A Note on Photos and Their Absence

I've added a photo to the blog homepage (upper right), the one of Tam, Sarah and myself on the famous "red couch" at the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou, China, shown at the top of the page on the right. I'll talk about the photo in a moment, but this is really intended as an explanation of why you won't find more photos on this blog.

When we started our family website, and when we adopted our daughter in China, we posted many photos for a while, along with our log of our trip to China to join Sarah.

Up through about her second birthday, we posted a number of photos. Then our jobs and the terrible twos intervened and the website didn't get updated. Now, Sarah is seven. She deserves her privacy and, well, we all know that the Internet has some strange folk lurking out there. We respect her privacy. For family and friends, you either have been or can be invited to gain access to our private sites at Flickr (for still photos) and YouTube (for videos). If you want to be added, E-mail me. If you don't know my E-mail, you aren't closely enough related to see Sarah's private photos.

I have no problem with posting the 2001 Guangzhou photo: It's been on the Web for six full years and is therefore no doubt archived by Google and many other sites. It's also on the homepage of tamandmichael.com, so it's hardly an invasion of Sarah's privacy at this point.

For those who may not have seen this photo before, or heard its background, the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou is a lovely, huge five-star hotel that happens to be next door to the US Consulate in Guangzhou. And all American adoptions in China are processed by that consulate, not by the Embassy in Beijing. So all adopting Americans, regardless of where in China you adopt, go out via Guangzhou (Canton in the old days). And for convenience, the majority stay at the White Swan. The hotel is surrounded by shops catering to adoptive parents.

There's a famous red couch at the White Swan where adopting groups traditionally take pictures. (Red is the color of joy and celebration in China, and you'll note that we're both wearing red. The couch makes for good photos, and it's in an area with a glass wall opening out over the Pearl River.) This is a photo taken on our last day in China (July 12, 2001: for our log for that day, see here.) There is also a group photo of all the babies adopted in our group. But this is our first relatively good family picture. (Our first pictures were the photos of our first meeting, while unquestionably our worst early family picture was the Chinese official adoption photo. We call it the "deer in the headlights"picture, but don't think much of it.)

For our close family and friends, just ask and we'll give access to the Flickr and YouTube sites.