BEFORE IT WAS TRENDY...

As the world gossips about Angelina Jolie's adoption of a Vietnamese orphan, the PGP Classic Soap Blog would like to remind that As The World Turns got there years before the issue was so celebrity-friendly.

After suffering pneumonia and miscarrying her son, stalwart heroine Penny Hughes learned she'd never be able to have another child. She married Roy solely so she could be a mother to his little boy, Jimmy. When Jimmy was returned to his biological mother, Penny and Roy divorced and she left town. In England, Penny adopted a biracial Vietnamese daughter, Amy Lin.

Amy (Irene Yaah-Ling Sun) came to Oakdale in 1973 to stay with her Hughes grandparents, but the proper young lady felt out of place with American youth her own age and soon returned home.

Her final visit was in 1986, for Chris and Nancy's 50th wedding anniversary (and ATWT's 30th), when she was played by Una Kim.

It's interesting that, for all the social issues daytime deals with on a regular basis, international adoption has rarely been addressed. (Maybe it's because adoption stories on soaps tend to fall into two categories: the long-lost child popping up out of nowhere to torment the biological parent, and the biological parent popping up out of nowhere to take their baby back from the loving adoptive parents; both domestic adoption stories.)

The only show that I can think of tackling the issue was B&B with Kristen and Tony's adoption of Zende (AMC's Erica pretending that the kidnapped Maddie was a Russian orphan named Sonya doesn't count). Can you think of any others?