Lifton, Betty Jean. Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter. McGraw-Hill, 1975.

Summary:

This is one of the first three memoirs in English by an adopted person in a closed-records plenary adoption, and with Florence Fisher’s and Jean Paton’s, is at the beginning of the ARM (Adoptee Rights Movement). Lifton relates that she was relinquished to a home after her mother attempted to raise her for a few months and places with her adoptive parents when she was two and a half. Her mother disclosed her adoption when she was seven, swearing BJ to secrecy because her father did not want her to know. Lifton feels like an outsider and outcast, marries Robert Lifton (the famous psychologist), travels to Japan, and finally embarks on a search where she discovers her natal mother and meets her (but then becomes estranged from her because her mother doesn’t want BJ to meet the rest of the family); then discovers her father, who has died just a few months before she learns his name. In the end, BJ becomes an advocate for open records, going to court to unseal records for the mental health of adopted people (primarily).

Thoughts:

I read this one, and Fisher’s, many years ago and hardly remembered the details of Lifton’s experience. I remembered mostly the way in which she mythologizes. That is, she creates—or taps into, I’m not sure which—the idea of the adopted person as a mythological figure embodying out spiritual and moral (and god knows what else) themes. She’s at the beginning of the adoptee search narrative’s use of Oedipus, for instance, as a stand-in for adopted people, arguing that his life story (abandonment, being taken up by strangers and raised outside his natal family, finding out in that round-about way, etc.) and his tragedy—especially his tragedy—are analogues for adopted people’s experience of adoption.

The tragedy of Oedipus isn’t hubris for Lifton, it’s secrecy. It’s hard to argue that secrecy isn’t operative: had Oedipus known that Jocasta was his mother and Laius his father, or that they could be construed that way anyway, then the oracle at Delphi might have been understood differently. The secret mattered, if what we’re dealing with isn’t destiny of course (the argument that Oedipus is faulty at all is an argument against destiny, isn’t it? Does it matter what he does?). It’s like when I was a kid, I couldn’t see why people in these stories just didn’t say out loud what they knew or tell someone or just stop keeping secrets. Clearly, the “bad thing” of the secret is only made worse because it’s a secret, right?

In Lifton’s memoir, it’s all about the secret. Not the open secret that she’s adopted, though maybe that too, but the secret her mother asks her to keep from her father, the one he keeps from her, the one her natal mother keeps from her family, the one she refuses to keep from her son (but keeps from her daughter who Lifton thinks is too young to know). That is, it’s the secret that is the punishment and the disfigurement in adoption. She says at several points that her own neuroses—her word—derive from her not knowing her roots for her formative years, though knowing them at last does not seem to help her feel less neurotic: as she says, she’s still someone who is restless and unsettled and can’t stay put (except in her marriage to Robert, who she claims is as restless as she is, but not adopted). In a scene from college, she’s told she’s empty and doesn’t know who she is. The memoir is a litany of trying on cultures and religions and mythologies and medicines, but I am not at all sure she doesn’t know who she is, and the people who tell her she doesn’t know herself are, after all, college sorority sisters when she is 18 or 19 years old. Is it youth or is it adoption?

What haunts adopted people: what is the effect, really, of not knowing one’s biological ancestry? The history in the flesh made in a body that didn’t raise you. In a sense, the problem isn’t the disruption of that connection or its obscurity. Rather, it’s the expectation of knowledge, the idea that one is different and does not fit in because that knowledge is missing for oneself and not others. In mid-century white middle class US culture, that would be a gap for sure. And maybe that’s all she wants to say and that’s all the generalizing a person can do from what she says about her own life and her own feelings of being different and having that difference stigmatized.

I just wonder, then, about the chapters having to do with transracial and transnational adoption, with race mixing in Japan, with speculation about what happens to the children who are, and who aren’t, adopted out of the homes run for non-Japanese GI’s children created in the bodies of Japanese women. She indicates that this is happening in Korea and Vietnam by the time she and her husband leave Asia, but if the text is only about Lifton (and her sort of adopted person) and not about adopted people experiencing adoptive difference AND racial difference AND national difference—and so much else—where are the points of contact? Are there any?

Is Lifton’s focus on the secret, and telling the secret as the cure, generalizable? The first time I read this, I was reading stories like hers without any context but my own adoptee life and there were times I felt like her story was useful; but there was also much that I thought not so useful or not very insightful. I hated “a-doption disease,” I didn’t feel compelled by her adopting the trickster analogue; I wasn’t depressed by her treatment of her natal mother and her adoptive one, both. But what I could begin to see, and what this text might be useful for, is the way in which it lays out so many of the tropes you can find in CAS discourse now: the fog is there, the Oedipal mystery, the adoptee as victim in a transaction (she talks about adoptees as “merchandized”); even her anger at her parents, all of them, but particularly the women who strike her as frightened, empty, and passive, and makes me want to think about the internalized misogyny—barely internalized, I’d say—of the search narrative. It’s as if, in order to write this story, we have to accept the men and blame the women, and re-reading Lifton shows you that if you’re looking for it.

I want to know why adoptees do this, particularly female adoptees. I know: it’s the patriarchy, stupid. But as I think about all of these that I’ve read, as I think about my own and my own experience—how often adoptees make women bear the brunt, the shallow, passive, scared-to-pieces women we are, our mothers were, we have to be. It’s sort of—more than sort of—appalling.