Look at this - OMG I had no idea I was fashionable

Adopting Asian kids becoming latest fad By Mike Seate PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW Thursday, June 19, 2008 Though I may not be ready for sainthood, I am owed some accolades for having sat through not one, but two, chick flicks with my wife in as many weekends. Few experiences are as emasculating and downright testosterone-sapping as viewing films made exclusively for and marketed toward the female gender. Their plot lines are centered almost entirely around emoting and the dashed expectations of true love. I often find myself enduring their 120-plus minutes by thinking, "Boy, she's going to watch six World Superbike races and a whole season of 'Tank Overhaul' for this one!" Although I spent most of my sentence, I mean time, during this all-estrogen double feature counting lint balls in my pockets and fishing for popcorn caught between my bicuspids and gums, something in both these otherwise interminable films did manage to pierce my thick fog of indifference. In "Then She Found Me," Helen Hunt portrays a neurotic mess of a woman who screws up every relationship in her life and can't tell good men from rotten ones. Unable to conceive a child naturally, Hunt's character decides to reward herself with something guaranteed to make her character and the audience smile: a Chinese baby girl. The film ends with long, lingering shots of the kid's smiling face, and half the women around us were fighting back tears. I was, too, but mine were because I'd never recover those lost two hours of my life. One week later, I suffered through an afternoon screening of the glitzy handbag commercial cleverly disguised as a major motion picture known as "Sex and the City." In that one, Charlotte, one member of the quartet of ditzy, clothes-obsessed main characters, couldn't conceive a child naturally. The solution? She adopts one of those adorable Chinese babies you've heard so much about -- forcing viewers to spend much of the next 90 minutes of film watching these four screwed-up women as they screw up some kid who would be better off in a rice paddy 7,000 miles from any of them. Call me cynical, but since when did Asian children become "must have" fashion accessories for upper middle-class Americans? Along with Calloway golf clubs and season tickets to football games, paying $30,000 to $40,000 to adopt an exotic baby is suddenly viewed as the most chic purchase this side of a pair of Manolo Blahnik pumps. Never mind that thousands of babies of other races -- most of them black -- go without foster homes and adoptions here and elsewhere in this country every year. It doesn't cost tens of thousands of dollars to adopt a black, Latino or mixed-race child. But for some reason, even Hollywood is marketing Asian babies as somehow superior and more desirable. That's a shame. Because if people really wanted to adopt children because of a desire to become parents, they'd just adopt babies, not fashion statements.