Update September 1st, 2020: as the investigation into the fire reveals more information, it seems the market is salvageable.  33 stalls were destroyed and another 44 were damaged (of the over 700 inside the building).  The fire is believed to have been caused by bad electrical wiring (which is anything but surprising given the way wires work in Cambodia), and a structural assessment of the building is ongoing.  The fire was largely contained to the western half, meaning that the clock tower in the eastern portion got a little dirty from smoke but seems to be standing just fine.  I have heard many local friends claim that the fire may end up being a good thing, as plans are already underway to clean and paint the market to make it look even better than it did before.  I am much relieved to know that the damage is not as severe as initially thought, even if some of my post is made irrelevant by that information.  For the sake of posterity, and because these issues are still important to consider at the market and beyond, I am leaving this post up in its original format.

​Soon after 6pm on Sunday, August 30th, 2020, hundreds of Cambodians encircled Psaa Nat - the Meeting Market - and watched helplessly as flames engulfed the structure’s empty clock tower that points just ever-so-slightly southeast towards the Sangkae River.  For nearly 90 years, Psaa Nat stood as one of the most iconic buildings in the northwestern Cambodian city of Battambang - visible on tourist t-shirts and postcards, and often serving as a backdrop for photos for locals and visitors alike.  The cause of the fire is as-yet unknown, although there were storms in the area so lightning is a possibility, as is the spread of an open fire through the textile market from a range of sources.

​Greetings once again, friends and fellow adventurers!  After several years away, I’ve finally decided to revamp this website and start writing again.  Apologies for being away so long, but life has been a bit of a roller coaster the past two years or so and I’m only now starting to settle down and let my head clear.  I’ve cleaned up some of the past postings, so for the few of you who actually missed reading my thoughts and musings, please bear with me for a little while as I try to get this site going again and re-fill the content.
 
I wish I had a better occasion for my return but, honestly, I decided to write again because today is the 20th anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School – an event that deeply affected me when I was younger, as I’m sure it did you.  Normally, I wouldn’t comment on this event, but I was actually in the Denver area last month and decided to visit Columbine High School and the memorial they’ve established to the events of two decades ago, so I thought it might be an interesting way to merge my personal interests with my professional life to briefly remark on that experience and what I find to be the more optimistic aspects of dark tourism, a term you may be familiar with thanks to a recent Netflix show on the subject (which I do NOT recommend).

I’m not going to rehash the entire tragedy, which is well known to most people of my generation, because it would seem exploitative and impossible given its complexity.  I have no connection to the event and no real right to it, as I was living almost 1,800 miles away on the South Carolina coast at the time.  I will say that, when I knew I would be in the Denver area for work and decided to visit Columbine High, I bought and read the book Columbine by Dave Cullen, who was one of the journalists actually on the scene twenty years ago.  I recommend the book if you are interested in this event and want a fair accounting of what happened along with thoughtful questions about our communal misunderstandings of the tragedy, as well as some insightful commentary about what has happened in that community more recently.  Cullen has some controversial viewpoints and I can’t claim to agree with everything he says – for example, I find him conflicting in how he ascribes the violence purely to psychopathy, and yet struggles to resolve this perspective with respect to the offenders’ social network – but I am convinced by several of his most important points.  According to Cullen:

• The shooters were not actually trying to commit a mass shooting.  Their plans were actually for an elaborate bombing intended to mimic and expand upon the Oklahoma City bombing.  They aimed for a spectacle of fire and death and easily could have killed hundreds of people, except that they failed to build or set off viable explosives.  Thus, although Columbine is often considered the genesis of the modern epidemic of school shootings in the United States, it was never intended to be known as a shooting and could have been much, much worse.  With respect to the tragedy that did occur, Cullen offers solace in how pathetically the shooters failed to achieve their goals, dying not in a blaze of action-movie grandeur but instead shooting themselves out of resignation while slumped in a corner, alone in their delusion.
• The myth that the shooters were loners and outcasts in their school and surrounding community is unfounded.  Cullen provides significant evidence that they did have friends and active social lives, albeit outside the main cliques in their school.  I found this discussion fascinating, as their friends so resembled my own friends in high school, and in many ways their feelings – left behind in their writings, which are sometimes poetic and even romantic – were so similar to my own.  The difference is that they chose to pick up weapons and I did not, a choice I’m sure is made by students with similar feelings every single day.  
• Cullen further elaborates that the myth of a violent, trench coat-obsessed gothic youth subculture that was a powder keg of murderous intent never had a leg to stand on, and yet I still know people whose views of such counterculture are painted by the misinformation they heard received during the aftermath of Columbine.  I was never a goth, but I was friends with many people who identified as such and while many of them engaged with symbolically violent rhetoric back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they’ve all grown up to be brilliant and self-reflective people who openly and honestly admit that such rhetoric stemmed from their personal insecurities, not a desire to harm others.  I also remember a time when, right after the Columbine massacre, the local teen hangout in our little neon beach town tried to ban anyone wearing too much black or the chains and large pants typical of that subculture.  Several of my friends countered, organizing a petition about their First Amendment rights with backing from their parents that eventually made its way before the city council.  In this way, I feel that I’ve seen how Columbine led to an active prejudice against youth who don’t fit the majority narrative of how teenagers are supposed to behave (which, on the face of it, is an absurd thing to assert anyway) and how it came to affect people far from Colorado, to all our detriment.
• To that end, Cullen makes a compelling case that one of the lingering consequences of Columbine is our desperate need to assign blame to someone, which inevitably fuels the cycle of violence.  Anthropologist Claudia Strauss has written about this phenomenon in the specific context of Columbine as well, if a bit obtusely, and you can also read a recent Buzzfeed News article about accountability written by one of Columbine's former teachers (Strauss 2007; Kelly 2019).  The ugliest parts of Cullen’s book aren’t the murders, but instead the aftermath in which everyone blames everyone else for what happened.  At both local and national levels, the focus became not so much why people were killed but by whom, the details of which the media obsessed over only to eventually inspire later shooters (Cullen includes a great but horrifying section at the end of the book that details how Columbine is referenced by murderers in later violent events).  Worse still, the community reverts to a barbarism that pits Christians versus non-Christians, creating hostilities not just between the parents of the shooters (who most people wanted to blame) and the community, but also between the political and humanistic interests of the religious community. 
• Following that thought, Columbine is an excellent example of religion gone awry.  While it is undoubtedly true that many people took comfort in their religion, which is perfectly fair and understandable, it is just as true that the survivors used religion to attack others.  The most egregious example, to me, is when a local preacher agrees out of the obligation of his position to perform a burial service for one of the shooters, at the family's request.  When the community finds out that he prayed over the grave of a shooter, he is ostracized and driven out of the community despite being a respected religious leader.  Later, a battle erupts over the placement of crosses on a hill overlooking the school – fifteen in total, one for each of the thirteen victims and two additional crosses for the two shooters.  Anger and vandalism eventually result in the removal of all the crosses, which of course angers other members of the religious community.  You can read more about this conflict in the work of sociologists J. William Spencer and Glenn W. Muschert (see below). 
• The most famous story of misused religion from Columbine, though, is that of the Girl Who Said Yes.  During the massacre, Cassie Bernall was supposedly asked by a shooter if she believed in God.  She said yes and was shot and killed for her answer.  I grew up in a religious family in the Deep South of the United States, and I distinctly remember this story being promoted in every conceivable form in my community.  The story was told at church, we were instructed to follow in the steps of this 'martyr', and popular books like Chicken Soup for the Soul spread the legend even further.  Cullen rather definitively proves that this interaction did take place, but that Cassie Bernall wasn’t involved.  Instead, a student named Valeen Schnurr likely answered the question but was somehow spared.  Schnurr told her story afterwards, but was accused of trying to steal the limelight from Bernall and, worse, taking away the minuscule peace of mind that Bernall’s family could find in the tale.  Although the Christian community could easily have framed Schnurr’s survival as a miracle born of her answer, she was instead made out to be a liar and a sinner – much to the community’s eventual shame.  Later, despite having conclusive evidence that her daughter did not answer this question, Cassie Bernall’s mother wrote a book about her daughter that includes the story, selling thousands of copies (and which I remember being present in my high school library).  Cullen’s book offers an excellent philosophical evaluation of why the truth about stories like these matter, even if the lie provides comfort to the aggrieved.
• Finally, and this should be no surprise, the police committed horrible violations of the law and promoted many misconceptions we continue to hold about Columbine.  Cullen shows that the police had ample evidence against the shooters prior to the massacre and chose not to act on it, which they later lied about and tried to cover up.  Cullen’s thesis seems to be that we should stop accusing only the parents of the shooters and instead hold to task those that could actually do something about it from the standpoint of justice, namely the police who chose not to execute a search warrant against the shooters and later lied about their knowledge of the shooters’ plans.  As the community of Columbine leans heavily towards the right wing of American politics, Cullen expresses frustration that there continues to be little desire amongst the populace to hold the police accountable for their lack of action.

 
From an anthropological standpoint, I see Columbine as an example of how communities come together even in the darkest of circumstances.  My specific focus in anthropology returns to this theme in numerous ways, as I am a specialist on Cambodia, which endured a genocide in the 1970s that resulted in millions of deaths, as well as someone who studies dark tourism, which Professor of Tourism and Development at the University of Central Lancashire Richard Sharpley describes as “travel…towards sites, attractions or events that are linked in one way or another with death, suffering, violence or disaster” (Sharpley 2009: 2).  In my capacity as a researcher, and as someone with an interest in the human experience at such sites, I have visited numerous places of death, from serious to humorous – for example, the mass graves of Chhoung Ek, commonly known as The Killing Fields, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation where American troops slaughtered hundreds of Native Americans, mostly unarmed women, children, and old men; the cemetery of Key West, Florida, where graves from the USS Maine are buried near the remains of former slaves and others who died in the Jim Crow era (plus a famous tombstone that reads “I told you I was sick!”); the grave of Martin Luther King, Jr., outside the Ebenezer Baptist Church where you can sit in a pew and listen to recordings of his sermons; Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood, South Dakota, where colorful characters like Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane are buried; the Winchester Mansion in San Jose, California, which is supposedly the 'most haunted house in America'; and so on.  From ghost tours to memorials to great tragedy, I try to run the gamut of the dark tourist experience whenever possible.  My approach towards going to these places is rather Zen-like: you must experience them with an open heart and open mind, accepting your feelings in full whatever they may be and then letting them go when it is their time to leave.  In this way, you appreciate what the experience teaches you and carry forth the lessons therein but also recognize that tears – of which there are many – need not be permanent.  I often find that tears, smiles, and even joyous laughter are not mutually exclusive even in these places of death, and there's something deeply uplifting about crying your heart out only to smile and even laugh at the smallest of silver linings in a place that might otherwise appear to have none.
 
Such experiences are cleansing.  Sometimes it’s good to feel bad, to lose your mind to your grief temporarily, and to then realize that you can put yourself back together again.  My desire to visit Columbine was certainly motivated in part by my desire to confront and reframe my emotions about the massacre, which I consider a seminal event from my childhood that I care about far more than most other tragedies (not to sound callous or anything), and the visit absolutely accomplished those aims.  Like many others, I hold am fascinated by tragic events, especially cult-like activities such as Jonestown and Waco, which I think are feelings that stem from a natural human curiosity about the extreme behavior of others.  There's also a sympathy there, and I often find myself empathizing with victims and perpetrators alike as there are usually social factors in their decision making that are familiar to my own experience, even if we made radically different decisions along the way.  Even with Columbine, I find myself rejecting the labels of inhumanity placed on the shooters because what they did, depressing or not, was an extremely human act with deeply human consequences.  Although not a cult, Columbine is a moment that created a community more than destroyed it, and I find myself attracted to such a powerful magnet of human adaptability.
 
Columbine is in the town of Littleton a few miles south of Denver, Colorado, with the Rocky Mountains looming in the background as they tend to do in this region.  I find it interesting that the details we miss in video footage of tragic events like Columbine are usually the things we focus on in person.  For example, to me the news footage of the massacre at Columbine makes the school seem almost secluded.  We see students running from the building through large grassy fields, exposed to occasional gunfire from the upper story windows.  This grassy area is Clement Park and does indeed surround the school with lots of green, but on the other side of the school are residential areas that push right up to the school grounds.  It’s actually quite a busy street that passes by the front of the school, with lots of activity from cars and pedestrians.  And, of course, since most news footage is shot from the top down perspective of people in helicopters, we lose the perspective of the Rocky Mountains, which are visible from a hill near the school and provide a gorgeous backdrop.  In many ways, I think Columbine High School is one of the prettiest school campuses I’ve ever seen, as many of the classrooms face the mountains – far better than the parking lot I used to stare at during math class.

​Clement Park, where most of the survivors fled, is an active recreational center with sports fields and walking trails.  Even on the cold day in early spring when I visited, the park was quite busy with visitors.  Families were picnicking, the fields were being prepared for baseball games and other sports, and lots of runners and walkers were using the trails – including a large number of older couples, which added a sense of gentility to the place.  Unlike other memorial sites that I’ve visited, Clement Park in no way felt like a place of sadness.  Yes, many people stopped near the Columbine Memorial to respectfully read the inscription or take a moment of reflection, but the general mood was jovial.  This park is the beating heart of the community, and it showed.
 
At the top of a tall hill – the same hill, in fact, where the crosses were once placed – is the Columbine Memorial, the official monument to the tragedy.  Access is open to all visitors, although park signs are placed around the memorial instructing people on proper behavior – no loud music or cell phone usage within the memorial space, for example.  The memorial is carved out of the backside of the hill such that when you are viewing the memorial itself, you cannot actually see Columbine High School.  The intention seems to be that your focus in this moment should be on the individualities of the victims, not on the broader presence of the school or the sensationalized details of its spatial history.  In this area is an inner circle consisting of a ring of thirteen plaques for each of the victims, adorned with a personalized inscription by their families.  Cullen provides a wonderful discussion of the politics of these inscriptions in his book, again showing that something so seemingly simple as memorializing the dead is anything but easy.  The ground is inlaid with the form of a large memorial ribbon with a heart shape at the top, and fountains are nearby for aesthetic effect (though they were turned off during our visit due to the cold).  An exterior wall includes numerous plaques with quotes from the community, praising the efforts of first responders and urging people to remember what happened here.  The design is well-conceived, as the words of members of the community - first responders, parents, other students, etc. - literally wrap around the victims in a supportive embrace.

​The inner circle with the individual plaques is decorated with items left by visitors.  Each of the names was covered in coins (which you can see in the gallery at the bottom of this post), and in one case, a dog tag left for a student who wanted to join the military.  The number of the coins indicated that people often visit and leave their offerings – I suspect that many members of the community make regular visits here.  The site is simple, but moving, and there was something about the coins that showed so much life in a place dedicated to the dead.

A walking trail circles the memorial and leads to the top of the hill, from which position it is possible to look over the school’s running track and towards the school.  On the far side is a small area of reflection where guests can look down on the totality of the memorial or away across a lake and towards the mountains.  The power of the space is palpable, and I daresay that it is an appropriately beautiful place for this type of memorial.  To that end, and I can’t stress this enough, is that Columbine High School is beautiful.  Such is the memory I took away from the school.  For all of the footage of the crying and suffering survivors, Columbine in real life is an idyllic place, which somehow makes the massacre so much worse and yet the recovery so much more inspiring.  The high school is named after the Colorado blue columbine, the state flower, and the name is fitting.  Columbine High School and Clement Park are clearly the flower of this community and you can feel a lot of love walking around the area.

Recently, another scholar questioned me about the difference between memorialization and dark tourism, arguing that memorialization is not necessarily completed for the purpose of soliciting visitation and they aren't relatable concepts.  I would agree that there are certainly differences needing qualification, as memorials are usually made to honor figures of importance, in this case the victims of a horrible crime, instead of appealing to travelers.  But memorials often serve educational purposes as well, and to accomplish that task need to attract viewers.  The connection between tourism and pilgrimage is a long-established conception within the social sciences, such that I do not hesitate to argue that tourists and pilgrims are often one and the same.  Both tourists and pilgrims seek transformation in some form, often involving themselves in some sort of historical story.  In this way, visiting the Columbine Memorial to learn about or remember what happened here is an act of pilgrimage, but one that also satisfies the curiosity of the dark tourist.  Yes, gawkers and rubberneckers are frustrating, and Cullen documents that dark tourists descended upon Littleton in the wake of the shooting and continue to plague the town with inappropriate questions, but I suspect from my visit that most visitors are of the far more reflective type seeking to honor and engage more than dominate and violate.
 
Furthermore, I reconfigure the work of art historian W.J.T. Mitchell, who famously questioned What Do Pictures Want?  To Mitchell, artworks desire viewership to achieve their purpose.  This post-modern anthropomorphizing of inanimate objects may be beyond where most people are willing to go in thinking about art, but serves the purpose of moving the interpretation of art away from the artist’s intention and towards the audience’s consumption of the artwork.  In this case, whether memorials are intended for tourists or not, if audiences view them as places of pilgrimage and visitation they become tourist sites all the same.  In this way, memorialization becomes transformation and meditation through dark tourism, and one does not preclude the other.
 
Esteemed anthropology Sherry Ortner is famous for chronicling the pathways of anthropological thought throughout the past century.  Recently, she argued that anthropology has taken a turn towards ‘dark anthropology’, which she describes as “anthropology that focuses on the harsh dimensions of social life (power, domination, inequality, and oppression), as well as on the subjective experience of these dimensions in the form of depression and hopelessness” (Ortner 2016: 47).  Studies of dark tourism seem to fit this bill, as they revolve around places of death and tragedy.  But I argue that the study of dark tourism are not dark in nature but actually quite optimistic.  Dark tourism itself might be a misnomer for what actually occurs in these spaces, and the study of tourism at these sites may yet prove to be a way for anthropologists to see the light in the darkness.  For my part, what I will remember most from my visit to Columbine is not the experience of standing on bloodstained ground, but instead the smiling, waving joggers who warmly greeted me on the walking trails and the students who respectfully stopped at the memorial on their way to other social activities.  Much like how I often find inspiration in the strength of the Cambodian people, my Columbine experience was one of life – green grasses, blue skies, and new generations of people that remember the past but are not beholden to it.  They are too busy building their present and their future to go backwards.
 
Below is a collection of photographs of the Columbine Memorial that I share without comment (as my words can add nothing to what they represent).  But I would finish this post by highlighting one of them, which summarizes so much about what anthropology can learn from dark tourist sites, and what you and I can learn by visiting places like these:

---
Cullen, Dave. 2016. Columbine. New York: Twelve Publishing.

Kelly, Judith. 20 Apr 2019. "I Taught at Columbine.  It is Time to Speak My Truth." Buzzfeed News. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/judithkelly/opinion-i-taught-at-columbine-it-is-time-to-speak-my-truth
 
Ortner, Sherry. 2016. “Dark anthropology and its others.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1), pp. 47-73.
 
Mitchell, W.J.T. 2005. What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 
Sharpley, Richard and Philip R. Stone, eds. 2009. The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism. Bristol: Channel View Publications.
 
Spencer, J. William and Glenn W. Muschert. 2009. “The Contested Meaning of the Crosses at Columbine” American Behavioral Scientist 52 (10), pp. 1371-1386.
 
Strauss, Claudia. 2007. “Blaming for Columbine: Conceptions of Agency in the Contemporary United States.” Current Anthropology 48 (6), pp. 807-832.

I’ve wanted to write informal posts about my adventures and ethnographic experiences for a while now, and yet here I am four months into my research with no fieldwork posts to show for it.  That changes today, with the first of what I hope will become a series of posts about living and doing ethnography in Cambodia, which I’m not so humbly titling “The Continuing Adventures of Mekong Matty.”  Which is a Jungle Cruise reference for you non-Disneylanders, but that’s a topic for another time…
 
I heard about archaeological work at Laang Spean – “The Cave of Bridges” – in the news a few months ago and wanted to arrange a visit.  After all, most archaeology in Cambodia is focused on the temples of Angkor, so any significant work being done in Battambang – the focus of my research on tourism – was naturally of personal and professional interest.  Luckily, my good friend, Khmer-language buddy, and esteemed archaeologist Dr. Alison Carter knew of a dig at Laang Spean happening from the end of February to the beginning of March.  Not only that, but being the amazing person that she is, she knew the head archaeologists – Dr. Hubert Forestier and the (soon-to-be Dr.) Heng Sophady – and put me in direct contact with them.  Sophady was eager for visitors and quickly invited me and my research assistant Visal out to Laang Spean in the middle of their dig to see what was going on for ourselves.
 
Laang Spean is easily accessible from Battambang, about 45 minutes by moto down the nicely paved road towards Pailin.  Anyone wishing to visit for themselves need only to head towards Phnom Sampeau and keep going past the entrance to that mountain, heading straight to the town of Sdau.  Small mountains begin appearing on the otherwise flat landscape near Sdau, and a little beyond the town is a temple near a hill, after which comes a turn-off onto a dirt road that leads towards Laang Spean.  This road can be a bit tricky to see at first, but if you travel slowly you’ll notice a sign in French and Khmer that indicates the mountain.

​Then comes the difficult part – actually reaching the mountain of Phnom Teak Trang, where Laang Spean is located.  While the highway is easy to traverse, the dirt roads are considerably less so.  No signs point the way as you pass through rows of fields growing rice, corn, and other crops, so you may have to stop and ask for directions (although the locals know there’s only one reason for a foreigner to be in those fields, so they’ll point the way quickly enough).  Much of the path is pure sand while the rest is mud, so riding a moto can be dangerous and tricky, particularly if there is any recent rain.  Worst of all is a hastily constructed wood bridge that you must cross.  Visal, being lighter and more experienced with motos than I am, volunteered to take our bike across and I saw several planks of wood lift up on one end where it should have been nailed down.  Luckily, we both made it across in one piece.

The Khmer word “phnom” means “mountain,” although in the Cambodian context it’s more like a large hill.  In this region, many “phnoms” dot the landscape, so finding the correct one is a bit tricky.  The key is to look for the giant scarring cave hole which you can just see about two-thirds of the way up the side of Phnom Teak Trang.  The only other indication that we found the right cave was the small collection of motos, tuk-tuks, and beat-up trucks we found at the base – clues that an archaeological team was nearby.

​A short path through some bushes led to a steep rocky climb up the mountainside.  A rope isn’t required, but I still had to stop to catch my balance from time to time for fear of sliding down the loose dirt.  I can’t even imagine trying to bring heavy equipment or artifacts up and down this path, and have much respect to those that do.

​The top leveled out into an entrance area of sorts.  The cave is exposed to the outside, making it well lit and cool from excellent airflow, and there’s a large foyer-type area on the right before proceeding into the deeper part of the cave to the left.  Separating the left and right sections is a tree and collection of vines that hang from the ceiling.  A small shrine dedicated to the tiger spirits is located at the bottom of the tree where I later witnessed visiting Cambodian officials (military, political, etc.) pray and burn incense.  Buddhist monks also performed a ceremony at this site before the dig to bless the endeavour, as per local custom.

​The cave is called Laang Spean – “The Cave of Bridges” – because of several large rock formations that create a bridge-like effect, the largest of which was behind the main dig area.  Supposedly there are more than a dozen more caves in the area that archaeologists suspect may house artifacts but are yet unexplored.  The cave, while smaller than I expected based on photos I’d seen, was no less beautiful and inspiring.  Visal, who loves learning new things about Cambodia that others don’t know, was quite taken with the place and swore to become an archaeologist then and there.  Sadly, no one teaches archaeology in Battambang!

​About 20 or so Cambodian students from Phnom Penh were digging in the deep test pits, assisted by several French archaeologists with cigarettes dangling from their mouths and two or three foreign volunteers (one American woman was volunteering here before heading to graduate school to study the archaeology of Burma).  Visal and I introduced ourselves to Hubert and Sophady, who were kind and enthusiastic about our being there.  Sophady was particularly accommodating and carefully guided us around the site answering any questions we had.  A shorter man wearing a black shirt and the checkered karma-scarf that most Khmers wear, Sophady is actually finishing his Ph.D. under Hubert and is defending his dissertation on Laang Spean in the next few months (good luck, Sophady!).  Based on what I saw in my interactions with him, I have no doubt that he’ll pass with ease and that Cambodian archaeology will be better off for it.

​Between Hubert, Sophady, and some articles I read before visiting the cave, I feel like I now have a decent understanding of the history of the cave, although I’m not an archaeologist (so, digger friends, go easy on me if I sound like an idiot).  The first archaeology in the cave was performed in 1965 by French couple Cécile and Roland Mourer, who found a flint point before performing further research.  Over several years of work, the Mourers found pottery, bones, molluscs, stone tools, animal remains (including a rhinoceros!), and a variety of other data that indicated significant prehistoric usage of the site.  In 1970, they wrote that “to our knowledge, [Laang Spean is] the first prehistoric cave deposit reported in Cambodia” (Mourer 1970).  Not only that, but they also mentioned a long history of habitation by hermits and religious devotees, signifying the continuing importance of the cave to the locals even today.

​Unfortunately, and you had to know this was coming, the Mourers were forced to abandon their research and flee the country with the rise of the Khmer Rouge.  According to Sophady, research was not fully revived at Laang Spean until about 2009, when he and Hubert from the Franco-Cambodian Prehistoric Mission received funding to continue the work that the Mourers started.  As Sophady described it, there are lifetimes of work left to be done that will require many more decades to complete, which is both exciting and daunting.

​Nevertheless, in the short time that archaeologists have been working there, Laang Spean has revealed a fascinating history for the habitation of the region.  According to Sophady, the test pits reveal three distinct layers in the limestone, indicating three major time periods of occupation – a Neolithic layer (for lack of a better term), a Hoabinhian layer, and an ancient pre-Hoabinhian layer dating back tens of thousands of years.
 
The stone tools mentioned above, which they continue to find (and which they let Visal hold and inspect, to her astonishment), are indicative of the Hoabinhian cultural complex.  The Hoabinhian people (named after the town in northern Vietnam in which the first materials were found) are known for specific tool-making techniques as well as certain dietary preferences, which includes seafood (hence the molluscs found on the top of the mountain).  Sophady estimates that the Hoabinhian people who lived in this cave probably did so somewhere between 9000 to 3000 years ago.  

Five burials have also been found – four men and one woman dating to between 1,700 and 1,300 B.C.  Some burials were adorned with bangles and gifts, while others were left bare, leading the archaeologists to propose that the society occupying the cave had some form of social hierarchy.  They also found 2,700 stone beads, from which later research may discover trade networks with other groups around Asia.  Sophady suspects there are more burials left to uncover in the future.

​The burials are likely from the Neolithic period, although the term Neolithic is highly problematic and hard to define out of context.  This problem is made more complicated because the different layers of occupation are mixed together a bit nearer the surface, making exact dating and separation more challenging.  According to Sophady, the important thing to know is that the occupants of the cave changed at some point in history.  Whereas some occupants used the cave to bury their dead, likely indicating a certain reverence for the site (and perhaps involving some form of spiritual belief), later treated the cave as a mundane living space.  Thus, the common-day remains of a living people – seafood shells, food refuse, etc. – have disturbed the pristine burials underneath.  The difference in usage of the cave has implications for the shifting cultural importance of the site over time, and is something the archaeologists hope to clarify more in the future.
 
The oldest layer is not yet fully explored, although the data indicate that some form of occupation may have occurred in the cave as far back as 71,000 years ago.  Hubert and Sophady were quite enthusiastic about the prospect of further research into the deeper and older layer, as there’s potential for the information gained to rewrite the history of human occupation in Southeast Asia.

​Unfortunately, Laang Spean is threatened by the encroachment of business development.  According to Sophady, the cave is not currently protected as a research site and he’s worried about a Chinese company that has been buying up nearby mountains and caves to exploit the limestone found within in order to make cement.  When I asked about UNESCO protection, Sophady shrugged off the site as being “too small” to request such a thing, and thus he’s relying on media attention influencing local politicians to protect the site.
 
From my observations, the campaign is working so far.  After a few hours, several well-dressed Cambodian officials came to visit the site, including the local chief of police and an assistant to the Governor of Battambang Province.  With their arrival, Sophady called off the student workers, who proceeded to set up a large tarp on the rocky and root-filled ground in the “foyer” area while the archaeological administrators took the officials on a tour.  Eventually, everyone sat down on the tarp for a communal lunch prepared by women from the local village.

​After lunch, while I went to speak with the officials about boring research-related issues, Visal went and talked to the students, who quickly started an impromptu contest to see who could swing the farthest, Tarzan-style, on one of the thick vines hanging from the roof.  The students were clearly having the time of their lives, despite the hard work of digging through limestone for hours a day.

​As a tourism specialist, I quickly saw the potential of the cave for tourism – both foreign and local – and discussed it with Sophady and the officials.  Everyone was in agreement that tourism from Battambang is logical, and there are plans to create an exhibit for Laang Spean at the Battambang Provincial Museum in the near future (indeed, a poster is already on display near the entrance of the museum).  Sophady expressed hope that tour groups from Battambang can help protect the site, as the government would likely not allow a cultural heritage site to be sold to private interests if it was also earning a healthy profit for the provincial government and becoming well known – at least, not in this case, he thinks.
 
Beyond the foreigners who may have an interest in the site, it was clear to me that the cave holds great social value as a tourist site for the Cambodian people.  Not only is there a long history of religious pilgrimage, both from the hermits mentioned by the Mourers and the evidence of the tiger shrine (as well as reports of high numbers of visitors during the Pchhum Ben ceremony of the dead), but the site is clearly quite popular with young couples.  One aspect of my research that will appear in my upcoming dissertation (and whatever book or articles come from it) will be a discussion of ancient sites as places for romantic tourism among young couples.  Sites like these provide quiet, private places for couples to court (or do other, less naïve things) while also providing justification to their parents through the appeal to cultural heritage.  Just like many of the other sites where I research, Laang Spean is covered in the graffiti of young couples writing their names, hearts, and “forever yours”-type messages to one another – damage that, Sophady claims, is mostly surface-level damage and does little to no permanent harm to the site itself (although graffiti at archaeological sites is a problem in most cases, so don't do it!).  Finally, Sophady told me that many student groups from around the country, including 200 undergraduates from Phnom Penh that he was expecting a week later, are increasingly common at the site.  He hopes for Thai and Vietnamese student groups also, as they share a history with Hoabinhian culture, and thus the cave could be a pathway to peace building amongst these oft-hostile neighbours.  Undoubtedly, Laang Spean has the potential for multiple forms of tourism beyond just foreign history buffs.

​Laang Spean is a fascinating place, and while archaeology isn’t quite my speciality, I found this trip to be more than worthwhile for my own research.  Not only that, but it was just downright fun (although you need to watch out going down the hill’s side, as the loose dirt is more dangerous going down than up!).  Visal was floored by the history here, which is of the type they don’t teach in Cambodian schools, and I was glad to have met amazing new people at a fascinating place.  If you’re in the region, I highly recommend a visit, although it’ll take a bit of adventuring to get there.

​For more information about Laang Spean and the recent archaeology performed there, see this newspaper article by Ben Paviour at The Cambodia Daily.
 
For more information about archaeology in Cambodia and Southeast Asia in general, follow my buddy Alison’s blog over at alisonincambodia.wordpress.com, or listen to her excellent podcast This Ancient Life.
 
If you have access to academic materials, you can also see the following research articles about Laang Spean, which I’ve used as resources for this post:

Forestier, H., et al. 2015. “The Hoabinhian from Laang Spean Cave in its stratigraphic, chronological, typo-technological and environmental context (Cambodia, Battambang province). Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 3, pp. 194-206

Mourer, Cécile and Roland Mourer. July 1970. “The Prehistoric Industry of Laang Spean, Province of Battambang, Cambodia.” Archaeology & Physical Anthropology in Oceania. Vol 5., no. 2, pp. 128-146

***Thanks again to Alison Carter, Hubert Forestier, and Heng Sophady!  You folks are awesome!***

​Which brings me to my next point: there is no singular ‘adoption narrative’.  Every adopted child experiences the challenges of adoption in ways dependent on their specific social position, history, etc.  Even my own sister, who was adopted from a separate birth family than my own, reacted to her adoption in a dramatically different fashion than I did.  So this post isn’t representative of “How Adoption Affects Kids,” which is a summary that cannot be written, but rather an exploration of how adoption affected one individual.  My hope is that this story will come across as less self-serving than it may sound and instead illuminate some of the more common issues that adopted people face.  I’m certain that non-adopted children will recognize many of the discussed emotional struggles of adolescence, while also learning new things about the unique challenges of adoption.
 
Let’s start with some terminology so that you’ll be able to follow along.  Many adoptive families use their own terms for specific ideas, but there are some common phrases that people generally recognize.  The most important of these is the distinction between “family” and “birth/biological family.”  The term “family,” or any generic marker of kinship that would be used in a typical situation, such as “mother,” “father,” “sister,” etc., are used to describe the adoptive family.  In other words, the woman I refer to as “mother” never gave birth to me.  The woman who did endure that labour for my existence is referred to as my “birth mother” because she is my mother only in terms of the act of giving birth.  In my case, my birth mother never raised me for even a moment and my relationship with her lasted only long enough to cut the umbilical cord.  For that reason, she gets the qualifying terminology.  Other families with different situations might play with these terms a bit differently, but the general idea is fairly common amongst adoptive families.
 
So now we can answer that question from earlier: do I want to know who my real parents are?  Well, I already do know them.  My mother and father – again, who did not conceive or birth me – are my real parents.  They raised me since the moment I was born, fed me, clothed me, taught me everything I know – therefore, despite not sharing my physical blood, they’ve certainly earned the right to the title through years of putting up with me.

​Many people get flustered when I explain this answer and say that my birth mother will always have a special connection to me because she endured nine months of pregnancy and then several hours of painful labour.  For many people, this act automatically gives her the right to be my real mother – perhaps because many of those people consider their own labour an unbreakable bond to their children, which is certainly a worthy and respectable idea.  But in my case, 9 months and a few hours of physical discomfort pale in comparison to the 30 years of physical, emotional, financial, and spiritual labour that my adopted parents spent in raising me.  My parents – again, the non-birth ones – dealt with the poopy diapers and temper tantrums, the puberty-stricken adolescent, the rebellious teenager, the love-struck then heartbroken young adult, and the anxiety-riddled graduate student that formed my personality. 
 
Let me put it another way.  When my mother tells other mothers about my adoption, they often blurt out the exclamation, “Well, I could never raise a child that isn’t mine!”  You’d think people would realize how insulting that sounds, but sadly I’ve heard this phrase said to my mother with some frequency.  She has the best response, though.  She laughs and then asks what they have that she doesn’t.  She got to raise a child from birth to adulthood, experience all of my failures and triumphs, and we have a wonderful relationship now just like many mothers and sons.  The only difference is that while other mothers spent 9 months enduring morning sickness and back pains, my mother went to the beach.  Okay, so maybe that’s a bit of a glib summary that adds a little flavour of how I would shape a response to the aging Southern Belles my mother befriends rather than what she actually says, but the idea is the same – birthing a child is a wonderful thing that should be respected, but it’s not the requirement for motherhood. 
 
If you use birth to justify the connection with your child, that’s wonderful, congratulations.  But don’t assume that the relationships between adopted children and their mothers are fragile because we don’t share your same standards of motherhood.  In fact, we’d quite proudly declare that our relationships might be even stronger than many natural born children specifically because we’ve had to craft a relationship from other means.
 
Maybe a demonstration would be best, so let’s take a look at my personal case.  To do this most effectively, we need to return to terminology for a moment.  In North America, there are two dominant forms of adoption – the “open” adoption and the “closed” adoption.  There are other forms, but these two are the most common.  In an “open” adoption, both sets of parents generally meet and are known to one another.  When the child grows up, they can know the names of their birth parents and may have a personal relationship with them in some form.  Most files are open to them to read and explore at their leisure.  My sister’s adoption was open, for example, and she met and became friends with her birth sister when she was about 19.  She even knows what her original birth name would have been, although she’d never use it because she thinks it’s super 90s and “gross” (oh, youth!). 
 
My adoption, on the other hand, was “closed.”  “Closed” means that my parents and my birth parents never met nor learned each other’s names.  They were paired together through an agency, approved each other’s case files anonymously, and a third party orchestrated my transfer to my new family.  My closed adoption also means that the information provided to me about my birth parents consists of about 8 pages of sparsely-filled medical forms, with their names redacted with white-out.  It looks like this:

​​The only change I made from the original form is to hide my birth mother’s birthdate for her own protection.  Otherwise, what you see here is all the identifying information I’ve known about my birth mother for the entire 30 years of my life.  That’s it.  That blank white space is all I know of my birth mother’s name.  A grand total of 8 pages just like this one contain all the information I have about her and her entire family as well as my birth father and his entire family, with all names redacted.  There are also a few short descriptive paragraphs that I’ll discuss momentarily, but I hope you appreciate how frustrating it can be to have to stare at a blank white space every time you want to ask a question about your family history.  It’s maddening to not even know the name (especially since it could have been my name).
 
There is one exception worth mentioning, however.  On the pages describing my birth father, whoever was responsible for redacting the documents missed one sentence:

This error is the only hint I have that my birth father’s name was probably Brian.  I still tend to refer to him only as my birth father, both because a name amongst so much anonymity feels awkward and because his name humanizes him in a way that I cannot replicate with my mother, which doesn’t seem fair to me.  Most of the time, I wish his name wasn’t there – it’s an eternal tease for more information that I cannot know.  This single bureaucratic error drove me crazy as a child.
 
Both the open and closed adoption styles have advantages and disadvantages.  In the open adoption, you can easily find your birth family and vice versa, but there’s no consideration of whether you want to know them.  The closed adoption has the advantage of anonymity, which can certainly be frustrating but is also beneficial for some children in terms of accepting a new family history.  However, the closed adoption also blocks a great deal of personal history, including some medical information (which can sometimes be accessed through a headache inducing application process), and tempts the abandonment narrative that all adopted kids face.  After all, it’s hard not to feel like your birth parents didn’t want you when you can’t actually hear them say they loved you.  Open adoptions provide more closure in that sense, but at the risk of losing agency.  What works best is a matter of context, as each adoption case has unique considerations that might be more appropriate one way or the other.
 
A sense of timing also complicates matters.  Some children are adopted before they can form permanent memories, whereas older children will remember their previous lives in some format, creating new challenges.  I can’t speak to the latter experience, as my adoption was completed before I was born.  Some people find that fact surprising and assume that adoptions are usually post-birth – I’ve never really known why people are shocked by this information, it just seems obvious to me.  In the case of my birth, my birth mother was not in a situation to support a child and decided to put me up for adoption fairly early in her pregnancy (yes, the common phrase is “put up for” not “given away” or anything like that).  As a result, I was taken from the delivery room and never saw my birth mother again – by her choice, mind you.  My parents – the real ones, not the birth ones – were able to visit me in the hospital until they took me home on the 6th day of my life.  

As I mentioned before, my parents never hid my adoption from me.  They even purposefully used the word “adoption” as much as possible around me while I was still in the crib so that I would never fear the word or find it unexpected.  Whereas other kids had Dr. Seuss and Goodnight Moon as their bedtime stories, Carole Livingston’s Why Was I Adopted? was read to me so much that we had to tape the binding.  Yes, they have children’s books specifically to teach adopted kids that they aren’t freaks.  My favourite page of the book was one where they taught that kids can't be bought in stores, with an illustration of adopted kids in a store window as a woman walks out with a child who has a price tag on him.  As horrifying as that sounds, it was actually a bit comforting because the underlying message was always that I wasn’t a mistake or brought home on a whim – I was specifically desired to belong to this family.  That sense of belonging is crucial to the psyche of adopted children.

​The old custom, again derived from that 1950s sense of shame, is to never publicly acknowledge an adoption.  If there’s one thing I truly believe to be universal about adoption, it’s that adopted parents should never, ever hide the reality of adoption from their children.  I’ve known several kids who didn’t know they were adopted until they were older and it never turns out well.  Think about it: if you know about your adoption from the beginning, you have time to grow emotionally as part of your new family and overcome the self-doubt that inevitably arises from adoption.  Whereas being informed later in life rips the rug of security you’ve always assumed you’ve had from beneath you and leaves you with no experience to battle all the questions and complicated feelings that most adopted kids have already dealt with.  In the case of one person I know, the (white) parents just assumed their (black) child would figure it out because of the obvious physical differences between them, and when they casually mentioned his adoption in his teens because they assumed he already knew, he panicked and refused to believe them.  Never assume when it comes to personal identity.
 
The counter argument that many parents make is that acknowledging adoption undermines their role as parents or distances the child from them.  This idea is foolish because it assumes, again, that adoption is somehow a negative thing.  If you enter into an adoptive relationship with that assumption, you’re doing a serious amount of harm to everyone involved.  Fear of acknowledging adoption implies that adoption is somehow an inferior state from ‘normal’ relationships, and all you’ll do is make more problems for everyone later.  If you don’t have the strength to acknowledge adoption from the beginning and battle through those identity struggles together, you probably should pause and truly think about why you want to adopt in the first place.  Is it for you or is it for your child?  There’s only one right answer, although if chosen correctly it’ll satisfy both sides.
 
This same argument applies to parents who think that adopted children who want to find out about or meet their birth parents are somehow insulting them and/or being disruptive of the family.  I’ve met far too many mothers who cry and scream and accuse their children of abandoning them when they ask about their birth parents.  This reaction is entirely selfish and demonstrates that these parents have not yet resolved their own insecurities regarding their choice to adopt.  Adopted children most often want to find out about their birth parents to strengthen their relationship with their adoptive families, not to abandon them.  Remember that an adopted child will constantly question who they are and where they come from, with varying degrees of intensity, for their entire lives.  As an adoptive parent, you do not have the right to emotionally blackmail your child into not seeking answers to that insecurity.  If anything, assisting them in their quest can be a highly rewarding and cathartic experience for both the child and the parent.
 
My parents always taught me to not fear my adoption, but being adopted inevitably plays an extra role in the insecurities that children like me face growing up.  Most kids start learning to resist their parents as they grow older and pass through the rebellious stages of life.  Adopted kids have an extra painful arrow in their quiver, however.  At some point in his or her early life, when they are fighting with their parents and are exploring what insults do the most damage, the adopted child will discover the phrase that cuts deepest: “Well, you’re not even my real mom/dad!”  My advice to prospective adoptive parents is to be prepared for this accusation because there’s nothing you can do to stop it.  Trust me, it’s just a matter of time until they use it.  However, do know that adopted kids hurl this insult right around the time they begin to question whether or not they truly are part of this new family or not.  It reflects their insecurities, not their hatred, and responding with love instead of resentment will go a long way in building their confidence in their self-identity.
 
I was fortunate that my parents reacted with support and understanding, encouraging me to explore my heritage so that I could realize just how vital I was to the stability of my family.  Nevertheless, I still doubted my place in the family for many years.  I asked the typical questions adopted kids ask: was I a mistake?  Did my birth parents just not want me?  Am I just pretending to be this person with a new name? 
 
The anxieties of youth added to the problem.  My family moved from my home country of Canada to the United States five days after my ninth birthday, an act that was devastating to me.  In my case, I’ve always fought against my insecurities by passionately embracing my adopted identity like a suit of armour.  Being Canadian is a large part of that identity, so when we moved I felt even more destabilized.  If both my birth family and most members of my adoptive family were in Canada, was I moving even further away from who I really was? 
 
Of course, childish cruelty didn’t help.  South Carolina isn’t exactly a shining example of multicultural acceptance and my new classmates were brutal when it came to my being a foreigner.  I was constantly harassed and teased for everything from my accent to my not wearing a heavy winter coat when everyone else was freezing with the approach of what passes for winter in the South (it was only 60, folks, c’mon!). 
 
As children do, any sign of difference becomes fodder for all-out attack.  Already an outsider, the revelation of my adoption just made me even more an oddity to be ridiculed.  I will always remember the day when, having just learned a robust vocabulary of swear words and their meanings, one of my classmates called me a bastard, paused, and with realization sweeping across his face, proclaimed, “Hey, you don’t know who your parents are, do you?  You really are a bastard!”  Kids really can be awful sometimes.
 
I rarely mentioned this bullying at home, preferring instead to internalize it and build my rage from within.  Obviously, this choice was not exactly healthy.  I reacted to bullying by deciding that other people weren’t worth my time and lashing out at them with everything I had.  I became a loner and, given my lack of athletic prowess, threw myself into academics specifically to embarrass other students through academic means.  Although time and experience have matured me some, I still exhibit many of these qualities that make it difficult for people to enjoy my company (a fact I am aware of and try to work on at all times).  And I wouldn’t doubt that my decision to pursue a Ph.D. is somewhat related to these feelings as well.  The point is that the regular insecurities of childhood mixed with the unique insecurities of adoption have long lasting effects on personality, and are still present in my daily life even as I approach 30.
 
I also struggled with my place within my own family, as most adopted children do.  Like many Canadians, my family spans a wide range of cultures, histories, and languages (with both French and English spoken at family gatherings with some frequency).  My cousins, of whom I have many, were all considerably older than me, and after our move we lived hundreds of miles from the rest of my aunts and uncles.  I even forgot the entire French language due to lack of usage in English-speaking America, a discovery that prevented me from communicating with many members of my family.  As a result, I struggled to position myself within a family that seemed distant in terms of both physical space and age.  Being so young, looking physically different, and not being near them to share their culture made me feel like an outsider.
 
My family is also one of those strongly Irish families that cling to the Old Country for identity.  My grandfather was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but left for Canada as a teen, making my father and his brother the first generation of Canadians in the family.  Most of my cousins remember Grandpa Trew for his thick Irish brogue and his love of sneaking alcohol around his strict Pentecostal wife.  He died just four months after I came home from the hospital, with only two or three photos of him holding me to remember him.  All of his Irish-isms for which others so fondly remember him passed me by.

​Like many families around the globe, heritage is crucial to how individuals in my family construct their identities.  In our case, as with many Irish families, we come from a clan system where social bonds are based on shared traditions.  The Trew family name is of Anglo-Saxon origin and can be traced back to Rannulfus Truue of Warwickshire, England, in 1160 AD, although most of the family history revolves around Ireland.  This clan mentality is represented by the Trew Family Coat of Arms, which depicts two greyhounds representing honour and loyalty running across a banner, which is a common symbol in our households.  Many of my relatives have tattooed this image on their bodies, and I admit a strong pressure and temptation to follow suit myself.  But I’ve always wondered if I have the right to it.  As someone technically born to another clan, do I have the right to the symbolism of this group?  Am I even eligible to declare loyalty to a clan not of my birth, or would I always be suspect as an outsider?  After all, I don’t look the same and, after lots of time in the US, I don’t speak or act the same either.  Not being able to fully commit to my Irish identity in a manner consistent with others in my family has always made me feel uneasy about my role in the Trew clan.

​My mother watched my insecurities grow for several years, trying to be encouraging and supportive.  Eventually, when I was 14 and right in that period of life where everything is extra dramatic, my mother decided it was time to take me aside and have a serious talk about my adoption.  In her wise opinion, the manner in which I was lashing out at the world was caused not just by the stresses of my age, but also by anxieties over my adoption.  She astutely saw that, like most teenagers, I was desperately trying to control my world and make it what I wanted it to be instead of following the flow of life.  She knew that I could never control the situation of my adoption, however, and my desperation would only increase until I accepted my lack of control.
 
One day, she took me for a drive in her car and parked at a beach access lot down the street from our home.  She then did something quite unexpected - she said almost nothing.  Instead of lecturing me or trying to give me advice that my teenage self probably would have rejected anyway, she simply handed me a manila folder.  Inside was my adoption record – the 8 pages of information that contained everything I could possibly know about where I came from.  In her opinion, the file rightly belonged to me and I was now mature enough and in need enough to read it without hindrance.
 
My reaction to the file was not one of joy.  In fact, my anger flared for the following months and my mother thought for a while that she had made everything worse.  In reality, that car drive was an intervention of sorts that forced me to hit rock bottom in terms of anger regarding my adoption.  The reason is simple: I couldn’t hide from the truth anymore - it was all written on those 8 pages. 
 
The file revealed that both of my birth parents were 16 at the time of my conception.  In other words, yes, I was a mistake made by two immature and irresponsible children – nothing more than an accident made on some wild date, or so I thought at the time.  My mother, being religious, always told me I wasn’t a mistake but was planned to belong to her by a higher authority.  I tried to throw myself into religion – Protestant Christianity – to feel as she felt, but unfortunately this attempt backfired.  My competitive side took over and I began to study the Bible intensely, specifically for the purpose of using it as a weapon against those who treated me differently – in some cases quite literally, as I discovered mini-Bibles make decent projectiles.  Ask anyone I went to high school with about my religiosity at the time and you’ll probably hear some horrific things.
 
In reality, my religious fanaticism was more a method for self-abuse than anything else.  The more I adhered to strict (and inaccurate) interpretations of the Bible, the more I felt the need to atone for what I perceived to be the sins of my birth parents.  This paragraph didn’t help:

​My teenage self did not interpret this information lightly.  Not only was I a bastard made by two irresponsible teenagers, but they didn’t even have the courage to face this problem together.  Consider also that when read conservatively, the Bible doesn’t have many nice things to say about unwed mothers, unless of course you happen to birth the son of God.  While I have a fairly large ego, I wouldn’t go quite that far in describing myself.
 
The consequences of this rigid religiosity were twofold.  In one respect, I saw myself as the living proof of sin – a stain on the world that I could never erase, as my very existence was proof of my birth parents’ failures.  I justified my religiosity as a form of training – if I was produced from evil, then I needed to become stronger than others to prevent my inner evil from escaping.  Whereas others could be weak and fall to the temptations of life, such as my parents did, I must become unbreakable. 
 
Obviously, I failed.  Since I was a teenager with a healthy interest in sex and other such things, I was constantly riddled with self-doubt.  Every time I found someone attractive, I told myself that I was becoming distracted from my life’s mission – to be the strongest warrior I could be.  I purposefully wouldn’t allow myself to ask anyone out, even if I had strong feelings – a decision I still regret when it comes to some of them.
 
The secondary fallout of this period of my life is something with which I still constantly battle: distrust in women.  I find this admission the most difficult to make, probably because I’m in graduate school in one of the most liberal cities in the United States.  With such heavily feminist surroundings, I’m occasionally criticized for being a bit brusque with women and am judged accordingly.  The truth is, I consider myself a feminist and absolutely believe in equal rights for women, and also that the strongest and bravest people I’ve ever met are mostly women.  The problem isn’t in the belief, it’s in the expression of belief.  No matter how hard I try – and I do wake up daily trying to improve my behaviour – I still sometimes have a gut instinct to distrust women.  There’s no justification for it, but I do think if you understand what adoption is like, you can at least appreciate how I learned this distrust. 
 
Adopted children often have periods of their lives where they view their birth mothers, especially in a closed adoption like mine where she remains anonymous, as someone who abandoned them to an unknown fate.  The temptation to feel unwanted is high, and the blame is usually placed on the woman.  Only time, experience, and a strong relationship with my adoptive mother helped me learn otherwise, but it’s still a battle that I, and I suspect many other adopted children, fight every day.  Just believe me when I tell you that when I do behave poorly in this regard, no shaming is necessary – I feel it deep down far more than you can know.
 
My birth mother isn’t the only one I blamed, however.  My birth father received a special brand of hatred from me.  While I would categorize my teenage feelings for my birth mother as uncertain, I do think “hatred” is the correct word regarding my birth father.  Whereas my birth mother tried to fill in each paragraph of my adoption file with as much detail as space would allow, my birth father barely wrote more than a sentence or two to answer each question.  His pages are mostly white space as a result.  But what really hurt was a blurry line at the bottom of the last page, marked off with an asterisk.

​Not only was he no longer there to support my birth mother, which may have prompted my adoption in the first place, and not only did he expend what seemed like little effort or interest in filling in details so that I might know him better, but he hadn’t even told his family I existed.  In my teenage years, this thought filled me with rage.  How many people with whom I shared blood cells didn’t even know I was alive?  Was he such a coward that he refused to acknowledge my existence so as to preserve his own backside?  Did he ever fess up, or am I a source of endless shame to him?  I’ve tried to see alternate perspectives on this issue, to attempt to see things from what may have been his point of view, but I admit that I still struggle to understand this decision as anything but cowardice.
 
The turning point for my feelings came right around my 17th birthday.  Although, as I mentioned earlier, I wasn’t the most active person when it came to the dating scene, the fear of repeating my birth parents’ mistakes was always lurking in the back of my mind.  I remember waking up on my 17th birthday, looking up at the sky as if my birth parents were somehow peering down on me, and saying out loud, with a certain degree of spite, “I did what you couldn’t.”  Teenage pregnancies are often cyclical and self-repeating, especially in adopted families, and I was always afraid I’d condemn another child to the uncertainties that I had faced.  Since my birth parents were 16 when I was born, turning 17 somehow felt like a victory and in many ways was the first step to my making peace with them.
 
I also went to college at 17, which was the true turning point of my life.  Like so many others, my collegiate experience helped me find out who I really wanted to be.  I was fortunate enough to attend the Honors College at the University of South Carolina, which is still the best and most supportive academic community I have ever known.  No one judged me there but instead encouraged me to use my talents to improve the lives of others.  When I returned home for Christmas that first year, a friend told me I was dramatically more “mellow” and had dropped the intense religious fanaticism that I displayed only a few months earlier.  When he asked me why I was so different, I reflected on my experiences – freedom to explore my identity independently, new friends who encouraged my increasing participation in extracurricular activities, and, crucially, the experience of overcoming my self-guilt and finally asking out a beautiful woman who became my partner for much of my collegiate experience.
 
Also important for my newfound peace was the encouragement to channel my intellectual abilities into endeavours that resulted in emotions other than rage.  Applying my academic interests towards avenues of learning instead of judging was transformative.  I must credit my mentors, Hal W. French and Karl G. Heider, for encouraging me in this regard.  Hal was a religious scholar who directed my religious interests in a way that reflected the historicity of the Bible and its original language, greatly softening my interpretation of the text.  He even took me abroad to experience the religions of the world – Christianity and Buddhism in particular – up close, leading to my current pluralist views.  Karl, on the other hand, is a brilliant anthropologist who saw my adoption as a means to encourage me to explore human relationships.  Using adoption to lead me into the study of basic kinship, where all anthropologists start their studies, he eventually encouraged me to pursue my love of anthropology in other areas, and I am still working in it today.
 
Hal and Karl also inspired me to explore my heritage in a more direct way.  In 2008, with funding they helped me acquire, I travelled to Northern Ireland to meet my distant relatives, becoming the first New World Trew to return to the Old Country.  Despite my aforementioned hesitations, my acceptance as Irish was instantaneous.  Although I do not share the blood of the clan, my place in the family was made clear by a great uncle, Noel, who knew my grandfather John as a boy.  As he put it in his delightful brogue, “If Johnny Boy loved and accepted you, then you’re as Irish as any of us.”  Yes, he really does talk like that.  I haven’t gotten the family tattoo yet, but I suspect the next time I’m in Canada I may have it done, as it is both my right and my honour as a Trew to display it.
 
In the end, my collegiate experience taught me to reread my adoption file with different eyes. - to not be so fixated on the little slights that my imagination could turn into personal insults.  Instead, my experiences taught me to see the common humanity I share with my birth parents.  From little things, like my birth mother’s favourite movie also being one of mine, despite our other hobbies not quite synching up.

​To a paragraph towards which I had never paid much mind before, in which my birth mother tells me how much she loves me in the few words she had to say it.

​Since then, I’ve learned a great deal more about life and its uncertainties.  I’ve made peace with my adoption, and am now quite proud of it.  Most importantly, my relationship with my mother is better than it’s ever been because I’ve come to understand that when she adopted me, she didn’t just shoulder the responsibility of raising a child.  She also bore the burden of knowing that she owed my birth mother for her child and had pledged to raise me as healthily and happily as she could.  
 
My mother once told me that even though she never met her, my birth mother was always present in my mother’s mind during all the stages of my life.  If my mother could respect my birth mother and feel that she was somehow accountable to her in spirit, how could I selfishly continue to hold a grudge against my birth mother’s many unknowns?  To refuse to change would be to shame my mother’s efforts, something that I could not abide.
 
People often ask me if I want to find my birth parents, particularly my birth mother.  Non-adopted people always say, “Oh, if it were me, I’d want to know.”  When I was a teenager, I felt the same way.  I was determined to meet them to ask them a hundred questions that all began with “Why?”  As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to wonder what good it would do.  I’m happy with who I am, a member of a wonderful family with whom I share much more important things than blood.  My original name, my birth family history, none of that information can offer anything that I don’t already have in a much more satisfying manner.  Some people think I should explore my birth heritage for the future knowledge of my children, but that heritage won’t be any more theirs than it was mine.  Their heritage lies within my current family, Irish tattoos and all.
 
The only temptation I still have for meeting my birth mother is to tell her that I came out just fine, and that my mother heroically fulfilled her pledge.  I wish I could tell my birth mother that she did the right thing and that I will always be grateful for the opportunities that she gave me.  I only want to meet her to try to give her the peace of mind that I attained years ago. But therein lives a problem: did she also reach inner peace on her own?  If so, would my presence disrupt her life by bringing up old wounds?  She probably has a new family, new children, and a new life – who am I to interrupt that?  But then again, what if she hasn't and is waiting for me to reach out to her?  This uncertainty eats at the heart of my current considerations, which typically lean towards leaving sleeping dogs lie but are never fully placated.
 
Every adopted kid handles this situation differently, of course.  Some people want to know their birth families, some don’t.  Desires often change with age, with no right answer.  Finding out and not finding out both come with risk, and there’s no guarantee of satisfaction either way.  In many ways, it’s this uncertainty that plagues most adopted children throughout their lives.  The gamble is equally high either way, and no matter how strong our acceptance of our current lives, there’s always the fear of rupturing the foundations upon which our newfound identities are built.  Even those with strong wills and confidence who go into meeting their birth parents completely certain of their identities still cannot predict how these relationships will affect them or their psychology.  All I can say is that none of us take this decision lightly, and it’s a form of anxiety that most people cannot appreciate without direct experience.
 
For adopted children struggling with these types of identity issues, I offer some solace from my chosen profession.  In my field of anthropology, we often teach our college freshmen about two major types of kin: consanguines and affines.  Consanguine literally means “with blood” and refers to kin whom we relate to through descent, with blood as the generally accepted connecting factor, such as a mother and a son.  An affine, on the other hand, is someone to whom we relate through marriage, such as a mother-in-law.  The problem with teaching these terms is that they are false, particularly in the case of adoption.  An adopted child is someone who should, by literal definition, be closer to an affine, but is instead treated like a consanguine, thus redefining these concepts.

Which is to say that families are fluid.  There’s no set standard for what a family should look like, just as there’s no set standard for parenthood.  In Cambodia where I work, everyone your age is referred to as either your older sibling or younger sibling.  The whole process of adoption is simply a matter of taking a new child in and raising them as yours (a practice that developed partially as a result of the genocidal events that took place in the country in the 1970s).  The local term for an adopted child is particularly elegant, as it can be translated as something like “a child for whom we care.”  Families flow like water here to accommodate everyone as best as possible. 
 
So remember, even if you come from a rigid cultural system where you feel like you don’t fit neatly into your family, you’re actively redefining what it means to be family every day of your life.  If your society is less open-minded, try to keep in mind that there is no set shape for what a family is supposed to be, and there are people all over the world who accept you as a member of your family, even if you’ve never met them. 
 
These examples help me make my peace with my adoption, although there are some lingering issues I should mention.  I still feel like an outsider when I meet my family because of how different we are, and I still wonder whether or not I should attempt to meet my birth mother.  Forgiving my birth father remains a challenging task, and not blaming women for my identity crisis is a daily struggle.  And heaven knows I still prefer to be anti-social around most people because of my childhood experiences. 
 
The biggest lingering issue is one of trust.  When you grow up wondering if your birth parents abandoned you, especially when your birth father wouldn’t acknowledge your existence, it can be hard to trust anyone.  After all, your parents are supposed to be the most trustworthy people you ever meet and, while my real parents far exceed that standard, my birth parents are a constant mystery.  Some days I am at peace with them, some days the old uncertainties rear their ugly head once again.  That’s how life is with adopted children – we can become more and more secure, but we can never turn off the temptation to wonder.  Despite the challenges, I still think my adoption has made me a much stronger person than I would have been otherwise. 
 
Adoption meant, in my case, that I had to struggle for my family.  I had to fight for my family at a time when most teens only want to rebel against them.  I’ve come to admire my mother and father for their sacrifices, and I’ve learned to appreciate just how desperately they longed for me – and specifically me – to be a part of their family.  Most importantly, I’ve learned to empathize and understand someone I’ve never met – to know that my birth mother almost certainly went through years of her own emotional struggles after giving me up, all as a sacrifice so that I could have a life she could not provide.  That’s a pretty special thing, now isn’t it?
 
I can’t possibly describe the full complexity of adoption, the emotional and spiritual struggle of it all, in one post, even one as overly long as this.  There’s just too much to say.  But I do think this little snippet serves as a decent teaser for what adopted life is like.  I’m sure some of these experiences will be instantly familiar to many other adopted children, whereas other children may not find common ground here at all.  That’s just how it goes with adoption – there are many branches on an endlessly growing tree. 
 
If you’ve made it this far, I thank you for your patience.  My hope is that there was some small inspiration for you here, as there was for me.  In closing, I wish to share some words far greater than my own, those of the great poet Max Erhmann in his classic piece “Desiderata,” as words of encouragement to any child who is questioning their identity.