Educational Media Reviews Online

On Me Prend Pour Une Chinoise! profiles five adolescent girls adopted from China by Quebecois during the international adoption boom of the early 1990’s. Anne, Léa, Flavie, Julia, and Alice (filmmaker Nicole Giguére’s daughter) represent typical international adoptees—in most ways like any Western kids, but having a few bumps in the road to adulthood due to the abandonment and/or neglect they experienced as infants.

The young women are like any North American teenagers—critically assessing their own looks, beginning to date or think about relationships, and forming goals for the future; they face occasional prejudice from peers, mostly in the form of ignorant or unkind remarks, but seem to take it in stride. The girls are quite articulate; well-informed about the effect of infant abandonment and neglect on international adoptees, they talk easily about the probable circumstances under which they were orphaned and the care babies receive in understaffed, poorly-financed Chinese orphanages. On the other hand, one has been hospitalized for anorexia, another attempted suicide and was taken into protective care; Giguére’s daughter takes medication for an attention disorder that has affected her schoolwork. Flavie, who attempted suicide, says she knew her adoptive mom was disappointed in her; she cautions parents to realize that an international adoption could turn out badly. This intimate and well-produced portrait should be of interest in particular to young adoptees, and possibly to prospective adoptive parents.