asian americans
“Two Mothers” - David Eng
David Eng is an Professor of English and the Graduate Chair of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, and he has done much of his research on the Asian American identity and Transatlantic Studies. This chapter out of the larger text makes the claim that transnational adoption is one of the most privileged forms of diaspora and immigration in the last century. Eng first introduces the idea of the Queer Diaspora, and the different radical kinships that LGBTQAI+ identities had to form in the face of much prejudice and heteronormativity. He then moves into a commercial aired by John Hancock seemingly advertising the idea of transnational adoption as a financial investment, and one that large banks could endorse. The commercial depicts a white lesbian couple who have just adopted a baby girl from China, and the commercial seems to be selling insurance on life events that are unexpected and yet joyful. Eng questions this commercial’s motivations and representations, but examines what social structures allowed this commercial to be aired to the public --- what about transnational adoption seems advertisable to white lesbian couples, and how do these different forms of diaspora and radical kinships intersect? Eng makes the argument that the transnational (often transracial) adoptee balances on the edge of both subjecthood and objecthood, and that they often are viewed as gendered objects in need of being saved (relating to war brides and mail-order brides coming from East Asian countries to Western countries). Eng carefully and thoughtfully discusses the social and psychological labors that transnational adoptees must go through, including the Freudian concept of melancholia, or mourning without end. The topic of failed motherhood is also explored through the lens of Freud, and this is meant to explain the kind of loss and envy that the transnational adoptee has in regards to whiteness.
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Personal Reflection:
Reading Eng’s chapter was certainly a hard pill to swallow, but it was one that made me feel instantly validated and understood. The sections about the objectification of the transnational adoptee was difficult to take, and it made me question my own parents’ intentions and underlying biases when adopting my sister and I. Viewing any person as a kind of object is always a painful realization, but it’s even more confusing and upsetting when that person is you. Something that I also had never formally examined before was the concept of melancholia, or mourning without end. I had certainly been grappling with this idea, but I never before had a name for it. The feeling of having a home that was lost and having no memory of that home causes a sort of disassociation and sadness that is almost unexplainable to anyone who grew up with their birth family. It is a catastrophic loss that one cannot remember. And the act of not being able to remember is even more shameful. Although Eng’s other assessment using Freud’s Oedipal Complex did not entirely connect with me, I appreciated his foray into the psychological realm to explain the unique type of trauma that transnational adoptees go through.
“Why China?” - Sara K. Dorowarl Grey
Sara K. Dorow is an Associate Professor at the University of Alberta, and she is currently the department chair in the Department of Sociology. For her book Transnational Adoption: A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender, and Kinship, Dorow focused her qualitative research on the causes, motivations, and social forces that resulted in the high number of transnational adoptions from China to the United States. She weaves ethnographic interviews within scholarly research to support her overarching claims about the controversial aspects regarding white parents adopting Asian children. The global effects that created the transracial adoption phenomenon included the perception of East Asian countries as borderless and beneficial for financial gain, while simultaneously being an exciting and foreign contrast to dominant white culture. Adoptive parents who were interviewed expressed a kind of excitement when they realized that adopting an Asian child offered the parents a new form of individuality and otherness that was previously inaccessible to them. In other words, engaging in transracial, transnational adoption allowed white families to have a “different” and potentially interesting family, while not being different enough to be ostracized or criticized by dominant white culture. Related to this, Dorow makes strong claims about the ways in which white adoptive parents think about race, specifically about the choice in adopting an Asian child versus an black child. Many parents that she included in her book stated that they did not see stereotypes about Asian people nearly as bad as those of African Americans, and therefore it was easier to integrate an Asian child into their family. An alternative reason parents gave for adopting from China was the subliminal notion of saving a child. Although not many parents would outrightly own this savior complex, this was surely a driving force in many of the interviewed adoptive parents’ minds, due in large part to the transnational adoption market and how it was advertised. Dorow states that a huge draw for Chinese adoption included adoption agencies promising that the biological mothers would not come pounding down the adoptive family’s door -- in fact, it was illegal for the Chinese mother to do so. In this way, Chinese adoption can seem like a cleaner break than having to juggle a domestic adoption that may involve the birth family, especially if the child is older than an infant. All of these factors (international and domestic racial stereotypes/associations, white families’ inclination towards cultural tourism, the high supply and demand of the transnational adoption marketplace, and the anonymous nature of the babies involved) combined to allow what we now recognize as the rush of transracial, transnational adoption to occur from China to the United States.
Personal Reflection:
Reading this chapter from Dorow’s book helped me synthesize many of the notions I had about transnational adoption together into a congruent and fathomable system. I had many moments in which the words I read made me pause to truly soak them in, but simply because I had known those words myself before even reading them. Dorow perfectly articulated all the controversial emotions I had (and continue to have) regarding transracial and transnational adoption, and the ethics behind those two. Long before encountering this reading, I had felt like I was carrying a very heavy, invisible weight on my shoulders, and while reading this chapter did not remove the weight, it felt like someone could finally see the weight I was carrying and validated it. I couldn’t help but feel the urge to share the chapter with my close family and friends, so that they would understand the holistic social, emotional, economic, racial, and global contexts of Chinese adoption, but I resisted the inclination to do so, partly because I was afraid that they wouldn’t understand it on the level that I did, and partly because I wanted to keep it for myself and fully process its words before they got out to others in my life. From this reading I can confidently say that I understand Chinese transnational adoption in a deeper and more comprehensive way.