Still, when she went back to Sri Lanka as an adult, she said it felt right. She looked like everyone else. The food was right for her body.

WTF a liking for South Indian food is not genetically determined for heaven's sake.

I thought that referred to vague digestive issues, like being stopped up by Swedish meatballs or something.

ASSHOLES.

I'll take, 'Examples of things that can be stopped by Swedish meatballs' for $100, Alex.

Zurich is a neighborhood in Stockholm?

1. As an atheist, I have a certain amount of sympathy for obnoxious Sam Harris-style literalism, but I still think we can cut people some slack for having feelings that don't quite match up with reality.

I like Swedish meatballs.

7: I didn't know you were Swedish!

I like Swedish meatballs too, but my favorite dish, right now, is älplermagronen.

I also think we're being too subtle: HG, you do know you have a typo in the post, right?

i've wondered for years what m*m*veryclevertrousers thinks about this whole ball of wax, the entire situations is so completely fuuuuucked all the way up --- even if you or your kid wasn't stolen the horror of thinking maybe your baby was??? do you pick at that sore, let it rest??? truly mind-scrambling awful horror.

Ha. I do now. Unfortunately I'm away from a computer for a while.

and it is by no means just int'l adoptions, or confined to the past -- it's happening right now with the children separated at the border, it happened in israel until quite recently with children of yemeni immigrants, there's the horror of no. america and australia indigenous children, once you start actually paying attention it seems to be everywhere adoption happens on an institutional basis, i.e., outside of the birth mother personally being in charge of the process.

Almost as if humans were a valuable enough commodity to be worth stealing. Weird.

13: It is weird! Humans are a pain!

Also, strictly, they weren't scam adoptions. The goods were delivered, but turned out to have been stolen.

The birth mothers were right there. They didn't say anything.

Nic Cage stole babies before he ever stole the Declaration of Independence.

At least they aren't throwing Swedish cheese on the babies.

Swedish cheese is safer, because it has air holes.

Swedish fish has gills instead.

Swedish Phish could be a cover band.

WTF a liking for South Indian food is not genetically determined for heaven's sake.

Right. I love South Indian food, but have no apparent "ethnic" or "genetic" ties to the region. The reification of food preferences is obviously quite wrong, and potentially a bit sinister (it gets us into weirdly racialized territory).

However, when it comes to an adoptee who grew up suspecting that something was off, something did not quite add up, I think we should cut a fairly long line of slack. Yes, the food stuff is weird, but maybe that's a shorthand for something at a deeper level that the adopted child did experience?

WTF a liking for South Indian food is not genetically determined for heaven's sake.

I don't know, seems like gut bacteria - rather than genetics - might be a plausible mechanism that would explain her body's affinity for the food.

23: gut bacteria are going to be influenced by what a person actually eats, though.

After a lifetime of eating Swiss cuisine, I suspect that any other national cuisine would seem right for just about anyone's body (OK, maybe not English or Scottish cuisines).

If you didn't die immediately after writing that, it's a lie.

Last semester I had a (mostly indigenous) South American student who had been adopted as an infant by a white US family. She's just beginning to identify as a transracial adoptee, so I gave her a few books from the perspectives of other adoptees that she seemed to find really meaningful.

Books which say what?

In part, that white parents who raise children of color need to think a lot harder about race and racism.

For instance? I'm curious because between aging rich countries and burning poor ones I think we'll be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing.

25: well, your national cuisine gives you the shits and/or kills you about 15 times as often as our national cuisine does us, so you may not be on the best ground to criticise.

But you don't even know who said that.

For instance? I'm curious because between aging rich countries and burning poor ones I think we'll be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing.

I know somebody who was just reading some books on that topic, and the ones I remember her mentioning are:

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung
Digging To America (fiction) by Anne Tyler

There was at least one more, which I'll try to remember.

Thanks, but I meant, like, examples. I doubt I'll be reading books about this.

That said, the last photo is the absolute best.

This is true.

This personal narrative seems to be the latest in a series of essays by adoptees, not all of them transracial. There are still domestic adoption scams in the U.S. I could come up with a lot more links pretty quickly.