Pop superstar Madonna leaves a gym in northwest London October 18, 2006.. Photo Credit: REUTERS/Stephen HirdBy Kate Kelland
LONDON (Reuters) - Chris Atkins was not much older than David Banda, the baby Madonna is seeking to adopt, when she was brought half-way across the world to become part of a white British family.
Coming from Hong Kong, where she was abandoned as a newborn on the steps of a tenement building, to a London suburb, she says she was given the love, protection and opportunity she may never otherwise have had.
But she says the psychological price cross-border adoptees pay for their new lives is high, and warns that celebrities like Madonna should not believe that huge wealth and status will be enough to cancel it out.
"People need to understand that the losses for the adoptees are immense and lifelong," Atkins, a founder member of the Transnational and Transracial Adoption Group (www.ttag.org.uk), told Reuters in an interview.
"The price many of us have paid is a lifelong struggle to gain a sense of belonging, to attain some kind of identity. And that lifelong struggle is tiring. It's tiring being ignored, and it's tiring being expected to say thank you all the time."
Atkins describes how "acutely embarrassed" she feels when Chinese people address her in Cantonese and she cannot answer.
"They call people like me bananas -- I'm yellow on the outside and white on the inside," she says.
As the world's media tracked the progress of baby David Banda from an orphanage in his poverty-stricken home country of Malawi to the opulence of Madonna's London mansion, few could deny the material benefits which lie ahead of him.
ANXIETIES
But Nick Pendry, an Indian transracial adoptee now living in London, says he has "anxieties" about the boy's future.
"I worry about him being taken from his primary cultural context ... and how that gap will be bridged," he told Reuters.
Pendry, whose Indian mother came from Kenya to Britain while pregnant and gave him up for adoption at six weeks old, says it is vital to have more children adopted into their own cultures.
Brought up in a white middle-class family in south west London, he too appreciates the love and advantage he was given, but says he has struggled with his identity.
Now 34, Pendry lives in London with his white wife and two children, and spends most of his time with white people -- but says he always feels that race sets him apart.
"At the same time, I have Indian friends and Indian family who I am in touch with, but I don't have a shared language, a shared history, a shared culture with them...
"It leaves me in a kind of no-man's land of not being one or the other, and not really finding anywhere to fit."
Madonna issued a statement on Tuesday defending her efforts to adopt the Malawian baby, saying she wanted to save one child from a life of poverty in a country with a million orphans.
Both Pendry and Atkins are eager not to condemn the American pop star's actions outright, but express concern about how much long-term thought she has put in.
They urged Madonna and those like her to focus on improving the chances for orphans in their own countries or cultures.
"If money and resources had been put into finding an Indian family to adopt me, then I have no doubt I would have had a different and more positive experience in terms of cultural and racial connectedness," Pendry says.
"The assumption is always that adoption into a white family is better than what the child would have had, but there is little thought given to how the alternative could be better."