Some 2 percent of all American children are adopted. Many of them are adopted across racial, ethnic and cultural lines, adding a distinctive, not always easy layer to their identities.
What is it like to be an African-American born in Texas and reared by a white Jewish lesbian couple in Brooklyn?
Or an older Chinese kid transported to Long Island with no English skills?
Or a Korean adoptee old enough to realize that the name on her passport is not her original name and determined to track down her past?
PBS’s “P.O.V.” this season offers a series of films that explore the phenomenon, “At the Intersection of Identity, Race and Adoption.” The very personal documentaries include one by Deann Borshay Liem, acclaimed filmmaker of “First Person Plural,” her 2000 look at her efforts to reconcile her Korean-American identity.
Mark the calendar: “Wo Ai Ni, Mommy” (“I Love You, Mommy”), by Stephanie Wang-Breal, airs tonigh at 10 on KRMA-Channel 6; “Off and Running,” by Nicole Opper, is slated for Sept. 7; and “In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee,” by Deann Borshay Liem, airs Sept. 14.
The collection begins with the story of an older-child adoption from China.
“Wo Ai Ni, Mommy” tells the wrenching story of Fang Sui Yong, an 8-year-old orphan with special needs yanked from her foster family and adopted into a Long Island home with three siblings. By turns touching, sad, uplifting and ultimately joyful, the tale of human resilience is also about the power of love and the meaning of family — sounds trite, but these profound concepts play out on-screen in intimate detail.
Donna Sadowsky, the iron-willed Long Island mom who adopted Faith at age 8, explained her motivation in letting a camera follow her newly adopted daughter: “My goal was to make sure that people saw that it was a blessing to adopt an older child because so many babies are adopted every day, but the older children, they are still sitting in orphanages, waiting to find their families.”
For filmmaker Liem, who has told her emotional journey in two films now, “It’s really about claiming a right to be here (in the U.S.) and a right to be in my family, which is, I think, a big part of coming to closure and having a sense of peace about the adoption.”
And Avery, the African-American track star with two Jewish mothers, acknowledged going through a teenage identity crisis. When she tracked down her birth mother, “what I got out of it was some small answers and a lot of pain, and I guess a way to deal with it.”
Junk or antique?
“Antiques Roadshow,” in which people drag out their old stuff and hope it’s worth something to someone, is PBS’s highest-rated series.
The inside take on the local stop of the phenom, “Antiques Roadshow: Behind the Scenes Denver,” airs Thursday at 7:30 p.m. on Rocky Mountain PBS.
The “Antiques Roadshow” episodes taped in Denver last summer — one of six stops on a national tour — drew more than 12,000 items; fewer than 60 made it on-air when broadcast in March.
Thursday’s half-hour by writer-producer-director Scott Darnell details how the items are deemed deserving of airtime and how people react upon learning that their supposed family heirlooms are worthless.
Presidential address.
Coverage of President Barack Obama’s speech is expected across the dial tonight, locally at 6 p.m. on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and cable news networks.
Additionally, PBS “NewsHour” offers week-long special coverage as the drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq continues. Senior correspondent Margaret Warner reports from Baghdad with a five-part series.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
