Raising a foreign child in another country can be stressful especially if you do not know what information you would like to keep and what to relate. So it must have been stressful for my mother not to relate to my older sister that she was adopted from another country, so that she would not think of herself as being inferior to the rest of the family. That was my mother's thought and it sounded genuine. Today this is sister is just as close as my other "biological" one. I am not a lover of politically correct terms but am using the word biological for the sake of simplicity.
I would be curious to know more about the pressures about bringing up a child from another nation and I imagine there would be because children may not be accepting, as we would like to be. Yet children learn from their parents so if the parent can serve as a good model than the child should not have to worry about being teased by others. But that was not the case for my mother who was ridiculed for coming from Russia when she was a young girl in Canada. That may have been due to the fact that she did not speak the language clearly at first. It may have been due to a prevailing attitude that if you were from a country where Stalin ruled, you were different. Today we realize that whoever runs the country has nothing to do with how a child is, and that one should not judge children because of where they come from.
After the Second World War it was common that the Japanese who remained in China would intermarry. It was difficult for them to return to Japan then because of the limits on re-entry. As a result these couples produced kids that were partly Japanese and partly Chinese. Some families chose not to relate to their children about their descent for fear that the other Chinese children would ridicule and judge them for the errors of the war. Today those children of mixed marriages have grown up and have had families of their own. It must have been stressful to keep part of one's identity shrouded because of the possible repercussions back then.
In the 1980's Japan repatriated all those Japanese citizens that wanted to come back to their country of origin and many are. Clearly returning back to your roots is a stressful task and deciding to remain behind must have been as well, because by the time the eighties came around those Japanese people had already established businesses, families and social networks in China.
