Nothing like a I-just-hurled-a-little-in-my-throat feeling to get through the past week or so:
Poor Pax.
Some points where I particularly puked a little:
"One immediate challenge: the language barrier. Pax, who until now has only known life inside the simply appointed Tam Binh Orphan Center on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, speaks only Vietnamese, while Jolie has learned a few phrases in his native tongue. Dr. Jane Aronson, a Manhattan pediatrician and international adoption expert who became a friend of Jolie's following Zahara's adoption, notes that Pax's years in an orphanage may initially slow his language abilities and that learning English will likely take several months."
A smaller irritating point, but a point at which I spit slightly. My response: No shit, Sherlock. You adopt an older child from a foreign country, it's going to take a while for them to adapt linguistically. I guess I am irritated by this always being made into a big deal. As if it is this sudden surprise that this child from a foreign country could actually speak a foreign language. Jolie/Pitt are not the first parents to deal with this issue. *sigh*
"Pax had not been told he was to be adopted until that day, for fear that "we might put pressure on him and make him more frightened," says Bui Thi Thanh Tuyen, his primary caretaker at the orphanage. When an overwhelmed Pax began to cry after meeting Jolie, she quickly showed her maternal instincts: "She told me she understands – that it's normal for all young children to be scared," says the orphanage director, Nguyen Van Trung. Later, after Jolie had taken Pax aside to comfort him, "he was very cheerful and happy," says Trung. "He even played with his new brother Maddox.""
This bothers me. So I guess a point of hatred can be spared and placed upon the orphanage director. Either way, whether you tell the child one week, or the day before, or even an hour before they are to be whisked away, wouldn't you be frightened, too? I think it's wrong to withhold that information, as if a "surprise attack" would make this poor child all the more pliable to be whisked away in sudden shock and taken to another country with some weird ass lady. Kudos for Jolie at least admitting that she understood that all children become afraid - shame on you, Nyugen Van Trung.
"Abandoned as a newborn by his birth mother at a local hospital, Pax – then called Pham Quang Sang – spent his days in the facility's structured environment: Toddlers rise at 6 a.m., when they brush their teeth and wash up before eating a typical breakfast of bread or rice porridge."
Definitely don't like this. The way they worded it, the fact that they put it in writing in an article...everything. It's bad enough that adoptees have to face some truth about their life as an orphan, but how would you like knowing that you could Google your name and get your entire truths on hundreds of damn websites? And, the whole publicizing of the on-goings of the orphanage (which gets better in the next paragraph) is just so...media-whored. It's bare-minimum, of course. And though I can't place full sentences or words together to express my entire feelings, I just know it doesn't feel right to me.
"Contrary to some reports, Pax's adoption was not fast-tracked, nor did Jolie, who requested a healthy boy – many of the children at Tam Binh are HIV positive – donate money to the orphanage in order to curry favor. "Things just fell into place," says Heidi Gonzalez, the Vietnam adoption program coordinator for Adoptions from the Heart, the Pennsylvania-based agency that arranged Pax's placement. "Angelina contacted me [in late fall] as I was looking for a home for Pax." "
In short: bullshit.
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