That's hysterical. My snap reaction is 'no actual harm done', but I'm probably missing it somehow.
Chinese is probably more useful professionally.
Luckily it's not as if any Chinese person ever had a problem with feeling like Koreans were coöpting elements of Chinese culture.
I find the story extremely funny, but I think that's because I don't believe it.
(Also: hi from 34,000 feet! Yay for onboard wireless.)
I think the guy could smooth over things if he announced it properly. "You've worked very hard and we've decided to promote you to Korean."
We try and be PC as possible and we thought we were doing the right thing.
There's your problem right there.
Look, the parents obviously care a lot about the kid, and they've provided him with a wonderful education and exposed him to a wider view of the world than most kids in the U.S. will ever have. If this is a problem, then they're seriously overthinking things.
That said, it's pretty damn funny.
3, probably. Also 4. But let this stand as a warning to people who go down the international adoption route without sufficient thought. I mean it's not like there are any American kids who need an adoptive family. Are there, Thorn?
Also 7 is Moby's comment of the month if not the year.
6: I don't believe it either. But if true, quel tragedie. I mean, the son could have been working on his math and practicing the violin through his formative years...
Am I going to out-humorless Witt? I didn't find it funny at all!
I mean it's not like there are any American kids who need an adoptive family.
If I'm reading the linked article right, this was an American kid. It's just that the parents mistakenly assumed he was Chinese-American, when he was in fact Korean-American.
7, 11: You know, I was snorting too hard to think about it, but come to think I don't believe it either. The way he tells the story, he had the identities of the bio-parents all along, and he represents himself as reasonably sophisticated. He would have had to never have recalled their names while thinking about nationality. But it's still a funny post.
I guessed exactly the punchline from the excerpt!
A Korean guy recently told me that Korean people have a much higher than average incidence of stomach cancer and that it's thought to be caused by kimchi. So they dodged that bullet.
It's not obvious to me that he met the bio-parents?
13/14. The kid wasn't even an immigrant? Well fuck that then, should have been learning Spanish and Latin. Should have been given a dobro for his 8th birthday.
No, as various people have said, clearly an amusing fiction.
18: From this:
About seventeen years ago my wife and I adopted a baby from an Asian American family. While we knew very little details, basically what happened with them is that we learned they were too young for children. I made very little inquiries as (they seemed embarrassed/I didn't want to pry)
To make the story work, you'd want to claim to have had no knowledge of the birth parents at all, and have found out their names later.
6. Don't jump! Or you ain't gonna fly no more.
(Also: hi from 34,000 feet! Yay for onboard wireless.)
My flight yesterday (today? yesterday? I'm confused) claimed to have wireless, and I could connect to a wireless network, but then if I tried to load a webpage I would just get a message that said "the connection was reset while loading this page." I must have spent at least 30 minutes of the flight connecting and disconnecting from the wireless network and trying to load different pages, all without success.
Also, once you're being suspicious -- bilingual in Mandarin while living in a non-Mandarin speaking household by five? Really implausible; I don't think you can get to bilingual with lessons before school age. Biannual trips to China? Not impossible, but that's an awful lot of money.
It didn't occur to me not to believe it when I read it, but thinking about it once Witt said? The details are really implausible.
I made very little inquiries as (they seemed embarrassed/I didn't want to pry)
See, the real reason they gave him up for adoption is because she realized that the baby's real father was the Chinese guy she slept with that one time. So it's all good.
16: Ditto, although I didn't guess the other ethnicity was Korean until I saw the unrelated picture.
20: It strains plausibility, but--I guess he might have become more knowledgeable of East Asian cultures and common names in the years since the adoption? Seventeen years is a long time.
Also, if you wanted your presumably-Chinese son to integrate into the local Chinese-American community, wouldn't you be getting him lessons in Cantonese or Hakka or some other topolect instead of Mandarin?
17. Not just Korea. Higher incidence of stomach cancer is widespread in Asia. H pylori infection also.
My I-should-know-better reddit is trashy
This has been making the rounds in the online adoption world since it went up and the assumption is that it's fake.
I think the story is fake and that the picture-unrelated woman on the front has had some work done.
Boy, I am gullible. It's very easy for me to believe that Reddit threads invite people to make shit up, and for that reason alone I'm happy to believe that it's made up. But if I heard it through some other channel, I'd never bat an eye. Inconsistent and self-serving? Sure, but that's how people tell stories.
Saw it coming and it was still funny.
Everybody should say what nationality you actually are!
Oh, Swedish.
Actually, I just had a funny email exchange with CharleyCarp, who does genealogy, and found a mid-20thC Breath distant cousin of his in Queens, and wanted to figure out if it was one of mine (turned out, no). We don't do a lot of family history, but in about an hour and half, starting from my grandfather's name and the first names of his siblings, Charley came up with names and dates covering pretty much everything I know (and slightly more) about my father's side of the family, including a couple of unexpected nationalities. One ancestor who I'd thought was English, based on last name, looks to have been German; another who I thought was German seems to have been Dutch by way of England.
Anyway, the speed and accuracy were really impressive. It's a heck of a party trick.
I had to ID a map of downtown Louisville for an eclectic online trivia quiz the other day and almost missed it because I-64 wasn't labeled.
Come to think, that was the sanctity of off-blog communication I just violated.
CCarp is the person who identified me in real life from a video newsclip, going solely on the fact that the person was in the same city as me, had the right age/demographic traits, and had the same mannerisms in real life as I do online.
Both the punchline and the fact that the story is clearly fake both seemed obvious to me just from the excerpt in the OP.
Sanctity is like attorney client privilege, and can be waived by the holder. A violation would be my giving the name of the village in Shropshire from which your English ancestors hale.
I feel like I picked the wrong excerpt.
As one who has just discovered herself to be a scion of the proud people of Cockshutt, I have no need for the shield of off-blog sanctity. I take pride in my newfound ethnic identity. (The Dutch thing really surprised me, for some reason. Not that Dutch is all that different from German, but no one in my family ever said Dutch. I guess that's the line that's a bit more of a black hole than the rest of it.)
I feel like I picked the wrong excerpt.
That's a pretty lame TIFU. Surely you can do better!
CCarp, you should hunt down my grandfather! He's a big family mystery - he left home at age 12 and absolutely would not divulge any details of his family of origin. Then from when he met my grandmother, there are a couple details from the 30s where family lore conflicts with a couple news articles. I'm very curious and have no knack.
CCarp, you should hunt down my grandfather!
The most dangerous game ain't what it used to be.
Sanctity is like attorney client privilege, and can be waived by the holder.
So can the analogy ban, by the looks of it.
I guessed the punch line from the excerpt, too. I also think it's likely fake for the reasons already cited.
The "revelation" story is especially weird. It's like the guy had never knowingly seen a Korean before doing his Google image search. Uh, sure. Yes, there's plenty of overlap between how Chinese people and Korean people (and Japanese people for that matter) look, but given his description of his son, his appearance is typical of Korean men.
So the story is made up. But if it wasn't... would you tell your wife/kid? You'd have to, right, but how?
To be humorless about it, this is one of the reasons adoptive parents are told that adoptees should know all of their personal story by about age 12, before which it's the parents' job to parcel it out in age-appropriate but honest ways. If they have the kid's parents' names, why on earth didn't he have a copy of that paper himself?
On reddit there's a followup where the dad claims one of the son's friends read the TIFU and recognized their situation and told the kid to ask his dad or some dumb bullshit. I didn't really pay attention. Sorry, heebz.
I thought the punch line was going to be about ethics in game journalism.
So the story is made up. But if it wasn't... would you tell your wife/kid? You'd have to, right, but how?
They both already know. They aren't as stupid as you are.
Is it so hard to put a bowl of kimchee in one corner, a bowl of dan dan mian in another, a bowl of ramen in another, and a bowl of natto in the other, and see which one the baby crawls to?
My dad once spent awhile creating a stack of index cards identifying the various fractions of various ethnicities/nationalities my sister and I were. Needless to say, it added up to over 1.
It's funny, because we're over 75% German/English/Irish, but then the rest of it is complete mongrel - French, Polish, Bohemian, who knows what-all else.
Huh. I wonder whether/how his calculus handled the part where his was adopted by a stepfather. I suspect he just treated the biological father as 100% Irish*.
*all I know - and possibly all anybody knows - is that said father was "a drunk Irishman". Come to think of it, that would have been a better pseud. Not "drunk Irishman", but his IRL last name.
is that said father was "a drunk Irishman"
Is there any other kind of father?
34: I guess that makes me Baltic German.
Funny. My heart goes out to the guy, though.
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Because I'm terrible, here's Kim Kardashian making coffee.
Probably not unsafe for work but maybe don't play it in your meeting with HR.
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63. I had to laugh at the comment on it that said "Respect the woman's privacy!" when the whole point of being a Kardashian to do just the opposite where publicity is available.
On second reading maybe the comment was intended as trolling. Or not.
The comments really are something. "She has married an extremely blasphemic negro man." Wow.
57: Okay, but maybe you got one of the imperialist Asian babies.
Hi there. Lurker from Madagascar from a while back. Now in the UK but just about to move to Beijing, so... I suppose this is relevant? Anyway, just wanted to add:
13 etc - Don't be too sure he would have checked the papers in that time. My (UMC) parents managed to celebrate my sibling's birthday on the wrong day for several years. It's just not the kind of thing you check, once you have it stuck in your head.
Anyway, they found out because I have two first cousins and a godmother's child with the same birthday and eventually one of the aunts asked 'why is X's birthday card always a week late?' A brief argument ensued, my folks trotted off to check the birth certificate and... Then told their eight year old that his birthday, was, uh, going to be on a different date next year.
65: That comment was written by "Pastor Todd Fondler"...
Stupid woes: The kid's new dance studio is in a black hole for bog standard cafés to hang out in. Everything is either hipster caffeinated or a bar where it would be very noisy to hole up with a brief. This is a drag.
69.1: Feel free to borrow my joke from 7 when you are in China.
Is it so hard to put a bowl of kimchee in one corner, a bowl of dan dan mian in another, a bowl of ramen in another, and a bowl of natto in the other, and see which one the baby crawls to?
And if they say "What the fuck is this supposed to be, the dol ceremony?" that demonstrates they're not Korean?
60 is that said father was "a drunk Irishman"
Is there any other kind of father?
Recently learned that Steve Earle's father's name was Jack Dublin Earle.
As others have noted this is certainly a lie. Among other things, my son living with a chinese mom who only speaks mandarin to him is certainly not fluent in both mandarin and English. That's pretty hard to do by five with no mandarin speaker in the house. I say funny liar.
DN
Here's a cute true story of Korean adoption. More links from MeFi.
And a more somber one from The Toast.
If you prefer a Chinese version of 76.1, PBS can help. I never kept going with my list of adoption reforms, but shit like this would be way high up the list.
I mean, 76.1 is indeed cute, but in some sense it seems more upsetting for twins to grow up unaware of each other than for a Korean child to believe he's Chinese, right? Is it just me? I've been training prospective foster parents all night, so my calibration may be off.
69.2: One of Lee's elderly relatives changed to celebrating the date on her birth certificate rather than in the family Bible in her 70s.
81: Huh, that's not my intuition at all. I can see how "twin-ness" could easily be as essential to the identity of some twins as ethnicity is to some people, but presumably it wouldn't be to twins who are raised apart and don't know each other exist. I can also see how knowing that kind of detail about one's birth family would be very important to some adoptees, but I know that for others it isn't (hi, parsimon!). I don't know much about adoption, though, and don't have strong opinions about it, so my calibration may be off as well.
Oh, I meant more the other direction, that it seems morally worse for an adoption agency or government body to falsely claim twins are unrelated (which definitely seems to have happened in the Chinese case; I forget the details of the Korean one) than for some stupid and possibly fictional parent to make assumptions about his child's ethnicity that could easily be refuted.
The link in 76.1, at least, doesn't say anything about what the adoption agency said to the adoptive parents of either twin. I haven't watched the video in 79.
I was thinking that if it is true, the kid now has a great college application essay.
It's funny, because we're over 75% German/English/Irish, but then the rest of it is complete mongrel - French, Polish, Bohemian, who knows what-all else.
Whereas German/English/Irish isn't mongrel at all?
this was an American kid. It's just that the parents mistakenly assumed he was Chinese-American, when he was in fact Korean-American.
So in fact there's a fighting chance that his biological parents don't speak Korean either.
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ATM: Is anybody good at recognising fonts? What the hell is this in? The weird lower case "a"s are the most recognisable feature.
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I can't help with the font (have you tried the online font identifiers? I've never had any luck with them but they may be worth a shot) - but more to the point, do you live near Heeley?
Between Nether Edge and Millhouses in fact, off Carter Knowle Rd
https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Advent+Pro
93. Thanks, yes, it's the condensed caps in the image titles that's bothering me more. The S is weird.
92: the negligent parents alluded to in 69 live in Broomhall and a few of my friends from school (High Storrs) lived in Heeley. Fond memories of climbing on the boulder there and drinking at the Sheaf View. Small world! I'd suggest a meetup, although I'm not sure whether I'll be back in Sheffield before going to China.
Well let me know any time you're in town. It's been years since I was in the Sheaf view, in fact I think it actually closed for a bit. The landlord who ran it back in the day moved to Idle, appropriately, and for some reason we stopped going.
