Vincent Cheng grew up six different countries around the world and has consistently negotiated navigating a variety of different culture throughout childhood. Additionally, Cheng has authored several books including Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity and Joyce, Race, and Empire. This particular work is Chapter Four of Cheng’s book Inauthentic which is titled “International Adoption and Identity: The Anxiety over Authentic Cultural Heritage”. The driving force behind this text is answering the question that many adoptees face of “What makes up our true, genuine identity?”. In other words, does your past heritage and life with your birth parents in any way drastically alter or change how you currently experience life or make decisions? Cheng argues that while acknowledging the past and its influence on the present, the past has already occurred and your true identity is a combination of many different influences and complex experiences which shape the person you are today. Throughout this chapter, Cheng lays out the reasons behind his claim along with other extremely relatable content or experiences that many transracial asian adoptees face. These experiences include going to culture camp, feeling of inadequacy in both the white community and the asian community, the continued difficulties with societies direct correlation between race and identity, and the challenges that adoptees and parents of adoptees face. Cheng’s closing thoughts on this subject conclude with the statement that “identity is a constantly shifting, progressively accumulating, individually varying thing, based on the lived experience of live individuals in live and growing communities. Such personal identity can, of course, also be enriched, inflected, and informed by an awareness of the cultural heritage of one’s birth parents. But the two things are not the same”.

 

Personal Reflection:

Everything that was mentioned in this reading hit very close to home for me. The way that we decided to set up our syllabus led to this reading being week two of our independent study and the biggest realization that I had during this reading was the fact that I am racist against myself. I was raised white, I think in white, I was surrounded by white, and as much as I do not want to believe that, I mostly walk through the world with the white mentality even though I am not white. I have done a fair amount of theater growing up and one of our exercises that I have been led through is a visualization of your character for that particular show. What are they wearing, how do they stand, what do they sound like, etc. However, through this article and other moments in college, I realize that I have always envisioned my character as white. Therefore, the experiences that I have lived/my mentality and how people view me are not the same. This article was really instrumental in acknowledging and validating my feelings of being consistently in between races, cultures, etc, as well as helping me to continue to come to terms with viewing myself as a person of color.

     Jenny Wills is currently a professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada and a Korean-Canadian adoptee. One of the focuses of Wills research surrounding adoption include questioning the authenticity of anti-essentialism without specific knowledge of your biology, origins, or ancestry, also known in more colloquial terms as “your roots”. As I was confused when trying to understand new vocab, you may be wondering “what is anti-essentialism?”. In general terms, anti-essentialism is the argument that your roots are not important to identity formation whereas essentialism means that your roots have the impact to inform identities. Wills new argument rests within paradoxical essentialism which she defines as “ the effect which takes place through prioritization of both biological kin and birth countries results in interconnected presences of constructivism, anti-essentialism, and essentialism as complementary qualities in individuals’ understanding of subjectivity” (CITE). Through this new perspective, Wills argues that both the past experiences and present experiences of an adoptee collide that those conflicts hold significance in identity formation. She describes the consistent narrative of adoptees “missing something” or being “reunited with their culture” as reminders that the anti-essentialist argument which states that the past is not as integral in identity formation is a privileged approach for those who are fortunate enough to know their whole story, including their past. By utilizing Wills approach of paradoxical essentialism, as adoptees we can work towards “recognizing the separate, distinct qualities of essentialism and anti-essentialism as they play out in adoption stories but also acknowledge the significance of the tension that arises when these two antipodes merge, collide, or interact” (CITE).

 

Personal Reflection:

     This perspective of paradoxical essentialism made so much sense to me. While I conceptually understand the anti-essentialist perspective of the past is less significant that lived experience, personally that has not been reality for me. There was a section where Wills was saying despite all of the encouragement surrounding the fact that their past is not as important as the life they are living today, adoptees still feel like they missed something really resonated with me and my experience. Growing up in seventh grade biology and doing a different project because I could not make a genetic tree is a small example of the consistent indications throughout childhood that I was missing something. Merging anti-essentialism and essentialism into paradoxical essentialism seems to be the most inclusive solution I’ve found in terms of understanding how to grapple with the discrepancies between the biological family vs. adoptive family and how to navigate the US as foreign born.

If I were able to find my birth family, I know that I would find some sort of satisfactory joy because I have always wanted to be able to look in the mirror and know where my mouth came from, the shape of my face, my eyes, my nose, my lips, my stature, etc. The fact that I don’t even get that chance to do so makes me confident in stating that I think the past has and an influence in terms of identity formation. Throughout my life the people who have taken the stance that the past is not as important as the present have always had the privilege of  knowing their origin story. How am I supposed to believe that they know what the best perspective is because they have never been uninformed of their past and I have never known anything about my pre-adoption past. The best analogy I can think of would be that a person who has been blind their whole life would never tell a sighted person that it’s better to be blind because they have never been sighted. Additionally a person who has been sighted their whole life would never tell a blind person it’s better to be sighted because they themselves have never been blind. Now a person who was born sighted, had an accident, and is now blind has much more of a stake in whether being sighted or being blind is more preferable because they have experienced both being sighted and blind.

Wills work has helped me realize that it is a privilege to be able to know where you come from and how you got there. Being the raised by people who knew their past brought me to believe that I am no different than them and their past is not important to them, so why should it be important to me. But for me my past is important and impactful. This article by Wills has helped me in my adoption identity journey in coming to terms with my differences in identity formation that that of those surrounding me who know their past and also embracing and accepting the paradoxical essentialism perspective.

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      Who are your real parents? This is a question that many adoptees, more commonly transracial adoptees are frequently asked throughout our lifetime. While there are many different responses to the question of “real parents”, what Kit Meyers examines is the impact of using language and antishitorical perspectives on family formation. Meyers is a professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California Merced and wrote his dissertation “Race and the Violence of Love: Family and Nation in U.S. Adoptions from Asia” (CITE) for partial satisfaction of the degree requirements for his Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies. Chapter Three of this dissertation is “Reifying ‘Real’ Families in Popular Adoption Discourse” in which Meyers discusses the many pitfalls and consequences of claiming that the past is irrelevant to the adoptive child, reducing the complexity of adoption, showing how violence associated with the adoption process is often negated or neglected.

 

Personal Reflection:

   Chapter Three of Meyer’s dissertation really allowed me to examine my values and views towards why I am so upset when people have asked me who my real parents are. And if that’s you out there, don’t worry, I am right there with you. However, in reading Meyer’s work, I wanted to dig a little deeper into why that question made me so angry and through reading and reflecting, I came to the conclusion that the adoption narrative and family formation perspective that has been instilled in me throughout my childhood is the driving force behind why I feel uncomfortable or upset when people question the “realness” of my adoptive mom. There are excerpts in Meyer’s work taken from adoptees and adoptive parents who have commented on blogs that felt like they were almost reading the thoughts in my brain. However, Meyers came in and deconstructed each of those comments which allowed me to widen my narrow perspective surrounding the fact that I want my family progression to behave in a linear fashion. Reading Chapter Three of Meyer’s dissertation also helped me broaden my perspective to witness and acknowledge the violence that the adoption process has brought and will continue to bring throughout my life. I’ve realized that I need to start coming to terms with the limits that love has in its ability to explain away race and culture differences and continue to learn how to let my past, present, and future intermingle and coincide with each other in order to broaden my perspective beyond the notion that the past is dead and unimportant to my present identity.