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the responsibilities adoptive parents have to maintain some sort of connection to the child's natal culture, however small. We were specifically talking about interracial adoption, so this person made what he thought was a good point, bringing up what if a (white) American couple adopted a child from Russia? The child would look like them and would not "look" Russian, so....
There were two ways to go with this. I chose to respond to his point and stay on-topic, but ever since, for the past three weeks, I've had a nagging desire for a do-over, to try out the other option - namely, to tell him, quite honestly, that my mother has been stopped on multiple occasions by strangers with no other desire than to inform her that she has "a Russian face" (and on one occasion by strangers who wanted to ask her directions in Russian, presumably because of her Russian face.)
She is half Russian. Or half Russian-ish, anyway, we're not sure exactly where her father's family comes from but it's somewhere in or adjacent to Tsarist Russia.
That answer would not have gone anywhere useful, and it would've been unnecessarily rude to somebody who didn't deserve it... but I still kinda wish I'd said it.
And if you're asking what a connection to that side of her heritage would bring her, she might have been able to respond to those tourists if she'd spoken Russian. She likes speaking to French-speaking tourists and immigrants, after all, and she likes to watch French-language TV. Speaking of which, are there any streaming services that focus on TV and movies from Francophone countries? France okay but not preferred over other nations.
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There were two ways to go with this. I chose to respond to his point and stay on-topic, but ever since, for the past three weeks, I've had a nagging desire for a do-over, to try out the other option - namely, to tell him, quite honestly, that my mother has been stopped on multiple occasions by strangers with no other desire than to inform her that she has "a Russian face" (and on one occasion by strangers who wanted to ask her directions in Russian, presumably because of her Russian face.)
She is half Russian. Or half Russian-ish, anyway, we're not sure exactly where her father's family comes from but it's somewhere in or adjacent to Tsarist Russia.
That answer would not have gone anywhere useful, and it would've been unnecessarily rude to somebody who didn't deserve it... but I still kinda wish I'd said it.
And if you're asking what a connection to that side of her heritage would bring her, she might have been able to respond to those tourists if she'd spoken Russian. She likes speaking to French-speaking tourists and immigrants, after all, and she likes to watch French-language TV. Speaking of which, are there any streaming services that focus on TV and movies from Francophone countries? France okay but not preferred over other nations.
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