In the Image of a White Savior: Part Two

L. Salazar Flynn
5 min readFeb 20, 2024

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Photo by Alex Grodkiewicz on Unsplash

Part two of a three-part series. You can find part one here and part three here.

Our world was Gospel Truth and absolute rightness; it was Divine Appointment and the Christian Principles our country was built upon. It was going out to preach to the nations as specially appointed disciples, then returning home to God’s country to tell how many souls had been won when we asked for money for the next trip.

It was raising children on stories that would infect them with missionary fever. Stories about heroic white people who gave their lives for Jesus in India or China; about smuggling Bibles through airport security and persecution in far-off lands but soon here too for having those Bibles; stories of people in other countries whose families turned them away because they heard about Jesus and made the daring decision to follow him.

It was couples addressing the congregation after they returned from Belize or Manila to share the work being done there to win souls to Jesus, our Jesus, who was not the same as the Jesus they already had there. It was families with a long row of children that went white, white, white, white, brown; little additions at the end of the line who would be lucky to retain their birth names as a follow-up to their new Christian ones — a crowd of Faiths, Hopes, Daniels and Samuels filling the pews, casualties of the Evangelical adoption craze of the 2000’s.

It was being chosen: God chose you for this special purpose, handpicked a small child to be orphaned (or abducted, or forced to be given up, or given up under false pretenses) in another country so you could swoop in and save her and so much better understand His redeeming love for you yourself, the undeserving wretch, and how He cleanses us of our old filthy lives and makes us new and brings us into his Heavenly family.

It was the certainty that we knew better. Had better. That our language and ways would only bless them. It was spending two or three years enjoying the privilege of celebrating Chinese New Year, and then many more with the privilege of letting it pass us by.

Photo by Benjamin Voros on Unsplash

I was twelve, and fanciful, and full of how suddenly interesting my life had become, when my sister joined our family. In the years after we adopted her, and later, my brother, I was prone to introducing myself as El-whose-family-adopted-two-children-from-China, never wondering if my new siblings might not want me or us to be defined by their origin story.

My thinking was magical, my view of the world idealistic and God-breathed, and in retrospect I see I got it honest. I can forgive my young self for reading about the Boxcar Children having an adopted cousin from South Korea and wanting such a thing for myself. Not so much my grown father for being deeply moved by a viewing of Anne of Green Gables and taking it as a sign from God that he too must adopt a little girl. (When said girl, both inspired by and named after outspoken and stubborn literary women, turned out to be outspoken and stubborn herself, they were shocked.)

In February of 2003, I followed my parents across the Pacific Ocean to a hotel in Wuhan, China called the White Rose, where they were more than familiar with accommodating foreign families coming to claim Chinese children, to get my new sister and bring her home.

We met her on the ninth floor of a tall, gray building in the city, where we had waited in empty nursery rooms covered in off-brand Disney decals until she arrived with nothing but the layers of clothing she was bundled in and the photo album we’d sent her months before, filled with pictures of us and our pets and home. The women who accompanied her pointed to the pictures and then to us, saying, “Ba-ba, ma-ma, jie-jie,” then talked to her at length and asked if she understood.

Hao,” she said each time, the smallest exhale of acceptance.

They made her hug us all in turn, then we sat and talked to the women from her orphanage with the help of our translator, while my new sister sat in my mother’s lap eating Cheerios from a plastic container. And then we took her back to the White Rose and she was ours.

Ours to raise, to convert, to teach our American ways. She was a small foreign island we brought trinkets and Jesus to; our beneficence to her made us good people in the eyes of the church, and no one asked her if we really were good people any more than we ask the children in Ghana or the Dominican Republic if they are truly being helped by the white teens in Chacos who come on a fully-funded ride to “show them Jesus” and fill their camera rolls with selfies. She was the embodiment, not of her own distinct culture and personality, but of who she was to us and who we expected her to be for us. And when she expressed anything revealing that her needs ran much deeper than what we had already gone out of our way to give her — the gift of entrance into our good Christian family and the money to care for her — she was invisible to us.

Now an adult, my sister tells me how our parents often told her to be grateful they’d saved her from certain misery and oppression in Communist China (in the very city that would originate a worldwide pandemic that they would one day mock and refuse to protect her from). How they never dreamed that misery and oppression could also smolder in the coals of the forced gratitude heaped upon her. And we were so wrapped up in the betterness of our culture that we didn’t think to leave her any connections to her own. For why would she want them?

But she does. She teaches herself to speak and write Mandarin, watches anime and K-dramas, and avidly follows Chinese fashion accounts on Pinterest. She craves connections to the places and people we took her from, and, like so many other adopted children, feels perpetually a foreigner to both her countries of origin and rebirth.

You are our rescue mission, a living beacon of our righteousness to all who see us. We will write testimonies likening adoption to salvation and your home country to our darkest sin; we will always be the god of these metaphors and you will always be the lost sheep. There but for the grace of we go you. If you are unhappy, it is Satan who steals the joy God sent you here to have. It could never be because of us.

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L. Salazar Flynn

Always learning. I like to write at the intersection of human behavior, religious deconstruction, and things I see on the internet.