Troublesome Terms: Words That Make Me Feel *Funny*

I am, like many people of my acquaintance, prone to think too much about little things. Not little things like these (although that’s probably the most significant news you’ll read here for a long time), but things like words.

Sometimes, they make me feel funny.

Here are a few of them, along with vague stabs in the direction of explaining why I think they’re a little peculiar (as opposed to ha-ha).

Abandoned. – Generally, this is a hard word to avoid, since we talk about “abandonment certificates” and “abandonment spots” and for nearly all of us in this China adoption system, this is part of our stories. It’s because of this word that it’s easy to see the nameless, faceless biological mother as something completely alien to our experiences – someone willing to abandon a baby. In English, it’s a word that goes with “wild” (as in to dance like a lunatic, with wild abandon) – something is lost, pushed away. I’ve heard that in Mandarin, the word that’s often translated as “abandon” actually has connotations of being put safely away for later recovery – something more like “deposit.” I don’t know if that’s true, but I know that when kids are – well, left someplace in a box or whatever (it’s hard to get around that word, isn’t it) – it’s almost always in somewhere public and well-traveled. A city street filled with people more than a remote copse where no one but scavengers ever goes. It’s an act that requires a different word. I haven’t found it yet.

China Doll. – It’s hard to know where to start with this one. It can seem so endearing. OK, it is endearing, sometimes. But it always makes me think of cold, hard, perfect porcelain and exotic trinkets from faraway lands, maybe children’s beauty pageants (look hard at her age) and definitely the whole fakeness of imitation Chinese stuff. There’s something strange about comparing children to dolls (although I know that’s the point of dolls) – I’ll own that that’s my personal weirdness – me and anyone who’s old enough to remember this advertising campaign. But there’s also something very strange about imitation Chinese stuff when it pops among people who don’t really know what they’re doing (myself unfortunately included).

Orphan (and Orphanage). These make me feel funny for reasons previously covered. There’s a lot of mythic weight put on orphans – Superman, Batman, Harry Potter, those tragic Baudelaires. The thing is, in most cases (as far as we know) these children of ours aren’t properly speaking orphans – they’ve got biological parents out there somewhere. And, as someone prone to flights of fancy, I need to stop myself from mythologizing *everything* as *much as possible*. Because my kids are already cooler than Spider-Man.

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