Trawling around the web today brings on another emotional rollercoaster.

From my colleagues over at the transracial adoption blog comes a link to a great, sunshiny New York Times article (available here if you don't want to register) on the growing China-adoptee subculture. I like subcultures. I like stories about happy young women adopted from China. But I also like hearing the whole story.

Which is why I was grateful to read some other, less thrilled reactions to the piece, which clearly underlined the thing that I found a little weird about it -- the thing sneaking around just under the line of sight. The privileged parent/child-as-commodity thing.

It's always there. It's the thing that freaks me out a little bit every time I hear about adoption stories (and especially China-adoption stories) on Oprah Winfrey. The thing that creeps me out when I read Parade magazine talking about Meg Ryan's latest trendy fashion accessory. I think it's also what freaks me out about the One Child Policy to begin with, but I'm not sure -- that might be a different thing. A related monster.

Anyway, the Twice the Rice blog led me (via the purposefully angry Daily Bastardette) to another, more beautiful thing: Ethica: A Voice for Ethical Child Placement, which is an organization that I kind of can't believe I hadn't heard of before, and one that I'm definitely going to be paying close attention to. (Although the reference to "things we accomplished in 2003" on their homepage brings new levels of ambiguity.)

From their credo("We Believe"):

That adoptees…

* Should have the assurance that their birth parents placed them for adoption of their own free will, or that the circumstances that necessitated their removal were valid and warranted;
* Should be placed with their siblings whenever possible;
* Deserve fully informed and well-prepared adoptive parents;
* Adult adoptees have a fundamental human right to unconditional access to records relating to their birth and adoption, including their original birth certificates, and that all current adoptions should include mandatory access to records for all involved parties;
* Should be treated as equal to biological children under all aspects of law.

Further trawling around my colleagues's sites brings me more of the same up-and-down sensation: battling in-family racism and reminders about birth-mothers. Tragedies. Struggle. Layers of complexity. This strange transaction that my family has become.

What Heather says here...

Just because a person is able to see the tragic side of adoption does not make them “anti-adoption.” You can view adoption as a beautiful thing and still be utterly depressed by the way it is currently being handled in most cases. You can be happy for the new family formed through adoption and devastated for the original family that is shattered. You can want to try every last-ditch effort to preserve the original family, and still come to accept that an adoptive family may be the best solution for a given set of circumstances.

...is worth repeating.

It's -- complicated, isn't it?