If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me where my "real" parents were or if I intended to go back "home," I could gentrify the Chinese province I was born in. It's a benevolent and well-meaning question, with "home" said in that pointed way that Westerners do when they’re talking to someone foreign, at heart, but it's also blithely uninterested in the complexities and nuances of adoption, particularly of transracial adoptions, where the child of adoption belongs to a different ethnic background than the parents.
Lion, which was directed by Garth Davis and adapted by Luke Davies from Saroo Brierly's memoir, A Long Way Home, is just as uninterested in these nuances, opting instead for the easily…