt I could even begin to understand her story.
Personal Narratives
Though I’ve been a mom for four years now, I haven’t stopped reading books from India and Viet Nam. By now, these books feel like part of me, part of my family’s own story—beginning with that first day of motherhood. Slowly, on that wild taxi ride to Ho Chi Minh City, I began to sense that everything would be OK. The countryside and the culture I saw slipping past through the window seemed familiar, from my reading. By the time we arrived at our destination, I knew what I’d gotten into. My son’s own story—about what it means to be Vietnamese, to be cherished, to be my son—had begun.
