Wish me luck tomorrow - I'll be joining my birth siblings and their spouses/children for lunch. This will be our first meeting ever since I last saw them in Nov 2005. As some of you can imagine, I've not been sleeping very well lately - so much anticipation, to say the least. I keep trying to tell myself that 'it's not a big deal, just take it easy', and another part of me says, 'are you kidding??' I've witnessed the ambivalence, anxiety of meetings between Western culture and Asian culture people in regular business settings - that's challenging enough, but with the added layers of post-adoption reunion and family dynamics...! The emotional rollercoaster continues. Luckily I've found a social worker who's fluent in both English and Chinese, I don't think I could deal with all the emotional, personality, linguistic, cross-cultural, post-adoption reunion dynamics all at once at a luncheon with 4 Taiwanese family members.
And at least I've crammed in about 2 months of Chinese language refreshing to help. I highly recommend other international adoptees try to learn their birth culture's language and culture - it so helps reduce a smidgen of a layer of all the confusion.
Nixon had it easy in his US-China reunification talks with Chairman Mao and Zhou En Lai!
Record of Historic Richard Nixon-Zhou Enlai Talks in February 1972 Now Declassified (joke! joke!)