I really didn’t want to go there. Why should I do that? But now I felt I should. Or shouldn’t I? I asked dad straight out. – What do you think about me traveling to Sukorejo? About me finding the orphanage where I was born? In the past year I have been through a mental and physical journey. I have entered into my own adoption story from Indonesia with the TV series “Gitt bort”. It’s a journey I couldn’t do before. I just wasn’t ready for it. And I wasn’t sure if it was Dad. Without his approval I could not have gone. This is as much his story as mine. Great expectations for a little boy Mum and dad had been waiting for over ten years to have a child. And 43 years ago they traveled to get me. In the middle of the capital Jakarta in Indonesia, they were to meet me for the very first time, together with other Norwegian families who also wanted children. Who was he? The small bundle that was carried in a small blue cloth bag from someone at the orphanage. Did I live up to the expectations they had created? Who did I have to be to live up to the image they had of me when they stamped me out of the Yayasan Sayap Ibu orphanage in Jakarta. If I was just good enough at school, good at sports, made a lot of friends? I pushed myself as far as I could to do well in school because I knew it would make mum and dad proud. Without saying it outright, I wanted to show them: “You have chosen correctly”. I wanted to be a son who did not disappoint them. As an adult, I know that I didn’t have to go that far, for them to be proud of me. But even though these were thoughts in a small child’s head, they followed me in almost everything I did growing up. I wanted so badly to show my parents that the choice they had made in having me was not wrong. They brought me from the other side of the globe and adopted me as their own. I had been so very wanted. A daily reminder of outsiderness My flat nose and dark skin, jet black hair and an unknown story of being born to a lady neither of us knew anything about created an invisible distance between us that I didn’t want to make bigger than it was. Being a close and good family became important to me, and we were. A family full of love. But in my darkest moments I could feel a repressed feeling and doubt. I heard that blood is thicker than water. And I was, in a way, water. “A lack of experience of having someone to look up to can also have an impact on the feeling of belonging”, says a report on adoptees from OsloMet, which reveals racism and outsiders. Another study by Kjersti Grinde Sathish from the University of Science and Technology points to anxiety and depression among adoptees. Several also struggle with suicidal thoughts, and some of those interviewed had also tried to carry it out. I have been lucky. I have not felt such strong emotions as Satish describes. But I have been unsure whether I was good enough for mum and dad. Feeling that way is also confirmed by associate professor at VID University of Science and Technology Anne Kyoung Sook Øfsti, who is herself adopted from Korea and works with adoptees as a family therapist: – I think that foreign adoptees in particular feel a sense of vulnerability. We are reminded daily that we have been “picked up”, chosen into a herd, which is not necessarily ours in the first place. If you have been selected, you can also be selected. The affiliation is porous because we know that our parents have adopted us with a view to and desire for an increased quality of life, she says. I think many non-adopted people may have that feeling, too. A desire to live up to the parents’ expectations. But for adoptees, there is another layer on top. A desire to belong despite a different origin. I had more to prove. That feeling has been strongly present all along. The important conversation Inside the Grand hotel it was dark. I walked a few steps behind dad. He knew where he wanted to sit inside restaurant Palmen, and showed the way. I had asked him to meet me here to talk about the adoption. About the things I’ve known about, but didn’t dare ask about before. During the conversation, he picked up papers, papers he has kept lying around. Papers that he might have shown me one time or another in my childhood when we lived at Siggerud, but which I hadn’t bothered to look at. Or I had simply forgotten about them. Because why should I remember them? Names, dates and places from a country that I had nothing more to do with. They had no meaning for me today. I felt I had a mixed feeling in my body. Both a lump in my stomach for asking him questions that I thought would hurt him and butterflies in my stomach for getting a few more answers than what I had carried with me from childhood. This was the first time he and I sat down together like this and talked about my adoption. It felt strange to sit down like this with him. It was so direct, so straight to the point. Most often when we talked about the adoption in childhood, it was if he or my mother took out the green photo album she had made from the adoption trip they had taken to Indonesia. Then we liked to talk about the pictures that my mother had pasted into the album. There were pictures of me, a few months old in Indonesia and my very first meeting with them. I remember thinking I looked happy as I lay on a small blanket and stared at my mother standing over me and smiling. I also remember that my mother looked happy. It seemed she was happy to have me as her son. After she passed away in 2005, it’s a nice memory to have with you. Now I was sitting across from Dad inside the Grand and he was going to tell me what was written in the forty-year-old papers. I felt I had many questions, many thoughts. He pulled out a stack of three gray folders. “You’ve seen these before?” He looked at me before opening the first folder. I looked at him, and became uncertain. I remembered the color of the folder. That they were in a box in mum and dad’s bedroom. In a closet above all of mom’s clothes. But I had never brought them down from there. Never seen them since I was 8, maybe 9 years old. I gently shook my head. Photo: Alexander Vollevik / news A safe bedrock I watched Dad read aloud from the papers with calmness and simplicity. Like it was just plain text, names and places. I felt that what he read from the papers was good to hear. I immediately noticed that I was much more open to hearing than when I was younger. This was information mum and dad might have told me before, but which I haven’t been ready to take into my life until now. Now I was sitting here with dad. Not only as his son, as it had been in childhood, but also as the father of two little boys himself. What he now told me took on a completely different meaning. I looked at it in a new way. For the first time, I understood more of what it must have felt like to give up your newborn child for adoption. Dad told about the trip to Jakarta in Indonesia. About places they had been, people they had met, about the adoption association and legal processes they had to go through to bring me home to Norway. I looked at dad and told him I wanted to go. That I wanted to go on the same trip that he and my mother took when they picked me up. Follow in their footsteps. Before, this would have been difficult to talk about. It could be perceived that I was looking for something that I couldn’t get from mum and dad. A bond I didn’t have with them. Now I was more confident in myself, and I had built a secure platform with my wife Madeleine and the children. The bedrock was encountered in a completely different way than in childhood. Now I was not afraid that my question about where I really came from and my biological family would change my relationship with my father, as I might have thought when I was younger. Now neither he nor I doubted where we had each other. I knew he loved me. Regardless. Photo: Anders Leines / news Asking for permission In my process of going into my own adoption story, I understood that it might not be possible to travel in mum and dad’s safe footsteps. They didn’t have any stories from the time before they got me in their arms in Jakarta. They had no idea. From really just being curious about the country, wanting to explore the food and the culture, I realized that I had to go deeper into it if I wanted to find answers. Then I had to open doors I hadn’t really wanted to. Then I had to travel to the small village of Sukorejo where I was born. A small town on the other side of Java. Two hours east by plane from Jakarta. How should I deal with that part of the story that no one in the family knew anything about? Step into the unknown, with the surprises that may come? Could I travel to Sukorejo? Even deeper into my own history? What would dad think of that? Was it okay with him that I went further than he and my mother had done? It became absolutely crucial for me that he gave me some kind of permission. He didn’t think twice before smiling. “I think you should do that, Christian. It’s going to be very strong” I looked at him that he genuinely thought it was something I should do. And I believed in him. It wasn’t something he said just to please me. I was glad we got to have that conversation. Shortly after, Dad died. Now I could get on the plane to Indonesia, knowing that what I was doing was right. For him and for me. Hello! If you have any thoughts after reading this case, I would like to hear from you. Watch the TV series “Gitt bort” on NRK1 Mondays at 20, or on news TV now: VIDEO: Dad is old and sick. If Christian is going to have the conversation he dreads, he has to do it now.
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It took 40 years before Christian Strand dared to enter his own adoption story – Documentary
