Transnational Adoption

A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender, and Kinship

Sara K. Dorow

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780814721476
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Each year, thousands of Chinese children, primarily abandoned infant girls, are adopted by Americans. Yet we know very little about the local and transnational processes that characterize this new migration.

Transnational Adoption is a unique ethnographic study of China/U.S. adoption, the largest contemporary intercountry adoption program. Sara K. Dorow begins by situating the popularity of the China/U.S. adoption process within a broader history of immigration and adoption. She then follows the path of the adoption process: the institutions and bureaucracies in both China and the United States that prepare children and parents for each other; the stories and practices that legitimate them coming together as transnational families; the strains placed upon our common notions of what motherhood means; and ways in which parents then construct the cultural and racial identities of adopted children.

Based on rich ethnographic evidence, including interviews with and observation of people on both sides of the Pacific—from orphanages, government officials, and adoption agencies to advocacy groups and adoptive families themselves—this is a fascinating look at the latest chapter in Chinese-American migration.

CHAPTER 1

Why China?

Identifying Histories

We should not conflate a haunted history with nonspecificity; on the contrary, haunted history alerts us to context.

—Anne Anlin Cheng (2001: 28)

Contemporary poststructural and psychoanalytic theorists define identification as a process that occurs where individual lives meet the haunting of social relationships—a process that “names the entry of history and culture into the subject” (Fuss 1995: 3; see also Cheng 2001).¹ In this sense, there are several overlapping histories that “identify” Chinese adopted children: trans-Pacific migration, the social and legal contexts of domestic and international adoption, and the unfolding dynamics of China/U.S. adoption itself. I see the traces of these histories in the stories American parents tell about how they decided to adopt a child or children from China. As prospective adoptive parents sift through their options, the ways in which they imagine the child that might become “our own” conjure elements of these histories. The title of this chapter, “Why China?” thus refers to two things at once: (1) parents’ reasons for choosing to adopt from China and (2) the historical forces that might explain the popularity and growth of the China adoption program.²

The histories that are invoked when parents choose transnational adoption tell us about racialized and gendered citizenship in the domestic nation and family. Yet my focus on parents is not meant to put them on the spot. Rather, parents’ expressions of transnational family building should lead us to interrogate the historical weight of dominant social discourses and practices that reach beyond—and inform—individual beliefs and everyday interactions in contemporary American social life more generally (Anagnost 2000; Eng 2003). For the adoption process itself, this means we should try to understand how parents’ choices are shaped within institutionalized practices in state and social service agencies. So while parent motivations for adopting are portrayed in the literature as notoriously difficult to pin down (Kirton 2000: 43–44), this becomes a problem for “knowledge about adoption” only when motivations are assumed to spring from inside the bounded individual decision maker, rather than from the juncture of individual and collective practices. I take the messiness of parents’ decisions as evidence of the circulating forces of history that shape the possible horizons of identification for them and their children.

Throughout the following pages, I focus in particular on moments in my ethnographic data when adoptive choices meet racialized exclusions—those places where histories of color blindness, salvation, and universal humanism meet their dialectical partners of white privilege, marginalization, and particularity. My intention is not to attempt any kind of exhaustive history, nor to permanently hitch contemporary China/U.S. adoption to specific historical sign posts, but rather to suggest resonances of a discursive and practical nature. When it comes to racial formations, for example, I am more interested in how adoption decisions might play off of the shifting topography of imagined black-white-Asian relationships than I am in reinforcing the imprint of a racial hierarchy on American culture.

I begin with the story of just one adoptive parent to suggest what historical traces I mean, and what I intend to argue in this chapter on “why China.” When we spoke in 1998, Jackie Kovich was a single white woman who had only recently adopted a daughter from China. Like most adoptive mothers and fathers I interviewed, Jackie began her adoption story with an explanation of her decision to adopt at all. She drew on humanitarianism and nonbiological parenting as naturally linked in a tacitly white embrace of a “different” child:

I’ve always had the feeling that adoption was what people ought to do, from a political perspective, and from a, from a social justice perspective also. And I’ve never had the need to reproduce, to see a child that looks like me…. And I’ve always worked with underserved people and in the Third World.

This expressed commitment to and familiarity with global political and social inequities recalls a long-standing but selectively invoked thread of adoption discourse in the United States: fulfilling national and familial discourses of generous humanitarian outreach (Briggs 2003; Modell 2002). But it also laid the narrative groundwork for Jackie’s choice to adopt from China in particular:

[A]bout three months after I came back from a business trip to China, I went to see my sister. And she said, “Oh, did you see the thing on TV about the Chinese orphanages?” And I said, “Yeah, and you know, those children are so beautiful. There are no ugly Asian children.” And my sister said, “Why don’t you adopt one?” Okay? And I’d never mentioned anything to her [about wanting to adopt]!

In Jackie’s account, a prescient remark by her sister seals her destiny with China, but only because overdetermined by the dual desirability of Chinese children as both needy and beautiful. “The thing on TV” refers to a 1995 media exposé of poor conditions in Chinese orphanages, beginning with a documentary titled The Dying Rooms, that ended up influencing a number of parents in their decision to adopt from China. At the same time, “there are no ugly Asian children” resonates with a history of American and European fascination with aestheticized, feminized Oriental others (Said 1994 [1978]; R. G. Lee 1999; Register 1991).

Taken together, these transnational expressions of need and desire figure through yet a third lens of domestic racialized history. A bit later in our discussion, Jackie had just finished telling me how important she thought it was to teach her daughter about Chinese culture, when she continued, “I mean, look at the black community. If they truly had pride in who they were, the community wouldn’t be disintegrating…. I think the reason why the Asian communities have excelled in our society is that they do have pride in who they are.” Simultaneously referencing discourses of the culture of poverty (associated with blacks), the model minority (associated with Asians), and globalized humanism (associated with whites), Jackie imagines what her daughter is and can be against what she is not and will not be. A racially and culturally proud, desirable, redeemable Asian child is distinguished from the racially and culturally abject, marginalized, and possibly irredeemable black (collective) body. As Cheng (2001) asserts, the “strain of Asian euphoria” that marks the model minority discourse “serves to contain the history of Asian abjection, as well as to discipline other racialized groups in America” (23). Explanations for transnational family building sometimes expose not only the historical blinders of American multiculturalism invoked by Cheng and others (Okihiro 2001; Omi 1996; Prashad 2003) but also its unspoken whiteness (which has little need to be culturally proud). Jackie’s story of choosing or being fatefully chosen for China—while more overt in its racial constructions than was the case in most of my interviews—brings to the surface several histories that reproduce/transform white middle-class subjectivity at the juncture of domestic and transnational practices and through the migrating adoptee.

Flexible Difference: Adoption as a Chapter in Trans-Pacific Migration History

China/U.S. adoption came along at the right time, or perhaps more accurately, because the times were right—that is, a confluence of historical processes made it both possible and attractive. It is toward this claim that my argument in this chapter is aimed, organized around three kinds of history that weave through Jackie’s story. In subsequent sections I deal with adoption histories themselves, but I begin with the migration of people, cultural imaginaries, and material objects between China and the United States, a history that is in some ways the least recognized of contextual histories of adoption, yet which leaves a certain imprint on the reasons people give for adopting from China. Parents imagine their and their children’s relationships to China through the traces of a long history of “trans-Pacific flights” of people, ideas, and sentiments. In other words, the reasons parents give for adopting from China are inseparable from the images and sociopolitical relationships that characterize the history of China/U.S. migration (Shiu 2001).

I do not want to suggest a direct and continuous link from centuryold images and constructions of China to the present, but as Gungwu Wang (2001) has argued,

[A]ny study of Chinese today must take account of the historical experiences of those who left China in the 19th and early 20th centuries, whose descendants form the majority of those abroad who are still identified as Chinese in some ways. Those experiences provide an important background to what it has meant for Chinese to live among different kinds of non-Chinese during the last hundred years or so. (119–20)

China/U.S. adoption fits Wang’s general description of migration yet reworks the relationship between contemporary and past experiences of Chinese migration. Because Chinese adoptees enter at a young age into the legal and social embrace of (usually) white American homes, adoption migration abruptly raises the question of what it means to “live among” non-Chinese and at the same time suggests a path free of some of the usual obstacles to doing so. Chinese adopted children leapfrog into the national interior across boundaries of kinship, class, nation, and race. And it is for that very reason that their presence compels explanation.

Adoption migration thus turns our gaze to non-Chinese and, more specifically, white American imaginaries of the immigrant past. It forces us to consider the Chinese experience of migration as it both shapes and is shaped by Western images of China—those familiar and contradictory historical traces that “have designated China in a range of ways, as worthy of admiration, sympathy, curiosity, fear, ridicule, hostility, conversion to Christianity, or as a means of profit” (Mackerras 1989: 11). One kind of American discourse of China has placed it at the center of an increasingly transnational and “borderless” world, for instance, as invoked in the notion of the open economy of the Pacific Rim (Palumbo-Liu 1999). At the same time, however, representations of the Pacific Rim tend to recover East/West binaries; its Orientalized others, as Said’s (1994 [1978]) pivotal work demonstrated, “recuperate a specific western individual at the core of reality” (Palumbo-Liu 1999: 339). These different but simultaneous imaginaries of China have developed through migration in both directions across the Pacific, for example, missionaries to China and railway workers to California. The cultural economy of adoption similarly occurs through the movement of people, ideas, and resources both from and to China.

The question of trans-Pacific migration must address the different historical contexts of the two areas in which I conducted research in the United States: the San Francisco Bay Area and the Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan area. The former has a 150-year history of Asian and especially Chinese immigration. Starting in the mid–nineteenth century, American westward expansion included the idea of developing East Asia (Dirlik 1993, referenced in Palumbo-Liu 1999), with San Francisco as its gateway to trade with China (Takaki 1989) and as the gatekeeper of Chinese immigrants who would provide labor for American nation building (E. Lee 2003; Takaki 1989). This means that in the contemporary Bay Area, where 30 percent of the population reports being Asian, Chinese American people and cultural representations are more pervasive as well as more variable than in the Twin Cities, where significant Chinese immigration is one or two generations old and only about 8 percent of the population is Asian.³ Thus, the Asian America of the Twin Cities is an instance of the more recent expansion of Chinese and other East Asian student, business, and family immigration to North America. Also significant is that in San Francisco, an estimated one-fourth to one-third of families adopting from China include at least one Asian or Asian American parent (mostly Chinese American but also some who identify as Japanese American and Filipina American, for example)⁴—a proportion substantially higher than Minneapolis–St. Paul and probably most any other location in the United States. For these reasons, the question of “why China” begs consideration of geographic location. Of course, location must always be considered alongside other social factors. Jackie Kovich, for example, contrasted her child’s identity to that of adoptive families living just over the hill from her in the Bay Area; she drew on the “free” cultural resources of her multiethnic working-class neighborhood, while wealthier white adoptive parents a few miles away could afford to send their children to private schools offering formal programs in Mandarin language and Chinese cultural arts.

Whether in San Francisco or the Twin Cities, parents’ narratives of “choosing China” both echo and challenge a central theme of the history of China/U.S. migration: the American construction of the Asian Other as both strange and familiar, as insider and outsider, and as variably suited to incorporation into national projects of citizenship (Lee 2003; Palumbo-Liu 1999; Lowe 1996). Since the nineteenth century, immigration policies and practices have sometimes invited, sometimes forced, and sometimes barred the migration of Chinese workers and students and the relatives (including “paper sons”)⁵ who have joined them. From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to the 1965 reforms abolishing official race-based immigration, to the grounding of the Golden Venture that stranded hundreds of illegal Chinese immigrants in New York Harbor in 1993, China/U.S. migration has been shaped by universal discourses of transnational capital as well as particularizing notions of the uncivilized or exotic Asian, or more recently, the virtuous model minority (PalumboLiu 1999; Lowe 1996). The flexibility of Asian difference—strange but adaptable—has thus enabled contradictory positions of expansionary transnationalism, nativist exclusion, and assimilationist embrace.

The liminal space occupied by Asian America is and has been accomplished on cultural and racial territory, and in response to material realities. The reaction to increasing labor pressures in California that catalyzed the late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century exclusion period, for example, was as much a manifestation of Orientalist discourses of the untrustworthy and uncivilized Chinaman (E. Lee 2003) as it was a class issue. Brought back by American missionaries and traders, these racialized discourses were reproduced “at home” in various ways; one exemplary case is provided in Nayan Shah’s (2001) study of political and social responses to Chinatown’s “contagion” in turn-of-the-century San Francisco. But then, even as the 1906 establishment of the Angel Island immigration station ensured increasingly standardized practices of keeping out unwanted Asian people (E. Lee 2003), the importation of “Orientalstyle” decorative arts and consumer products reached heights previously unprecedented in middle-class white American culture (R. G. Lee 1999).

This dialectic of danger and exoticism has echoed again since the 1960s in the seemingly more benign “model minority” discourse, which Lowe (1996) argues is yet another instance of the projection of American national anxieties onto the site of Asian American immigration. While purporting admiration of “traditional values,” the model minority discourse tends also to depoliticize the material realities of racism and to deny histories of labor exploitation by promising “deliverance of minority subjects from collective history to a reified individualism” (PalumboLiu 1999: 415). But even so, there is regular confirmation that such transformation is not fully possible, as the case of Wen Ho Lee demonstrated.⁶ R. G. Lee (1999) points out that in the late capitalist national American imaginary, Asian Americans have become both model minority and potential enemy within. In discourse echoing some of the nativist tone of the late nineteenth century, Asians are in and to America “economically productive but culturally inauthentic” (191). A more recent surge of “Asian cool”—hip but respectable popular Asian American culture—is perhaps the latest reinvention of America’s flirtation with the exotic potential of such inauthenticity (see Galang 2003).

Reasons parents give for adopting from China at times reflect this contradictory history of Asian America, sitting uneasily on the impossible binary of rejecting/embracing images and ideologies of flexible Asian difference. Some of the multicultural promise of adopting children from China hinges on cultural-racial desirability and accessibility. But Asianness may still threaten to exceed the bounds of consumable difference. I argue below that such excess is at least partly kept in check through the construction of black difference as less assimilable difference. As suggested in Jackie’s narrative, motifs of model Asian America play off the construction of abject black America and failed black-white relations (Gotanda 2000; Palumbo-Liu 1999), allegedly manifest in welfare dependence, criminality, and ingratitude.

For a select group of parents, feelings of connection to China and Chinese culture come from histories of trans-Pacific migration in their own families. Some Chinese American adoptive parents I interviewed cited a “natural” connection based on cultural heritage, even as they were sometimes quick to distinguish their second-, third-, or fourth-generation Chinese American experience from the Chinese heritage their children seemed more directly to embody. A number of white adoptive parents also cited a direct connection to China because they had relatives who had been missionary, diplomatic, or academic sojourners there or had themselves lived in or frequently visited China as businesspeople or teachers. But most white parents expressed an affinity with Chinese culture that bore more indirect traces of the cultural and political histories of migration discussed above. It was not uncommon, for example, for white adoptive parents to indicate a preexisting or growing interest in “ancient Chinese culture.” Some named such an interest as a circumstantial bonus, while others indicated they thought it was a mistake for people to adopt from China if they did not have such an interest. Cultural knowledge and interest on the part of adoptive parents is encouraged by Beijing as well. The China Center of Adoption Affairs has long asked prospective foreign adopters to indicate in writing that they will teach their children about Chinese culture.

White parents usually construed Chinese culture as admirably different but accessible, lending itself to some form of celebration or incorporation into their family lives. Adoptive father John Padding said, “We obviously wanted to adopt for us, but maybe another reason it makes it okay is that it’s also a good thing, for our daughter, for the world, for multiculturalism”; he later added, “We like Chinese people and food and things and culture, so it was an easy thing to connect to.” In the middle of my interview with the Cook family, adoptive mother Nancy stopped mid-sentence to muse, “You know, I was just thinking as we’re sitting here, looking at our house… we have a lot of Asian influence, and most of this was before we adopted her. This was just our taste, I guess.” In the San Francisco Bay Area in particular, the accessibility of “things Chinese” contributed to justifications for adopting from China. As Jason Bradley discussed his and his wife’s decision to adopt from China, for example, he noted that having lived on the West Coast for so long, “we had had Asian American friends, and had had exposure to that culture.” On a number of occasions parents in the Bay Area contrasted its multicultural and especially Asian population to some town in the Midwest that represented a problematic lack of the same.⁷ While white parents in Minnesota did not as often or as confidently claim to have been primed for adoption from China through “exposure” to Asian cultures and peoples, their reasons for being attracted to the China program also sometimes referenced the accessible difference of Chinese culture itself, and thus the imagined adaptability of their children.

Accessibility—naming the appeal of Chinese food and art objects or naming Asian American friends—was in turn made possible by the definability and longevity of Chinese culture. As Mackerras (1989) argues, late-twentieth-century images of China ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Why China?
• 2. Matches Made on Earth
• 3. Picturing Kinship
• 4. Client, Ambassador, and Gift
• 5. Shamian Island
• 6. Storied Origins
• 7. American Ghosts
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author