"Words on the Night Breeze" was a 1990s Chinese radio call-in show for women. The radio personality, Xinran, moved to London in 1997 and now writes occasionally for The Guardian.
Last month she wrote an article describing her "encounter" with a birthmother who had abandoned her child. I now have enough anecdotal supporting evidence that when Katie and Claire ask (and I know they will) if their abandoning birthmothers' loved them, I can sincerely answer "yes."
But I now have other questions after reading the article.
The compassion of bystanders for abandoned children is not always there. Xinran was ridiculed for attempting to come to the aid of an abandoned child. We too felt this while we were in China adopting Claire, when we got the occasional dirty look from pedestrians. Why the lack of compassion?
The birthmother who called Xinran and admitted to abandoning the child on a cold winter morning was sobbing when she reported that her family and village(!) were urging her to get rid of her child. I cannot imagine how a village could pressure a mother into abandonment or infanticide.
Xinran reports another birthmother wishes for a rich person to take her daughter. This to parallels our experience. While in China adopting Katie, a father offered to sell us his preschool daughter. One could charitable in saying these birthparents wanted a better life for their children, but I cannot think but that the love of a birthparent is beyond any monetary sum.
A birthmother wonders if foreign adoptive parents "know how to feed and love them." This coming from a parent who had decided to leave her daughter defenseless on a street corner. When we adopted our girls, the Chinese and Vietnamese governments had us sign an affidavit indicating that we would never abandon or sell the children. What was unthinkable to us apparently wasn't a given in their society.
Finally, a birthmother begs the new family "to love her as if she were their own." This is the one phrase I hear in casual conversations that annoys me the most. Of course I am going to love my daughters as if they were my own because they are my own. It annoys me to no end that some don't consider my family to be a true one. I am not a fake parent and my children belong to no other than my wife and me. Well-meaning strangers often say "I'd consider adoption if I couldn't have children of my own." I can never get myself to reply "good for you!" These same people should never adopt because adoption should never be viewed as a consolation prize. (The Institute for Adoption Information has a handy guide as to what phrases can be offensive to adoptive families.)
Xinran has a book out that looks promising.
Tonight was beggar's night. Marissa was "Bubbles" Powerpuff, Katie was "Blossom" Powerpuff, and Claire (too small for a Powerpuff costume) was a dalmation who didn't want to wear her dog hat. Had I not been so lazy, I would have gone as the matching Professor from Powerpuff. Interestingly enough, neither of my Asian girls identifies with "Buttercup", the one with black hair.
The girls' Kindergarten teachers suggested they categorize and count their candy as an exercise so between the older two, the haul was 515 pieces of candy. It barely fit on the kitchen table. Well actually 509 pieces of candy, 2 milkshake vouchers, 2 pencils, and 2 sets of Vampire teeth. Claire helped and got out of the wagon for only about 6 houses, but since the other family members will invariably eat all the 18-month-old's candy, I can't say as I blame her.
To match her character, Katie wore black makeup around her eyes. It was a pain removing at bathtime. There will be some residual makeup tomorrow at school for her as Chris doesn't have any cold cream.
I snuck a Snicker's crucher bar after the girls went to bed. The guilt has passed.
Back in the bad old days before the Voting Rights Act, states use to pass all kinds of tests to prevent or intimidate blacks from voting. These tactics included poll taxes, literacy tests, vouchers of "good character, "disqualification for "crimes of moral turpitude" or "grandfather clauses" preventing voting unless you were descended from another voter.
Even though these laws didn't single out blacks, these election laws were enforced selectively along racial boundaries to skew the vote in favor candidates supported by whites. They were evil and rightly outlawed.
Surely no mainstream party would attempt to selectively intimidate and enforce voting laws to skew the vote against blacks in this upcoming election. It would be so wrong, that they would be vilified. Right?
Well actually Jack Richardson IV, a political party chairman in Kentucky, is doing it. He is registering "challengers" for Election Day in 59 voting precincts in predominantly black neighborhoods. These challengers, very few of whom live in their assigned precincts, can question and force a prospective voter to prove their identity and residency. They can be denied the right to vote if they don't cooperate. Like the Jim Crow laws in the past, the challengers are within the bounds of the current law but the law can be enforced as the challenger sees fit. Mr. Richardson has not designated any challengers in predominantly white neighborhoods.
Some fear that some older black residents, who are legally allowed to vote but remember the harassment that occurred before the Voting Rights Act passed, might feel too intimidated to show up at their polling location.
Last year, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional because it contains the words "Under God". Those two words (and a comma) were added by congress in 1954, during the height of the Red Scare at the suggestion of the Knights of Columbus to distinguish us from the Godless communists (a common term at the time).
The original, written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist preacher and socialist was:
I Pledge Allegiance to my Flag And to the Republic for which it stands, One Nation, Indivisible, With Liberty and Justice for All.
And so now, after three revisions, it is currently:
I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America And to the Republic for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, With Liberty and Justice for All.
Like all good schoolchildren, my daughter has learned the Pledge in Kindergarten. Last night, she recited it spontaneously for the family and wouldn't you know it, they have the audacity to teach yet another version! Rather than wait for the Supreme court to make their decision on its legality, my daughter's school is doctoring the pledge to suit their needs.
Here is the version she has memorized (note the subversive ending):
I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America And to the Republic for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, With Liberty and Justice for All. Have a great day!
P.S. My favorite version is here.
For four days, my wife and mother-in-law went on vacation to Las Vegas. I took off work to be a fulltime care giver. While I pale in care giving expertise in comparison to their mother, the girls and I had a good time; enough so, that they were not upset that mommy was gone so long. I was exhausting for me though. I could not do full time what she does daily.
When her flight home touched down Sunday afternoon, she called from her cell phone to ask whether she should pick up dinner on the way home. Yes, thank you. She also told me not to mention to the girls that she was on her way home: she wanted to surprise the girls. I kinda wished she hadn't called because the next two hours waiting for her to come home felt like forever.
When she got home, I was kinda expecting a gushing "Thank for you taking time off work, so I could enjoy a great vacation," but what I got instead was "I didn't enjoy myself enough to go back." It was a homecoming devoid of gushing. Oh, well.
She did bring fast food dinner home, but when she noticed the drive-thru didn't get her order straight, she got back in her car to rectify the situation. It became another dinner alone with the girls.
The Feds have received a threat from a religious cleric who recently was quoted on internationally broadcast TV saying 'If I could just get a nuclear device inside Foggy Bottom, I think that's the answer.' He went on to say 'We've got to blow that thing up.' Government has strong indications that this clergy was referring to U.S. State Department's headquarters located there.
The State Department has been aware for some time that this figure has financial ties to Liberia. Intelligence reports indicate that he supported its repressive leader Charles Taylor, who was recently ousted. U.S. troops are now policing the country as it recovers from the dictator.
The head of the State Department called his treats "despicable", but the department is powerless to act in light of the laws in the religious figure's country protecting his actions.
The religious leader's comments on blowing up the State Department are documented here.
The religious leader's comments supporting the Dictator are documented here.
My wife and kids aren't interested in politics, but I did mention to my young daughter this week that California is getting a new "boss." She's not familiar with the term "Governor" but she is familiar with the term "boss." She hears that all the time.
Daddy: "Who is the boss of the family?"
Marissa: "Mommy!"
Marissa then asked who was the boss of the world and I said President Bush. (In hidesight I should have said Kofi Annan, but then I would have had to explain the meaning of puppet figurehead.) Anyway, Marissa said she wanted to be the President when she grew up. And then I said she couldn't be President, but quickly added she probably wouldn't want to be and that she could be anything else. I didn't go into why being born in Vietnam dequalifies her.
Well maybe that'll change. Sen. Orrin Hatch wants to amend Article II of the Constitution to allow foreign-born citizens to become president. He's started pushing this idea mid-summer when Arnold Schwarzenegger started considering the run for Governor.
Personally I think it would very unlikely that a Hollywood actor could ever be elected Governor of California then go on to become the president of the United States.
Until my girls are old enough to contribute, at dinnertime my wife is the cook in the family and I am the dishwasher. She cooks in bulk to save effort as we can then eat leftovers a few times a week. As dishwasher, I have the honor of clearing the table and putting the leftovers in the fridge. Because we often have leftovers, we've invested in a couple dozen GladWare containers. So as I am putting sliced pears in a container, I read its lid: "CAUTION! CONTAINER MAY BE HOT."
As far as I am aware, all grocers sell these containers empty and at room temperature. I believe the only way to warm them up is to put them in the microwave (ideally with food in them). This thermal law applies to non-GladWare containers as well, so the warning really belongs on the microwave: "CAUTION! PUTTING ITEMS IN THE MICROWAVE MAY CAUSE THEM TO GET HOT."
But just in case I'm mistaken, I will start retrieving my GladWare from the cupboard with a pot holder.
I accidently clicked on a banner ad yesterday.
What looked like a web form field actually took me to the emode.com website and I got suckered into taking their IQ test. After spending 20 minutes taking the test they, of course, would only give me the results if I supplied my e-mail address. Against all the advice I give my family and friends, I gave them an e-mail address (to my all-but-dormant Yahoo! account) so I could get my score. I declined the offer of their newsletter.
They calculated my IQ as 138, but I have a feeling the folks emode.com pad the scores to make everyone feel better. Besides engineers always ace logic tests. Amazingly enough, after only taking a short multiple choice test, they could classify me as a "Visionary Philosopher." No ego stroking there! And wouldn't you know, they instantly e-mailed me an offer to buy a detailed report of my results with all the correct answers for $14.95. I declined their kind offer. Perhaps I would have paid for the results had they told me I was "Mysteriously Handsome." Just kidding.
I had no great titles in Jr. High. In eighth grade I took an occupational interest test. By process of elimination from my answers to several yes/no questions, a field of hundreds of occupations was winnowed down to a few. At the time, the perfect career for my introverted personality was: Trash Collector. Had I not chosen later in life to be a Software Engineer, I'm sure I would have been a very visionary garbageman.
The last time I took an intelligence test was for a three-month Effective Time Management course at my workplace. Of course you don't need to know how smart you are to manage your time, but the bosses wanted to know how smart everyone was. The course was lead by "cheerleader type" and was horrible. The course advocated removing pictures of your family from the office because they are too distracting. They also suggested you file memos without reading them to save time. Almost all the participants made effective use of their time by dropping out of the course.
Here are a couple of common misperceptions about Iraq:
1) U.S. Forces found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (After months of searching, Kay's report shows there were none.)
2) There's clear evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein worked closely with the Sept. 11 terrorists. (After months of investigation, Bush indicated that there is no such connection.)
So since no WMA or 9/11 evidence has been found in Iraq and no news organization has reported any evidence, why do people have these misperceptions?
Well it turns out that a study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes organization, found a correlation between a person's primary news source and whether that person has these misperceptions. To state the obvious, what you believe is affected by what you hear on TV.
Assuming that merely changing channels doesn't make you stupider (or smarter) and assuming that news organizations don't outright lie, it becomes a matter of which news outlets are most accurate (and least slanted) when presenting information.
The rankings:
1) PBS/NPR (viewers with the most accurate understanding of events)
2) Print media
3) ABC
4) CNN
5) NBC
6) CBS
7) FOX (viewers most mislead by reported events)
So, I'm switching to ABC for my evening news.
According to a recent study by two economists, U.S. parents of a girl are about 5 percent more likely to divorce than parents of a boy. U.S. parents with three girls are almost 10 percent likely to divorce. Full disclosure: I have three girls. Well I guess I'm lucky to be in the U.S. as this disparity is wider in the developing countries surveyed: Columbia, Kenya, Vietnam. In China, parents get condolence letters when their newborn is female.
It is not just divorce statistics. Divorced mothers with girls are substantially less likely to re-marry than if they had boys. And, as before, that marriage is less likely to last.
Even unmarried couples are less likely to marry if they find out that their fetus is female. So why do couples seem to prefer boys? The authors of the study don't say--they are economists, not psychologists. I can't relate myself, because I really dig being a father to girls.
Yesterday, one of my wife's friends came over and brought her five-year-old boy over to play with our girls. He ran all over the place constantly screaming and the top of his lungs while chasing my middle daughter and hitting her with a foam bat. My other two girls played pretty quietly by themselves. The daughter being chased was giggling so it wasn't too violent, but the boy's mother did almost nothing to rein him in because he was just being a normal kindergarten boy. He was certainly more boisterous than I've ever seen my girls. And I don't have angels.
Years ago, my wife came to the same conclusion that boys are more highly-strung after an afternoon watching the neighbor's toddler boy.
So why do couples prefer boys? The conclusion I come to is that they obviously must crave the turmoil. :-)
A Danish psychologist at Aarhus University has noticed that the average intelligence was falling in his country. Because it was a problem he thought needed fixing, Prof. Helmuth Nyborg has suggested that "The 15 to 20 per cent of those at the lower levels of society - those who are not able to manage even the simplest tasks and often not their children - should be dissuaded from having children."
He said educated women work and study while less educated women spend time procreating. He wants smart women to work less while paying dumb women not to have kids. He insists he is not like Hitler because the dictator exterminated groups and that those groups included intelligent people. I wonder what Nyborg would have thought of Hitler had he only exterminated dumb people.
In a tangentially related topic, former Jew "Dr." Laura Schlessinger's new book The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, which hits the shelves in January, encourages women to have sex with their spouses even if they don't feel like it because husbands "go to work and earn money" and visit relatives they don't like so "why can't their wives put out on demand?"
However if wives aren't motivated to have sex, they can still move to Denmark and use the excuse: "I know you visited my relatives and all, but some Professor paid me money not to have sex with with you."
On China's National Day, the Chinese government repealed a decade's old marriage law. Prior to 5:00am today, you had to get your employer's permission to marry. Not surprisingly the number of marriage registrations jumped dramatically after the law was repealed, with lines going around the blocks of government offices even with extended hours. Wedding halls are all sold out. There have been mass weddings on Chinese TV today.
This was a throwback to the Danwei system of state-run working units which, in the best interest of state, controlled whether you could marry, divorce, get a passport, or get an education for your child. Some of those in line today were filing for divorce now that couples no longer have deal with a mandated mediation by the local civil affairs department.
Over time these laws, like many official functions, occasionally amounted to extortion by employers before these were approved.
The government has not given any indication that it will repeal the household registration system that dictates where Chinese may live.