I, geekrevThe closest you want to get to looking inside the mind of Shawn Coons.

My good friend Jim posted this blog entry about boycotting China.  It’s about a family from Louisiana who went for a year without buying products from China.  Here is how Sara Bongiorni describes deciding to boycott China for a year, as she inventoried her family’s Christmas presents:

It stared back at me from the empty screen of the television. I spied it in the pile of tennis shoes by the door. It glowed in the lights on the Christmas tree and watched me in the eyes of a doll splayed on the floor. I slipped off the couch and did a quick inventory, sorting gifts into two stacks: China and non-China. The count came to China, 25, the world, 14. Christmas, I realized, had become a holiday made by the Chinese. Suddenly I’d had enough. I wanted China out.

I haven’t read her book, but in the two articles I’ve read about her decision I haven’t found much of a reason for the boycott other than there is too much Chinese stuff in her consumer world.  In my opinion, her decision seems xenophobic at best and racist at worst.  She chooses only to boycott China and not any similar foreign countries.  China is out, but Thailand and Taiwan are OK.

My friend Jim, on the other hand, is choosing not to simply follow negative course of action, but he is adopting a positive course.  While he is concerned about the safety of toys from China, he is not simply going to stop buying Chinese products, instead he is going to Shop Small and Shop Local.  He hopes to make more purchases from smaller businesses and more local businesses.  This should allow him to better judge the economic and justice impact of his purchases.

We shouldn’t boycott based on geography or ethnicity, but on practices, products and working conditions.  There are unjust companies in China, but there are unjust companies all over the world, especially in America.  Likewise, just companies need to be supported wherever they are - in China, Taiwan, Africa, Europe or America.

Singling out China leads to racism.  A good example is from a World of Warcraft podcast I used to be a part of.  There is a running character, named Ding Pong, who comes from the Chinese Gold Farmer stereotype.  The reality is that there are quite a few people in China who make a living playing online games “farming” for gold to sell for actual cash to other players.  But this has been used as a vehicle for all sorts of racist humor, like Ding Pong.

Don’t boycott China, instead make positive choices to support fair trade wherever it is to be found.

Disclaimer:  We are in the process of adopting a little girl from China (LID 9/18/07) who in all likelihood hasn’t even been born.  Boycotting China could take a job from her parents or literally take food out of her mouth.

Carrie and I went to the local U.S. Citizenship and Immigrations Office to get fingerprinted today as part of the adoption process. Over the past couple of years I have cultivated a fairly strong aversion and suspicion to the fear-mongering that the U.S. government calls “security.” So I definitely wasn’t pleased to voluntarily give them a detailed electronic scan of each of my digits. I’ve got no problem with giving my fingerprints for the purpose of screening potential parents for international adoption. I just don’t trust our government not to abuse this kind of information. There have been way too many examples of information about U.S. citizens being used by the government for illegitimate purposes.

Call me an enemy of freedom, but I don’t quite trust the government that has declared A War on Moisture (even though there wasn’t enough evidence to convict the original “liquid bomber”). Think about it. If our government really believed that the liquids we tried to bring on planes were dangerous would they dispose of them like this? Our government is trying to use fear to accomplish their political goals - which are tangential (and sometimes opposed) to making us safer. Which is why I chose to wear this awesome Creative Commons design shirt last time I flew. I wasn’t told not to wear it (unlike these people), but one of the flight attendants gave me a couple nasty looks.

A pregnancy is fairly easy to announce. You usually don’t have to find a way to work it into conversation. You just say “Guess what? I’m pregnant!” Or if you are the soon-to-be father you get that dorky looking smile on your face, put your hand on your wife’s stomach and say those annoyingly cute and inaccurate words, “We’re pregnant!” But I’m finding that it doesn’t feel as easy to announce an adoption.

Although, I guess I kind of just did. Carrie and I have decided to adopt a child from China. It’s something that we’ve thought about on and off at least since we got married. But this past winter we began considering it as a serious option for our lives right now. There are a million and one steps that led us to this decision and maybe I’ll go into them at some point, but regardless of how we got here. Here we are.

Here we are at the beginning of a new chapter for our family. We have a lot of paperwork to get in order before we send our dossier to the Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs (the agency within the Chinese government that handles all international adoptions). Once our dossier is approved, then we wait. Probably a year and a half to two years, and hopefully not more. The wait will be hard. We know that once we are with our daughter (most Chinese adoptees are girls) the wait will hopefully not matter, but right now it does.

For the moment we are actively gathering vital records, medical forms, net worth statements, background checks and a dozen more pieces of paper that will be part of the measure of our worth as parents. We are going to have a fairly extensive home study with a social worker from Great Wall. We’ve both read the book The Lost Daughters of China which helped us make our decision and gave us a good beginning into learning about the birthplace of our daughter. I’ve even got ambitious plans to give some of my precious IPod time to learning some conversational Chinese.

It’s hard to catalog my emotions. I am definitely excited and happy, but it seems so daunting to envision the next two years culminating in a trip across the world.  A trip with Carrie and Ben to welcome someone else’s child into our family - forever.

Who knows what will happen between now and then - and after then.