There is Something About a Train

On a lighter note, today is The First Annual National Train Day. While this event isn't exceptionally exciting in and of itself, riding the train is one of my favorite things to do and the most environmentally-friendly option when compared to driving or flying.

Survivors (Most Likely) Include: Thoughts on the Sueppel Murders

I was actually typing away at a café up the street from St. Mary's Catholic Church in Iowa City while mourners were walking to the Sueppel family's funeral Mass on Saturday March, 29th, but I didn't know that there were four adopted children involved until days later. I was up late writing, as I like to do when the house is quiet, and I just happened to pick up The Gazette from Sunday, the 30th, that had the above photos on the bottom half of the front page. My blood ran cold at the sight of the white couple and the Asian children who were bludgeoned to death by the husband.

It wasn't until days after that that I found out that I wasn't alone in my outrage: "How many seriously have to die before we all start demanding changes in adoption? How many children have to be hurt before the adoption industry is held accountable for their actions in the placement of these children?"

The story made national and international headlines, particularly in Korea: "An embattled former bank executive committed suicide by crashing his van after killing his wife, failing to asphyxiate their four children in a garage then slaying them individually, authorities in Iowa said."

Steven Sueppel, the alleged thief and multiple murderer, was once heralded locally as a "humanitarian" because he and his late wife had adopted the now-dead children. The repeated purchasing of Asian children, however, seems more like obsessive consumerism than an act, or acts, of altruism.

Another article from The Gazette, written by Diane Heldt and published on the 28th, contained the following two gruesome details: "A black bat, a blue bat and a piece of skull bone and biological tissue found in the main level hallway were among the items taken by Iowa City police officers from the home of Steven and Sheryl Sueppel in Iowa City Monday." In the van with Steven Sueppel's body were found "social security cards that were partly burned and a permanent resident card and passport from Korea for Jinhee Choi, according to the search warrant."

No efforts will be made by the adoption agency to contact surviving relatives of any of the dead children back in Korea as, clearly, this would be bad for business.

International Monday: "Sold Into Adoption"

"Sold Into Adoption: The Human Baby Trafficking Scandal Exposes
Vulnerabilities in Chinese Adoptions to the United States" -- Written and presented by law students Patricia Meier (right) and Xiaole Zhang (left)


Date: 03/24/2008 Time: 12:00pm-01:00pm
Location: Iowa City Public Library, Meeting Room A
Sponsor: International Programs


I was floored when I saw this event listed on the main University of Iowa calendar a few weeks ago and had been looking forward to it with a combination of dread and relief. Dread because I wasn’t sure that the facts would be presented nearly as well as they were and because I didn’t know that I’d necessarily be able to keep my cool during a public forum about issues that I feel so strongly about. And relief because someone was going to speak locally about international adoption in such a way that wasn’t just the typical “Strategies for Procuring Children from Foreign Countries Seminar for Affluent American Couples.” This sense of relief was deepened soon after Xiaole Zhang was introduced and began presenting the issues surrounding the sale of Chinese children for purchase, primarily in North America, by way of international adoption with such levelheaded clarity.

From a press release issued by International Programs at The University of Iowa about this lecture:

“Meier and Zhang [spoke] about the Hunan baby trafficking scandal [also referred to as “The Hengyang Case”] that was uncovered in late 2005. In the incident, the Chinese government prosecuted a number of orphanage officials and private individuals for their involvement in a child trafficking scheme that profited from placing trafficked children for inter-country adoption and collecting mandatory $3,000 donations from adopting parents. The story surprised many in the adoption community because China’s program of inter-country adoption had been thought to be nearly scandal proof to that point.


[Patricia] Meier is a mid-career law student at the University of Iowa. She worked as a writer and editor in Iowa, Washington, D.C., Illinois and Colorado before entering law school. She is also a mother to three children, one of whom was adopted from China in 2003.


[Xiaole] Zhang is a second-year law student at the University of Iowa. She received her Bachelor of Law degree from the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), in Beijing, China. Before pursuing her Juris Doctorate, Zhang completed her Master’s of Law in International and Comparative Law from the University of Iowa College of Law in May 2005.”

Zhang and Meier cited a history of ineffectual laws and lack of adequate enforcement mechanisms in both the United States and China, as well as rising demand, as some of the contributing factors to this nearly-unbelievable problem of state-sanctioned human trafficking. “The same motivations still remains” in The East and in The West, Xiaole made a point of saying, and those motivations are fueled, not surprisingly, by “money.” And, as is the case in the US, most of the children exported from China and put on the adoption market “are not orphans.” (China’s one-child policy and a generalized reluctance to care for children with special health needs often lead to child abandonment. Others are simply stolen. Literally.)

Both women were gracious as they answered some of my questions and posed for the photo (above) after the lecture, but my biggest questions about international adoption still remain perpetually unanswered:

“Why don’t we take care of our own children and why aren’t other countries expected do the same?”

San Fiasco!

I was recently in California for a fast-and-furious weekend visiting my good friends, Wendy and Patrick Vasta, and checking out the faux flower children and the junkies in our old neighborhood. I shot this photo (above) somewhere South of Market and thought I’d share even though I’m not sure if ORFN (the tagger) is actually a literal, or a metaphorical, orphan.

Here’s a super touristy shot of me and Wendy on the Embarcadero near The Ferry Building:



She’s currently showing some of her gorgeous paintings at My Boudoir on Fillmore Street!

AWP in NYC

Just under a week ago, I was alone overnight in the Detroit airport on my way home from The Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ annual conference, held this year in Manhattan. I didn’t plan it that way, but my connecting flight was canceled due to the weather, so I wrote from midnight until 4AM on Tuesday morning in a phone booth on my old Handpring (one of my favorite tech hand-me-downs from Adam).

While in New York, I met a slew of friends, writers, authors, and editors from all over the country, including: Susan Ito, Karen Salyer McElmurray, Joy Castro, Raphael Kadushin, Ira Glass, Greg Gerard, and Heather Sellers.

One of my best “discoveries” at AWP was an author named Lorraine López who read from her work on two of the panels that I attended. Ridiculously talented and funny as hell, I look forward to reading her debut fiction collection, Soy la Avon Lady and Other Stories, as soon as I can.

Being in New York, however, is difficult for me because I feel like I’ve been fighting with its imperviousness for years and yet, when I visit, it’s business as usual, get out of my way, I’m trying to make a train and don’t really have the time, or the inclination, to help you find your family. It’s a matter of scale that seems to hammer home the impossibility of ever winning the court battle of “Michael Allen Potter vs. The Entire Fucking State of New York and Everyone In It.”

Today is My Brother's Birthday

But I have no idea where he is. Why? Because he was adopted and his original birth certificate was replaced with a document that reflects only the names of his court-appointed guardians and that of his own reassigned identity. I wonder if they kept his first name of LeRoy? (I doubt it -- I'm sure that it was a little bit too country, a little bit too rock 'n' roll, maybe a bit too conspicuous for the neighborhood.) I wonder if they retained his actual date of birth (01/28/73)? I wonder if they even told him that he was adopted? (Told him that he has an older brother and an older sister?) Or if he was simply matched with people who were as pale and as blond as I imagine him to be long before he had a voice to object? To say that this day makes me mad, or sad, or angry, or despondent really doesn't do justice to the way I feel right now.

I want to burn things.

Adam took this photo last year on a weekend trip to Minneapolis (as he is a much better photographer). We drove by this bench at a bus stop earlier in the day, but I made him go back with me after dark to take a series of pictures, as it was the first time I had ever seen anything like this out in the world.

Today is my brother's thirty-fifth birthday and I wonder if he is happy. (Gay? Straight? OK? Alive?) Did I take the subway to work with him for years and years in San Francisco and not know it? Did we attend some of the same schools as children back in Albany? Will I pass him on the street later this week in Manhattan? Does he live next door to me here in Iowa? (Sometimes here in The Midwest, I think I see him a hundred times a day.)

The State of New York maintains that I do not have the right to any of this information, based on legislation passed in 1935 designed (it is purported) to spare us both from the shame of illegitimacy, and I think that's just fucked here in 2008.

"Opening Closed Books on Adoption"

Hot on the heels of the sensational story of the twins who recently married (is no one else outraged that they were adopted out to separate families in the first place?!?) comes a phenomenally level-headed article written by Jennifer Gish of The Times Union in my hometown of Albany, New York.

Published on Sunday, "Opening Closed Books on Adoption" outlines the issues faced by Sharon Casey Smith, a 43-year-old woman from Colonie, as she continues the search for her mother that began in 2000.

""I just want to know her. Sometimes you feel like you're not connected, like you don't have any background," says Smith."

To read the entire article, click here.

[Many thanks to my good friend, Nancy Drew, for forwarding this link to me over the weekend!]