This is a 2009 movie, “The Blind Side” is an inspirational film based on Michael Lewis’ novel “Weakness: The Race Process”, directed by John Lee Hancock and starring Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw and Quinton Aaron. It is about a homeless African-American boy Michael Oher who was abandoned by his parents since he was a child, he had low self-esteem and was a huge-bodied “invisible man” at school. With the help of Mrs. Tuohy’s family, Michael Oher gradually rebuilds his self-confidence, and with his physical condition and hard workouts, he finally goes to college and becomes one of the first players to be drafted in the NFL. The film deals not only with racism, education and the adoption culture of American families.
The boy in the film, “Big Mike” Oher, is lucky to meet such a family, and from the film to the real world, in recent years, there is a constant news of American families adopting children, the Associated Press reported that the number of children adopted in the United States in 2017 was 4,714, the largest number of children adopted in China, and the special thing is that American adoptions include a large percentage of children who need special care. The U.S. is certainly an active country when it comes to adopting children, so what makes it such an important force?
Unlike China, Chinese parents, under the influence of long-standing Confucianism, believe that after raising their children, they will have to support themselves in their old age and have to raise their children for their old age, while under the influence of Western religious thought and a more complete medical and pension system, American parents see their children more as a gift and a blessing, and they can be raised to the age of 18 and become independent, and their parents do not need to provide them with any more material support. Parents do not need to provide them with any more material supplies, and there are social policies to protect them in their old age.
Furthermore, in terms of religion and faith, most American adoptive families already have children of their own, and they have a strong sense of social responsibility and mission in their value system, and in their eyes, as long as they have the conditions, they will help those abandoned children, even though some children have congenital physical defects, they strongly agree with the saying Every child is a gift from God; and Chinese families generally do not readily accept children without blood ties because the patriarchal system and the first-born son succession system established in feudal times require that the offspring be related by blood and that parents need to pass on their careers to their offspring and want them to be strong and healthy.
Adoption in the United States can become a culture mainly because of the social security system and the flow of historical concepts, but of course it needs to be viewed dialectically, because many adopted children in the United States may be rejected by some white children, and at the same time not purely Chinese children, but also by children of Chinese descent, and some of them cannot find their own identity, and are not so happy to live in the cracks. Finally, I hope that all adopted children will grow up happily, and that the birth of each child will be taken seriously, because after all, every child is a gift from God, and every family should bear this responsibility.