Adoption Barbie

When we were kids my little sister used to go over to her friend’s house next door to play with Barbie dolls. When it was time to come home, my mom would send me over to get her. I remember the scene quite vividly at the DeFontos’ (anonymous name) house. There were the girls on the carpet of what would have conventionally been the dining room playing with – though that hardly seems the appropriate term – fifty or so half naked perkily proportioned figurines. My sister and her friend would yank their respective barbies’ arms to the point of dismemberment in order to adorn them with roll neck sweaters or snap off legs in vicious attempt to remove their bell-bottoms and then toss them aside for another as if sharing a bucket of chicken wings. It didn’t seem odd to me then, but thinking back on the scene now I picture the DeFontos’ dining room carpet resembling that famous Hieronymus Bosch painting, the one depicting sexual gluttony with the hundreds of skinny naked people fated to hellfire. Though Barbie never seemed to mind the indelicate treatment she was receiving. Nor did she seem to mind when foul-mouthed, curmudgeonly Mr. DeFontos – who was blind – swiftly knock the smiling Barbie horde and their sparkling accessories across the carpet with the pendulum wave of his aluminum cane…

…When we returned home from China two years ago we spent a good part of that summer running the washing machine, creating files for our assorted travel documents, and finding homes for our special Asian treasures, the most fragile of which was wobbling on our living room rug. Arm and Hammer was doing its best to ring out of our clothes what China’s ungodly humidity did to them, we had made individual hills of the cumulative mountain of adoption papers, and we pushed aside the Irish crystal vases and Italian ceramic serving dishes in our crowded china cabinet to make room for our new Nanchangian porcelain tea set, chop sticks and bowls. Two years later, we sit in a house of cultural immersion and relative orderliness. Our craftsman bungalow is trimmed with mission-style furniture and shelves stocked with Italian cookbooks, Irish Mythology hardcovers, and various titles of all things China. Our file cabinet is jammed full of files with tabs reading: Referral Papers; Early Intervention; Suichuan Orphanage; Travel-Prep Package; Chinese Cultural Workshop; In-China Travel; Jiangxi Province; Home Study; Lifebook Info; and Readoption.

So while all things related to our Chinese Adoption adventure have settled into their own respective niche, one item remains boxed, lying in prone position on a shelf in a cavernous corner of what we now call the “Craft Room.” Intended initially as an office, the euphemistically dubbed Craft Room is essentially our junk drawer on steroids, housing such things as unused candle holders, holiday wrapping paper, college binders, photo albums, picture frames, a sewing machine and inanimate oddities that have to be hidden from the upset eyes of certain household residents: a Shrek doll that Ruby is petrified of and an Adoption Barbie doll that, quite frankly, gives me the creeps. It was given to us by the Mattel company of Hong Kong through their business partnership with the White Swan Hotel on Shamian Island, Guangzhou as one of the many tokens that symbolize the bond we have forged with our adopted country. Today, Adoption Barbie remains a token that – like Shrek to Ruby - disturbs me, not so unlike the embalmed Chairman Mao, whose crystal coffin is on daily display in Memorial Hall at the southern end of Tiananmen Square.

I have commonly been known in my family as the “Barbie Nazi,” an unfair title bestowed upon me by my brother and sister for my supposed forbiddance of the doll. The truth is my now eleven-year-old daughter was never really that taken by the fashionable blond anorexic. She was simply indifferent to Barbie, as I am to cats, so the reason I habitually kept in storage the dozens of Barbie paraphernalia my daughter received as gifts over the years had little to do with toy tyranny or social politics and more to do with her good taste, our limited room and the feng shui spatial arrangement to which I am highly attuned. At least that’s how I reason it.

So I now sit here at my desk studying our bizarre gift from China. On the back of the box is written: “This souvenir is presented by Mattel (HK) Ltd. to adopting parents of Chinese orphan children staying at the White Swan Hotel, Guangzhou, China.” The deal is, apparently, that because most American Adoptive families end their adoption journeys at the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou, the nearest five-star hotel to the American Consulate, Mattel has developed a special “Going Home Adoption Barbie” to be given to each adoptive family as a sort of token of thanks. They’ve also set up a Mattel playroom at the White Swan for families and their new adoptees.

The gift has sparked a bit of lively discussion. While some, like me, stow the unopened box away in a dark corner of a room next to an inoperable sewing machine, others argue the toy can be beneficial in helping their daughter to understand how she became a family member. Still others offer up mother and child to eager Barbie enthusiasts on eBay for close to three hundred dollars. I’ve even heard adoptive mothers who happened to have stayed at a different hotel in Guangzhou complain about the unfairness of Mattel in only granting the White Swan with the complimentary doll.

“What dat?” my adoptive daughter - now two and a half - asked me, as I sat studying it. “Dat fo me, daddy?”

“No,” I hesitated.

She proceeded to list all family members and ask if the doll was for each of them. Each time I responded no. “I’m not sure who it’s for,” I said, which is about the truth of it. I turned to examine it further. Barbie is sporting a polyester blend dress flagged with Miami colors and accessorized by a knit shrug with gold threads and matching belt. Her golden locks, dreamy blue eyes, and flashy dress are a striking contrast to her Chinese baby’s dark, matted hair, narrowed eyes, and primitive outfit. It’s difficult to see Barbie’s pink high-heels as they are obscured by the picket fence slatted at the bottom of the box. She is surrounded by ivy, bricks, shrubbery, a mail box that says “Going Home” and behind her is presumably the front door to the child’s new home, though Barbie’s amazon height renders it more like an attic crawl space. The baby seems to be levitated by some magical force, as Barbie’s slender fingers are extended in manicure pose rather than clutched in maternal grip. And since at the bottom of the box it says “For ages 14 and over…This is not a toy” I surmise that Going Home Barbie is not intended for either of my daughters, but for my wife and I. To play with? To display? To undress and lay strewn across the dining room rug a la the DeFontos’ house? To what?

For now, it goes back into the Craft Room, interminably encased like Mao, until we become strapped and need to make a car payment. Then Barbie mom and child will be auctioned off on eBay with the rest of the boxed orphans.