ASAM reading journals paper

“Pandas, Lions, and Dragons, oh my!”: How White Adoptive Parents Construct Chineseness

Andrea Louie

Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 12, Number 3, October 2009, pp. 285-320 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI:

For additional information about this article

Access provided by University of California , Santa Barbara (1 Oct 2018 18:21 GMT)

https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.0.0047

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/316059

285“Pandas, Lions, and dragons, oh My!” • louie •

“Pandas, lions, and dragons, oh My!”

How White Adoptive Parents Construct

Chineseness

andrea louie

jaas october 2009 • 285–320 © the johns hopkins university press

Whites choose which aspects of the abducted child's culture to

assimilate into family life and which to discard. The children are

forced to participate in the racial fantasies of the white parents. White

parents dress the children of color up in their "native costumes." They

treat their abducted children like little ethnic dolls. The white parents

become perversely expert on the food, language, and customs of the

abducted child's birth culture. They proudly claim to be "learning with

my abducted child."

—Kim So Yung

The above quote is excerpted from Kim So Yung’s “Living Dolls: Transracial Adoption and Cultural Appropriation,” posted on the “Transracial Abductees” Web site. Kim So Yung’s bio lists her as “a faux

Korean who was adopted/abducted by white Americans when she was

four months old” and as the cofounder of the group, which refers to itself

as “angry pissed ungratefully little transracially abducted motherfuckers

from hell.”1 Hers may be viewed as a cynical and extreme perspective on

parents’ efforts to honor their children’s birth country’s culture, insinuating

that parents engage in these practices more for their own comfort and

pleasure than for their children’s benefit.2 Ironically, the efforts to teach

children about their “cultures of origin” she criticizes are often viewed by

adoptive parents as a progressive and corrective approach to the practices

of previous generations of adoptive parents. This approach, however, has

286 • JAAS • 12:3

also been the focus of a set of new critiques leveled by many academics

and adoption activists who have expressed concern about the efforts of

adoptive parents to educate their children about their “birth cultures” at

the expense of attention to race and other issues of social inequality that

permeate adoption. Jane Brown, a social worker and white adoptive parent

of children from Korea and China, expresses her concerns about adoptive

parents’ practices in a more moderate way: “Sometimes parents want to

celebrate, even exoticize, their child’s culture, without really dealing with

race. . . . It is one thing to dress children up in cute Chinese dresses, but

the children need real contact with Asian-Americans, not just waiters in

restaurants on Chinese New Year. And they need real validation about the

racial issues they experience.”3

As reflected in the quote by Brown, in constructing Chinese cultural

identities for their minority children, white parents may merely be repro-

ducing the myth of contemporary multiculturalism, which focuses on

the celebration of diversity while skirting issues of white privilege, racial

politics, and power. Academic critics have gone further to assert that in

constructing Chinese culture for their children, adoptive parents produce

decontextualized and aestheticized versions of culture, and engage in

consumptive practices at the expense of attention to race. Other studies

on adoption are less critical of these practices and more optimistic about

the potential that they represent, focusing on the new, hybrid forms of

identity that these families create and the work that these cultural produc-

tions may do in resolving important adoption-related issues such as the

longing for the “birth mother.”4

While my own work can be situated within the above concerns and

critiques, I also strive to find a middle ground that explores possibilities

for movement beyond the difficult and often untenable position within

which white adoptive parents find themselves in relation to their efforts

to expose their children to “Chinese” culture. The adoption of Chinese

children into white families represents the potential for the creation of new

identities, not just for adoptees, but, as noted in Kim So Yung’s quote, also

potentially for their parents who begin to understand their own identities

in new ways. Sara Dorow’s research points to a middle ground in which

identities can be transformed, but her work also articulates the limits

287“Pandas, Lions, and dragons, oh My!” • louie •

within which these processes of reproduction and transformation occur.

In her comprehensive study of Chinese adoption, she analyzes how parents’

approaches to cultural diversity are constrained by “the deep structuring

power of race and racism.” At the same time, she observes that “parents’

organizational activities, social practices, and family stories re-narrate their

children’s identities in the midst of these differences, both reproducing

and struggling to transform them.”5

In this vein, in this article I examine the processes by which Chinese-

ness and Chinese culture are negotiated by adoptive parents within the

politics of race, class, and culture of the Midwest. I focus on how the

construction of identities for adopted children by white parents reveals

parents’ assumptions about how race works and how to defend against

racism, about culture and its relation to race, and about identity and how

to shape it. The celebratory focus on Chinese culture of adoptive parents

criticized above is often presumed to occur at the expense of teaching

children about race and racism, with these two processes being mutually

exclusive. However, I argue that it is possible that some parents can come to

new, more nuanced understandings of how race affects their children’s lives

and that there is and should be a place for culture in the lives of adoptive

families, even in its more essentialized forms. As Dorow observes, adoptive

parents’ approaches to creating cultural identities for their children reflect

larger “organizing principles that more generally discipline normalized

subjectivity in the United States.” She notes:

As Ong (2004) argues, the American obsession with “culture”

as the foundational issue of citizenship misrecognizes a key feature

of U.S. history: so-called cultures become equated with race-based

traditions because new immigrants are judged and categorized through

the racialized lens of an unspoken black-white continuum. Her point

is complicated in adoption by the formation of intimate relations of

kinship across cultural-national borders. From one side, parents’ race and

class privilege conditions the flexibility of the child’s citizenship; from

the other, the child’s abandonment and racialized body circumscribe

the promise of such flexibility.6

Many critics have asserted that culture, as employed both by policy

makers and everyday citizens in the form of multiculturalism and dis-

courses of pluralism, has become an inadequate shorthand for addressing

288 • JAAS • 12:3

more difficult and complex issues of race and inequality within broader

U.S. racial and cultural politics. Constructions of “culture” are also viewed

as problematic by academics and cultural critics because they are being

produced not only by but also for the groups they claim to represent, in

the form of packaged cultural experiences and cultural products.7 Given

this context, it is not surprising both that adoptive parents focus on issues

of cultural identity and that as products of this environment some might

create or consume essentialized and decontextualized versions of Chinese

culture that are removed from the specifics of mainland Chinese or Chi-

nese immigrant histories. At the same time, it is important to consider

what “work” these cultural productions, despite their limitations, may

potentially perform within the context of U.S. multiculturalism. Thus,

in searching for a middle-ground approach, it is important to consider

how new understandings of Chineseness as race and culture are created as

parents learn what it is like to parent children of color, and what potential

spaces these conceptions might open up for future change. While parents’

understandings of Chineseness may both be shaped by and reproduce

existing power hierarchies and racial meanings, in the process of the

everyday parenting of their children, adoptive parents are negotiating

broader issues of difference, both racial and cultural. In the process, they

may begin to reevaluate their identities. In order to understand how these

conditions can change, it is necessary to further understand what drives

and constrains these constructions of racial and cultural identity. We need

to consider how white American families deal with the attention brought

to Chineseness as a form of both racial and cultural difference, and how

they imagine the Chineseness of their children in a midwestern context in

relation to both blacks and whites. How do they conceptualize the idea of

a Chinese or Asian (American) community and their children’s relation-

ship to it, and how do they draw upon various resources for defining the

broader racial, class, and ethnic positions of their child(ren)? At the same

time, I remain cognizant about the broader constraints that shape their

approaches. It is essential to remember that change is incremental, as are

the processes by which understandings of race, culture, and identity of

both parents and their children evolve. What I present here are not grand,

sweeping changes, but rather areas of potential that anthropological

289“Pandas, Lions, and dragons, oh My!” • louie •

analysis can reveal—gaps that may have opened up within U.S. racial and

multicultural politics that might leave room for alternative paths that may

parallel, for example, the ways that cultural symbols have been marshaled

in the context of Asian American identity politics.

This study’s ethnographic focus on the Midwest also makes a con-

tribution to Asian American studies in the Midwest by providing a more

nuanced and complex view of the processes by and contexts within which

identities of middle-class white midwesterners are both maintained and

challenged through the experience of adoption. The Midwest is often

viewed as a homogenous cultural desert in contrast to larger metropolitan

areas that are usually located on the coasts, with the implication being that

midwestern adoptive parents may have fewer resources upon which to

draw in creating a sense of Chinese community for their children. However,

as a region defined by its black/white race and power relations, largely seg-

regated residential patterns, and scattered Chinese American populations,

this context is representative of the majority of Chinese children adopted

into white families who live in communities that, unlike San Francisco or

New York, are not home to large numbers of Asian Americans.

Rooted in extensive ethnographic interviews and participant observa-

tion, this article presents part of a broader argument in which I situate the

practices of white adoptive parents within a larger comparative frame-

work. There is a burgeoning literature on Asian international adoption,

and, as noted above, many authors have made original and important

contributions to understanding issues of race, culture, and class among

adoptive families. In light of both this existing literature and my own

previous work in relation to Chinese American identities, in my broader

project I compare the practices of white adoptive families with those of

Chinese American adoptive families, most of whom I interviewed in the

San Francisco Bay Area. Chinese American families, both adoptive and

not, served as an implicit model of comparison for many white adoptive

parents as well as those who criticize them. Critiques of white adoptive

parents that focus on their attention on essentialized versions of culture

imply that this focus occurs at the expense of attention to issues of race,

and that these decontextualized and dehistoricized versions of culture turn

culture into what Anagnost calls “culture bites.”8 Ironically, based on my

290 • JAAS • 12:3

research interviews in the Bay Area, some Chinese American adoptive par-

ents engage in similar practices. However, because they enjoy the privilege

of authenticity when it comes to creating cultural and racial identities for

their children, they can exercise more freedom and flexibility in making

choices for their children, and for the most part escape the pressures that

white adoptive parents face. Therefore, examining the ways that Chinese

American adoptive families approach culture may help demystify some

of the perhaps unrealistic standards to which white adoptive parents are

being held and inform us about the possibilities that the freedom to experi-

ment with and blend Chinese culture might represent. Furthermore, in

looking at these forms of Chinese American cultural production, we can

further explore their relationship to broader antiracist efforts for Chinese

Americans, both adopted and not adopted.9

The MidwesT as CulTural deserT?

While on a postdoctoral fellowship at Washington University, St. Louis,

in 1997–1998, I grew to know some local adoptive families and was asked

as an “expert” on Chinese American identities to speak on a panel at a

local adoption agency on Chinese American culture and identity, along

with journalist Mei-Ling Hopgood. After moving on from my postdoc,

I decided to return to St. Louis to develop my project on Chinese adop-

tion, later expanding my study to the Bay Area. This article is based on

ethnographic research conducted with adoptive families in St. Louis and

is part of a broader ethnographic project that I have been conducting

from 2000 to the present. I have thus far conducted thirty-five interviews

in the St. Louis area with adoptive parents and an additional twenty-five

interviews in the San Francisco Bay Area with white and Asian American

adoptive parents and teens adopted from China.10

Interviews focused on parents’ adoption stories—why they decided

to adopt, why they adopted children from China, and what they went

through during the process of adopting—and on whether, why, and how

they thought it was important to teach their children about China and

Chinese culture.11 I conducted participant observation at numerous com-

munity events for adoptive families in both regions, including Families

with Children from China (FCC) events such as Culture Day, informal

291“Pandas, Lions, and dragons, oh My!” • louie •

gatherings to discuss my research, adoption agency picnics and reunions,

and a single mothers’ gathering in St. Louis, and at play groups and infor-

mal get-togethers with adoptive families in both areas. I also accompanied

a group of adoptive parents to China in 2002 as they met their children

and processed paperwork.

While most adoptive parents in St. Louis were white, middle class,

and originally from the Midwest, there was some diversity in terms of age

and family type among the parents I interviewed. Some were older parents

in their late forties or fifties who had married or remarried later in life.

Some families had biological children in addition to adopted children,

and in some cases the biological child was much older (fifteen to twenty

years) than the adopted child(ren). Many families had adopted children

from other countries or “racial” and ethnic backgrounds in addition to

China. Parents’ occupations ranged from medical doctors and Ph.D.s,

to businessmen and women, to military personnel and store managers.

Their homes ranged from two-bedroom apartments to spacious, newly

built houses. While some adoptive families made conscious efforts to live

in more racially diverse areas such as the city of St. Louis or University

City, others lived in majority white middle-class suburbs.

As a midsize midwestern city, St. Louis may in many ways be more

representative of the experiences of the majority of adopted children from

China than large, highly diverse metropolitan areas such as the Bay Area or

New York City. And while St. Louis may not have as many resources about

and connections to China as do larger metropolitan regions, it does have

a visible Chinese population with historical roots in the area. According

to Huping Ling, unofficial estimates place the dispersed Chinese “cultural

community” in the greater St. Louis area at between 15,000 and 20,000

people.12 She notes that the lack of a Chinatown after 1966 resulted in the

creation of a primarily suburban and professional Chinese “cultural com-

munity,” observing that “by 1990, 80 percent of the Chinese in the St. Louis

region who were working were either professionals or entrepreneurs. . . .

Also by that time, 83 percent of the Chinese in the St. Louis region were

living in the suburbs.”13 At the same time, St. Louis is marked by its black/

white race relations. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, the population

of the city of St. Louis is 43.8 percent white, 51.2 percent black, and 2

292 • JAAS • 12:3

percent Asian. In contrast, the St. Louis counties are 73.5 percent white,

21.8 percent black, and 3 percent Asian.14 These statistics not only reflect

the racial segregation between city and county but also the primarily

black and white racial politics of the area, with Asians representing only

1.5 percent of the total population of Missouri.

Aside from small strips of Chinese stores and restaurants in more

urban areas such as Olive Street, in St. Louis County not far from the St.

Louis city border, and on Grand Street in St. Louis, the Chinese “cultural

community” was spread throughout the surrounding suburbs. Churches

and Chinese schools served as gathering places for many local Chinese

Americans. There were two Chinese-language newspapers in St. Louis (one

of which has run a feature on FCC), a local chapter of the Organization of

Chinese Americans (OCA), and active groups of individuals from various

parts of the community who organized special events such as the Chinese

New Year celebration and the annual Chinese Cultural Days (usually

in mid-May) at the St. Louis Botanical Garden.15 Many of the children

adopted from China attended language classes either at the Taiwanese-

run St. Louis Chinese Language School, which offered Chinese-language

classes for English speakers, or through private lessons from local Chinese

teachers, some of whom taught small classes at parents’ homes combining

language and culture in lessons geared to young children. Many adoptive

parents made efforts to attend the community cultural events mentioned

above and to patronize local Chinese restaurants to expose their children

to Chinese food.16 Therefore, while Chinese culture was accessible, it was

also something that parents had to consciously seek out. In contrast, the

unusual demographics of the San Francisco Bay Area made it much more

likely that Chinese people would be a daily part of white middle-class

family lives as bus drivers, teachers, store employees, and so forth. In

this sense, for St. Louis parents, the Chinese community might likely be

viewed as a resource, but also as a population that was not necessarily a

familiar, everyday part of family lives—as something that could be drawn

upon and partially incorporated into family activities, but that remained

somewhat foreign and separate.

In St. Louis, it became clear that the community of adoptive families

took part in a number of overlapping networks and drew informally on

293“Pandas, Lions, and dragons, oh My!” • louie •

these resources in different ways and at different times. In comparison to

the Bay Area, the relatively smaller size of the adoptive community and

comparatively limited range of Chinese resources created opportunities

to study these overlapping organizational networks, as I was able to see

families multiple times in varied settings. I was able to readily identify

the key sources of “Chinese culture” upon which adoptive families drew,

including adoptive parent organizations, adoption agencies, foundations

focusing on China adoption, local and virtual informal networks of adop-

tive parents, and local Chinese and Taiwanese community members. The

presence of a major adoption agency in the area that provided both pre-

and postadoption services for adoptive families served as another basis

for networking and created opportunities for me to meet with adoptive

families at agency reunions and other events.

Most of the parents I interviewed were members of FCC, a national

organization composed of local chapters of adoptive parents. At the time

the majority of my interviews were conducted, the St. Louis chapter of

FCC had approximately 200 member families. They were active to vary-

ing degrees—some served on the board and organized activities such as

the annual Culture Day. At this annual event, children learned Chinese

songs and calligraphy and listened to Chinese stories. Parents attended

panels about raising adopted children. Often local members of the Chi-

nese community gave cultural performances and sold items at the vendor

tables. FCC had its own booth, selling T-shirts, Chinese dresses (qi paos),

Panda purses, stationary, Chinese jump ropes, and other trinkets for

children. Some families attended one or two events a year, while others

only received the group’s mailings. FCC was a key resource around which

parents gathered and shared information about China and Chinese/

Chinese American culture and implemented this information through

various Chinese culture-related activities. It also served as a network for

adoptive parents to discuss matters relating to child rearing, from issues

specific to adopting children from China to more general parenting is-

sues. Overall, mothers appeared to be more involved than fathers in FCC

activities, which is consistent with studies that have examined parental

participation in adoption-related issues.17 Parents also formed networks

around other organizational nodes such as their China travel group, with

294 • JAAS • 12:3

which many had periodic reunions. There was also an international fami-

lies group for adoptive families from all countries and a single mothers’

adoption group that was open to all adoptive single mothers, regardless

of where the child was from.

addressing raCe

Adoptive parents conceptualized their children’s racial and cultural

difference within the context of broader social, cultural, and historical

frameworks that shaped how they understood issues of culture and race—

particularly what constituted racism, how it was experienced, and how to

best “defend against” or change the conditions producing racism.18 But

while many had actively pursued the avenues opened up by U.S. multi-

culturalism to connect to, identify with, and celebrate racial and cultural

diversity, they also worked within a set of external influences that overlay

deeply rooted relations of class and racial privilege that had historically

positioned white middle-class Americans in relation to nonwhites. They

engaged in a delicate balance between acknowledging and incorporating

their child’s Chineseness and simultaneously reworking their own identi-

ties as white middle-class Americans who were now part of multiracial

and multicultural families.

At the same time, as I discuss further at the end of this section, they

learned about issues of race through their experiences with their children

of color. As they drew upon and implemented elements of Chinese identi-

ties for their children in self-conscious and deliberate ways, they to some

extent were producing new forms of racial and cultural identity as they

encountered the ways that the Chineseness of their children was viewed

as a form of both racial and cultural difference, and in many cases they

found themselves in positions where they needed to educate others about

their racially rooted misconceptions. While whiteness historically may

have served as an unmarked racial identity created in contrast to nonwhite

identities, the practices of these adoptive parents may signify a new type

of identity formation in which whiteness is no longer necessarily created

solely in opposition to nonwhites, but rather through incorporating (some

may say co-opting) parts of a nonwhite culture into family identities.

295“Pandas, Lions, and dragons, oh My!” • louie •

In this section, I focus on St. Louis parents’ understanding of their

children’s racial identities within the context of a racial politics that posi-

tions Asians as somehow in between black and white. In Dorow’s insight-

ful study of transnational adoption from China, “blackness emerged as a

kind of ‘white noise’ against which Asianness became flexible in the white

American imaginary.”19 These racial meanings played out in parents’

narration of their adoption choices. A few parents I interviewed said that

“if race hadn’t been an issue,” they would not have hesitated to adopt a

“biracial” or black child.20 While most who raised this issue said that they

themselves did not consider adopting a black child to be a problematic

issue, they had heard that the adoption of black children by white parents

was “controversial” in the black community. At the same time, while they

recognized that their children were also racial minorities, it was also clear

that many perceived adopting an Asian child as different than adopting an

African American child.21 Many adoptive parents I interviewed in St. Louis

noted what they perceived to be a cultural and racial distance between

whites and African Americans—with a history of “white flight” from the

city, race relations in St. Louis continue to be defined in primarily black

and white terms, with most lower-income blacks living in the city proper

and most more affluent whites in the suburban “West counties.”

One family said they believed that African American and white cul-

tures were “more on top of each other,” whereas Asian culture was “more

aligned” with white culture. For some families, the differential racializa-

tion of African Americans and Asians was highlighted in what they saw

as competing desires to expose their children to “diversity” while at the

same time prepare them for mainstream society. In the context of St.

Louis, where African Americans comprised the largest minority group and

statistically occupied lower socioeconomic positions in relation to whites,

some parents worried that exposing children to “diverse” schooling may

compromise the quality of their education. One family’s older daughter

attended a public school in the city of St. Louis. Half of the students in

her class were black, and her mother was concerned because some of the

teachers and teachers’ aides spoke “black English.” Though she clarified

that her concern was not with “black English” per se, but rather that her

daughter would not learn “proper English,” “black English” was equated

296 • JAAS • 12:3

with improper English, making the differentiation more of a racial and

class distinction rather than a cultural one. Both parents were raised as

Catholics, and they signed her up for the Catholic school on the corner,

but later changed their minds because that class was not “diverse.”

Renee had interesting insights into the differential racialization of

Chinese and African American children, as she saw the multiple meanings

surrounding racial difference converge within her own experiences with

her two adopted children, Julie, age six, who is from China, and Justin,

age four, who is from St. Louis and is African American. Renee found

that people reacted to Justin and Julie very differently. I first heard her

comment on this when I joined some adoptive parents and their children

who met to eat at a local Chinese restaurant. She said that people would

call Julie a China doll, but would not say anything about Justin, who was

younger and, as those present pointed out, also cute. Renee thinks that

both skin color and gender are keys to why Justin and Julie will have dif-

ferent experiences growing up because the transracial adoption of chil-

dren from China is more socially acceptable. She commented that Julie’s

skin is “white” like theirs, while Justin’s is not. Renee thinks that people

will no longer see Justin as cute when he grows older—as a young black

male they will see him as a threat. Often people, including her childhood

friends from the St. Louis counties, will make derogatory comments

about black people in her presence, and she wonders how they could do

so. Had they forgotten that she has a black child? Renee’s comment about

her Chinese daughter’s skin color being “white” was interesting, in that

Asians are generally thought of as being nonwhite. At the same time, as

Dorow notes, Asian racial categorization becomes flexible in the context

of black and white racial politics of the United States and, in this case

more specifically, of St. Louis.

Families that are formed through international adoption bring

children (primarily of color) relinquished by their birth parents in third

world countries into middle-class (primarily) Caucasian homes. As Or-

tiz and Briggs and Dorow observe, unlike children of color available for

adoption in the United States, these children are viewed as both victims

of their circumstances and as highly redeemable and flexible subjects who

can reach their full potential with proper parenting. Rather than suffer-

297“Pandas, Lions, and dragons, oh My!” • louie •

ing the purported cultural and biological deficits of U.S.-born adoptees

of color, the former exemplified in the culture of poverty and the latter

in “crack babies,” Chinese adoptees are seen as embodying a number of

potentials in their racial and cultural origins. They are viewed by parents

and others as innately intelligent and fairly trouble free to raise (the fact

that most adoptees from China are girls helps with the latter image), and

free of problems associated with fetal alcohol syndrome, crack addiction,

institutional neglect, and other problems attributed to domestically ad-

opted (read black) or other foreign adopted (that is, Russian) children.22

Though parents may realize that these ideas are stereotypical, they may

still be guided by them. As one adoptive father recalled, after accepting

infertility and not having biological children, he and his wife began to

consider adopting children from China. Their decision to adopt children

from China, he admits, was guided in part by the positive U.S. stereotypes

of Chinese girls versus negative ones of South American boys:

I remember sitting here on a sofa and weeping buckets and she had

seen something about a program in China . . . so we got to thinking about

it . . . and really I had this real racist thought going through my mind

at that moment. When somebody comes to the door and a Chinese girl

opens the door that person thinks, “Oh, math major at some snooty

ivy league school,” and if it is a South American boy who answers the

door, they think gardener, waiter, or something like that. It was real

stereotypical in my mind.23

But upon adopting a child of color, some parents came to the realiza-

tion that despite the generally positive images of Asian girls, their child

could not easily merge into an ethnic American cultural identity because

of her racial difference. One mother noted that, at first, she thought that

her daughter would become Irish American like she and her husband,

but that things turned out to be more complex than that. One day her

daughter came home from day care and asked if she was black. They

explained to her that she was not, and took this as a sign that she was still

sorting out her identity.

Another set of parents recounted the history of racial prejudice in

their own families, and their struggle to gain acceptance of their daughter

from their extended family. Bruce is from a blue-collar family in Chicago.

298 • JAAS • 12:3

They used to call Polish people “Pollacks” and had derogatory names for

other groups, including other white ethnics. His attitudes changed in col-

lege. His wife, Annette, also comes from a blue-collar background, and

she was part of a desegregation program. She grew up being open about

other people. However, her sister is married to a man from St. Charles,

Missouri, whom the husband described as “one step out of Deliverance”

with only an elementary education. The brother-in-law openly expressed

his hatred of black people—in fact, when his sister bought his daughter

a Magic School Bus, he threw out the black play figure. They decided to

build a protective shield around their adopted daughter until she is older.

They believed that they had good resources in the area to support her, as

St. Louis had a both a large Asian community and a large adoption com-

munity.24 They noted that their racist brother-in-law now thinks their

daughter is cute. But while some narratives emphasized triumph over

racism through the final acceptance of the child’s difference by family

members and others, this acceptance nevertheless occurred in a broader

climate of racial/racist meanings, with their child sometimes serving as

an exception in being accepted by otherwise racist friends and relatives.

Annette, for example, does not think her brother-in-law is no longer rac-

ist, as she recounted an incident at a bar when she had to stand between

him and a black man to prevent him from hitting the man for being with

a white woman. In relating this incident, Annette was illustrating to me

that she was someone who would stand up against racism.

As the ethnographic material above indicates, on the one hand,

parents perceived the flexibility of Chinese adoptees as allowing them

to overcome many of the problems commonly associated with racism

against other minority groups, particularly African Americans. In this

sense, their practices appeared to reinforce existing racial hierarchies. In-

deed, some of the parents I interviewed said that despite their fears, they

had seen very little racism against their children from China. But it was

not always clear what deeds and acts parents deemed racist. For example,

many parents were not sure how to take the comments from both friends

and strangers referring to their daughters as “China dolls.” Some seemed

to find fault more with the accuracy of the description (“my daughter is

far from fragile”) than the racialized and gendered connotations of the

299“Pandas, Lions, and dragons, oh My!” • louie •

term. Chinese girls were viewed by many people as cute and exotic. Thus,

some parents seemed unaware of the broader implications of the forms

of gendered Orientalism that their daughters would be subject to as Asian

women growing up in the West. While being called a “China doll” may

on the surface appear to be a compliment, the term has historically car-

ried with it implications about the exotic, subservient positions of Asian

women in relation to the West.

Most parents understood race and racism as consisting of discrimi-

natory acts, rather than as a set system of historical inequalities that is

structurally embedded and historically rooted. As Frankenberg observes,

it is often difficult for white Americans to understand the “structural and

institutional dimensions of racism” because racism has historically been

framed in essentialist terms in which “particularly intentional, explicit

racial discrimination remains, for most white people, . . . paradigmatic

of racism.”25 Furthermore, they viewed racism as something that could

be overcome through education and cross-cultural sharing, in the vein

of contemporary multiculturalist rhetoric. Parents understood offensive

comments as stemming from the ignorance or lack of open-mindedness

of others. Aside from some "ignorant” comments from adults and “stupid”

questions from friends and family members, most parents thought people

had been supportive and positive toward their family. They viewed the

formation of their families across racial and national lines as one such im-

portant step in opening the minds of others. This “color-blind approach”26

focused on efforts to create social change through educational and social

awareness activities that did not necessarily challenge the existing power

structure. Thus, by celebrating their children’s cultural difference and

teaching others to “appreciate” these differences, many parents believed

that were preparing their children for life in a racist society.

However, some parents did gain an increased understanding of ex-

periences of racism through their daily experiences, and in the process

“encounter[ed] their own racialized locations relative to domestic and

transnational, Asian and black.” To some extent, this may bear out the

possibility that Dorow raises that “U.S. adoption does not necessarily re-

produce but also potentially challenges the racialized structures through

which children are differentially commodified and sacralized.”27 It was clear

300 • JAAS • 12:3

that Renee, mentioned above, had learned from her children’s differential

experiences with racism and had begun to rethink her own identity in

relation to these experiences. She commented that she realized that as the

children grew older, it would be insufficient to merely focus on the fun

aspects of culture:

When our kids get to be adolescent or preadolescent, when we

put on a culture day we are going to have to do stuff dealing with those

issues at their level. You know, right now they are just out making fun

little snakes, and little animals and stuff like that because they are 5. I am

glad to know that the [FCC] group is there to evolve with them and with

their needs. They sort of have their own little built-in support group.

They have other kids that are going to go through the same thing that

they can talk to.28

She viewed FCC as a support group not only for parents but also for

the children as they grow older, and is concerned that there are no similar

groups for her son. However, she has tried to build her own network of

resources to learn more about various forms for racism that she knows

exist. For example, she has learned a great deal from her black neighbors

about racial profiling, noting that one man who is a surgeon often gets

stopped for “driving while black.” She admits that she “can’t pretend to

know what it is like to be nonwhite” but at the same time thinks that be-

ing a woman has helped her on a certain level understand what it’s like to

face discrimination, unlike her husband, who has never faced barriers as

a white man.29 While she has intentionally sought out information from

African Americans regarding racism, she realizes that racism affects both

her son and daughter, though perhaps to different degrees.

Some adoptive parents began to understand the various ways that

racial meanings took shape by individuals who were apparently well-

meaning but ignorant about their racializing practices. These parents

also took it upon themselves to educate those individuals about their

misconceptions. Annette, mentioned above, recounts her efforts to teach

her neighbor that all Asians do not look alike. Upon returning from an

out-of-town adoption agency reunion, she wanted to share some cute

pictures of her two-year-old daughter with the next-door neighbor, noting

that the reunion had been a big success with a thousand families attending.

The neighbor replied, “Boy I’ll bet you really had to keep a close eye on

301“Pandas, Lions, and dragons, oh My!” • louie •

her.” Annette asked her, “Why?” and the neighbor replied, “Well they all

look alike, were you afraid you were going to lose her?” Annette recounts:

“So I started going through the pictures. . . . I said do these two look like

[my daughter]? I was just taking pictures randomly of two girls so I lined

them all up and I said now you tell me if these people look alike. Can you

find [my daughter]?”30

In quizzing her neighbor on whether she could identify her daughter

in the pictures, Annette was confronting her on her ignorance about the

variation among Chinese people, something that she most likely never

had to do prior to having a child of color.

Serena, mentioned earlier, shared similar experiences she had with

her sister, who wanted her to meet a neighbor who moved in down the

street. Her sister said, “Oh there’s this couple that moved down the street,

and they have a daughter that looks just like [your daughter].” Serena

remembers thinking: “That’s one sentence I hate to hear. That gets under

my skin. There is no one that looks just like anybody. She’s got black hair,

ok. The girl you know has Asian eyes. Ok that means she looks just like

[my daughter]?”31

She is also trying to teach her daughter not to lump all Asian people

together, reflecting: “Yeah. A lot of people say that out of ignorance. That

aren’t familiar with Asians. I keep telling [my daughter] . . . she’ll see

somebody in a store and say look they’re Chinese. That may not be. . . .

They could be Korean or Japanese.”32

From the analysis above, it is evident that many parents do come to

a more nuanced understanding of the role that race and racism play in

their children’s lives. At the same time, it is tempting for them to fall back

on culture as a means of addressing the potential racism their children

may face. This is not a surprise, nor is it a criticism, as adoptive parents

work within the broader confines of U.S. racial and multicultural poli-

tics, which celebrate culture at the expense of addressing the inequalities

surrounding race and which position Asians as a model minority foil to

other minority groups. In the next section, I further address how adop-

tive parents understand and employ cultural difference as a preemptive

response to issues of racism, cultural identity, and adoption that they fear

their children will face.

302 • JAAS • 12:3

PreeMPTive ConsTruCTions of Chineseness

Whether in the Midwest or elsewhere in the United States, white adoptive

parents find themselves challenged with reworking their family identities

to include a child of color, as they strive to combine elements of Chinese-

ness into white family ethnic and religious lives without placing too much

emphasis on this difference. This “balancing act,” as Dorow terms it, can

become complicated, as attempts by parents to focus on the Chineseness

of their children may serve to accentuate their difference. One mother,

Serena, noted that her six-year-old daughter gets embarrassed about being

Chinese when she is around her white friends, but that when she is with

her Chinese adoptee friends, they try on their Chinese outfits together

and practice counting in Chinese. “She has these two lives,” her mother

observes.

What marked adoptive parents who adopted children from China as a

group is the conscientiousness and perhaps self-consciousness with which

they went about teaching their children about China and Chinese culture.

They saw education about China and Chinese culture as an obligation to

their child because they took their child from his or her “birth culture”33

before he or she was old enough to give consent. For the most part, in the

St. Louis context, these children were not being raised in Chinese American

households and ethnic enclaves, in which many other Chinese Americans

were imagined to live. Because of this, their parents feared they would not

grow up being exposed to other Chinese people and their customs and

language. Therefore, parents believed they had an obligation to teach their

children about their “birth culture,” in part because children may seek

this information out at a later age, but also to give them the proper tools

if they wanted to return to China to search for their roots. Many parents

went a step further and viewed Chinese cultural knowledge and pride as

a potential defense against racism.34

The focus on adoptee cultural identities stands in marked contrast to

the secrecy surrounding adoptee origins in the past, to adoption workers’

attempts to physically match adopted children to parents in domestic

adoptions, and to the assimilationist rhetoric that used to mark Korean

and other transracial adoption.35 It accompanies a new openness to trans-

national, transracial adoption, and a sometimes color-blind philosophy,

303“Pandas, Lions, and dragons, oh My!” • louie •

where the celebration of cultural diversity is viewed as the arena for over-

coming entrenched racial boundaries.36 The adoptive parents I interviewed

consciously created social and cultural environments for their children

through making choices about the schools they attended, the neighbor-

hoods in which they lived, the activities in which they participated, and the

friends with whom they associated. They strategically employed resources

about China and Chinese culture for their children as they engaged in a

type of reflexive, preemptive parenting in which they proactively create

Chinese identities for their children in response to potential discrimination

and identity issues they may face, related both to being adopted and to

being Chinese in America. Having learned from the experiences of adult

Korean and Chinese adoptees through panels, articles, and discussion

boards, parents hoped to preempt possible problems that their children

may face in adolescence or adult life regarding issues of loss, abandonment,

and lack of exposure to their “birth culture.”37 They organized panels of

adult adoptees and asked for their advice on how to raise their children.

Information from adoption experts on international and interracial adop-

tion given to them by the adoption agency, found in magazines for adoptive

parents such as Chosen Child and Adoptive Families, or found in Internet

chat rooms or newsletters of organizations such as FCC, Our Chinese

Daughter’s Foundation, and Half the Sky emphasized the importance of

introducing adopted children to their “birth cultures.”

At the same time, both outside institutional forces (social workers,

the Chinese government, and the promise of multiculturalism) and the

intense nature of the adoption stories of their children compelled many

to bring Chinese culture into their family’s lives in very deliberate, self-

conscious ways. Bay Area adoption advocate Beth Hall is cofounder of

PACT: An Adoption Alliance, a nonprofit agency that provides services

for adoptive parents of children of color. She argues that at the root of

adoptive parents’ culture-making practices are what she terms “entitle-

ment issues”: “There’s this need almost to be better than the best parent

. . . to make up for your child’s adoption . . . and this legitimacy to make

parenting choices is compromised . . . so often these parents struggle with

big decisions, and they almost become almost hypervigilant . . . super

overinvolved because there’s this need again to prove their legitimacy to

parent this child . . . so they have to do it all and then some.”38

304 • JAAS • 12:3

Her comments may apply to all adoptive parents, but one can see how

the public visibility of the transracial adoptive families with whom she

works may help drive this hypervigilance. As I discuss further below, the

public nature of international adoption from China for white adoptive

families makes their practice of Chinese culture in some ways an involun-

tary performance to help establish their legitimacy not only as adoptive

parents but also as adoptive parents of children of color.

Adoptive parents are a self-selected group of highly conscientious

parents who have gone to great lengths to get their children. Many have

dealt with issues of infertility, disappointments from adoptions that fell

through, and long periods of waiting and uncertainty during the adop-

tion process. Interracial adoption results in the breakdown of the public/

private barrier that protects most families from public scrutiny, marking

them visibly as an adoptive family. The often invasive questions that fol-

low, including the clichéd but unfortunately not uncommon supermarket

query, “How much did she cost?” are provoked by the phenotypical “dif-

ference” (or Chineseness) of their child. Renee, mentioned earlier, related

the unsolicited comments that she and her children received when she

went to cast her vote:

This one older man says, “Are those your kids?” And I said, “Yes,

those are my children,” and he goes, “Well where did you get them?”

and I said, “Well . . .” He said, “Is she is from China?” and I said, “Yes she

is.” . . . He said, “Well where did he come from?” He kept going on and

on. I thought, just let me vote here. He said, “Well she is just so cute.

Somebody in my family just got through adopting one.”39

This invasion of privacy compels adoptive parents to respond by turning

Chineseness into a positive marker of difference, something for which the

child should be proud. In this next section, I discuss parents’ construc-

tions of Chinese culture.

addressing CulTure

The ways that race marked the difference of their children adopted from

China made most adoptive parents realize that this marked difference

needs to be addressed, both for the sake of their children and for the

broader identity of their family. But though some acknowledged that race

305“Pandas, Lions, and dragons, oh My!” • louie •

was an issue in their children’s lives, white parents constructed Chinese

culture for their children in a manner that reflected broader patterns in

U.S. multiculturalism that situated conceptions of Asian cultural differ-

ence in relation to broader issues of race and power in U.S. society. In

middle-class folk understandings of cultural difference, some groups (such

as Asian Americans) were viewed as possessing more, as well as better,

culture than others (such as African Americans), and their “difference”

was viewed in cultural rather than racial terms.40 Indeed, the perceived

cultural difference of Asians had deep historical roots, as racial hostilities

against Chinese immigrants to the United States in the late 1800s were

framed in popular rhetoric in terms of the immutable cultural differences

of the Chinese, rather than the economic terms that underlay their ten-

sions with white working-class laborers.41 In a contemporary context, the

model minority myth asserts that Asian Americans have in many ways

become “honorary whites” who have overcome racial barriers and, in

many cases, outperformed whites, oftentimes due to their strong “cultural”

values.42 Other minorities, such as African Americans, were viewed as a

contrasting case, as domestic minorities who were lacking in appropriate

middle-class culture and who are performing below white standards.43

Therefore, parents viewed Chinese culture as a very positive asset to which

they could expose their children, and potentially as something that would

differentiate them from other minorities. While parents deliberately and

selectively researched and collected information about Chinese culture,

the actual experience of trying to implement it within the household may

further complicate the idea of Chinese culture for adoptive parents.44 In

this sense, the performance of cultural traditions was contradicted by

the everyday, lived practices that may challenge rather than reproduce

“traditional” notions of culture.

As a consciously created part of their family life, parents expressed

Chinese culture through engaging in particular types of activities and

through the owning and usage of particular items. Parents formed close

friendships with other adoptive families, often with those with children

who were the same age and sometimes even from the same orphanage.

They sought out Chinese or Chinese American friends. They stayed in

touch with their China travel groups and had periodic reunions so that

306 • JAAS • 12:3

the children could keep in touch with their orphanage-mates. They cre-

ated their own Chinese New Year celebrations, which sometimes involved

decorating the home in elaborate ways and going into their children’s

classrooms to do a special presentation on Chinese New Year for their child

and his or her classmates. Parents also collected items related to Chinese

culture and adoption for their children’s use, whether in the present or the

future. At the time of my research interviews, books that dealt with adop-

tion from China more specifically, such as Sara Dorow’s When You Were

Born in China and Ying Ying Fry’s Kids Like Me in China, were popular.

Amy Tan’s children’s book (also a cartoon on PBS) Sagwa the Chinese Sia-

mese Cat was also found in many homes. Videos such as Disney’s Mulan

and Sesame Street’s Big Bird in China were especially popular. Parents read

books and watched movies about China and adoption issues for their own

education and enjoyment. These included books and magazines specific

to adoption from China such as Lost Daughters of China and A Passage to

the Heart to books by Amy Tan. Parents purchased stones with Chinese

characters engraved on them and other home decorations with Chinese

themes and intermingled these designs with other family heirlooms and

artwork. Some children’s rooms were decorated with Chinese artifacts

such as stuffed panda bears, Chinese dolls, and Chinese artwork. These

items were usually mixed in with pictures of kids and their soccer teams,

kids’ artwork, and the usual clutter of toys, stuffed animals, and clothes.

Children did not always clearly differentiate between “Chinese” items in

their rooms and their other toys and books. One five-year-old, whose

mother asked her to show me her books from China, began to show me

other Chinese things people had gotten her, and then continued by show-

ing me everything on her dresser top, much of which was not “Chinese,”

including some U.S. fifty-cent coins. When I asked Amy, a six-year-old,

about her the collection of Chinese dolls in her room, she said, “Yes, Mom

really likes those dolls.” Her father, who was also in the room, reminded

Amy that she liked them, too.

Many, but not all, white families saw themselves as having little cul-

ture of their own. Bringing Chinese culture into their homes was both

a way to honor the heritage of their adopted child and to explore a new

and exciting culture that complemented existing family background or

307“Pandas, Lions, and dragons, oh My!” • louie •

provided a way for a family to become “ethnic” by incorporating specific

traditions, decorations, and costumes from a Chinese cultural context

into their family’s lives. And having culture, which included everything

from a rich material heritage to strong family values, was something that

parents viewed positively in this atmosphere of multiculturalism. However,

the white adoptive parents I interviewed were used to being able to freely

exercise “ethnic options” in relation to their own ethnic backgrounds. In

the context of U.S. multiculturalism, a pluralistic view of culture allows

for bits and pieces of cultural influence to be blended within the context

of family life. Cultures are viewed as consisting of discrete elements that

can be picked and chosen to enter the American “melting pot,”45 leading

to a view of ethnicity in which cultures are represented in symbolic terms

as white ethnics engage in what Mary Waters terms “ethnic options.”46 Ac-

cording to Waters, white ethnics selectively adopt and display practices that

symbolically represent the aspect(s) of the cultural heritage with which

they choose to identify. For example, Irish Americans may eat corned beef

and cabbage or wear green on St. Patrick’s Day. But Waters emphasizes

that while white ethnics have the luxury to choose these representations

of their heritage, and where and when to perform them, racial minorities

do not. Rather, they are marked by “racial” features that connect them to

the historical legacies of racism and oppression in the United States and

leave them few options for selectively creating and displaying ethnic and

racial identities.

Recognizing that negative stereotypes about Asia and Asian Americans

still existed, parents tried to selectively edit the aspects of Chinese culture

to which they exposed their children, at least while they were young. At the

same time, they could only employ select symbols to effectively represent

Chineseness in the context of everyday U.S. life. While people in mainland

China have for some time been riding bicycles, wearing blue jeans, and

even going to church and eating at McDonald’s, these practices were not

readily identifiable as “Chinese,” and therefore would not serve as effective

symbols of Chineseness within an American context. Given the history of

Orientalism that has defined China and Asia as distinctly different from

the West, timeless and unchanging, the symbols that have come to repre-

sent China and Chinese culture were often framed in binary opposition

308 • JAAS • 12:3

to Western cultural elements. Chineseness was thus represented through

material objects such as chopsticks, silk outfits, and traditional crafts and

foods, and encapsulated in ideas and practices such as feng shui, Chinese

calligraphy, filial piety, and so forth. However, while both “Chinese” and

“American” elements were viewed as comprising the cultural makeup

of adopted children’s lives, these cultural elements were conceptualized

in binary, static terms, despite the fact that in reality, there were many

areas of overlap between these essentialized conceptions Chinese and

American culture, particularly in the context of everyday family life. In

the next section, I discuss how Chineseness played out in the context of

everyday family life.

Chineseness in The ConTexT of faMily life

Meanings constructed around both “Chinese” and “American” cultures

came into play on a daily basis in the lives of adoptive families. For the

purposes of this article, I provide only an overview of these constructions

of Chinese culture and how they might fit into the broader analysis of

parents’ approaches discussed earlier in the article. As families outside

the mold, adoptive parents had to creatively produce their own family

histories and narratives to provide their children with a sense of a past that

also serves to connect them to the present as a member of their adoptive

family. They accomplished this in part through the production of videos

and “memory” books, using materials collected in China as a base. These

comprised an important, albeit incomplete, archaeology of family origins

that legitimized and reinforced family identity. In addition to artwork and

souvenirs that parents bought on their trip to China and other items sym-

bolizing Chineseness they had purchased in the United States, parents often

kept memory books and videos of the adoption journey in their living

rooms, where they could be easily accessed. Some children looked at these

books quite often and knew the stories by heart, similar to other stories

they had read and memorized. The artifacts also took on new meanings

as they were used by parents as a means to celebrate new family rituals,

such as family, or “Gotcha,” day, which can signify the anniversary of first

meeting the child, or the day that the adoption became official in China.

One family showed their video of their adoption trip to their daughter

309“Pandas, Lions, and dragons, oh My!” • louie •

when she was four years old, on their Gotcha (or family) day. The video

has become an important part of her history and their history as a family,

which her parents note will be become even more meaningful to her when

she begins to explore her history. Stacey, a thirteen-year-old I interviewed,

showed me the pictures her parents had taken in 1995 when they went to

China to bring her home. She had visited China in 2005 on a China Ties

tour with her mother and told me that she compared the new pictures they

took (many of which she kept on her iPod) with the ones her parents had

taken back in 1995 when they traveled to get her. She proudly showed me

a book of pictures from the summer 2005 trip that her parents had made

and presented to her that Christmas. One of her best friends, who had

been adopted at the same time and traveled with her on the China Ties

trip, made her a special scrapbook for her thirteenth birthday containing

pictures from when they were infants in China, through their childhood

years, including their China Ties trip and Vietnam trip (their families had

recently traveled together to Vietnam, the birth country of their younger

siblings). Stacey said that her friend had told her that the pictures proved

that they had been friends their entire lives. Her friend had also left blank

pages in the album for future adventures together. This example illustrates

the ways that artifacts become the basis for the ongoing life experiences

that are key to the negotiation of identities and relationships with both

family and friends.

For many families I interviewed, consumption played a key role in

shoring up identity narratives, allowing families to display and perform

identities with material objects to make the selective histories they craft

seem more tangible. They illustrated these stories with objects such as

Chinese outfits, decorations, DVDs, food, and music that provide visual,

auditory, and other sensory means of participating in Chinese culture.

While many adoption critics have pointed out the problems with focus-

ing too much on the superficial consumption of cultural goods, and I

agree with their concerns, I think it is also important to point out that

consumption can play a role in the display and definition of identities on

numerous levels. The Chinese Americans I previously studied displayed

and practiced Chineseness through the consumption of popular culture

items that are pan–Asian American or even pan-Asian, and not neces-

310 • JAAS • 12:3

sarily rooted in the specific histories of their families and communities.

Transnational cultural flows played an important role in providing the

repertoire for this selective display of identity elements. They consumed,

used, and displayed products such as Hello Kitty knickknacks and Asian

air fresheners, sometimes with a sense of irony.47

Though they appeared to be more concerned with symbolizing tra-

ditional, “authentic” Chineseness, favoring things that had Chinese writ-

ing on them or that had historical meaning (antiques), it is important to

consider that white parents may not have as much flexibility as Chinese

Americans in integrating pan-Asian or Asian American culture into the

repertoire, because of the scrutiny they receive as non-Chinese people for

possibly implementing Chinese culture in inauthentic ways. In addition,

parents with young children are often focused on symbolically represent-

ing Chinese culture to young children. But while adoptive parents were

concerned about authenticity in one sense, at the same time they were

reinventing traditions in novel ways that combine Chinese traditions with

aspects of their own family lives. These included passing a baby through a

giant Challah48 or the myriad of Gotcha day traditions that families cre-

ate. One Jewish family invited me over for dinner on the Shabbat, during

which their six-year-old daughter adopted from China recited prayers

in Hebrew. They discussed the complexity of their daughter’s identity,

commenting that “you also then throw religion into the mix and there

are just so many things that go into bringing up a child. [She] is more

than a little girl from China.” She not only is learning Hebrew but also

takes ballet and gymnastics lessons.49 Her parents also try to learn about

Chinese culture, and the family attends the New Year celebration in one

of the Asian enclaves in which Vietnamese and Hawaiian cultures are

also represented. They must also consider the identity issues of her little

brother, who was adopted from Vietnam. But one wonders whether, in

the context of the scheduled and compartmentalized lives of U.S. families

today, if Chineseness may just become another activity, alongside swim-

ming lessons, birthday parties, and school. As much focus and attention as

parents place on constructing Chinese culture, they must operate within

the context of daily family lives, combining Chinese cultural activities

and material culture with other aspects of their daily routines—school,

church or synagogue, swimming lessons, and playgroups.50 Busy family

311“Pandas, Lions, and dragons, oh My!” • louie •

schedules required many families to make discrete choices about how

and when to expose their child(ren) to Chinese culture, constrained by

a number of factors, including local resources, children’s interests, and

scheduling issues. Adoptive mothers found themselves in “time binds” as

they engage their children in various extracurricular activities designed

to develop their children’s minds and bodies, and in what Jacobson terms

“culture keeping” activities. She observes:

Culture keeping through FCC, Chinese dance, language classes, or

strategic play dates with other Chinese children, were seen a way to help

develop a well-rounded child with healthy self-esteem. Participation

in the many organized activities, however, is taxing for a parent. To

emphasize this difficulty Holly showed me an elaborate color-coded

weekly schedule written on a large poster board. Each minute of the

day, literally, was accounted for. It was an amazing jumble of colors

designating school and work, music lessons, swimming, martial arts,

Chinese language, homework, rest time, etc.51

Parents believed they needed to set limits on their cultural activities in

light of other family needs and practical considerations. Renee, mentioned

earlier, who had a daughter adopted from China and an African American

son from St. Louis, asked, where do we stop? When they adopted Justin,

her husband half-jokingly said that they had to draw a line in terms of

celebrating their children’s cultural heritages. They weren’t going to do

Kwanza too!

The importance of attending Chinese-language school encapsulated

many of the discussions and debates that parents have about the place

of Chinese culture in their family’s lives. When asked why they wanted

their child to learn some Chinese, the majority of St. Louis parents told

me that they would like their children to be able to say a few words in

reply if spoken to in Chinese.52 Attending Chinese-language school also

provided an opportunity for children to socialize with other adopted and

nonadopted Chinese Americans from the local community. But at the

same time, because Chinese-language school represented a substantial

time commitment (every Sunday afternoon, plus homework), parents had

to decide how, when, or whether they wanted to take it on. Some families

made arrangements with private tutors who could adapt to their schedules

and curricular needs. But ironically, Serena, mentioned earlier, observed

312 • JAAS • 12:3

that the Taiwanese American adviser to the St. Louis FCC chapter did not

think it was important his children (now grown) learned to speak Chinese.

She noted that as adoptive parents, they did not have the luxury to make

this choice on behalf of their children.

What do the limits that parents place on Chinese cultural activities

tell us about what Chineseness means to adoptive parents in the St. Louis

context?53 Does it speak to the fact that Chinese cultural activities need

to be sought out and scheduled in a context where Chinese cultural ac-

tivities are not an integral part of everyday life? Does it speak to the fact

that these Chinese children and their Chineseness have blended in and

become one of many aspects of family identity? Or that parents value

Chinese culture only as an extracurricular enrichment to their child’s

identity? It might be tempting to speculate that because of the relative

lack of resources on Chinese culture in St. Louis as a midwestern city,

Chineseness can only take a back burner to other activities. But based on

my research interviews in the Bay Area, despite the relative abundance of

Chinese cultural resources there, many parents used similar approaches,

seeking out other adoptive families and Chinese American friends, and

attending Chinese cultural events. Bay Area parents did have more op-

tions at their disposal—for example, many parents I interviewed sent their

children to Chinese immersion programs and hired Chinese babysitters to

further expose their children to Chinese culture and people. FCC groups

contained Asian American adoptive parents from whom white parents

could learn about Asian American culture. Still, others said that because

of the strong presence of Chinese and other Asian cultures in the region,

they did not have to go out of their way to experience Chinese culture

or to expose their children to it. Therefore, while we may be able to at-

tribute some parental behavior to geographical location, it is essential to

remember that it continues to be shaped by a broader contemporary U.S.

racial and multicultural politics.

ConClusion

My approach has focused on ethnographic descriptions of constructions

of Chinese culture in the context of white middle-class family lives, illu-

minating the racial and cultural politics that define these culture-making

313“Pandas, Lions, and dragons, oh My!” • louie •

processes and the complexity of their actual productions. As discussed

at the beginning of this article, the construction of Chinese culture by

adoptive parents may lead to the reproduction of parental racial and class

positions, but also to their transformation, as it plays out within the con-

text of family lives. Some of the ethnographic evidence above points out

how, in thinking about ways to address the Chineseness of their children

to family and friends as well as strangers, many white parents begin to

realize that race affects both themselves and their children in ways that

are not always overt. Within the context of daily lives, these parents strove

to understand and negotiate meanings attached to both race and culture.

Like many other scholars who have worked on adoption, I found that my

interviewees often addressed my questions about race by talking about

culture—viewing cultural pride as a solution for the focus on the child’s

difference. At the same time, some also questioned their focus on culture

and the exoticism it might lead to. And though they might not have nec-

essarily labeled them as racist acts, parents also talked about events that

happened in their everyday lives, such as ignorant statements involving

assumptions that all Asians look alike, and found themselves in positions

where they were educating their friends and family about the fallacy behind

this thinking. In seeking out resources on Chineseness, parents were also

creating networks and connections to the local Chinese American com-

munity upon which they hoped their children could later draw as they

began to create their own social networks. FCC members reached out to

and jointly hosted events with the St. Louis chapter of the Organization

for Chinese Americans (OCA), a civil rights–based organization. They

enthusiastically attended meetings such as the one I hosted, in which we

discussed the concept of Orientalism as well as the perpetual foreigner and

model minority stereotypes and how they affected Chinese Americans.

They searched for other connections with multicultural and multiracial

families. FCC programming has also evolved to include activities for older

children and numerous guest speakers on topics related to both adoption

and Chinese American issues.54

In modifying Chinese culture, white parents may be seen as absorb-

ing Chinese cultural difference into their family.55 However, the examples

of adoptive parents’ constructions of identity provided above illustrate

314 • JAAS • 12:3

that there is some potential for adoptive families to creatively play with

culture by crafting new forms that are consciously removed from histori-

cally rooted, and often limiting, conceptions of identity. Sociologist Miri

Song argues that racial minorities can exercise some ethnic options as they

strategically reframe negative images about their group that have been

imposed on them by others or “re-appropriate” them for the creation of

new, positive meanings.56 Her application of Waters’s concept of “ethnic

options” to racial minorities politicizes the idea and gives it an instrumen-

tality that differs from its use with white ethnics. In speculating about the

future of Chinese adoptee identities, the capacity to critically interpret and

to recontextualize representations of Chinese or Chinese American culture

will be key. After all, the Chinese culture created by adoptive families does

not exist in a vacuum. Rather, it coexists with all of the other elements that

comprise contemporary family lives, including their ethnic and religious

identities. So what is at issue here, I think, is not solely whether culture

is removed from its original context or whether families engage in too

much consumption, but rather how those excerpted elements of Chinese

culture are assigned meaning, politicized, and recontextualized within

the context of adoptive families lives. As I discuss elsewhere, the decon-

textualized versions of Chinese culture that adoptive families create may

share similarities with those of other Asian Americans who are attempting

to create identities that are removed from traditional and constraining

conceptions of Chineseness. As Michael Fischer notes in his classic piece

“Ethnicity and the Post Modern Arts of Memory,” ethnic identities, as

reflected in the works of literature he analyzes, may be “grounded in a

connection to the past,” but are oriented toward the future. They are also

“multidimensional.” He observes:

What is discovered and reinvented in the new works about ethnicity

is, perhaps increasingly, something new: to be Chinese American is not

the same thing as being Chinese in America. In this sense there is no

role model for becoming Chinese-American. It is a matter of finding a

voice or style that does not violate one’s several components of identity.

In part, such a process of assuming an ethnic identity is an insistence

on a pluralist, multidimensional, or multifaceted concept of self: one

can be many different things, and this personal sense can be a crucible

for a wider social ethos of pluralism.57

315“Pandas, Lions, and dragons, oh My!” • louie •

This notion of identity as reinvented provides a constructive alter-

native to the idea of “birth cultures” that must be excavated from past

histories.58 Indeed, if we examine the diverse Chinese American com-

munity, we realize that there are a multitude of possible formations of

Chinese culture, each combining elements of Chinese culture within an

interpretive framework of family, values, and traditions. My ethnographic

interviews with Bay Area Asian American adoptive parents reinforce the

idea that there is no one way of being “authentically” Asian American or

Chinese American. While it may initially appear that white parents have

more flexibility in experimenting with culture, my research shows that

Asian American adoptive parents retain the privilege of assumed authen-

ticity, which may also grant them license to invent cultural traditions

anew. Some Asian American parents I interviewed said that they were not

making specific efforts to teach their children about China and Chinese

culture beyond the mixture of traditions that they recognized as Asian

or Asian American growing up. They may appear to be providing their

children with even less overt Chinese cultural content than white parents

who approach the issues in a more deliberate way. Of course, this begs

the question of what comprises Chinese culture—is it the more tangible

material items and ritual practices symbolizing Chineseness, or is it specific

values (frugality, respect for elders, close-knit family) and daily practices

that within a U.S. context may not be identified as specifically Chinese?

Most Asian American parents I interviewed saw Chinese American cul-

ture as adaptive, and to some extent a matter of selective choice, having

observed how in the context of their own families, certain practices may

have persisted, others may have come to represent new meanings, and

still others might have been invented anew. At the same time, while some

Asian American parents did not worry too much about inserting Chinese

customs into the home, this did not necessarily correlate with whether

they addressed issues of adoption or racism. While some emphasized the

importance of making their children aware of the positioning of Asian

Americans as racial minorities, not all Asian American parents were

concerned about the racism that they or their children may face. Many

observed that, particularly in the Bay Area, families like theirs were not

unusual and the Asian/Asian American presence was large. They did not

316 • JAAS • 12:3

recall their children experiencing very much racism, though, like many

white parents, they tended to view racism as consisting of overt acts of

discrimination and had perhaps internalized the color- and race-blind

notions that define contemporary multiculturalism.

The question becomes how to ensure that Chinese adoptees have

the resources they will need to recognize racism, combat negative stereo-

types, and access knowledge about Chinese, Chinese American, and Asian

American culture and society when they want to do so. It is my hope that

whether they have Asian American or white parents, adoptees will have

the ability, flexibility, and willingness to embrace, transform, and re-create

the variety of Chinese, Chinese American, and Asian American identities

that exist in the world. It will be essential for them to have access to the

resources and social networks to connect to Chinese adoptee, Chinese

American, or Asian American social movements so that they will be able

to critique Asian American stereotypes and the Orientalist filters through

which these images become part of U.S. society.

notes

I would like to thank Allison Berg, Victor Jew, Michael Largey, and Anna Pegler-Gordon for their comments on various versions of this article. I would also like to thank Pawan Dhingra for his work as issue editor in helping me develop this essay further. Finally, I would like to thank those adoptive families and their supporters in the St. Louis area whom I interviewed for sharing their stories with me for this research. This research was carried out in part with funds from a summer National Endowment for the Humanities “We the People” grant (2004) and Intramural Research Grants Program funding from Michigan State University.

1. http://www.transracialabductees.org/politics/; www.conflere.com. 2. At the same time, her words reflect a very potent anger and frustration that

some, though certainly not all, adoptees experience. 3. Quoted in Lynette Clemetson, “Adopted in China, Seeking Identity in

America,” New York Times, March 23, 2006. 4. Sara K. Dorow, Transnational Adoption: A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender

and Kinship (New York: NYU Press, 2006); David L. Eng, “Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas,” Social Text 76 21.3 (Fall 2003): 1–37; Ann Anagnost, “Scenes of Misrecognition: Maternal Citizenship in the Age of Transnational Adoption,” positions: east asia cultures critique 8.2 (Fall 2000): 389–421. Anthony Shiu, “Flexible Production: International Adoption, Race, Whiteness,” Jouvert 6.1 (2001), http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v6i1-2/ shiu.htm. Less critical studies include: Toby Alice Volkman, Cultures of Trans-

317“Pandas, Lions, and dragons, oh My!” • louie •

national Adoption (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); Richard Tessler, Gail Gamache, and Liming Liu, West Meets East: Americans Adopt Chinese Children (Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey Press, 2001); Jay W. Rojewski and Jacy L. Rojewski, Intercountry Adoption from China: Examining Cultural Heritage and Other Postadoption Issues (Westport Conn.: Bergin and Garvey, 2001).

5. Dorow, Transnational Adoption, 235, 32. 6. Ibid., 212. 7. I thank Michael Largey for reminding me to emphasize this point, and for

his feedback on the article overall. 8. Anagnost, “Scenes of Misrecognition.” 9. I have also begun to interview teenagers who were adopted from China as

infants or toddlers regarding how they understand and shape their identities, both in relation to being Chinese and more broadly. Interviewing teenagers will shed light on how Chinese adoptees are responding to or building upon the foundations their parents have crafted for them. Again, while it is beyond the purview of this article, understanding teenage adoptees is another key part of understanding the future implication of adoptive parents’ construc- tions of race, culture, and family.

10. The majority of interviews with St. Louis parents were conducted between 2000 and 2004, but I will return to St. Louis in the summer of 2009 to conduct additional interviews with both adoptive parents and teenage adoptees.

11. All of the parents in this unavoidably self-selected sample (parents not inter- ested in issues of Chinese culture would not contact me to participate in the study) believed that it was important to some degree to teach their children about China and Chinese culture. However, the ways they went about doing this varied, as did their reasons for doing so.

12. Huping Ling, Chinese St. Louis: From Enclave to Cultural Community (Phila- delphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 2.

13. Ibid., 17 14. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/29/29189.html. 15. Ling discussed the significance of Chinese Cultural Days in Chinese St. Louis,

222–224. 16. Knowledge and appreciation of Chinese cuisine are two symbolic markers of

identification with China and Chinese culture, in a manner consistent with other forms of symbolic ethnicity in the context of U.S. multiculturalism. For example, Roger Rouse notes that popular ethnic street festivals involve public displays and associations with “traditional” foods and cultural prod- ucts to represent the diversity within U.S. culture. Roger Rouse, “Thinking Through Transnationalism: Notes on the Cultural Politics of Class Relations in the Contemporary United States,” Public Culture 7.2 (1995): 353–402.

17. See Tessler et al., “West Meets East.” More research will need to be done in this area. When I asked why mothers were more involved, both mothers and fathers would reply that perhaps it was because child care and transmitting

318 • JAAS • 12:3

culture and values have traditionally been a women’s job. However, if we take a broader view of parenting, fathers were very involved in other aspects. Also, there are some fathers who are very active in FCC activities, serving on the board, and so forth.

18. J. Shiao, M. Tuan, and E. Rienzi, “Shifting the Spotlight: Exploring Race and Culture in Korean-White Adoptive Families,” Race and Society 7.1 (2004): 1–16. In their study of the approaches to race of parents of transnationally adopted Koreans, Shiao, Tuan, and Rienzi (8) identify three main approaches: “emphasizing the exotic yet non-threatening aspects of their child’s racial differences”; “acknowledging the significance of race and racism in America”; and “ a color-blind approach in which their child’s Asian-ness was essentially ‘e-raced’ or overlooked.” Dorow, in Transnational Adoption, discusses a spec- trum of approaches used by parents who adopt children from China, from assimilation to immersion.

19. Sara K. Dorow, “Racialized Choices: Chinese Adoption and the ̀ White Noise’ of Blackness,” Critical Sociology 32.2–3 (2006): 360, 370.

20. “Biracial” usually referred to a child who had one parent who was black and one parent who was white.

21. The transracial adoption of African American children has sparked contro- versy in the past, most visibly in the strong objection voiced by the National Association of Black Social Workers in 1972, which stated that white parents would be unable to raise black children to adequately deal with racism. International adoption removes children from the historical and political circumstances that frame their relinquishment, and for many U.S. parents, the lack of connections to birth parents facilitated the ease with which they became part of new family identities. Dorow, “Racialized Choices,” 364; Ana Teresa Ortiz and Laura Briggs, “The Culture of Poverty, Crack Babies, and Welfare Cheat: The Making of the ‘Healthy White Baby Crisis,’” Social Text 76 21.3 (Fall 2003): 39–57.

22. Dorow, “Racialized Choices”; Ortiz and Briggs, “Culture of Poverty.” 23. Interview with John Ward and Stephanie Ward (pseudonyms), St. Louis, June

2001. 24. The perception that St. Louis had a large Asian community was of course a

subjective one. As compared to other parts of the country, the 2–3 percent Asian population could be considered small. However, in comparison to other parts of the state and indeed the country as a whole, this population might seem larger.

25. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 139.

26. Ibid. 27. Dorow, “Racialized Choices,” 374. 28. Interview with Rebecca Dodson (pseudonym), St. Louis, June 2001. 29. Ibid. 30. Interview with Annette Cummings (pseudonym), St. Louis, July 2001.

319“Pandas, Lions, and dragons, oh My!” • louie •

31. Interview with Serena Thompson (pseudonym), St. Louis, June 2001. 32. Ibid. 33. The very idea of “birth culture” is, of course, very telling, as it conflates geo-

graphical and biological origins of culture, when in reality cultural practices are flexible and dynamic, and sometimes do not correlate with ancestral origins.

34. Dorow (in Transnational Adoption, 216) notes that there is a range of ap- proaches to Chinese cultural education, represented by the four key strate- gies practiced by adoptive parents she interviewed, including assimilation, celebrating plurality, balancing act, and immersion.

35. Dorow, Transnational Adoption; Sandra Patton, Birthmarks: Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America (New York: NYU Press, 2000); Toby Alice Volkman, “Embodying Chinese Culture: Transnational Adoption in North America,” in Volkman, Cultures of Transnational Adoption, 81–116; Deann Borshay-Liem, First Person Plural (Center for Asian American Media, 2000), 56 min.

36. Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters; Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996).

37. Madelyn Freundlich and Joy Kim Libreta, The Gathering of the First Genera- tion of Adult Korean Adoptees: Adoptees’ Perceptions of International Adoption (New York: Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, June 2000).

38. Interview with Beth Hall, Oakland, California, July 2008. 39. Interview with Rebecca Dodson, St. Louis, June 2001. 40. Paula Ebron and Anna Tsing, “From Allegories of Identity to Sites of Dia-

logue,” Diaspora 4.2 (1995): 125–151. 41. Arif Dirlik, “The Asia-Pacific in Asian-American Perspective,” In What Is in a

Rim?: Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea, ed. Arif Dirlik (Boulder, Colo.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 283–308.

42. Min Zhou, “Are Asian Americans Becoming White?” Context 3.1 (2004): 29–37; Mia Tuan, Forever Foreigner or Honorary White? (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press 1999).

43. Timothy Fong, The Contemporary Asian American Experience: Beyond the Model Minority (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2006).

44. I go into the ways that parents create versions of Chinese culture with respect to their own ethnic and religious backgrounds in a forthcoming article.

45. D. A. Segal and R. Handler, “Multiculturalism and the Concept of Culture,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 1 (1995): 391–340.

46. Mary Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Ethnic Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

47. Andrea Louie, Chineseness Across Borders (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).

48. Volkman, “Embodying Chinese Culture.”

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49. In a recent June 2009 interview, I learned that she has become a highly com- petitive karate champion who will be one of four young women representing the United States on the junior karate team in the Eighteenth Maccabi Games for Jewish athletes, to be held in Israel in July 2009.

50. Heather Jacobson’s findings differ. Heather Jacobson, Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008), 189. In her study of adoptive mothers in Boston, she found that “among women with children from China, a Chinese adoptive cultural identity often overshadowed or eclipsed any prior white ethnic affiliations of the parents.”

51. Ibid., 97–98. 52. This strategy stands in contrast to an alternative response of some Chinese

Americans who take offense at the assumption that they speak Chinese or do not speak English well. But while many parents assumed that most Chinese Americans spoke Chinese at home, in actuality there is a great deal of varia- tion in the Chinese-language competence of Chinese Americans, which varies by generation, social class, geographical location, and so forth. There is also some disagreement within the Chinese American community as to whether knowing the Chinese language is essential for Chinese American identity.

53. I thank Pawan Dhingra for suggesting I expand on this idea. 54. However, it remains an organization primarily run by adoptive parents.

Chinese adoptee organizations are beginning to form, such as the California- based Chinese Adoptee Links, run by Jennifer Bao Yu Jue-Steuk, a Chinese adoptee and Ph.D. student.

55. Anagnost, “Scenes of Misrecognition.” 56. Miri Song, Choosing Ethnic Identity (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003). 57. Michael Fischer, “Ethnicity and the Postmodern Arts of Memory,” in Writ-

ing Culture, ed. George Marcus and Michael Fischer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 196.

58. The American-born Chinese Americans I previously studied, many of whom did not speak Chinese fluently or know much about China before traveling there on “roots-seeking” journeys, employed de-contextualized symbols of Chinese or Asian American popular culture to bolster identity narratives that reflected their modernity and tenuous connections to both mainstream U.S. and Chinese societies. Like adoptive parents, they, too, integrated the celebration of Chinese holidays with mainstream American ones. There is great variation across social class, regional origins, and generation in the number of and ways that Chinese American families practice both Chinese and American holidays. I remember attending Thanksgiving celebrations at my maternal uncle’s house, at which dumplings would be served alongside turkey, mashed potatoes, and squash, and a few hours later, everyone would enjoy jook (Chinese rice porridge) that had been made with the turkey bones.