My Studious Spouse, the one with the job doing the home studies, recently pointed me toward a bulletin she'd received from the agency with which she contracts. It's about adoptions from Taiwan, which apparently are getting more popular (as previously alluded to in this space). If you'd like to be adopting from Taiwan, you should definitely include some descriptions of your exposure to and familiarity with the culture, and your plans to include the culture in the child's upbringing.

This not only brings up some of the questions about how culture works and what culture is that I've been asking recently, but also what exactly they mean when they refer to Taiwanese culture. Taiwan's a little weird; if you look for its entry in the CIA Factbook, you won't find it in the "Ts" and you won't find it in the "Cs" (for China). You'll find it at the end, with an asterix next to it. It's where the democratic (but notoriously corrupt) Nationalist government fled in 1949. The island had been kind of tossed back and forth between China and Japan prior to that, and currently, both the government of mainland China and of the Democratic Republic of China officially think both countries should be part of China - they just disagree over who should be in charge of the rest of China. In other words, Taiwan (population 22 million) wants to take over the PRC (population 1-point-some-odd billion). So, with the government's struggle over its Chinese-ness, no one much pays attention to the native Taiwanese.

Most of the people on Taiwan are either Fujianese (Han Chinese from Fujian) or Hakka, which is an ethnic minority in China (although an influential one - the Taiping Rebellion was started by a Hakka dude). They speak Min-nan dialect and they've been there for a few hundred years and think of themselves as "natives." But there's also an indigenous population of, well, Taiwanese. They're something like Polynesians who've been there for millennia. As a result, it's a little confusing when the Mandarin-speaking government officials ask that adopted kids be raised with "original" Taiwanese culture.

Meanwhile, the minority of Han who arrived in 1949 still make plenty of noise, and the way the world treats them affects the way the PRC - the country run from Beijing - treats the world.

That's why it can be worrying when the Pope changes where they sit at the big party... well, funeral, and why those of us prone to unhealthy ideation (that is, worrywarts) might predict longer wait times for families hoping to do familial business with Beijing when the American president shakes the wrong guy's hand.

Yeah, international politics can affect our lives based on something that small. Let's hope this is a trend that can be reversed.