Eleana J.kim, Lisa Cartwright, Claudia Fonseca, Barbara Yngvesson Transnational Adoption Social Text, Spring 2003 2003

Transnational AdoptionSpecial Issue Editors Toby Alice Volkman and Cindi Katz

Preface v

Introduction: Transnational Adoption Toby Alice Volkman 1

Going “Home”: Adoption, Loss of Bearings, and the Mythology of Roots Barbara Yngvesson 7

Embodying Chinese Culture: Transnational Adoption in North America Toby Alice Volkman 29

Wedding Citizenship and Culture: Korean Adoptees and theGlobal Family of Korea Eleana Kim 57

Photographs of “Waiting Children”: The Transnational Adoption Market Lisa Cartwright 83

Patterns of Shared Parenthood among the Brazilian PoorClaudia Fonseca 111

Contents

Lisa Cartwright is an associate professor of communication and sciencestudies at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Screen-ing the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (University of MinnesotaPress), coauthor of Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture(Oxford University Press), and coeditor of The Visible Woman: ImagingTechnologies, Gender, and Science (NYU Press).

Claudia Fonseca is professor of anthropology at the Federal University ofRio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Her research interests include family organiza-tion and gender relations in Brazilian working-class populations, with spe-cial emphasis on human rights issues and international adoption. Recentpublications include articles in journals such as Law and Society Review,Law and Policy, and the Adoption and Fostering Journal, as well as twobooks: Caminhos da Adoção (Cortez) and Família, fofoca e honra: Etnografia derelações de gênero e violência em grupos populares (Editora da UFRGS).

Cindi Katz is professor of geography in environmental psychology andwomen’s studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of NewYork. Her work concerns social reproduction and the production of space,place, and nature; children and the environment; and the consequences ofglobal economic restructuring for everyday life. She is the editor, with Jan-ice Monk, of Full Circles: Geographies of Gender over the Life Course (Rout-ledge) and the author of Disintegrating Developments: Global EconomicRestructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives (forthcoming from Univer-sity of Minnesota Press in 2003).

Eleana Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at New York University.Her dissertation research focuses on transnational adoption from SouthKorea through an examination of the cultural work of an emerging trans-national adult Korean adoptee “movement.”

Contributors

Toby Alice Volkman is a visiting scholar in the Anthropology Depart-ment at New York University. She was formerly a program officer at theFord Foundation, where she developed “Crossing Borders,” a worldwideinitiative to revitalize area studies; she also served as director of the Southand Southeast Asia Programs at the Social Science Research Council.She is the author of Feasts of Honor: Ritual and Change in the Toraja High-lands (University of Illinois Press) and is currently working on the cultureof transnational adoption.

Barbara Yngvesson is professor of anthropology at Hampshire College.She is the author of Virtuous Citizens, Disruptive Subjects: Order and Com-plaint in a New England Court (Routledge) and coauthor of Law and Com-munity in Three American Towns (Cornell University Press). Her currentresearch focuses on movements of children between families and nations inadoption, the power of law in constituting these movements, and the hierar-chies of belonging and exclusion (racial, familial, national) that they produce.

This special issue on transnational adoption focuses on matters that havereceived considerable public attention in recent years. The contributors tothis issue, mostly professional anthropologists and adoptive parents, areintimate with the phenomenon and offer a fine-grained account of thecomplexities too often missing from conventional portrayals. Their claimsfor transformed relations of kinship stand in critical relation to norms ofnational patrimony and reflect both a commitment and a politics that hasnot been without controversy. In a subsequent issue of Social Text, we willpublish additional essays in this area that will explore different lines ofengagement and other dimensions for what could be considered nationaland transnational spaces of adoption.

—The Editors

Preface

Sierra Song E, Marty, and I sat with our noses pressed against the glassstraining to see the land as it intermittently appeared and vanished through the clouds. Almost in a whisper she confided “I think that placeright down there may be where my birth parents live, Mommy. I thinkmaybe they might be looking up and wishing that their little girl could flydown to them for a visit. Someday, maybe I will look for them. I’m sendingthem a wish now. It is that I hope they have enough to eat and they arehappy. I hope they are not missing me too much. I wish I could tell themthat I will come back to China again and again. I hope they catch my wish, Mommy and Daddy—don’t you?”—Jane Brown

In the early 1990s, the adoption of children across national borders beganto accelerate at an astonishing rate. Although transnational adoption orig-inated more than fifty years ago in the aftermath of World War II and theKorean War, the current wave of adoption is unprecedented in magnitudeand visibility. Immigrant orphan visas issued by the U.S. Immigration andNaturalization Services nearly tripled between 1991 and 2001: from 7,093to 19,237. In the United States alone, more than 139,000 children havebeen adopted internationally in the last ten years. Over 50,000 of thesechildren were born in China or Russia.

What are the implications of this massive movement of children,almost entirely from poor nations, to the more affluent West? The essaysin this issue explore transnational adoption from multiple perspectives,encompassing both “sending” and “receiving” countries: birth parents whorelinquish children, adoptive parents and adopted children, and adultadoptees. All of the essays view adoption as situated in the midst of largersocial and cultural transformations and, inevitably, in the space of familialintimacy and the public sphere. In its transnational mode, adoption entersinto and informs the complex politics of forging new, even fluid, kinds ofkinship and affiliation on a global stage. These politics start from, ratherthan end on, the critical insight that identity is a social construction (seeTaussig 1993).

Questions of belonging, race, culture, and subjectivity loom large inthe discourses of transnational adoption. In an earlier era, adoption acrossborders was assumed to be straightforward: A child traveled to a new

Toby AliceVolkman

Introduction

TRANSNATIONAL ADOPTION

Social Text 74, Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Duke University Press.

country and stayed there. A child born in Korea and adopted in Minne-sota was expected to grow up, and remain, simply a (white) American.Parents and adoption organizations did not question that their acts weregood deeds. The past was erased or contained in an abandoned “there”;the racialized trace of origins tended to be treated as manageable. Today,adopted people—children or adults—are expected, or at least invited, toexplore their multiple identities: to retain a name, to imagine their birthfamilies, to learn about “birth cultures,” perhaps to visit the birth country.

As an anthropologist and interpreter accompanying a group of Chileanadoptees and their Swedish parents who traveled “home” to Chile, Bar-bara Yngvesson tracks one such exploration, suggesting that these jour-neys unsettle the narrative of exclusive belongings, the notion of a singu-lar identity, a self that can be made whole. Contemporary adoption discourseechoes the ambivalences discussed in Yngvesson’s essay: the contradictorynarratives of the child “rooted” in his or her original culture and the childas freely transferable, to new kin and culture, in the global marketplace.

At least some of the popular culture of adoption has begun to acknowl-edge the impossibility of “exclusive belongings.” An American motherwrote on the Internet of her hopes to give her daughter “what she wouldneed to have a fulfilling, but divided life.” The daughter, six-year-old SierraSong E, echoed her mother’s thoughts: “Part of me lives here now andpart of my heart is in China now, you know?” Her mother replied: “Thatis the way it should be—you are a daughter of each of the two lands yourightfully claim as yours” (Brown 2002). Like the passage quoted in theepigraph above—Sierra Song E’s whispered thoughts upon leaving Chinaat the end of her first “homeland visit”—this dialogue would have beenunimaginable even a decade ago.

The state may stake its own claim to the adoptee, as Eleana Kimdescribes in a quite different version of the “roots” journey. Reversing thedirection of fifty years of Korean adoption, thousands of young adultKorean adoptees have traveled to South Korea in recent years, wheresome attend “cultural training” camps sponsored by a government noweager to recast Korean adoptees—once seen as outcasts—as “overseasKoreans.” In this process, Kim shows, adoptees have resisted appropria-tion by the state and are struggling to create alternative identifications.Those struggles are part of a larger, self-consciously global movement inwhich Korean adoptees are encountering “Korea” in complex ways,wrestling with their own fantasies of origins, articulating new forms of “cul-tural citizenship” and understandings of what it might mean to be bothKorean and not.

The voices of these Korean adoptees, adopted at a time when for themost part their Koreanness was suppressed, have been extraordinarily

2 Toby Alice Volkman

influential in shaping the consciousness of adoptive families in the 1990s.Long silenced, Korean adoptees are now seen as articulate pioneers: pro-ducers of “authoethnographic” film and video, creators of such collectivepractices as worldwide gatherings of Korean adoptees. On the Internet, amother whose son was adopted from India thirty years ago wrote simply:“Everything I’ve learned has been from the Korean adoptees.”

Changes in the culture of adoption have been especially dramatic inthe last decade of the twentieth century. Aware of the experiences of ear-lier generations of adoptees and caught up in the rhetoric of multicultur-alism, North American adoptive parents of younger children self-consciouslystrive to embrace difference rather than assimilation and attempt to helptheir children fashion multiple or fluid identifications. Such efforts aremost visible in the case of adoptive families with Chinese children, whoseintense involvement with “Chinese culture” brings to the fore tensionbetween the affirmation of difference (cast sometimes as culture, some-times as race) and its reinscription. Fascination with the performance orembodiment of “Chinese culture,” I suggest, may also represent displacedlonging for the unknowable narrative of the child’s past and the imaginedfigure of the birth mother.

In each of these instances, adoptive families are not isolated actors butare engaged in some form of larger community—the Swedish agency-mediated travel group, the emerging global Korean adoptee movementand state-orchestrated stagings of identity, organizations such as Familieswith Children from China. Perhaps most distinctive as a 1990s medium ofcommunity making is the Internet, where adoption discussion groups pro-liferate. Media and new technologies may shape communities of discourseand expand the sense of solidarity, but they have other complicated effectsas well. Lisa Cartwright reminds us how the media catapulted viewers intoaction in the rush to adopt in Romania, and she explores how digital tech-nology has made possible the creation of a staggeringly vast archive ofavailable children. Images of “waiting children” are used to incite desire,to classify and grade and diagnose, and to serve as “identity’s most . . .legible representation.”

Until the mid-1970s, when the “open adoption” movement was bornin the United States, adoptive parents were pressured to create “as if” bio-logical families. These practices were premised on the forgetting of a child’spast, and especially on the erasure of birth parents. In dramatic contrast,contemporary adoption discourse encourages, even exhorts, adoptivefamilies to imagine, to grieve for, and at times to search for those parents.These changes are sometimes read as a progressive opening up, an unset-tling of the constraints of conventional kinship and the idealized whitenuclear family. Alternatively, might the desire for the birth connection—in

3Introduction

the form of what some now call “birth culture,” birth kin, or country—represent a reemergence of the dominant American ideology of “blood,”now recast in a more contemporary idiom of DNA? Cartwright arguesthat the late-twentieth-century turn toward the social construction of fam-ily was quickly followed by a return to genetics in adoption discourse,wherein the adoptive family is seen as a “set of genetic legacies” linkedthrough choice, “a network of blood lines that closely cross but do notmix” (Cartwright n.d.). Tensions between these visions complicate adop-tive parents’ discourse about their pleasure in creating new forms of kin-ship even as they pursue the remote possibility of finding “true” DNA sisters(see Volkman’s article).

Preoccupations in the West that impel parents and adoptees to seekconnections with the country or the culture of origin have stimulated allsorts of border-crossing movements that would have been unimaginable inan earlier era: an array of culture camps, charitable initiatives, orphanagevisits, birth family searches, and other forms of travel. These movementsare promoted by social workers and agencies, the adoption community,listservs, and even in some instances by policies of “sending” states, mostconspicuously by South Korea but increasingly by other countries that areobserving their counterparts elsewhere.

The sometimes vexed relationship between transnational and domesticadoption in the legal and policy realm is also treated in Claudia Fonseca’sessay, which highlights discrepancies between global legal frameworks andlocal understandings and practices. As Brazilian legislation was revised toconform to “modern” global frameworks for adoption, it insisted on ple-nary adoption. The possibility of a permanent and complete rupture withthe past, Fonseca argues, is profoundly discrepant with local Brazilianunderstandings and practices involving the circulation of children.

Although there is a voluminous adoption literature in psychology andsocial work, in other disciplines adoption has just begun to emerge as aserious topic. Even in anthropology, with its traditional core focus on kin-ship and the making of culture, adoption (except in faraway places likeOceania) has been oddly absent. Transnational adoption, in particular, pro-vokes myriad questions about race, culture, and nation; about genes, kin-ship, and belonging; and about the politics of sending and receiving nations,poor and rich, powerless and powerful. As Strong (2002) writes elo-quently: “Adoption across political and cultural borders may simultane-ously be an act of violence and an act of love, an excruciating rupture anda generous incorporation, an appropriation of valued resources and a con-stitution of personal ties” (471).

Adoption also raises methodological questions for those among uswho are adoptive parents (as several in this collection are). We live daily


with these ambivalences and ambiguities and have struggled with how toposition our research and writing: how to cast an eye that is both criticaland sympathetic, attuned to our own profoundly personal connections tothese questions and to an analysis of the cultural and political contextswithin which adoption must be situated. We see these essays as the open-ing of a terrain of inquiry and the beginning of a dialogue: among schol-ars, but also with a growing and highly engaged community of those touchedby adoption.

Note

Cindi Katz, Erika Duncan, and Charles Zerner provided helpful comments onthis introduction. Cindi Katz first envisioned this special issue; her keen insightsand formidable editorial talents helped bring it to fruition. Faye Ginsburginspired and supported this project in countless ways, including a conferenceshe organized at New York University in September 2001 titled “The Traffic inKinship.”

References

Brown, Jane. 2002. [email protected], Lisa. n.d. On the bodies of children: Media and communication

technology in the construction of the child subject. Unpublished manuscript.Strong, Pauline Turner. 2002. To forget their tongue, their name, and their whole

relation: Captivity, extra-tribal adoption, and the Indian Child Welfare Act.In Relative values: Reconfiguring kinship studies, edited by Sarah Franklin andSusan McKinnon. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and alterity: A particular history of the senses. NewYork: Routledge.

5Introduction

An angel with no face embraced meAnd whispered through my whole body;“Don’t be ashamed of being human, be proud!Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly.You will never be complete, that’s how it’s meant to be.”—Tomas Tranströmer, “Romanesque Arches”

In the world of intercountry adoption, two stories predominate: a story ofabandonment and a story about roots. In the abandonment story, a babyis found in a marketplace, on a roadside, outside a police station, or in thetour of an orphanage; alternately, a child is left by its mother at a hospitalor is relinquished or surrendered to child welfare officials, a social worker,or the staff of a children’s home. After passing through the hands of socialworkers, lawyers, and/or orphanage staff and perhaps in and out of hos-pitals, foster homes, and courts, this child may ultimately be declared freefor adoption, a process that requires a second, legal separation that con-stitutes the child as a legal orphan. Similarly, a mother who relinquishesher child to state agents must consent to the irrevocable termination of herrights to the child. In international adoptions, the child will also be sepa-rated from its state of origin (a procedure that in some nations involvessealing the record of this severance and altering the child’s birth certifi-cate) so that it can be connected to a new family, a new name, a new nation.The child is given a new identity. It now belongs in a new place.

This story of separation is a story about loss and the transformationof loss into a “clean break” (Duncan 1993, 51) that forms the ground forstarting anew. The clean break separates the child from everything thatconstitutes her grounds for belonging as a child to this family and this nation,while establishing her transferability to that family and that nation. With apast that has been cut away—an old identity that no longer exists—thechild can be reembedded in a new place, almost as though he or she nevermoved at all.

Even as this legal story of separation is the official ground for consti-tuting adoptive identities, another story competes with it in both law andadoption practice. This other story was a persistent counterpoint to themovement for “strong” adoptions that prevailed at the Hague Conference

BarbaraYngvesson

Going “Home”

ADOPTION, LOSS OF BEARINGS,

AND THE MYTHOLOGY OF ROOTS


in the early 1990s (Duncan 1993) and was incorporated into the HagueConvention as children’s right to preservation of their “ethnic, religiousand cultural background” (Hague Convention 1993, Article 16c). Thepreservation story implies that there is no such thing as a clean break andunderpins the search movement in domestic adoptions, the debate oversealed records, and the movement to keep adoptions open in the UnitedStates today (Yngvesson 1997; Carp 1998; Verhovek 2000). In this story,identity is associated with a root or ground of belonging that is inside thechild (as “blood,” “primal connectedness,” and “identity hunger”) (Lifton1994, 67–71) and unchanging. But it is also outside the child in the sensethat it is assumed to tie her to others whom she is like (as defined by skincolor, hair texture, facial features, and so forth). Alienation from thissource of likeness produces “genealogical bewilderment” (Lifton 1994, 68,citing Sants 1964) and a psychological need for the adopted child to returnto where she really belongs.

The story of a freestanding child and the story about a rooted childappear to be mutually exclusive and are associated with different adoptionpractices. The former is associated with race and other forms of matchingthat are intended to produce “as if” adoptive families that mimic naturalones (Modell 1994). Even in international transracial adoptions, whererace matching is impossible, adoption practices in the 1960s and 1970semphasized complete absorption of the adopted child into the new familyand nation (Andersson 1991). By contrast, the story about roots is asso-ciated with the recognition of adoption as a distinct family form (Kirk 1981)and involves acknowledging (even underscoring) the differences betweenan adoptee and his or her adoptive parents, constituting the adoptive fam-ily as a site of tension because of its inclusion of a child who “naturally”belongs to another person or place.

Both practices are versions of a familiar and powerful (Western) mythabout identity as a matter of exclusive belongings and belonging as a mat-ter of “an active proprietorship” (Strathern 1988, 135).1 In the clean breakversion of this myth, the adoptive child is set free from the past (constitutedas “abandoned” or “motherless”) so that he or she can be assimilated com-pletely into the adoptive family. In the preservation story, on the otherhand, the child is imagined as a part of his or her birth mother or birthnation, imagined as being constantly pulled back to that ground.

In what follows I propose an alternative to the narrative of exclusivebelongings as a way of thinking about the connections between adoptiveparent and child, adoptive family and birth family, and giving and receiv-ing nations. This alternative begins with the lived experience of adoptees,adoptive parents, and birth parents—that no one of them is freestandingvis-à-vis the others, but that there is a pull toward the other parent, the

8 Barbara Yngvesson

other nation. The pull back is an effect of the closures and cutoffs ofadoption law and has materialized in the practices of open adoption, rootstrips, searches, and so forth. These trips and the reunions to which theysometimes lead reveal how compelling the myth of the return can be. Butthey also unsettle the idea that such journeys of self-realization are likely toproduce completion for the adoptee, or that they constitute a “journeytowards wholeness” (Lifton 1994). Rather, as Elspeth Probyn (1996, 114)suggests, “Bringing forth beginnings can result in a loss of bearings.”

This loss of bearings involves the discovery of a self both familiarand strange, me and not-me, a pull to the adoptive parent at the verymoment one is in the arms of a birth mother, a pull toward the birthmother at the very moment that she is embracing one’s child. The identitynarrative and the concept of a child or a parent as “a part of me” areinadequate for capturing the contradictions of desire that constitute thisstate “in-between being and longing” (Probyn 1996, 35). Neither do theycapture the movement —the “desire for becoming-other”—(ibid., 5) that ispart of the search for a root of belonging and that is provoked by theexperience of seeing someone who “looks like me,” by touching the nativesoil of an adopted son or by the realization that there is a connection, notan unbridgeable gulf, between oneself and the birth mother of one’s child.Each of these moments provokes “yet another journey” (Saffian 1998,301–2), an opening rather than an experience of closure.

Roots trips reveal the precariousness of “I am,” the simultaneous fas-cination and terror evoked by what might have been, and a longing for thesafety of home. They materialize an unfathomable moment of choice,when one life that might have been was curtailed and another life thatexists now came into being: “Why just me? It feels very strange. One won-ders, ‘What would have become of me if I had remained there? Who wasI during the time I was there?’” (Sarah Nordin, interview, August 1999).Such moments interrupt the myth that the legal transformation to an“other” was free—that the child simply came home to a site of love wherehe or she always belonged—revealing instead the cost of belonging (andof love), its inseparability from the birth mother, the orphanage, the court-house, the agency, and the histories linking nations that give children tothose that receive them.2 But they also interrupt the myth of the return as a form of completion or fulfillment in which one can find oneself in another (be consumed by an other) at a place or point of fusion, of“immanence regained” (Nancy 1991, 59). Rather, interruption “occurs atthe edge, or rather it constitutes the edge where beings touch each other,expose themselves to each other and separate from one another” (ibid.). Itis at this edge that both connects and separates, as Jean-Luc Nancy sug-gests, that beings “come into being” (ibid., 61).

9Going “Home”

The account of a roots trip that follows explores these issues, focusingon the experiences of adoptive parents as they sought to fill a gap in thebelonging of their adoptive children, the complex emotions of adoptees asthey were pulled between a familiar self and an unknown other, and theposition of adoptive parents as witnesses to the “labor of mourning” ( J.Benjamin 1995, 113) in which their children (and the parents themselves)were involved. My analysis is based on participant observation and oninterviews conducted in 1998 and 1999 with adult adoptees born in Chileand with the Swedish parents who adopted them in the 1970s and early1980s. I also interviewed staff of Stockholm’s Adoption Centre (AC) andChilean adoption officials. This work is part of a larger study of Swedishinternational adoption in which I have been engaged since 1995.

Return to Chile

The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. —Milan Kundera, Ignorance

In April of 1998, I accompanied a group of twelve Swedish families (nine-teen parents and sixteen children, ranging from ten to twenty-one years ofage) to Santiago, Chile, on a roots trip organized by Stockholm’s Adop-tion Centre. No one in the families spoke Spanish, and as I am fluent inboth Spanish and Swedish, it was agreed that I would serve as one of thethree interpreters for the group. I had lived in Santiago as a teenager buthad not been back since that time, and in many ways the trip felt like areturn to roots for me as well as for the adopted children.

The adoptions had taken place during the middle years of the Pino-chet dictatorship, and for the parents this was their first visit to Chile.Some of them had adopted other children from countries such as Thai-land or El Salvador, where they had journeyed to fetch their child. As Idiscuss below, such trips are charged (often difficult) moments for adopt-ing parents and many consider them a key piece in the work of transform-ing themselves into their adopted child’s “real” parents. Tense politicalrelations between Sweden and Chile during the 1970s and early 1980s—Sweden was a place of refuge for significant numbers of Chileans who fledtheir country during Pinochet’s dictatorship—meant that children adoptedfrom Chile at that time were not picked up by their adoptive parents butarrived with escorts.

To complicate matters further, Swedish adoptions from Chile endedin 1991 under strained circumstances. A new adoption law introduced in

10 Barbara Yngvesson

Chile in 1988 as a result of concerns about child trafficking changed therelationship between AC’s representative in Santiago and the tribunals insouthern Chile that were responsible for approving international adop-tions. Chile was one of Sweden’s principal “sending” or “giving” nationsbetween 1974 and the early 1980s, with adoptions exceeding two hundredchildren annually in the late 1970s and remaining in excess of one hun-dred annually until 1985. In the late 1980s, Swedish adoptions from Chiledropped off steeply, and after 1991 they stopped completely.

Marta García, head of the adoption division of SENAME (ServicioNacional del Menor), Chile’s child welfare office, explained the ending ofChilean adoptions to Sweden in an interview in 1998:

Before 1988, the Swedish Adoption Centre had its representative here andworked very well through an arrangement involving direct coordination withthe tribunals [family courts], especially those in the south. . . . The babieswere transported from the south to Santiago, and in Santiago they wereplaced in the care of the Adoption Centre, an institution which always guar-anteed excellent care for the children: seriousness, transparency. No faultwith the Swedish Adoption Centre, none! They had good foster mothers,good social workers who were in contact with the families, everything. Buteverything was very easy, also. The babies came to Santiago—almost all werefrom Temuco—and were entered in the civil register in Santiago with thenames of the adoptive parents, with Swedish surnames. So everything wasvery easy for them.

When SENAME was established in 1988, I had to deal with AC’s rep-resentative in Santiago and we had many clashes, trying to make her under-stand that things had changed and that now the business of internationaladoption was to be regularized. (Interview, 15 April 1998)3

The tensions surrounding Swedish adoptions from Chile are sug-gested in Marta García’s observation that the processing of Chilean babiesfor adoption in Sweden was “very easy” for the Adoption Centre. Hercomment hints at the complications that, in her opinion, should surroundthe conversion of a child, who is assumed to be by nature Chilean, into aSwedish child, while tacitly acknowledging the power of state officials toeffect such arbitrary conversions—the babies were simply “entered in thecivil register in Santiago with the names of the adoptive parents, withSwedish surnames.” The “Chilean child” in effect disappeared before iteven left the country.

García’s unease gestures toward the implicit assumption that under-pins such transactions in children: they can only take place if the Chileanand the Swedish child are treated “as if” they are directly exchangeablefor one another—that is, “as if” they are the same. Clearly, the child who

11Going “Home”

might have grown up in Chile and whose mother was compelled or per-haps “chose” to relinquish, abandon, or place her child for adoption is not“the same” child who grows up in Sweden and whose mother was unableor chose not to give birth to a child, or who adopted a Chilean baby forpolitical, humanitarian, or other reasons. The exchange is only possible,however, if this knowledge is bracketed. The adoptable child is treated “asif” it were not a material object that bears traces of its passage in theworld but rather a “sublime” object that can “endure all torments with itsbeauty immaculate” (Zizek 1989, 18). The sublime object is treated “ ‘asif it were made of a special substance over which time has no power’”(ibid., quoting Sohn-Rethel 1983, 59). It was this assumption and theseeming transparency of transactions that obscured it that were disturbingto Marta García, no less than the concern that some foreign adoptionswere set in motion by money, or that there was a clandestine network ofcaring women through which the movement of babies from Chile to Swe-den was occurring.4

By contrast, for Swedish parents who adopted from Chile at this time,the ease of the transaction was part of its appeal: there was little delay, thechildren were very young, and parents assumed that there was little oftheir child’s developmental history that they were missing. The only thingneeded to complete the child was his or her “culture,” something thatcould be passed on through stories, albums, and eventually visits to a dis-tant land with its exotic tastes, smells, and customs. For Swedish parents,the ease of the transaction eased the process of the baby becoming “mychild.”

García’s discomfort and the satisfaction of the parents are both aneffect of the power of the market in constituting any child—any person—as an entity that “qualifies . . . for life” in a market economy.5 The dis-comfort it occasioned for García suggests how important it is to our con-sistency as subjects that we be blind to this truth (like the parents). Childadoption brings us face-to-face with this needed blindness and the myth itproduces: that the circulation of children in a global economy is free, leav-ing no traces on the body of the child.

The clashes with AC’s local representative over the ease with whichChilean children were becoming Swedish disrupted this myth and indoing so brought to an end Sweden’s complex relationship with Chile as asending country for adoptive children. For Chilean adoptees and theirfamilies, this meant that there was indeed a clean break with the past, onethat was no less significant than the official cutoff instantiated by adoptionlaw. The informal relationships of communication and cooperation that tieagencies in receiving countries to orphanages, foster parents, social work-ers, and child welfare officials in sending countries were disbanded. These


relationships, which are crucial to the movement of children from nationsthat give to nations that receive, are no less important (as I argue in moredetail below) to the memories, desires, and (re)constructions that consti-tute an adopted child’s identity. They provide the grounds through whichadoptees (and their adoptive parents) can “seize” (W. Benjamin 1969,255) and “own” (Petcheskey 1995) a past in which the prevailing charac-teristic is only fleetingly and problematically captured in the metaphor ofa search for roots from which adopted children have been “cut off.”

The search for roots assumes a past that is there, if we can just findthe right file, the right papers, or the right person. This kind of search ispart of a familiar story of belonging and of lost belongings in which analienated self must be reconnected to a ground (an author, a nation, a par-ent) that constitutes its identity. By contrast, seizing the past involves notso much finding a ground as piecing one together, a process that is morematerial than intellectual, an active (re)inhabiting of events in order to layclaim to them (and in this sense, to “own” them). Reinhabiting encom-passes a broad range of processes that adopted children and their familiesare presently involved in but always involves bringing the “past” into dia-logue with the present, rather than collapsing present into past (or privi-leging one over the other).6

In my analysis here, I am particularly interested in the revisitation ofsites of involuntary displacement, separation, and (sometimes temporary)emplacement through which a child who is “abandoned” and placed foradoption undergoes the complex transformations in identity necessary tomake it an adoptable child, a “precious resource” for the nations thatreceive it and that give it away (Yngvesson 2000). Laying claim to the pastin this way may shake up identity in the very moment of grounding it byrevealing the interruptions, contradictions, and breaks through which theprocess we know as “identity” takes shape.7 The informal relationshipsthat bind (Northern) agency to (Southern) orphanage are crucial to thisprocess of simultaneously making and shaking up identity.

In the case of Swedish adoptions from Chile, seizing the past requiredwhat Birgitta Löwstedt, the AC representative in charge of the agency’sResor och Rötter (Trips and Roots) division for South America, describesas “true detective work” (interview, 18 May 1998). During the first monthsof 1996, Löwstedt received over fifty calls from families who had adoptedfrom Chile inquiring about adoptee backgrounds or requesting assistancein making contact with Chilean adoption officials. As a result, she renewedAC’s contact with SENAME and in late 1996 made a trip to Santiago.She took with her a suitcase filled with letters and photographs from 250adoptive families with Chilean-born children and the name and address ofone of the foster mothers who had cared for the Swedish adoptees. She

The search for

roots assumes a

past that is there,

if we can just find

the right file, the

right papers, or

the right person.

13Going “Home”

was cautiously hopeful that she could contact social workers and fostermothers and possibly the doctor who had delivered many of the children.

SENAME was unexpectedly helpful in this process, in part becauseof its own interest in rethinking the relationship between Chile and its chil-dren adopted abroad. This rethinking of the relationship of adopted chil-dren to their birth nations has become increasingly important to officialsin all of the major sending nations. While SENAME had had no contactwith the foster mothers, Löwstedt located one whose (incorrect) addressshe had with the help of a determined taxi driver. Through her, she wasable to locate others who were related as sisters, daughters, aunts, and in-laws, bringing them news of children they had been told to “forget” oncethe children left the country. Because the Swedish foster mother system wasunofficial—although not clandestine—in the 1970s and 1980s, and becauseSweden’s activities as an adopting nation at that time were regarded withsuspicion by the Pinochet government, the women had kept a low profileand had simply disappeared as a “system” when adoptions to Swedencame to an end. They had never expected to hear of the children again.

The success of Birgitta Löwstedt’s trip led to plans for a group tour toChile in April 1998. The aim of the tour was in part simply to see thecountry, since none of the parents had been there before and the childrenhad left when they were infants. More significantly, however, Löwstedtsaw this as an opportunity for parents and children to visit the hospitals,orphanages, courts, foster mothers, social workers, doctor, judges, and gov-ernment offices that had been involved in the adoption of the children toSweden. For some families, there was the possibility of locating a birthparent. For all, there would be access to court records that containeddetails of the birth and relinquishment, key materials for piecing togethera story of the early weeks or months of their child’s life.

Going Back

What do you mean, go “back”? I want to travel there as if it were any othercountry. I want to see the country.—Nina, eighteen-year-old Chilean-born adoptee

While adoptees sometimes respond negatively to the idea that they mightwant to return to their birth country, insisting that they are “completelySwedish” (Clara, interview, 20 May 1998; and see von Melen 1998, 116)and that for them a visit is not a “return,” adoptive parents on the Chiletrip expressed a powerful desire to go to the birth country of their chil-dren. This was especially noticeable in the stories of parents who fetched


their first adopted child in his or her home country but were unable to doso for the second child. Two of these parents, who traveled to Chile withtheir sixteen-year-old daughter, explained why they felt this way:

Mother: For my part, I missed not having been in Chile. I wanted sometime in my life to come to Chile, especially because we had been in El Sal-vador when we adopted Daniel [their eldest child] and saw how it was there.That piece was missing, I thought, when we got Maria, because we hadn’tbeen in Chile. But then, we have always said that the compensation was thatshe was so young.Father: I felt that because we traveled to El Salvador we could be a meansfor passing on some of that to him [förmedla något till honom]. So we wantedto do the same for Maria, later.Mother: We missed being able to pass on to her our sense of the sounds andsmells, what one has experienced oneself. That’s not something you see onTV, you can’t experience it on the TV. And it’s the same thing, being able tosee the Andes from the hotel window, the buses they drive. (Interview, 15May 1998)

The use by these parents of the Swedish word förmedla (for whichthere is no good English translation in this context) is telling. Förmedlameans to mediate, to go between. It also means to make peace, restoreharmony, bring into agreement. For them, going to Chile or to El Sal-vador was a way of bridging the experienced gap, of restoring harmony inthe experienced dissonance of having a child who belongs on (whoseroots are in) the other side of the world. The parents become a bridgebetween there and here, become, in other words, a kind of “back” for theirchild by virtue of having been there to fetch the child. The album withphotographs of the orphanage, the caretakers or foster mother, and otherscenes from the birth country, or in more recent adoptions, a video of thearrival at the orphanage and the stay (typically lasting weeks or months) inthe child’s birth country are a visual prop for this “back.” Because none ofthe parents on the Chile trip had been able to make the voyage to Chilewhen they adopted their children, the roots trip became, in the words ofanother adoptive mother, “my own life’s trip [min livs resa]. It was verypowerful.” It provided for her (and she assumed for her daughter) some-thing concrete to grasp on to [någonting att ta på]. “If someone asks aboutChile, then you can tell about it, that you have been there, you have a pho-tographic memory of it, you have powerful experiences associated with it”(interview, 19 May 1998).

Here, the adoptive parent becomes—like Walter Benjamin’s story-teller—someone who “exchanges” experience, who “takes what he tellsfrom experience . . . and makes it the experience of those who are listen-

15Going “Home”

ing to his tale” (1969, 83, 87). In the stories told to their children by adop-tive parents, “it is not the object of the story to convey a happening per se,which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds it in the life of thestoryteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening. It thusbears the marks of the storyteller much as the earthen vessel bears themarks of the potter’s hand” (ibid., 159). The adoptive parents’ “powerfulexperiences” associated with the trip to fetch (or revisit the birth countryof) their child become embedded in both parent and child through thetelling of the story. By recounting experiences that might provide theiradoptive children with “something concrete to grasp onto” about theirnative land, parents thus become engaged not only in the work of com-pleting a child who (it is assumed) might otherwise remain fragmentedbut in completing themselves as parents as well.

“Completion” here (unlike the conventional understanding of com-pletion as fulfillment or a making “whole”) is a spatial and temporalprocess of “infolding” (Rose 1996, 43).8 Through travel to a child’s birthcountry and retelling the story about bringing the child home, powerfulexperiences associated with that distant landscape (the long journey toreach it, its associated sights, tastes, and smells) become a “part of me” forthe parent in a process that places the adoptive child “within” the parentas well. For another family on the Chile trip, this infolding of an “exte-rior” place was accomplished not only by stepping together with theirson onto Chilean ground but by collecting in a small plastic bag someearth from outside the hospital where he was born. The moment of gathering the earth was highly charged for the little boy’s parents, whoreturned to the bus on which we were traveling in tears. The child himself,at ten years of age the youngest on the trip, appeared to have little interestin this event. For his parents, on the other hand, their son’s past wasmade present in the plastic bag that they took back with them to Sweden.It contained fragments of a place and was powerfully associated with thememory of their son’s birth—and would become part of the story of theirreturn.9

In words that are familiar from countless stories told by adoptees, amother on the Chile trip spoke of her daughter’s need for completion interms that applied no less (and perhaps even more) to adoptive parents.For both, adoption is a process that can never be complete. It is aresponse to, but continually reproduces for parent and child, a “hole intheir lives that must be filled if they are to be whole people” (interview, 19May 1998). The trip to Chile and the memories it made possible in sto-ries, photograph albums, and handfuls of soil were a way of attempting tofill this hole. At the same time, these embodied memories were a constant


reminder of what the adoptee had left behind, of what he or she lacked. Inthe words of another adoptee who had chosen not to revisit her birthplace,this lack—which she described as “some kind of empty space”—doesnot go away. It remains as “some kind of pull towards an origin [en slagssträvan mot urprunget]” (von Melen 1998, 166).

As this suggests, roots trips, journeys by parents to the birth countryof the child they plan to adopt, and the stories that are told about thesemovements that bring a child home or take him or her back are not only away of bridging a narrative gap in the relation of adoptive parent to childor completing a “break” in the child’s narrative (Lifton 1994, 36–37).These practices also create gaps and narrative breaks. Journeys “back”materialize a moment of abandonment by a return to the physical spaces(orphanages, foster homes, and courtrooms) in which this break was con-cretized. They constitute a kind of “time travel” (Saffian 1998, 296) thatdisplaces “home” (even as homes are made through such journeys) andsplit the present with powerful memories from the past (Aronson 1997).They reveal the impossibility of ever being fully integrated, of having any-thing “that constitutes both an outer and inner place where I belong”(Trotzig 1996, 214).

Roots trips propel adoptees and their parents into what one Swedishsocial worker, in a talk about her work with adoptive parents, describes as“the eye of the storm.” They bring the adoptive family and the adopteeface-to-face with the terror and the promise of confronting an “other”who is experienced as “a part of me” by the adoptee, but who cannot befully contained and remains irredeemably “other” for the adoptive family.In adoption practice, the birth mother embodies this “other,” but thebirth country is also a powerful site where the potential and the impossi-bility of full belonging may be experienced (Trotzig 1996; Liem 2000;Yngvesson and Mahoney 2000). Confrontation with this impossibilityshakes up the idea of a coherent “I” and the illusion of autonomous fam-ilies, nations, and selves on which this “I” is contingent, gesturing insteadtoward the dependence of receiving nations and adoptive parents on thedispossessed for their self-possession and at the irreducible distance andasymmetry involved in this relation of difference and of nonpossession.The stories below illuminate these contingencies of belonging, focusing on the ambivalence and discomfort experienced by adult adoptees, whileopening a space in which a more complex understanding of the relation-ship of self and other can materialize.

17Going “Home”

“This Is Your Country”

I don’t think I had so many expectations. I didn’t know what to expect ofthe country, except maybe that in some way I would get to know myself,but then of course one knew that one was into [in på] two different places,that one belongs in two different places. I already knew that before I went.—Maria, sixteen-year-old Chilean-born adoptee

Like adoptive parents, for whom the journey to Chile was a way of plac-ing their (unknown) child within themselves, for adoptees, coming toknow Chile was a way of connecting to an unknown part of themselves, a part that they weren’t even sure was themselves. For example, Mariatalked about how she had wondered, before going on the trip, “Do I reallycome from Chile?” By contrast to a friend from Colombia, whom shedescribed as “having more of a Mapuche-like appearance,” she herselfwas not obviously “from Latin America.”10 With her light skin, “I couldhave been something else.” Maria described a ceremony held at the officesof SENAME on one of the last days of the trip, when the director said toall of them, “ ‘This is your country.’ It was, I think it was for everyone, itwas a conviction that, ‘OK, I am from Chile, too!’ It was like a confirma-tion from a Chilean and from the country itself that I am from Chile. Itwas so big in some way. That was why we dared to respond and began tocry.”

Clara (an eighteen-year-old) described an evening gathering with thefoster mothers as the moment when “I began to realize that I was reallythere.” She had fantasized about Chile before the trip, but “it felt strangeto be there. It felt as though I myself was left in Sweden although my bodywas in Chile, and so one was somewhere in between, where one didn’tknow where one was. It was really strange. But when we met the fostermothers, I found myself” (emphasis added).

Like Maria, whose light skin made her wonder if she “really” camefrom Chile (as though, her father commented wryly, “we had fooledyou”), Clara worried at times about who she was, but in her case it washer dark skin that occasioned doubts. She recalled a time in the secondgrade when people came up and began speaking Spanish to her “and Icouldn’t grasp what they were saying. And then I began to think, ‘they seeme as an immigrant, when actually I am Swedish.’” Anti-immigrant inci-dents in Stockholm made her feel “scared, since it isn’t obvious on theoutside that one is adopted”: “There is that feeling of unease [en sådan häroroskänsla], that others see one as though one is dark, those around you,those you know, and you know yourself that you are completely Swedish.And you know, sometimes I forget that I am dark-skinned. When I sit with


friends and chat. And then when one looks in the mirror: ‘Aha! That’show it is!’” (interview, 20 May 1998).

This sudden sense of “aha!” was intensified on the roots trip to Chileand was a key element in the repeated (re)discovery by adoptees that oneis not “completely Swedish [helsvensk].” This discovery was mediated, inpart, by its collective dimension and by the support experienced fromother adoptees and from parents.11 As Clara explained, regarding theclose bonds developed among adoptees on the trip, “one didn’t need toexplain how one felt, because everyone felt the same.” This “same” feel-ing was on the one hand exhilarating. It involved a kind of grounding of an intuited self as Chilean that had always seemed just out of reach in Sweden, until one “looked in the mirror.” But it was complicated by the inseparability of being Chilean (of being “dark-skinned,” of being“Mapuche-like”) from the experience of abandonment that was redis-covered in the physical spaces of hospitals, orphanages, and courtrooms,in the spoken words of social workers and government officials, and in thewriting on “papers” that finalized the separation of each adoptee from hermother and from the country to which she was now returning in order tofind or know her self. The carefully cultivated experience of pride in beingChilean, transmitted by the Swedish parents of the adoptees and con-nected to their own experience of the trip as “my life’s trip,” was con-tingent on the adoptees’ displacement to Sweden, on their being able toimagine Chile in the way their parents did, as part of a tour of Chile or atemporary visit from afar. Adoptees could share this imagined Chile withtheir parents, in part; but their parents could only act as witnesses to apart of Chile that their children had once experienced firsthand, up close.This complex, emotionally explosive Chile was in the rooms and beds of an orphanage, in the feel and smell of a rosary that belonged to anadoptee’s birth mother, and in the written words and physical presence ofa doctor or a matron who had recorded the details of a particular child’sbirth. As one twenty-year-old woman described her feelings after readingthrough a file of documents at the Temuco court, visiting the orphanagewhere she had spent three weeks as an infant, and driving by the housewhere her mother once lived, “It was the most tumultuous day of my life.I found out about everything! [Det var det mest omtumlande dag av mitt liv.Jag fick veta allt]” (interview, 9 April 1998).

19Going “Home”

Two Mothers

Father: How do they choose which children will be adopted? What criteriadoes the court have for accepting or rejecting a child?Social Worker: There are no criteria for accepting or rejecting a child, butthe mother is advised of her rights. Before the child is born, we explainwhat it means to place the child “in a state of abandonment” [en situaciónde abandono]. It will be like the child is dead to her. She will never hearmore about the child.—Field notes from visit to Temuco court, 18 April 1998

Central to the meaning of the Chile trip for each adoptee, in one form oranother, was some attempt to grapple with the experience of abandon-ment and what Jessica Benjamin (1995, 113) describes as “the labor of mourning.” For some, this desire was more clearly formulated than for others. Clara went to Chile together with her adoptive mother in theexplicit hope of meeting her birth mother. She had learned her namefrom documents in Sweden and carried with her a letter in which shewrote, “Although I don’t know you, I feel as though in spite of everything,you are a part of me.” Clara explained how much she longed to knowwhat her mother looked like and who she was. With the cooperation ofSENAME and the assistance of a distant relative who had cared for hermother when she became pregnant and was forced to leave home, thewoman was located after a week’s search, and Clara’s letter was deliveredto her. A meeting was arranged for the day prior to our departure forSweden. Clara explained her feelings about this meeting during an inter-view in Stockholm a month later:

Clara: I felt so strange, and wondered how I would react, if I would stay inone piece [sitta helt], that is, if I would not start to cry or if I would immedi-ately begin to cry when she came. . . . But when she saw me, she began tocry and then . . . but it was as though, because I have always had a holeinside, or however one might say it, and then when I saw her, immediately Icried and then it [the hole] was filled again. I still don’t understand that feel-ing, that it went so fast. I was almost a little scared.Barbara: That the thoughts were gone, you mean?Clara: Yes, or rather, the thoughts, the fantasy of how she would look. NowI had a picture of how she looked and how she was, how the house was. Soeverything fell into place in an hour. It was such a short time.Mother: It was a very strong experience. I had also imagined what shewould be like, that she was probably very poor and had lived a hard life andwould be marked by that. But that wasn’t the way it was. Well, she was poor,but not very poor. One understood how much she had suffered.Clara: One thing I had thought a lot about was sitting in the same room withtwo mothers. I thought it would feel very strange.


Barbara: And when it actually happened?Clara: It felt good, partly because I could speak Swedish with my motherfrom Sweden, and then I had you, who could translate. I felt supported tohave mamma along, someone from Sweden. It was something one couldreturn to, that one wasn’t alone in Chile. (Interview, 20 May 1998)

The meeting with Clara’s “mother from Chile” was held in the mod-est house of the woman who had cared for her eighteen years previouslyand was attended by Clara’s cousins, a half-sister, a nephew, and otherextended kin, as well as by her adoptive mother and a social worker fromSENAME. I was present at the meeting, to interpret for Clara and herbirth mother. As they “cried themselves out together” and I leaned towardthem to catch their whispered words, there was a kind of breathlesssilence. Clara’s mother caressed her daughter’s face and begged her forgiveness. I felt like the thinnest of membranes connecting the twowomen—linguistically, physically—and separating them from (joiningthem to) Clara’s “Swedish mother,” who stood nearby. I struggled to main-tain my composure. Even the youngest children seemed to be suspendedin the tension that caught us all up in this collective moment of recogni-tion, in which Clara said she felt as though she were “more or less thesame and yet not the same [as her birth mother], since she is mother to meand I am daughter to her.”

Afterward, we all sat down to a long meal together, gifts wereexchanged, addresses written down, and eventually Clara, her adoptivemother, and I left. Clara took with her a rosary that was a gift from herbirth mother. She described this later as “a wonderful present. One couldsee that it had been used and that it had a special smell. It smelled likeher.” It was “something one knows about that one can make something of[later], on one’s own.”

This “making something of” an object surely includes moments ofcompletion or of “filling a hole,” as in Clara’s meeting with her mother.Similar moments were experienced by other adoptees in the midst of theturbulence of the return, as they walked on the street in the neighborhoodwhere their mother once lived, visited the maternity ward of a hospitalwhere they could “feel that my mother was here once when she gave birthto me,” or held a file containing details about the time and place of theirbirth, the name and age of their mother, and the date on which she for-mally consented to their abandonment. But return trips and other effortsat recovering or confronting the past “are always double-edged” (to quotea social worker with over twenty-five years of experience with transna-tional adoptions), and moments of clarity are typically that—moments—in a process of self-constitution that is ongoing, painful, and turbulent,challenging any sense of a stable ground of belonging.

21Going “Home”

One woman, elated finally to be touching the papers in her court fileand overwhelmed with the sense that finally she had “found out abouteverything”—the hour of her birth, her mother’s name, the address whereher mother had lived when she was born—became distraught when shewas advised not to make contact with the woman. She insisted on drivingby her house, lingering on the street where she imagined she had oncelived, and photographing the area. When I spoke to her a month later, shewas still shaken by the experience. She had also become worried about the issue of how babies are chosen for adoptive parents. Her own parentsexpressed shock at the discovery that children today are carefully moni-tored by the agency for defects, and that their adopted son, who suffersfrom Asperger syndrome, would surely have remained in his Thai orphan-age had his affliction been known. Another adoptee, who hoped to contacther mother and brother in Chile, was told by a court social worker thatthis would be unwise because the woman was “extremely aggressive” andhad threatened to harm herself and the baby had she not been permittedto surrender her for adoption nineteen years earlier.

These events, no less than the meeting of Clara with her birth mother,disturb the notion of return as completion or closure, revealing the dis-tance and asymmetry separating women who give their children away andthose who receive them as acts of love. They expose the work involved inproducing a child who can be chosen (by the agency, by the parent) sothat it can be loved as though it were “one’s own,” and the key role of alegal clean break in securing the ground on which exclusive belonging isforged: the freedom of the child, the adoptive parent, and the birth parentvis-à-vis one another. Returns unsettle these freedoms, revealing the pow-erful dependencies that underpin them. On the Chile trip, these depen-dencies were pieced together from fragments of a past that each personseized in an effort to make sense of an event that could never make sense,that would forever remain “somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect,”even as it was “unmistakably present” in papers, places, and the ambigu-ities and silences of a court document (W. Benjamin 1969, 158).

In each of these situations, the mediating presence of others (adoptiveparents, other adoptees, AC staff, the kin of Clara’s mother, the childrenin an orphanage, myself as interpreter) was crucial to the process of seiz-ing the past. We became both witness and bridge, a potential space inwhich the complex and contradictory meanings of being “the same asme” (or “different” from me) could materialize in places that were satu-rated with meaning for adoptees and their families (the hospital, thematernity ward, the orphanage, the court, the house of a foster mother,and so forth). These places, perhaps more than any words that were spo-ken, infused present encounters with meanings that were linked to mem-


ories and fantasies of what had once taken place there. At the same time,these fantasies, and the work of constructing an account of the adoptee’sabandonment, depended on her capacity to “return to [them]” in Sweden,a return that was possible because “one wasn’t alone in Chile.”

The Eye of the Storm

An area like a hole or column in the center of a tropical cyclone marked byonly light winds or complete calm with no precipitation and sometimes by asunlit clear sky (the eye of a hurricane). —Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language

Ingrid Stjerna, a Swedish social worker who works with prospective adop-tive parents, speaks about how important it is to “awaken [in them] posi-tive, warm empathic feelings for this person who could not take care ofher child. It is important for the child that they have these positive feel-ings.” Stjerna notes that this is harder to accomplish when “you became aparent standing at Arlanda [the Stockholm airport] with money in yourhands—none of this traveling to difficult countries.” Meeting the mother,by contrast, “awakens anxiety. Background and country and decorationsand songs, all that is fine—but the mother: no. That puts them into theeye of the storm. That forces them to come to terms with the pain andmisery” (address to visiting AC representatives, Stockholm, 21 August1996).

Coming to terms with the fact that “there is no such thing as a moth-erless child—even if she is dead, she is important”—has been crucial to thetransformations that have taken place in adoption over the past two decadesand in international adoption during the past ten years. That the child isnot motherless implies that adoptive parents must accept the fact that thisisn’t really their child, Stjerna argues. What I understand her to mean bythis is not that the child belongs to somebody else, but that the child is notfreestanding: she came from someone, and from somewhere, and bears thetraces of that elsewhere, just as she bears traces of the pull, the desire thatlinks her to the adoptive parent and adoptive country. Accepting that thechild belongs to no one means accepting that she is neither rooted norfreestanding, but is marked by an existential condition of thrownness intothe world as much as by the need for connection, for hands to catch him orher, so that she can take her “place” in the world (Doyle 1994, 210, para-phrasing Merleau-Ponty 1968). The return trip to Chile illuminated thecontradictory truths that the adopted child—like other children—has beenthrown into the world, but that she is not motherless. Thrownness is the

Accepting that

the child belongs

to no one means

accepting that

she is neither

rooted nor

freestanding.

23Going “Home”

condition that marks the child as not-me, as fundamentally other-than-me,while the condition of being “not motherless” marks the child’s proximity,his or her openness to an encounter with a stranger who can say, “This ismy child, too.” 12

Ingrid Stjerna’s insistence that this is not a motherless child in spite ofthe breaks mandated by adoption law captures (in different words) Mari-lyn Strathern’s (1997, 301) idea of the “double-evocatory power” of thegift—the gift child of adoption has been freed for exchange and links thegiver and receiver as partners in the exchange. These partners are embed-ded in a complex web of connections, a web that broke down when adop-tions from Chile to Sweden ceased in 1991. This web binds orphanage toagency and adopting mother to abandoning mother, tying developingnations with an “excess” of children to overdeveloped nations that needthese children. The physical movement of a child in adoption—the routesit takes from “there” to “here”—is a part of this interdependence and theexchanges through which it is played out. To be “in the eye of the storm”is to enter, imaginatively and in practice, the space of these exchanges.

Entering this space involves more than having warm, positive feelingsabout the birth mother or pride in the birth nation of a child. Thesebenevolent feelings evoke the sense that the eye of the storm is a site ofcalm but ignore the relationship of this center of calm to the chaos thatproduces it. To enter the eye of the storm is to take risks: that a back-ground story will be too hard to bear, that the pull “back” will be too pow-erful, that we will lose our boundaries, the edges that make our familiescomplete. The challenge for international (and other forms of ) adoptiontoday is in the ways it has opened a space that is structured, but cannot befully contained, by adoption law. This space has revealed a kind of chaos,shaking up (and opening up) families, persons, and nations in the worldthat created international adoption and that international adoption helpedto create. While adoption is the focus of this opening up, the questions itraises reminds us that we are all, in one way or another, close to the eye ofthe storm, which is where life is lived.

Notes

Research on which this article is based was supported by the National ScienceFoundation (grant #SBR-9511937) and by faculty development grants fromHampshire College. It was made possible by the cooperation and generosity ofadoptive parents, adoptees, staff at Stockholm’s Adoption Centre, and Chileanchild welfare officials. I thank Michelle Bigenho, Maureen Mahoney, Beth Notar,Jeff Roth, Janelle Taylor, Sigfrid Yngvesson, and in particular Nina Payne fortheir helpful comments on earlier drafts.


1. As Strathern notes (1988, 158), there is no comfortable space for thepresence of an “other” in this concept of identity except as supplanted author-ship or proprietorship. See also Janet Farrell-Smith’s (1983, 205, 208) discussionof the exclusion of others as fundamental to the idea of “proprietary or posses-sive control over another thing or person.” For a discussion of the ways in whichadoption policy and practice work to constitute adopted children as the adoptiveparents’ “own,” see Ragoné 1996 (359); Hoelgaard 1998 (229–31); Yngvesson1997 (67–76); and Yngvesson and Mahoney 2000.

2. The phrase “came home,” or “will come home,” is widespread in Internetchat groups for the parents of internationally adopted children and in magazinesand brochures published by and for adoptive parents.

3. Interviews in this article were recorded either in Spanish or in Swedishand translated by the author.

4. The argument about the exchange value of a child is persuasively devel-oped by Viviana Zelizer (1985) and by Igor Kopytoff (1986), both of whom buildon Simmel’s ( [1908] 1978, 390–91) seminal insights about the complex relation-ship between desire for an object and the object being “set into motion” by money.As Zelizer (1985, 14) argues, the priceless child presents a legal quandary that isno less a cultural and social quandary: “How could value be assigned if price wereabsent?” Kopytoff (1986, 75) points to this same paradox, noting that to be “ ‘price-less’ in the full possible sense of the term” can as easily refer to the uniquelyworthless as to the uniquely valuable. To acquire value, Kopytoff argues, the“patently singular” must become part of a “single universe of comparable values”—that is, it must be placed into circulation, made “common” (ibid., 68–72).

5. The quote is from Judith Butler (1993, 2). The argument here draws onmy reading of a range of works relevant to this issue, including Strathern 1988(135–59); Kopytoff 1986; and Zizek 1989. The crucial point is that entry intothe symbolic order of culture and law is an arbitrary legal process on which our“naturalization” as whole persons (as civil subjects) is contingent.

6. Here I build on Lyotard’s (1984, 22) insight about the “ephemeral tempo-rality” that accompanies narrative knowledge. Lyotard argues, “The narratives’reference may seem to belong to the past, but in reality it is always contempora-neous with the act of recitation.”

7. For a discussion of identity processes in adoption narratives, see Yngves-son and Mahoney 2000.

8. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Nicolas Rose describes the “fold”as indicating “a relation without an essential interior, one in which what is ‘inside’is merely an infolding of an exterior” (1996, 43).

9. See Walter Benjamin’s (1969, 158) discussion of how “the past is ‘some-where beyond the reach of the intellect, and unmistakably present in some mate-rial object (or in the sensation which such an object arouses in us)’” (quoting Proust,A la recherche du temps perdu). Similarly, Nicholas Rose (1996, 143) suggests,“Memory of one’s biography is not a simple psychological capacity, but is orga-nized through rituals of storytelling, supported by artefacts such as photographalbums and so forth.”

10. Note here the stereotyped linking of Latin America more generally withthe “indigenous” and the use of “Mapuche” as a trope for a person of color.

11. By contrast, see Swedish adoptee Astrid Trotzig’s (1996) account of hertrip alone to Pusan, South Korea, where her experience of not belonging therewas no less intense than in Sweden.

25Going “Home”

12. These words were spoken by an Ethiopian woman as she smoothed thebedcovers over a friend of her birth daughter during a visit of the two Swedishwomen to Ethiopia. Both had been adopted by families in Sweden.

References

Andersson, Gunilla. 1991. Intercountry adoption in Sweden: The experience of 25years and 32,000 placements. Sundbyberg, Sweden: Adoption Centre.

Aronson, Jaclyn C. 1997. Not my homeland. Senior thesis, Hampshire College,Amherst, Mass.

Benjamin, Jessica. 1995. Like subjects, love objects: Essays on recognition and sexualdifference. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 1969. The storyteller. In Illuminations: Essays and reflections,edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken.

Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. New York:Routledge.

Carp, E. Wayne. 1998. Family matters: Secrecy and disclosure in the history of adop-tion. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Doyle, Laura. 1994. Bordering on the body: The racial matrix of modern fiction andculture. New York: Oxford University Press.

Duncan, William. 1993. Regulating intercountry adoption: An international per-spective. In Frontiers of family law, edited by Andrew Bainham and David S.Pearl. London: John Wiley & Sons.

Farrell-Smith, Janet. 1983. Parenting and property. In Mothering: Essays in femi-nist theory, edited by Joyce Treblicot. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld.

Hague Convention. 1993. Hague conference on private international law, final actof the seventeenth session, 29 May 1993, 32 I.L.M. 1134.

Hoelgaard, Suzanne. 1998. Cultural determinants of adoption policy: A Colom-bian case study. International Journal of Law, Policy, and the Family 12:202–41.

Kirk, David. 1981. Shared fate: A theory of adoption and mental health. New York:Free Press.

Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. The cultural biography of things: Commoditization asprocess. In The Social Life of Things, edited by Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge:Harvard University Press.

Liem, Deanne Borshay. 2000. First Person Plural. Ho-Ho-Kus, NJ: Mu Films.Lifton, Betty Jean. 1994. Journey of the adopted self: A quest for wholeness. New

York: Basic.Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge,

translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Univer-sity of Minnesota Press.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The visible and the invisible. Evanston, Ill.: North-western University Press.

Modell, Judith. 1994. Kinship with strangers: Adoption and interpretations of kinshipin American culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The inoperative community. Minneapolis: University of Min-nesota Press.


Petchesky, Rosalind P. 1995. The body as property: A feminist re-vision. In Con-ceiving the new world order: The global politics of reproduction, edited by FayeD. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Probyn, Elspeth. 1996. Outside belongings. New York: Routledge.Ragoné, Helena. 1996. Chasing the blood tie: Surrogate mothers, adoptive moth-

ers and fathers. American Ethnologist 23: 352–65.Rose, Nicolas. 1996. Identity, genealogy, history.” In Questions of cultural identity,

edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. London: Sage.Saffian, Sarah. 1998. Ithaka: A daughter’s memoir of being found. New York: Basic.Sants, H. J. 1964. Genealogical bewilderment in children with substitute par-

ents. British Journal of Medical Psychology 37: 133–41.Simmel, Georg. [1908] 1978. The philosophy of money.Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. 1983. Intellectual and manual labor. Atlantic Highlands, NJ:

Humanities Press.Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The gender of the gift. Berkeley: University of California

Press.———. 1997. Partners and consumers: Making relations visible. In The logic of

the gift: Toward an ethic of generosity. New York: Routledge. Trotzig, Astrid. 1996. Blod är tjockare än vatten [Blood is thicker than water].

Stockholm: Bonniers.Verhovek, Sam H. 2000. Debate on adoptees’ rights stirs Oregon. New York

Times, 5 April.von Melen, Anna. 1998. Samtal med vuxna adopterade [Conversations with adult

adoptees]. Stockholm: Raben Prisma/NIA.Yngvesson, Barbara. 1997. Negotiating motherhood: Identity and difference in

“open” adoptions. Law and Society Review 31: 31–80.———. 2000. Un niño de cualquier color: Race and nation in intercountry adop-

tion. In Globalizing institutions: Case studies in regulation and innovation,edited by Jane Jenson and Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Aldershott, England:Ashgate.

Yngvesson, Barbara, and Maureen Mahoney. 2000. “As one should, ought andwants to be”: Belonging and authenticity in identity narratives. Theory, Cul-ture, and Society 17: 77–110.

Zelizer, Viviana A. 1985. Pricing the priceless child: The changing social value ofchildren. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Zizek, Slavoj. 1989. The sublime object of ideology. London: Verso.

27Going “Home”

Isabelle, who is six, makes a list of all the children she knows and begins toidentify those among them who are, as she is, adopted. Naming threeother Asian children in her New York City first grade class, she pauses,then shakes her head: “No, but they look adopted.” Isabelle’s mother asks,“What does an adopted person look like?” Isabelle replies, “Chinese.”1

In the 1990s, families in the United States began to adopt children fromother regions of the world in unprecedented numbers. Although adoptionacross national borders had its beginnings in the 1950s, in the aftermathof World War II and the Korean conflict, it remained for decades a rela-tively unnoticed phenomenon. “The quiet migration” is how a demogra-pher writing in 1984 described the movement of children for adoptionacross national borders (Weil 1984). That description now needs to berevised. Over the past ten years, transnational adoption has become bothvisible and vocal. How has this shift occurred? And how might the con-temporary practice of transnational adoption provoke new ways of imag-ining race, kinship, and culture in North America?

Visible and Vocal: Adoption from China

In 1994, when I traveled to China with my husband to adopt our daugh-ter, I had no inkling that we were on the cusp of what would become anenormous wave of Chinese adoptions. Neither did I sense the tremendouschanges in adoption practices that were under way, the heightened atten-tion to all aspects of adoption that would become so defining of thismoment, or the ways in which my lived experience would touch so inti-mately on contested anthropological terrain. Soon after returning to NewYork, however, I realized that our very personal act of creating a familythrough adoption was simultaneously, if unwittingly, part of a larger, col-lective project. In that project “culture” figured both prominently and, forme, a bit uneasily. This essay is the fruit of my efforts to understand par-ents’ fascination with the imagined “birth culture” of their adopted chil-dren. I argue that this fascination may, in part, represent displaced long-ings for origins and absent birth mothers, and I attempt to situate such

Toby AliceVolkman

Embodying Chinese Culture

TRANSNATIONAL ADOPTION IN NORTH AMERICA


longings within historical and cultural shifts in adoption discourse andpractices over the last ten years.

Adoptions from China to the United States soared from 115 in 1991to 5,081 in 2000.2 By the end of the 1990s, China had become the leading“sending” country of children to the United States and the world, andmore than 30,000 adopted Chinese children, mostly girls, were growingup with their (mostly) white parents in North America. In February 2002,bookstore windows in Manhattan displayed Valentine’s Day specials, amongthem I Love You Like Crazy Cakes (Lewis 2000), a children’s book abouta single mother adopting a baby girl from China. The mainstreaming ofChinese adoption has occurred in part through the incessant media atten-tion that has been lavished on adopted Chinese girls over the past decade.3

This interest shows no signs of abating, with a steady stream of articles indisparate venues. On a page entitled boldly “How America Lives,” theLadies’ Home Journal featured “Citizen Amy,” an adopted five-year-oldChinese girl in Kentucky, American flag in hand (Leader 2001).

Numbers and media attention do not in themselves suggest profoundtransformation or the normalization of adoption. They surely do not revealthe ardent embrace of a new transracial kinship; the Ladies’ Home Journalknows that this is not really how most of America lives. Nonetheless, thephenomenal growth of adoption that crosses lines of nation and of race—and its media presence—hint that interesting changes are in motion,changes that must be situated within larger processes of rewriting kinship,identity, and culture in North America.4 I focus here on adoption fromChina, because Chinese adoption and the communities that have devel-oped around it have become remarkably visible and vocal. Families withchildren from many other parts of the world, however, are dealing with sim-ilar issues, particularly when race visibly marks differences between par-ents and children.5

In contrast to the isolation and confusion articulated in recent yearsby many young adult Korean adoptees, adopted children from China andtheir (mostly) white parents are visible not just to the public but (intenselyso) to each other, through the formation of play groups, dance troupes,Culture Days and camps, reunions, Web sites, listservs, and publicationsintended for the adoptive community. (See figures 1 and 2.) Visibility isentwined with vocality. Writing about the world of disability, Rayna Rappand Faye Ginsburg describe how publicly circulating narratives chroni-cling intimate experiences with disability have helped to shape “a moreexpansive sense of kinship across embodied difference” (2001, 534). Asimilar proliferation of stories characterizes the world of transnationaladoption.

There has never been another cohort of transnational, transracial


adoptees that has arrived in the United States in such large numbers, in sofew years, of roughly the same age and mostly the same gender. Manymore Korean children have been adopted into U.S. families—one hun-dred thousand—but they were widely dispersed over time and space: fiftyyears, across urban, rural, and small-town America. Operation Babylift, inwhich two thousand babies were flown out of Saigon to the United Statesin a few days in April 1975, was a dramatic moment, but these childrenalso were dispersed throughout the country and were not followed (untilrecently) by other Vietnamese adoptees. For most adoptees from Asia,stories such as those filmed in recent years by Korean adoptees were farmore typical: the only Asian child growing up in a largely white smalltown somewhere in middle America (Adolfson 1999; Liem 2000). Adop-tion was not freely discussed, and racial assimilation was the goal. Theremust have been many parents like Nathan Adolfson’s mother in Min-nesota, who simply wanted her child to be, as she declares in her son’sfilm, “a little Scandinavian” (Adolfson 1999).

Adoptive parents themselves have a distinctive demographic profile.Those who adopt from China are “older” (until 1999, China requiredparents to be at least thirty-five) and often share a sense of generationalhistory and sensibility.6 “We came of age in the sixties, we told our storiesin the women’s movement,” one New York mother said. Especially inurban areas, where the largest numbers of children adopted from Chinalive, such parents typically postponed childbearing, are relatively affluentand well educated, and see themselves as active citizens of the world.Many are unmarried. Although China’s policies have recently changed toprohibit adoption by gay and lesbian parents and to limit single-parentadoptions, during most of the 1990s China’s openness was striking, andcoincided with increasing acceptance of single parenting and other non-traditional ways of making families in North America.7 Unconventionalparents easily forged connections out of networks in which they alreadyparticipated, such as support groups for single women contemplatingmotherhood. Such parents are often conscious of their delicate and diffi-cult roles. A mother in a discussion group mused, somewhat anxiously:“We are older, we are Jewish, we are two mommies, we are white. Just howmuch difference can we give them?”

The experience of adopting in China has also catalyzed the growth oforganizations beyond the family. Whereas Korean babies typically arrivedon planes, delivered by escorts to expectant parents in North Americanairports, families who adopt from China must travel there to meet theirchild, in groups as large as a dozen families arranged by adoption agen-cies. A family spends two weeks in China with this group, sharing momen-tous experiences: the emotionally charged moments of delivery of their

31Embodying Chinese Culture

children, visits to the orphanage, and myriad anxieties, difficulties, joys,and surprises. These trips create powerful bonding experiences, whichpeople subsequently seek to reproduce and reinforce through reunionsand little rituals, like annual photo shoots of children lined up on some-one’s couch.

Ties forged in travel groups may focus on intimate connections: par-ents of babies who shared an orphanage crib may decide to nurture theirdaughters’ friendship as they grow, even to return to China together whenthe girls are older. Sometimes the sense of kinship extends in the otherdirection, to a sort of bonding with “China,” a China that is imagined yetsomehow palpable, embodied in the child, archived in photographs andother tangible souvenirs.

Perhaps most critical in shaping the visibility and vocality of Chinaadoption is the historical moment. The discursive celebration of multicul-turalism of the 1990s is worlds apart from the earlier emphasis on assim-ilation. If we live now in an era of “Rainbow Kids,” as one adoption mag-azine is called, this was not the case when transnational adoption began inthe 1950s. Then, the all-American white-bread family was very much thedesired norm, and green-eyed, freckled, Irish Catholic babies were sup-posed to be matched with green-eyed, freckled, Irish Catholic moms anddads. The “as if begotten” biological family was the goal (Modell 1994),a “clean break” with the past achieved by rewriting birth certificates withthe names of adoptive parents, the identity of birth parents erased bysealing records (Carp 1998). In the 1950s, when Oregonians Harry andBertha Holt launched adoption from South Korea as a Christian “rescue”mission for mixed-race orphans fathered by American soldiers, it seemsthat little thought was given to how such children would fit into a societywhere sameness was the unquestioned norm. The prevailing “clean break”model of domestic adoption was transposed, in intercountry adoption,into a “clean break” from biological progenitors and from the national orcultural origins of the child (Shanley 2001; Yngvesson 2000).

The civil rights movement sparked some adoptions in the late 1960sof black or biracial children by white parents. But in the early 1970s, inpart because of the strong stance of the National Association of BlackSocial Workers against transracial adoption, race again became an explicitbarrier in domestic adoption. Around this time Americans began increas-ingly to embrace adoption from other nations. This turn coincided withdramatic changes that were unfolding within the domestic adoption com-munity. The silence and secrecy that had surrounded adoption werebeginning to dissolve, as adoptees began to assert their rights to be toldtruthfully about their past, their “roots,” and the parents who relinquishedthem. As adoption became “open”—both in the sense of specific and


legal forms of “open adoption,” in which information is disclosed, recordsare unsealed, and birth families and adoptive families may actually knowone another, and in the broader sense of openly acknowledged, the mythof the “as if” family, “constituted by shared biological heritage, by the‘mystical commonality’ of mother and child” (Yngvesson 1997, 71), couldno longer be easily sustained.

By the 1990s, these changes in the American social landscape inter-sected with growing political and economic pressures within China. Theone-child policy, the Chinese state’s attempt to curtail population growth,called for all couples to limit themselves to a single child. In many areasthis became a “one son/two children” policy: parents were allowed to tryfor a second child—a son—if the firstborn was a daughter. Enforcementmeasures included steep fines for “over-quota” children, sterilization, andthe threat of forced abortion in the event of future pregnancies.

These policies had serious consequences for gender relations. Moth-ers who gave birth to baby girls might be “subject to verbal and physicalassault from unhappy husbands and in-laws,” and their little ones suf-fered, too, “as peasant women discriminated against their baby daughtersin order to ensure the birth and survival of a son” (Greenhalgh and Li1995, 609–10). One form of discrimination was infant abandonment.8 Inthe late 1980s, large numbers of healthy abandoned baby girls began tocrowd China’s state-run orphanages (Johnson 1993, 1996). Kay Johnsonand Chinese researchers found that in the 1990s most couples expressedthe wish to have a daughter and a son, but felt under intense pressure ifthey failed to produce the son. Many couples felt they had “no choice”but to abandon second or third daughters (Johnson, Banghan, and Liyao1998, 469–510).9

Abandonments, which are illegal, take place in secrecy. The baby isleft where parents hope he or she will be found: the steps of a police sta-tion or hospital, the side of a well-traveled road, a busy marketplace, atrain station, perhaps at the entrance to a house where a family lives whomight, especially if they already have one son and no daughter, decide toadopt the child.

Ironically, then, as adoption and the embrace of birth family in theUnited States have become increasingly open and encouraged, the cir-cumstances of the child’s abandonment are profoundly hidden, unknow-able, in China. Adoptive parents often express a yearning for connection,a wish for knowledge of a narrative that cannot be complete. Sometimesthe painful realities that have created both the possibility and the impossi-bility of these connections are acknowledged, as longing is laced with acritique of the inequities in the global political economy through whichwhite American parents benefit from the suffering of their Chinese coun-


terparts: “People whose agony over her [the writer’s daughter] I cannotbegin to comprehend. People whose deep loss produced perhaps mygreatest joy,” writes Lindsay Davies (2000, 19). “I don’t know what to sayto a woman whose greatest tragedy is my good fortune,” writes EmilyPrager in a similar musing. “That you should have your daughter forcedfrom your arms by a government who I then must pay to envelop her inmine is the stuff of which I have fought against my entire career. That Ishould end up tacitly supporting this policy is my shame, and yet, myfate. . . . Forgive me, Madam, for my part in ripping off the Women ofChina and in particular, of course, you” (2001, 237).

A More Expansive Sense of Kinship

Two institutions—one real, one virtual—have been critical in shapingand sustaining a sense of kinship and community beyond the family. Fam-ilies with Children from China (FCC) is a name used by more than onehundred separate organizations that have developed across the UnitedStates and Canada since the mid-1990s. Inspired in part by smallergroups founded in the late 1970s by parents of children adopted fromKorea, FCC’s beginnings can be traced to 1992, when a few of the earli-est adopters on the East Coast met in New York’s Chinatown to celebratetheir new adoptions. Susan Caughman, one of the founders of the orga-nization in New York, described the impulse behind this early FCC: “Wefelt as if we knew an amazing secret that we had the obligation to tell theworld about” (Klatzkin 1999, xiii).

The other powerful force contributing to the shaping of the adoptiveChinese community is the Internet. The Internet and adoption from Chinabegan to grow at approximately the same time. By 2002, the two largestChina adoption lists had a combined membership of over thirteen thou-sand subscribers, and more than 350 other lists were devoted to more spe-cialized interests, from chinaboys and China Dads at Home to born-againChristian lists. There are lists for those whose adoption dossier went toChina in a particular month, and well over one hundred lists for familieswith children adopted from the same orphanage or region. Members oforphanage lists may come to think of all children in their child’s orphan-age as siblings.

The Internet may serve its greatest function outside of cities, whichalready have flourishing FCCs, an array of friendship circles, and count-less other forms of face-to-face sociality. But for many, the lists providevaluable information, ideas, a space for debate, and a sense of community.Both FCC and the Internet dramatically expand the sense of kinship


beyond the domestic sphere: FCC through the many gatherings it spon-sors, the Internet by building on-line relationships that extend throughoutthe country and internationally as well. In cyberspace, even more than in the face-to-face contact of FCC activities, people may come to feel asthough they know each other well, an illusory intimacy perhaps, but none-theless a space in which they are comfortable sharing concerns and inti-mate details about their daily lives, emotions, and their children that theywould not easily reveal to ordinary (known) relatives. In response toanother list member’s announcement that a long-awaited child had beenreferred, one person wrote “Mazel Tov, Mazel Tov, Mazel Tov! . . .Although we don’t know each other I have thought of you and your hus-band often. I am so happy for you two tonight” (Silverman 2002).

The Question of Culture

The question of culture pervades the discourse of contemporary adop-tion. Contradictory movements—“erasures of belonging” (Yngvessson2000, 177) and its reinscription—permeate and complicate the everydaypractices of Chinese and other forms of transnational adoption. Is thechild an “open cultural space,” or is he or she inextricably “rooted innational soil” (ibid., 173)?

Real Simple (“the magazine about simplifying your life”) published anarticle in which a mother describes how her daughter, Oona, adoptedfrom China eleven years ago, was provided with opportunities to develop

a deep appreciation of the Chinese art and culture that are part of her nativeheritage. At home in the San Francisco Bay Area, we wheeled her in thestroller past the exquisite brush paintings and ceramics in San Francisco’sAsian Art Museum, stopping afterward for dim sum in Chinatown. We tookher to see the Chinese acrobats at the Civic Center and dutifully attendedthe Chinese New Year Parade (even though she hated it, because of the fire-crackers). And when friends began packing their daughters off in frilly tutusand pink slippers for ballet classes after school, we opted for a more interna-tional form of movement: gymnastics. (Putnam 2002)

In spite of all this, Oona fell passionately in love with, and became incred-ibly good at, Irish dancing.

Like most articles on Chinese adoption, Oona’s story was circulatedon Internet lists and provoked a range of responses, including some criti-cisms of Oona’s parents. Oona’s enthusiasm for Irish dance, one personspeculated, was a reaction to the family’s overemphasis on China at theexpense of a more all-embracing multicultural heritage that would have

Is the child an

“open cultural

space,” or is he or

she inextricably

“rooted in

national soil”?


included her adoptive parents’ Irish “culture.” To this Julie in Chicagoresponded:

Where do we draw the line between strenuous but appropriate efforts toaffirm our status as a minority family, and putting the family into a boxwhere only ethnic activities focused on the child’s/children’s birth heritage(s)are deemed appropriate? . . . Is the child in the article, so filled with joy atpresent, being set up for future trauma by spending so much time withringleted, red-haired, creamy-complexioned sprites, whom of course she cannever physically resemble? (Higginbotham 2002)

A parent whose adopted Indian son was fond of boat racing commented:“Until I read this thread about the little girl loving Irish dancing, I neverthought to ask our son, ‘Gee, Son, maybe you should only excel at a sportthat would somehow reflect your Indian culture.’”

“If constructions of race and culture are contingent processes that arehistorically open-ended,” Ann Anagnost has written, “we need to considerhow current adoption practices do not merely fit into what is historicallygiven, but in themselves produce race”—and, I would add, culture—“in anew form.” Anagnost suggests that adoption practices may reproduce theproblem of identity and difference anew, “in a domestication of differ-ences emptied of history,” or they may be progressive, as “the experienceof racism opens the possibility of pushing politics of parenting beyond thefamily, as the basis of a broader politics of anti-racism” (2000, 391). Bothtrajectories, I argue, are at play.

The challenge to the biologically formed family is particularly clearwhen adoption crosses racial lines, as it usually does in the case of China.10

A recurrent theme in the adoption world is how to respond to racist, rude,ridiculous, or simply awkward questions from strangers (or sometimes fromfriends and relatives). These typically occur in public venues, like grocerycheckout lines. “Is she yours? Is she real? Is she natural? Where did youget her? How much did she cost? Are they really sisters? In China theydon’t like girls, do they?” One list member reported a colleague’s remark:“What a lovely baby, it’s just too bad she’s a communist.” Responses tosuch comments range from calm to furious; some parents try to turnthese encounters into “teaching moments,” others reply with sarcasm. Toa common query, “Is her father Chinese?” one mother laughs, “I don’tknow, I couldn’t see his face.”

The highly visible, racially marked challenge to the bio-family maycontribute to the media’s fascination with adoption from China, accountsof which provide what appears to be a less fraught space in which to dealwith race than stories about transracial black-white adoption in the UnitedStates.11 Whereas racial differences were just as striking for earlier gener-


ations of Korean adoptees, until recent years pressure for sameness seemsto have suppressed or obscured them. Many adult Korean adoptees recallgrowing up thinking they were white like their parents: the “little Scandi-navian” invoked by Nathan Adolfson’s mother. A survey of adult Koreanadoptees reports that as they reached adolescence their ethnic identifi-cations shifted: “Only 28 percent of the respondents considered them-selves Korean-American or Korean-European as they were growing up;by contrast, 64 percent of the respondents, as adults, viewed themselves asKorean-American or Korean-European” (Evan B. Donaldson AdoptionInstitute 1999, 1). They described themselves as “Caucasian with a dif-ference,” “a white person in an Asian body,” and “white middle class, butadopted from Korea.” Or as “trying to be white,” “not white enough,”and “Caucasian, except when looking the mirror” (ibid., 18).

It is in part awareness of the Korean experience that motivates par-ents of Chinese children to provide something—pride in culture, pride inbeing Chinese. The sense of responsibility for doing this may begin withsocial workers who counsel prospective parents about the challenges offorming transracial or transnational families and about the need to acquire“cultural competence” (Vonk 2001, 246). This counseling differs strik-ingly from the earlier emphasis on matching, assimilation, and denial. Ithas a counterpart in China: as part of the adoption proceedings, parentsmust promise the Chinese authorities not only to provide their childrenwith love and care but to impart respect for “Chinese culture.” Global dis-courses reinforce these concerns: the United Nations Convention on theRights of the Child (1989) and the Hague Convention on IntercountryAdoption (1993) affirm that “due regard shall be paid to the desirabilityof continuity in a child’s upbringing and to the child’s ethnic, religious,cultural and linguistic background” (Stephens 1995, 38; Cecere 1998).

While there certainly are families who have decided that their childrenare “just American” or “just New Yorkers,” even parents who describethemselves strongly in these terms are aware of FCC and its commitmentto culture. Among the most vivid representations of this commitment are“Culture Days.” In New York, Culture Day has grown steadily since themid-1990s, and the event now draws about two thousand people. Perfor-mances abound: drum ensembles, shadow plays, bits of Peking opera,and a vast array of dances performed by professionals as well as children.There are crafts and dragon carts and cotton candy, and raffle tickets aresold to benefit Chinese orphanages. In 2002, the Chinese Consul Generalattended and praised the “rich Chinese culture,” against a very New Yorkbackdrop, as Kay Johnson (2002) noted, of Polish sausages and soft pret-zels. Children who arrived early in the day marched under the banner of their home province in China in a “Parade of the Provinces.” And


throughout the day, on a huge map of China, each child could point toher presumed place of origin and attach a sticker with her name.12

The desire for culture is translated into a panoply of cultural produc-tions, representations, performances. Parents work to connect their chil-dren and their families with some relatively accessible form of Chineseculture: dance and dumplings, language lessons, Chinese babysitters androle models. Anagnost refers to these practices as “culture bites” (2000,413), a metaphor that does not fully capture the myriad strategies familiesexplore.

Miriam, a New York mother, expressed it this way: “It’s all aboutblending—she’s Jewish, she’s Chinese, she’s American, she’s a NewYorker, she’s from Kansas.” Miriam’s daughter studies Hebrew, Chinese,Suzuki violin, ballet. She attends Passover seders (mostly with other adop-tive families and lots of Chinese girls) and Lunar New Year festivals. Shehas many names: Chinese, Hebrew, and English. Miriam is thinking aheadto her bat mitzvah and wondering whether appropriate Chinese elementscould be incorporated. Although the oldest Chinese adoptees are onlyabout ten, ideas are already beginning to circulate. One mother suggestedlooking at Chinese coming-of-age rituals: “For my daughter’s baby nam-ing we hybridized something from a baby boy’s thirtieth-day celebrationthat we saw in a Zhang Yimou movie: Villagers passed the baby through a


Figure 1. Preparing for a dance performance. Culture Day, New Jersey, 2002.Courtesy Kevin Bubriski

giant, donut-shaped, decorated steamed bun, so we had a bakery make usa giant donut shaped challah and passed her through at the end of thenaming ceremony to much delight and applause.” Chinese friends, sheadded, “said they’d never heard of the ritual, but were not surprised sinceChina is a large country with lots of regional customs” (Eisenberg 2002).

Culture is seen in part as a way of instilling pride in adopted children,who come to learn impressive things about the glorious civilization of theplace of their birth. Art and language and ancient history loom large in theimaginary that is China, and holiday celebrations abound. Far less is men-tioned about Chinese politics. This overwhelmingly celebratory view ofChina and Chinese culture is sometimes questioned, especially by AsianAmerican parents. Some criticize white parents for “exoticizing and mys-ticizing and obsessing about Chinese culture in China while ignoring theliving, breathing Chinese American culture at our doorstep” (Klatzkin2002). Others contend that providing appealing little packages of culture isin itself a form of racism and “worse than nothing,” eliding more painfulhistories of oppression, colonialism, and Asian American immigration(Chang 2001).

In her study of China adoption Internet discussions, Ann Anagnostsuggests that “celebratory representations of cultural difference, whichare often detached from immigrant histories in the United States,” maymake it difficult for adopted children to understand their racialization and


Figure 2. A girl places herself on the map of China. Culture Day, New Jersey,2002. Courtesy Kevin Bubriski

may even serve to maintain “the separations that constitute racializedboundaries in U.S. society historically” (2000, 391). But Anagnost stud-ied discussions on a list that included parents who were waiting for or hadjust received referrals. When babies turn into children, especially school-age children, a very different set of concerns emerges, and both Internetand daily life are filled with talk about race, identity, and adoptive families’ambiguous relationships to other immigrant communities. Conversationsabout race and racism do not always come easily. When Robin’s seven-year-old daughter mentioned that a young friend asked her if she plannedto work in a Chinese restaurant when she grew up, Robin said, “Do youthink he asked because that’s what I did when I was in college?” Robin’simmediate response was to affirm her connection with her daughter; onlylater did we wonder together whether that might have been a moment todiscuss race or stereotypes or immigrant labor. Nurturing “cultural pride”is often seen as the critical ground on which later struggles against racismmay be waged. The startling, sometimes shocking, discovery of racism,whether subtle or flagrant, has transformed many parents’ consciousnessof race in ways they never anticipated. When children are teased for theirsmall noses, flat faces, yellow skin, or short eyelashes, parents wonder ifthey can truly empathize or help. “What can I say to her?” asked onemother: “I speak with long eyelashes.”

The question of relationships with Asian America remains unsettled.FCC branches often cultivate relationships with Chinese American worlds.In New York’s Lunar New Year Parade, an FCC contingent marches withits own banner.13 While social workers advocate adult role models and“meaningful relationships” in the Asian American community, it is notclear which parts of this “community” would be accessible or receptive.Speakers of Mandarin or Cantonese or Hakka? Students, workers, or sec-ond- or third-generation professionals—another category of “privilegedimmigrants” struggling with the nature of their “Chinese American” iden-tity?14 One white adoptive mother laughed as she described how a highlyeducated Chinese American friend sought her advice on books aboutthings Chinese for his young children.

Vivia Chen, one of a small number of New York FCC mothers who isChinese American, recounted a telephone conversation with a white adop-tive mother in search of mooncakes, who insisted: “ ‘You’re Chinese, youmust have an old family recipe somewhere.’ I replied, ‘Chinese peopledon’t make their own mooncakes. I mean, who makes their own bagels?It’s not done. Just go to Chinatown and buy some.’ Silence ensued on theother end of the line. Finally, she spoke: ‘Well, I’m sure real Chinese peo-ple make their own mooncakes!’” (Chen 1999, 17).

Chen upset a few of her fellow New Yorkers when she wrote: “I fear


that some parents might mistake the colorful trappings of Chinese tradi-tions for the experience of being Chinese-American. . . . I can understandwhy parents are so intrigued by sword dancing, lantern making, dragonboat racing and mooncake baking. These snippets of Chinese culture areappealing, fun and just more accessible than grappling with the more dif-ficult issue of identity and the race thing.” Yet, Chen went on to say,adoptive parents “astound me with how much pride they take in theirdaughter’s birth culture. In fact, they’ve inspired me to incorporate Chi-nese art and language into the fabric of my daughter’s life” (ibid., 18).

There is, on the one hand, an inevitably disappointing search for anorganic connection with things Chinese or Chinese American and, on theother hand, an unselfconscious pleasure in things imagined to be “Chi-nese,” whether appropriated or invented. The “red thread,” for example,has come to represent connections between adoptive parents and their chil-dren and among those who share loved ones or children from China. Theimage, said to be drawn from an old Chinese tale, evokes lovers predes-tined to meet, connected by an invisible red thread that will never break,or red threads that spring from a newborn’s spirit and attach to all peoplewho will be important to the child, shortening as he or she grows andbringing closer those who were meant to be together.

Ironically, in China the red thread tale appears to have a more limitedand not altogether positive resonance. “An invisible red thread attachesyou at birth to your future spouse,” writes Amy Klatzkin. “With romanticmarriage now the norm in China, it has taken on a positive glow, but Ithink that’s recent—and it has nothing to do with adoption. Given thattraditional marriages often brought misery and servitude to women, thefate signified by the red thread was not necessarily a happy one.” Klatzkinadds: “It astounded me at first to see it morphed into an American feel-good, everything-is-for-the-best ideology of international adoption.” Inmost writing about Chinese adoption, the red thread signifies the destinythat brought parents and children together. Klatzkin questions this as well:“And will our children always feel that they were destined to be with usand only us? Mine certainly doesn’t. She delves deeply into the arbitrari-ness of her fate” (Klatzkin 2002).

While it is easy to parody the compulsion to consume—to spend lav-ishly on Asian dolls or to search the Web for panda pajamas—or to scornthe superficiality of a celebratory multiculturalism, many parents strive forsome deeper transformation of their own identities and lives. Some par-ents become local advocates for adoption, revising school curricula, or cri-tiquing media portrayals. Others work to create a sense of communityextending to China, often through efforts to “give back” something, toredress imbalances in “a world in which children flow in only one direc-


tion” (Yngvesson 2002). These efforts also represent an activation of tiesto China, an affirmation of the child’s origins.

Giving back may be a matter of contributing to a growing number oforphanage assistance programs, many of which have been founded byadoptive mothers in the United States who have taken the project of adop-tion in significant measure beyond the personal. These individuals oftenwork full-time directing programs that provide foster care for orphanagechildren or school fees, warm clothing, surgeries, or “hugging grannies,”retired women who come to the orphanage to offer stimulation and affec-tion. For other adoptive families, giving back may be as simple as sendingphotographs, letters, and money to children’s orphanages, sometimesmoney that children themselves have raised by selling lemonade or run-ning campaigns in school. Orphanage directors in China often welcomethese connections in emotional terms. In May 2002, the director of oneorphanage sent greetings in an e-mail message to “our adopted childrenand adoptive parents,” noting that orphanage children would celebrateChildren’s Day on 1 June and hoping that adopted children would “havea good time too.” She added: “My staff and I care about all the childrenthat have been adopted. We would like to know how the children are get-ting along in life. We would like to see your children’s pictures. I wouldlike you to tell your children that we still love and miss them” (Shenyang2002).15

Longings

Although some parents prefer to adopt in a distant country in order toavoid the complexities of dealing with birth mothers, especially at thebeginning of the process, many adoptive parents come to express deepsadness about lack of knowledge or possible contact with the birth family.Beyond the efforts to instill a kind of protective cultural pride, it is thissadness and desire, I suggest, that may incite tremendous interest in thechild’s “culture.” In the absence of the mother’s body, the longing fororigins may be displaced onto the body of the nation and its imagined cul-ture. The genetic lineage of the child is unknown, but the cultural heritagecan be studied, celebrated, performed, and embodied. The world of adop-tion has come up with a term that seems to express this, a paradoxical for-mulation: birth culture.

The shift in domestic adoption, now something to be celebratedrather than shrouded in mystery and silence, to be explored lifelong ratherthan ignored, has surely helped to create a climate in which it is desirableto search: whether for actual birth families, or for greater knowledge about

In the absence of

the mother’s

body, the longing

for origins may

be displaced onto

the body of the

nation and its

imagined culture.


those families, or at the very least for one’s story. This shift has alsohelped to create a climate in which the adoption of children who looknothing like their parents, as is often the case in transnational adoption,may be accepted, even welcomed and embraced. Yet there is nothinginstantaneous or simple about this welcome, and its complexity is com-pounded by the fact that the child has come from another country, another“culture.” Furthermore, the new focus in domestic adoption, to create anarrative of the self that includes genetics and beginnings, does not trans-late easily to situations when virtually nothing is known of the specific cir-cumstances of a child’s abandonment or of her birth parents.

The social pendulum has swung from the virtual denial of adoptionand the biological beginnings of the adopted child to an insistent ideologythat without embrace of those beginnings there will forever be a gapinghole, a primal wound, an incomplete self. Betty Jean Lifton, a psychologistand adoptee whose books have been influential in the domestic adoptionworld since the late 1970s, writes of “the ghosts that haunt the dark cre-vices of the unconscious and trail each member of the adoptive triangle . . .wherever they go” (1994, 11). Lifton has provided the world of adoptionwith a compelling vision and language describing “the journey of theadopted self,” “the broken narrative,” and the “genealogical bewilder-ment” of the adoptee (ibid.). This vision and this language have helped tomake the case for dissolving the secrecy that once surrounded adoption.But they have also helped to create an adoption discourse in which search-ing to repair the wounded self and broken narrative seems almost com-pulsory. Activism of adoptees and birth mothers, changes in adoption lawin many states, open adoptions of various sorts, the prevalence of searchesand reunions and literature describing them, social work discourse, the newgenetics—all this has created a set of new cultural pressures to find themissing genetic link, what Kaja Finkler calls “the kin in the gene” (2001,235).16 Pressures that originated within domestic adoption now touch theworld of transnational adoption as well.

The mysteries that would be part of any adoption are compounded inChina by the absence of a narrative and by a political, social, and eco-nomic situation that seems to preclude the possibility of ever learningmore. As we have seen, most Chinese adoptions are of a baby who wasabandoned at a place where she (sometimes he) would be found andtaken to safety: a Chinese family who might adopt the child or, moreprobably, an orphanage. Adoptive parents struggle with contradictions asthey seek to imbue a child with a love of China and an understanding ofthe harsh realities that probably inform her personal history. It is notuncommon for adopted children, like eight-year-old Ying Ying Fry, whowrote a book called Kids Like Me in China, to have a rather sophisticated


understanding of the one-child policy and what Fry calls “the girl thing”:the expectation that boys take care of their parents when they are old andpass on the family name. “Sometimes they decide they can’t raise anotherbaby girl, no matter how much they love her, because they need to tryagain for a boy. And then they take that new baby girl someplace safe,where she will be found quickly and taken care of and maybe get a newfamily—in China or some other country—who can love her and keep herforever. Maybe that’s what happened to me,” adds Fry. “I don’t know forsure” (2001, 13–17).17

The secrecy that must surround this surrender of the child and theconsequent absence of knowledge of, or possibility of connection with, thebirth mother or birth story, may, in part, impel the proliferation and cir-culation of parents’ personal reflections in the world of Chinese adoption.In “Navel Gazing,” Lindsay Davies ponders her daughter’s belly button:“Thus for Gemma, a child adopted from China, her navel is the sign onher flesh of her deep loss. It marks an actual physical connection to thewoman who gave her life; with the woman whom later, no doubt, she willtry to imagine, try to grasp in her mind and heart; for whom she will cryand yet never be able to know. This fleshly knot attaches her to a past shecan never access and to people who will remain as elusive as shadows”(2000, 18). Davies tries to embrace these shadows and see them as peo-ple: “People who contributed the nature part to the nature/nurture equa-tion of identity. People who are present in her in ways we can never exactlyknow but which constantly provoke my imagination” (ibid., 19).

Françoise Romaine-Ouellette and Hélène Belleau have pointed to the“paradoxical situation that is created for the child who is assigned exclu-sively adoptive kinship in a society where blood ties are seen as indis-soluble bonds of love and solidarity” (2001, 27). A strategy for dealingwith this paradox, they suggest, is to see biological ties as preceding orexternal to adoptive ties, “as just one tiny part of the particular history ofthe child, and not a component of the child’s current identity.” Thoughbirth ties are “recognized” in documents, photographs, and “souvenirs,”Ouellette and Belleau (27) describe these as a “deactivated, objectivized”archive. I contend that, on the contrary, parents seek ways of “activating”the archive and the connection. The quest for a DNA connection with sis-ters (to which I shall return below) is one example. The return journey isanother.

Many parents have undertaken return journeys—sometimes to adopta younger sibling, sometimes to visit orphanages and foster families,sometimes to give their child an experience of China (and of looking likethe majority). “We watched as she was enfolded into feeling a sense ofbelonging and oneness with the kind people she was meeting,” wrote one


mother of her six-year-old’s trip to China. “Her self esteem grew a foottaller. Her sense of self as a person of Chinese heritage grew a mile. ‘I looklike everyone else. You two don’t!’ she would say with an impish grin”(Brown 2002). A cheerful version of the journey developed by JaneLiedtke, an entrepreneurial Beijing-based mother, is a traveling “culturecamp” in which groups of families visit tourist attractions and child-friendly sites like panda reserves but most importantly create a solidarityamong the campers and a sense that China is a real place: huge, compli-cated, filled with Chinese people. “We specialize in helping your childfall in love with China!” Liedkte’s brochure (2002) proclaims.18 Liedtkeeventually hopes to convert an abandoned Beijing palace into a “culturalcenter” for families traveling to adopt or to revisit China—but also forreturning adopted teenagers and young adults and even soon-to-be-retiredparents, who would like to engage in some form of community service inChina.

Travel may also take the form of a quest. Knowing that it is virtuallyimpossible to find birth families in China, nonetheless the search for something—and the narration of that search—can assume nearly mythicalproportions. Wuhu Diary: On Taking My Adopted Daughter Back to HerHometown in China recounts Emily Prager’s journey with her five-year-olddaughter back to the town of Wuhu. Hoping to visit LuLu’s orphanageand to find some traces, some additional information to supplement theincomplete narrative of her child’s beginnings, Prager writes: “LuLu isnow part of our heritages, in the kinship charts. Yet the mysteries of hergenetic code . . . are lost to her, probably forever. So anything we can find,any tiny nugget that might lead us back, we will take and store. If paleon-tologists can build a race from just a jawbone, surely we can glimpse amother and father from an entire town” (2001, 40).

After two months in Wuhu, mother and daughter left China withoutlearning anything more about LuLu’s birth parents or her past. Even theorphanage (which they were not allowed to visit) had been torn down andrebuilt. Prager’s desire for connection to the woman who had borne herchild is displaced onto a town, China, the Chinese people, the history ofChina. In the preadoption letter that she wrote, at the agency’s request, toher daughter’s imagined birth mother, she assures her: “I will also instill inher . . . a love of China, and an identity with the Chinese people. Don’tworry. She will know where she comes from, that she was born of a greatand ancient tradition. Perhaps some day, she would wish to go back. Thehistory of China is, as you know, wide and long.” Prager adds: “As yourdaughter becomes my daughter, your ancestors become my ancestors,and mine become yours. It is an interesting thing and very modern”(ibid., 238).


Part of what is “very modern” is the role of the adoption agency,which asked Prager to imagine and write a letter to the birth mother of herto-be-adopted child—even before a child is referred. When a discussionon a listserv that includes parents of older children turned to the questionof grieving and whether grief is overemphasized, a social worker special-izing in adoption countered that a child adopted as an infant who does notappear to grieve may later learn to grieve for a loss she was too young to experience, understand, or articulate. Although this grief is not “theintense, powerful, time-limited primary grief that someone experienceswhen someone known and remembered and cherished dies,” mostadoptees do “grieve the loss of birth parents, connection to ancestry, dis-connect from their original culture . . . at the same time that they celebrateand claim the connections that they have to their adoptive parents”(Brown 2002).

Such emotions are expressed in a cultural and historical field that haschanged considerably since the silences of the 1950s, when the possibilityof grief on the part of anyone in the adoption triad (child, birth parents,or adoptive parents) or any attention to birth parents was suppressed.The contemporary discourse of American social work and much of thepopular literature that has focused on search and reunion frame orphan-age travels and the wish to search as a quest for knowledge, as a necessarystep in what is constructed as a universal, “natural” process of grievingand healing.

A growing number of adoptive families have returned to China. Somehave been allowed to visit the orphanage, to meet the child’s caregivers, orto visit a foster mother outside the orphanage. One mother has establisheda small enterprise that provides photographs of a child’s “abandonmentsite” and other key places in her story. Ironically, thanks to substantialfinancial support from parents in America, many of the older orphanageshave been torn down and rebuilt. Yearning for some tangible connectionto their daughters’ pasts, two mothers who visited a reconstructed orphan-age sought out the original building’s site, from which they each managedto retrieve, and carry home to Massachusetts, a single brick. Children,too, may seek something tangible. A girl in Arizona, asked by a friendwhat she would like from China, replied, “Dirt—I would like some Chinadirt—so I know it’s a really real place.” She “treasured that small bag ofChina dirt,” her mother wrote, and when she returned to China for thefirst time at the age of six, she and her family went to the mountainsideand “dug up some rich, brown, moist and fragrant earth from SierraSong E’s beloved China” (Brown 2002).

There is in all of this a sense of multiple, layered longings. In theabsence of birth parents (mothers especially), longings may emerge as a


quest for place. Parents at Culture Day help their child place her name onthe map of China. In China, Prager tries to reconstruct the scene of herchild’s abandonment, to render the tale concrete. Staring at the bridgeabove the canal where she has been told LuLu was found, she muses,“Did people bring her here on a houseboat? Lu, with her love of boatsand water? They could have. Did they bring her up out of the houseboatand place her right here?” (2001, 83).

In The Lost Daughters of China, Karin Evans also writes of her longingfor fragments of a story about her daughter and wonders about the sceneof abandonment and being found. Knowing only that Kelly was left in amarketplace when she was three months old, Evans conjures a scene vividwith sensuous detail:

It was mid-winter, a season of mild weather, I’d been told, but likely to bewet and the market would have been crawling — filled with buckets ofsquirming local shrimp, live frogs in bamboo cages, and tiny shiny eelsswimming in tubs. . . . Bok choy and long beans tied in neat bunches. Pilesof oranges. And somewhere in that large, bustling place, tucked among theproduce, maybe, or near the winter melons, was a baby. (2000, 83)

She continues to fantasize about the finding of the child—perhaps afarmer, reaching for a melon—and then tries to imagine “all the possibleidentities for her elusive mother—a farmworker, a young university girl, adaughter forced to fend for herself when floods destroyed her family’s vil-lage, a poor rural woman who came to the city seeking work and foundherself instead with an unexpected child? . . . Was she sixteen? Or twenty-two? Or forty?” (ibid., 85).

Unable to answer these questions, Evans turns to something palpable,to geography, to land and water. She imagines a symmetry between thechild’s birth mother and herself: “Just as the rivers in my daughter’shomeland defined the physical landscape . . . there was an invisible humancurrent at work. A rippling flow of people, poor and prosperous, riding toand from the city on motorbikes, bicycles, in trucks and cars. Somewhereback in the Pearl River Delta, I knew, I had a counterpart” (ibid., 86).

Belongings

Unlike most previous waves of adoption, adoption from China has furtherchallenged the normative family by creating large numbers of single-parent families. Adoption from China is not, of course, alone in destabi-lizing the two-parent biological family model but takes its place among allsorts of contemporary ways of making families and babies: blended step-


families, gay and lesbian parents, parents who conceive with the help ofnew reproductive technologies. These new family forms challenge thestrength of the symbolic blood tie, that powerful metaphor of Americankinship (Schneider 1968). Is adoption inescapably bound to the effort toreplicate, echo, or mirror the family formed by biological ties? Or is amore radical transformation possible, as Yngvesson (1997) suggests in heranalysis of open adoption? The practices of contemporary Chinese (andother forms of transnational) adoption reveal both the pull of the gene-alogical model and the impulse to transcend it and create new forms ofkinship beyond blood.

The search for adequate language suggests something of the effortentailed in rewriting kinship. Adoptive parents worry about ways of nam-ing the woman who conceived and gave birth to their children. Birthmother is the preferred term of the moment, but discussion often turns toways of acknowledging that both adoptive and biological mothers are“real.” One listserv member commented that whatever we call them, itshould not be so hard to incorporate the idea of extra mommies: after all,we have grandmothers, godmothers, and stepmothers, and lesbian familiesalready have two mothers. Meg produced peals of laughter from a groupof friends when she recounted a chance encounter with a New York Cityfireman: “Now be good to your mommy and daddy,” the fireman urgedsix-year-old Hannah, who responded by announcing to all who couldhear, “I don’t have a daddy, I have two mommies!” (not adding that theother one is in China).

If the birth mother is impossible to find, the longing for genetic con-nection may be transposed onto a search for sisters. Two families—one inthe United States, one in Europe—pursued efforts to determine if theirdaughters, fifteen months apart in age and adopted from the same orphan-age, might be sisters. The girls look so much alike, wrote one mother,“that their photos could easily be mistaken for one another’s. It’s reallyastonishing. Even if they aren’t siblings . . . it will be very cool to knowsomebody who looks that much like them.” The families met, the girls’DNA was tested, and after six weeks of anxious waiting, the results wereinconclusive. Both families were deeply disappointed. Social worker JaneBrown mused: “In a world where one is genetically all alone, it is a rarething to have even a chance at making a connection.” At the same time,she noted, adoptive families “have to acknowledge that our relationshipsare not just like those of families who share a genetic history. We can talkopenly about how we are the same and how we are different—and thatdoesn’t make our relationships any less authentic and powerful” (Brown2002).

If adoptive parents struggle to affirm a kinship that is always in the


process of being created, the media is quick to dramatize the romance ofgenetic kin reunited. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer published a story oftwins discovered when a couple in Seattle sent a disposable camera to thefoster home in China in which their soon to be adopted daughter hadspent the first year of her life. Upon returning home with their child, theydeveloped the film and to their astonishment saw pictures of her withanother toddler who appeared to be her identical twin. In this case DNAtesting verified the genetic link: “A miracle made possible only by a pho-tograph” (Eggert 2002). Although the second child had already beenreferred for adoption to another family, the Seattle parents were able tostop those arrangements and adopt the twin as well. The mother said,“I’m very excited, to put it mildly. . . . Twins are supposed to have thisbond” (ibid.).

Oscillations between these discourses—the search for the DNA con-nections and the bonds that blood relatives are “supposed to have” andthe creation of a “different, authentic, and powerful” kinship—appear inother contemporary kinship forms. “Open adoption” may entail knowingabout or meeting birth parents, or it may go further and incorporate birthand adoptive families on an ongoing basis (Yngvesson 1997; Pertman2000). Adoptive parents are on the edge, as they struggle to balanceassumptions driven by the dominant ideology that everyone has an“innate desire to know about their genetic histories” (Pertman 2000,11–12), and simultaneously to legitimize the cultural construction of kin-ship. Kahleah Guibault, who was born in Guatemala and now lives inQuebec, wrote this when she was nine:

There are two ways of building a family, by giving birth to a child, or byadopting a child. Some people do both! . . . Being a member of an adoptivefamily means having two families. One birth family, and one forever family.Both families are important in different ways. . . . Some people ask me ifMommy and Daddy are my REAL parents and if Tristan is my REALbrother. I answer, “You can’t get more REAL than my family!” . . . I wish I could write to my birthmother. If I could, I would tell her: I love her, I am okay, I am happy and loved. I have a family. I hope she is happy andloved . . . I think adoption is a great way to build a family and to make peo-ple happy. To me, a family is: people who love each other, take care of eachother, help and teach each other, and will always be together. (Guibault2000, 52)

As I have suggested, there is a movement toward the palpable and theparticular among families who have adopted from China. The search forthe place of birth and abandonment; the telling of the story of beingfound; the salvaged orphanage brick that represents an individual’s his-


tory; the forging of solidarity with others who have been adopted from thesame town, or orphanage, or even crib, or at the same moment: all ofthese substitute for the unattainable “kin in the gene.” At the same time,there is a movement that goes beyond the China community to create abroader, more transcendent space. One venue for such efforts is a NewYork ritual created by adoptive parents’ groups, organizations of youngadult adoptees, and birth parents. The annual “Spirit of Adoption” cer-emony strives to bridge not merely gaps but chasms by representing andcelebrating all members of the adoption triad, in both domestic andtransnational adoption. A similar broadening is also evident in NewYork’s Korean adoptee community. The mentorship program created bythe largely Korean members of Also Known As (AKA), an organizationof adult adoptees, is intended particularly to reach adopted Chinese chil-dren. AKA’s own Culture Day was notable for its Korean drummers anddancers who performed along with groups of Vietnamese, Chinese, andeven salsa dancers from Colombia—a mix of adopted and hyphenatedAmericans.

“We’re all in the Adoptee Network,” concludes each verse in a poemcomposed by seven-year-old participants in a New York playshop in 2001.A sort of junior consciousness-raising and empowerment group foradopted children, the playshop was invented by social worker Jane Brown.The poem’s refrain was provided by Brown, but it is an idea that echoesthrough much of the discourse of contemporary Chinese adoption. “Janehelps our children see that they are part of something big,” wrote AmyKlatzkin in describing Playshops “that they have a role to play in learningwhat this all means and passing on their knowledge and experience to thechildren coming after them. She helps them see themselves not as victimsof a sad past but owners of brilliant lives whose futures are theirs to cre-ate” (Klatzkin 2001). And indeed, Klatzkin’s daughter, Ying Ying Fry,declares in the first paragraph of her book, “There are lots of kids like mewho were born in China and adopted by parents from other parts of theworld. . . . Wherever we go, we often meet families like ours” (2001, 1).

The powerful image of the network, of “kids like me” or “families like ours” “wherever we go,” enacted through the everyday practices ofribbon dance classes or FCC picnics, reflects how significantly the cultureof adoption has changed in recent years. Parents of children adopted inearlier decades often note these changes with some awe, wishing that theyhad had a venue for the complicated discussions of myriad issues that arenow daily staples of adoption talk on the Internet. It is not that the com-plexities and contradictions of adoption have become any simpler. Per-forming “Chinese culture” surely does not erase racism; it may reinscribeor reify difference in unintended ways. But many of these complexities

There is a

movement that

goes beyond the

China community

to create a

broader, more

transcendent

space.


and contradictions are now exposed, voiced, and debated, at times tosuch a degree that some parents wonder if this is not too much. “Are wenot scrutinizing every little thing to excess?” one mother wrote.

For many, however, the scrutiny, occurring in the field of a larger col-lectivity, yields both pain and pleasure. It is too soon to know what thegrowing cohort of adopted Chinese children will eventually have to sayabout adoption, about birth parents, about culture, race and gender, aboutChina or the world. To date, the voices we have heard are mostly those ofparents. But we do know that narrative impulse in the world of Chineseadoption is being nurtured at an early age, supported by adults with a lotto say, but also by a new and rapidly evolving culture of adoption. Thatculture includes an array of practices, from play groups and playshopsand FCC newsletters that devote whole issues to the work of kids to thecirculation of autoethnographical films and writings by older Koreanadoptees. It was First Person Plural, the film by Korean adoptee DeannBorshay Liem, which originally inspired eight-year-old Ying Ying Fry tocontemplate a film of her own. Fry’s mother, a writer, persuaded her thata book would be simpler, and the idea for Kids Like Me in China wasborn. The mother of an eighteen-year-old Korean adoptee wrote on theInternet: “My daughter says she belongs to four cultures . . . Korean,American, Jewish and Adoption. In my heart I feel her best bet is in theadoption community. It’s going to be very interesting to watch how thesenext few years play out.” The interaction between the young generation of Chinese and other adopted children and their older counterparts fromKorea and elsewhere will no doubt continue to play out in unanticipatedways, reminding us that adoption, like other forms of transnational kinship, is situated in a moment of increasingly unquiet, crisscrossingmigrations.

Notes

I am grateful to the Ford Foundation, especially to Alison Bernstein and JanicePetrovich, for support, and to the Center for Media, Culture, and History andthe Department of Anthropology at New York University for hosting me as a vis-iting scholar. Barbara Abrash made me welcome at NYU, and Faye Ginsburgorganized the conference that inspired both this article and the idea of a collec-tion of essays. Rayna Rapp first encouraged me to undertake this project. AnnAnagnost, Jane Brown, Sharon Carstens, Lindsay Davies, Faye Ginsburg, CindiKatz, Laurel Kendall, Eleana Kim, Rayna Rapp, Nancy Smith-Hefner, MargaretWiener, Barbara Yngvesson, and especially Charles Zerner shared ideas and readdrafts. I thank New York’s FCC for accepting me as an ethnographer as well asparent, and the listserv participants who allowed me to use their words.


1. Field research for this article was primarily carried out in New York City(2001–2), supplemented by seven years of informal “participant observation” as an adoptive parent in New York and by Internet materials and listservs that represent a more broadly North American population. Some names have beenchanged, and identifying information has been omitted for listserv participantswho requested anonymity. This article does not address differences in communi-ties throughout the United States or Canada, nor does it deal with families whohave chosen to raise their children as “just American.” Nonetheless, membershipin FCC and Internet participation encompass a very large percentage of adoptivefamilies. Statements in this essay about “most” or “many” adoptive parents orchildren must be understood in terms of these constraints.

2. For statistics, see travel.state.gov/orphan_numbers.html.3. In the late 1990s, one writer counted more than one thousand articles

published in the popular press in a mere two years (Cecere 1998, 82). This inter-est is paralleled by coverage of adoption in general. See Hallmark Channel’srelease in 2002 of a thirteen-hour series, “Adoption” (www.hallmarkchannel.com).

4. Transnational adoption is also surging in Europe and Australia.5. Whereas adoption from Russia parallels the Chinese case in terms of dates

and numbers, issues of race and difference have not emerged with the samesalience, nor have the communities that mobilized around Russian adoptionbecome as vocal (Scroggs 2000). Most adopted Russian and Eastern Europeanchildren are considered “white” in the United States (although in their birthcountry they may be stigmatized as Roma) and may to some extent resembletheir adoptive parents. Even families with children from Latin America or India,where racial differences are often marked, have not organized as actively andvisibly as their China counterparts. In the North American imaginary, Chinaand Chinese “culture” are paradoxically deemed both exotic and accessible.

6. In 1999, the age limit was lowered to thirty years both for foreignadopters and for Chinese parents wishing to adopt in China.

7. Prior to quotas issued in 2001 that limited single-parent applications to 5percent of each adoption agency’s total, such adoptions constituted 25 to 35 per-cent of the total (Smith and Kelly 2002, 4). An earlier set of regulations prohib-ited gay and lesbian parents from adopting.

8. Other forms include sex-selective abortion. The growing use of ultra-sound scans to determine gender is partly responsible for sex ratios that havebecome increasingly skewed since 1980. The 2000 census reported a ratio ofalmost 117:100 males to females (Gittings 2001). “The numbers tell a frighten-ing story: little girls are being eliminated from Chinese society . . . on a massivescale” (Greenhalgh and Li 1995, 601).

9. Abandonment has painful consequences for parents, including punish-ments (fines and sterilization) if they are caught. We know little of emotional con-sequences, but Johnson et al. describe one birth mother who “wept silently beforewe even began to speak; several years after abandoning her second daughter sheremained undecided as to whether she would ever proceed with another preg-nancy despite the fact that she held a certificate of permission to give birth againand was under great pressure from her husband, and in-laws. She vowed that ifshe did decide to become pregnant, she would never again abandon one of herbabies regardless of the gender” ( Johnson, Huang, and Wang 1998, 480–81).


10. On the West Coast and Hawaii, there are many families with one ormore Asian American parents (Wang 1999).

11. Other reasons include the American public’s fascination with China, amix of longings for some mysterious “East” and fear of its contemporary power.Orientalizing and ambivalence take gendered forms with respect to adoptionfrom China. On the one hand, Chinese girls are represented as adorable, evenexquisite; on the other, they are viewed as victims of a cruel and oppressive soci-ety that devalues women and discards its precious daughters. These representa-tions pose dilemmas for adoptive parents, who see their children as neither“China dolls” nor “abandoned girls.”

12. Adoptive parents have no way of knowing their child’s birthplace; allthey know is where the child was found.

13. In San Francisco, where a third of FCC children have at least one AsianAmerican parent, FCC marches without a banner, merged with the whole paradeas members of local schools or Chinese American groups (Klatzkin 2001).

14. At a workshop on transnational adoption at Spence Chapin AdoptionAgency in New York (6 March 2002), parents responded to social worker JoyLieberthal’s talk about the importance of Asian role models by lamenting thefact that in their virtually all-white communities there were no Asian doctors orteachers; the only Asians worked in restaurants or Laundromats. Lieberthal sug-gested that children should see all sorts of Asians because they, too, will somedaybe mistaken for the delivery boy (or girl).

15. The influx of resources from abroad may have unintended, less benefi-cial consequences, as some officials “have grown accustomed to the benefits ofinternational adoption and seem less than eager to promote the domestic adop-tion of healthy children” (Johnson 2002).

16. “When you go to the doctor you do not have a medical history and youare not a person,” commented an adoptee in Finkler’s study of the medicalizationof family and kinship, a sentiment shared by almost every adoptee Finkler met(2001, 241).

17. For girls, the birth policy story offers a partial answer to the question:Why didn’t my parents keep me? It is a somewhat comforting possibility thatbirth parents had no choice but to relinquish their female babies. But for parentsof the 5 to 10 percent of adopted Chinese children who are boys, the standardgendered narrative is not helpful. One mother wrote: “I’ve had parents react toour family as though we didn’t ‘really’ adopt from China because we adopted aboy . . . because we didn’t save one of these precious little girls that had been dis-placed because of the one-child law. I’ve even had people suggest we should haveturned down our referral or perhaps sued our agency for not making us moreaware that boys were even a possibility. . . . We were, for the record, one of themany families each year that writes a gender-neutral application, paints the nurs-ery pink, then gets surprised by the referral of a son. Like most of these families,we got over our shock and went ahead with the adoption and lived happily everafter (except for having to repaint the bedroom)” (Ridenour 2002). This com-ment raises the question of how inclusive is the adoptive “community” in a worldwhere girls so clearly predominate.

18. The market for such trips is growing rapidly: Liedkte (2002) offered tenoptions, including “Yangtze River Camp Cruise” (see your daughter’s home-town before it is submerged by the Three Gorges Dam, on a ship outfitted to resem-


ble a splendid palace, offering onboard tai chi, kite flying, and seminars). Otherorganizations that have sponsored Korean and other “heritage” tours for yearshave begun to add China to their repertoire.

References

Adolfson, Nathan. 1999. Passing through. 27 min. NAATA. Video. Anagnost, Ann. 2000. Scenes of misrecognition: Maternal citizenship in the age

of transnational adoption. positions 8: 389–421.Borshay, Deanne Liem, . 2000. First Person Plural ( video). National Asian Amer-

ican Television Association. Brown, Jane. 2002. [email protected], Wayne. 1998. Family matters: Secrecy and disclosure in the history of adoption.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Cecere, Laura. 1998. The children can’t wait: China’s emerging model for intercoun-

try adoption. Cambridge, Mass.: China Seas.Chang, Kimberly. 2001. Personal communication.Chen, Vivia. 1999. No recipe for being Chinese-American. Families with Children

from China 6: 17–18. Davies, Lindsay. 2000. Navel gazing. Families with Children from China 7: 18–19.Eggert, David. 2002. By sheer chance, Chinese twin toddlers are reunited. Seat-

tle Post-Intelligencer, 4 April.Eisenberg, Freda. 2002. [email protected] B. Donaldson Adoption Institute. 1999. Survey of adult Korean adoptees:

Report on the findings. New York: Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute.Evans, Karin. 2000. The lost daughters of China: Abandoned girls, their journey to

America, and the search for a missing past. New York: Putnam.Finkler, Kaja. 2001. The kin in the gene: The medicalization of family and kin-

ship in American society. Current Anthropology 42: 235–63.Fry, Ying Ying, with Amy Klatzkin. 2001. Kids like me in China. St. Paul, Minn.:

Yeoung & Yeoung.Gittings, John. 2001. Lost and found. Guardian, 17 August.Greenhalgh, Susan, and Jiali Li. 1995. Engendering reproductive polity and prac-

tice in peasant China: For a feminist demography of reproduction. Signs 20(spring): 601–41.

Guibault, Kahleah Maria de Lourdes. 2000. Family and adoption. Adoptive Fam-ilies (November–December): 52.

Higginbotham, Julie. 2002. IAT or [email protected], Kay. 1993. Chinese orphanages: Saving China’s abandoned girls. Aus-

tralian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 30 (July).———. 1996. The politics of the revival of infant abandonment in China. Popula-

tion and Development Review 22: 77–98. ———. 2002a. Personal communication. ———. 2002b. Politics of international and domestic adoption in China. Law

and Society Review 36.Johnson, Kay, with Huang Banghan and Wang Liyao. 1998. Infant abandonment

and adoption in China. Population and Development Review 24: 469–510.Klatzkin, Amy. 2001. Personal communication.Klatzkin, Amy. 2002a. [email protected].


———. 2002b. Personal communications in 2001 and 2002. ———, ed. 1999. A passage to the heart: Writings from families with children from

China. St. Paul, Minn.: Yeoung & Yeoung.Leader, Melinda. 2001. Citizen Amy: Adopted from China, five-year old Amy

Speth pledges her allegiance as a U.S. citizen. Ladies’ Home Journal, July, 136.Lewis, Rose A. 2000. I love you like crazy cakes. New York: Little, Brown.Liedtke, Jane. 2002. OCDF China tours (brochure). Bloomington, Ill.: Our Chi-

nese Daughters Foundation.Lifton, Betty Jean. 1994. Journey of the adopted self: A quest for wholeness. New

York: Basic Books.Modell, Judith. 1994. Kinship with strangers: Adoption and interpretation of kinship

in American culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.Ouellette, Françoise-Romaine, and Hélène Belleau. 2001. Family and social inte-

gration of children adopted internationally: A review of the literature. Montreal:INRS-Univèrsité du Quèbec.

Pertman, Adam. 2000. Adoption nation: How the adoption revolution is transform-ing America. New York: Basic Books.

Prager, Emily. 2001. Wuhu diary: On taking my adopted daughter back to her home-town in China. New York: Random House.

Putnam, Conan. 2002. Dancing to her music. Real Simple: The Magazine aboutSimplifying Your Life, 11 February.

Rapp, Rayna, and Faye Ginsburg. 2001. Enabling disability: Rewriting kinship,reimagining citizenship. Public Culture 13: 533–56.

Ridenour, Barb. 2002. [email protected], David. 1968. American kinship: A cultural account. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press.Scroggs, Patricia. n.d. Building cultural bridges for internationally adopted chil-

dren. Unpublished manuscript. Shanley, Mary. 2001. Making babies, making families: What matters most in an age of

reproductive technologies, surrogacy, adoption, and same-sex and unwed parents.Boston: Beacon.

Shenyang. 2002. [email protected], Lesley. 2002. [email protected], Joann and Kelly, Joe. 2002. New adoption regulations set quotas, restrict

singles. Families with Children from China 9: 4.Stephens, Sharon, ed. 1995. Children and the politics of culture. Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press.Vonk, M. Elizabeth. 2001. Cultural competence for transracial adoptive parents.

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from China. Master’s thesis, University of Hawaii.Weil, Richard. 1984. International adoptions: The quiet migration. International

Migration Review 18: 276–93.Yngvesson, Barbara. 1997. Negotiating motherhood: Identity and difference in

“open” adoptions. Law and Society Review 31: 31–80.———. 2000. Un niño de cualquier color: Race and nation in intercountry adop-

tion. In Globalizing institutions: Case studies in regulation and innovation,edited by Jane Jenson and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 247–305. Alder-shott, England: Ashgate.

———. 2002. Personal communication.


On a hot August afternoon in a bucolic setting on the outskirts ofKwangju, South Korea, a palanquin was hoisted up and brought to thesite of a canopy tent, under which a table, laden with food, alcohol, andtwo live chickens, rested. An elderly Korean man intoned directions into a microphone and an interpreter called out the translation in English.Around fifty Koreans, the women dressed in Korean hanbok, surroundedthe tent, and all eyes were on the heavily made up bride as she was helpedout of the palanquin, her face turned down into her hands, elbows raisedto either side of her head. She and the bridegroom knelt on opposite sidesof the table, rising awkwardly to kowtow several times, pouring and cere-moniously sipping alcohol from carved out gourds—and thus enduredthe elaborate ritual of a traditional Korean wedding ceremony.

In this pastoral location, the authenticity of the ritual performancewas made conspicuous by tennis shoes and sports sandals peeking outfrom beneath the hanbok (which were poorly fitted––some too large andsome too small for their wearers) and by men in tank tops and shortslooking on from a distance. As the spectators stood on tiptoe and cranedtheir necks to observe the careful gestures of the bride and groom, theirgazes were frequently interrupted by the aggressive movements of televi-sion camera crews. Some onlookers were elbowed out of the way by cam-erapeople getting into position, another was hit in the head more thanonce by a camera being wielded on a cameraperson’s shoulder.

This was not, by any means, a typical Korean wedding––in fact, it wasnot even a legitimate union between a man and a woman.1 The presenceof the cameras and their intrusiveness on the experience of those watchingsuggested that the real intended audience was elsewhere, on the other sideof the lens. The audience here was being captured as part of the samespectacle—for ultimate consumption by the Korean public.

In fact, the “wedding” was staged for a group of overseas Koreanadoptees, invited and hosted by the South Korean government under theauspices of the Overseas Koreans Foundation (OKF), a division of SouthKorea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The roles of bride andgroom were played by Korean adoptees, and the onlookers were, for themost part, other adoptees or, like myself, camp counselors.2 It was theseventh day of a ten-day program in which thirty adoptees, ranging in age

Eleana Kim

Wedding Citizenship and Culture

KOREAN ADOPTEES AND THE GLOBAL FAMILY OF KOREA


from sixteen to thirty-four and hailing from North America, Europe, andAustralia, participated. On this day, perhaps aggravated by the heat, frus-trations had mounted, and the presence of the media only made thingsworse. Later, some complained to me that they felt like “animals in azoo,” made a spectacle of as they were transported from location to loca-tion on what one adoptee called “the orphan bus,” emblazoned with abanner that read “2001 Summer Cultural Awareness Training Programfor Overseas Adopted Koreans” [kukoe ibyang tongp’o moguk munhwayeonsu] in Korean and English.

I begin this article with a story from the 2001 OKF summer program tosuggest how the attempts and gestures of the South Korean state to grant“Koreanness” to overseas Korean adoptees come into conflict with thedesires and experiences of adopted Koreans themselves.3 The OKF program was in many ways an attempt to wed Korean adoptees to“Korea,”4 an invitation to the “motherland” so that they might, as offeredby the president of OKF, “begin to feel the breath of Korea’s rich culture.”The OKF program was cohosted by Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link(GOA’L), a four-year-old adoptee-established organization that in Janu-ary 2002 received NGO status from the South Korean government, andby Bridge of Adoptees from Chonnam Kwangju (BACK), an independentvolunteer Korean organization headed by a local businessperson. It occu-pied the participants with activities that included trips to ancient palacesand courses on Korean “traditional” food and customs, thus introducingthem to a folklorized vision of Korean culture.5 Attendees were largelydiscouraged from experiencing contemporary urban South Korean life,aside from one afternoon of sightseeing in Seoul, several hours at Korea’slargest amusement park, and a presentation of the ROK’s military prowessat the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). One day of the program was devotedto the third annual GOA’L conference, where issues such as search forand reunion with birth families and the human rights of adoptees wereaddressed. Although the OKF participants constituted the majority of theconference attendees, they were not involved in the conference proceed-ings or presentations.

The wedding of Korean adoptees to Korea has both political andaffective dimensions that are mutually informing. Transnational Koreanadoptees have recently been legally incorporated into the “global family”of South Korea as part of the cultural and economic “globalization” pol-icy (segyehwa) nominally inaugurated under former president Kim YoungSam and expanded under president Kim Dae Jung (see S. Kim 2000).OKF, established in 1997, is the prime government agency for incorpo-rating overseas Koreans (chaeoe tongp’o) and has as its mission “to serve as

58 Eleana Kim

the spokesperson on behalf of overseas Koreans worldwide. We recognizetheir immense contributions, which have provided a tremendous boost,not only to the Korean economy during the 1997 economic crisis, but alsothe morale of Koreans everywhere” (Overseas Koreans Foundation2001). Overseas Koreans are welcomed back as part of a global economicconsolidation project as well as to participate in Korea’s global reputation.Recently gaining recognition as “overseas Koreans” in 1999, adopteesare now also eligible for F-4 visa status, which allows them, as overseasKoreans, to stay in Korea for up to two years with rights to work, makefinancial investments, buy real estate, and obtain medical insurance andpensions.6 Yet this recognition of their political and economic citizenshipdisregards the difficulties of negotiating the “cultural citizenship” ofKorean adoptees in South Korea and elsewhere.7

The ritual ceremony described above, I argue, reveals how Koreanadoptees’ “identity,” existing as it does between available diasporic cate-gories, both in the West and in South Korea, is brought into visibility atmoments when the motives of the state come into contradiction with thelived, felt experiences of adoptees in their “birth country,” as they unearththeir pasts, recover embodied memory, and confront the “elsewhereness”of their “authentic” identities. Encounters with the South Korean statethus become awkward weddings of “culture” and “citizenship,” wherestagings of identity, orchestrated by the state, provoke unintended and unan-ticipated effects among adoptees, opening up the possibility for resistantpractices and alternative senses of belonging. This article offers a prelim-inary examination of the dynamics between the South Korean state andKorean adoptees, based on participant observation conducted in thesummer of 2001 at the OKF program and in September 1999 at the firstGathering of the First Generation of Korean Adoptees. I examine thesetwo sites to demonstrate how a collective adoptee consciousness is beingelaborated in active relation to the South Korean state, provoked by“disidentification” with hegemonic versions of being “Korean.”

The camp was a government-sponsored “motherland” tour and theGathering an adoptee-organized biannual conference that has planted theseeds for what is emerging as a self-consciously global movement. Despitethis important difference, both sites provide lenses onto the complex waysin which Korean adoptees encounter “Korea.” Moreover, they demonstratethat the diversity of Korean adoptees’ experiences frustrates attempts atbroad generalization. Not only do differences among them cut across per-sonal histories and nationalities, they also transgress boundaries of class,race, gender, and sexuality, as well as religion, generation, and region.8

Adult adopted Koreans negotiate a complex relationship to Korea ina globalized economy that has made it possible for them to recognize

59Korean Adoptees and the Global Family of Korea

their own ethnic identity in new ways, both individually and collectively.This identity is also being reformulated by the South Korean state in lightof a broader political and social transformation that places Korean adopteesin an ambiguous position—being at once reminders of a difficult pastand beacons of an ideal, global future (see Hubinette 2002). This essayalso explores this dialectical relationship by posing questions about cul-tural citizenship and national belonging for a diaspora that is being newly(re)valued by the South Korean state.

Disidentification

Muñoz (1999) employs the concept of disidentification to reference a strat-egy of cultural survival in which subaltern performances of differencebecome “rituals of transformation” that render visible the boundaries ofsymbolic meaning and the constructedness of naturalized social cate-gories. From a less psychoanalytically inflected perspective, Lowe (1996)writes that “disidentification expresses a space in which alienations, inthe cultural, political and economic senses, can be rearticulated in oppo-sitional forms. It allows for the exploration of alternative political and cul-tural subjectivities that emerge within the continuing effects of displace-ment” (103–4). I draw upon both Muñoz and Lowe (extending theirdiscussions of minoritarian cultural politics in the United States into atransnational context) to argue that it is precisely in the moments of“disidentification” with the official narrative of the South Korean statethat the “adoptee” as a problematic social category becomes visible.9

Against the attempted enrollment of adoptees into the mythic nationalnarrative or into an ahistorical folklorist spectacle, Korean adoptee “auto-ethnographies” and what I call “sites of collective articulation” (E. Kim2001) constitute individual and group visibility through expressive formsand social practice. I interpret these practices as inscriptions of an unoffi-cial history of adoption from South Korea, one in which histories of dis-location and displacement reveal the possibilities for counterhegemonicreimaginings of social relations. It is through translocal practices thatKorean adoptees are constructing and questioning their “roots” againstthe autochthonous master narrative proffered by the Korean state.

Ritual performances produced by the South Korean state, like thewedding ceremony, encourage Korean adoptees to participate in enact-ments of Koreanness, yet they also produce a conflicted sense of culturalbelonging, often provoking feelings of inauthenticity and alienation—andsometimes active resistance. Moreover, the welcoming embrace offered toKorean adoptees by the South Korean government is also a stifling one,

This identity is

also being

reformulated by

the South Korean

state in light of a

broader political

and social

transformation.

60 Eleana Kim

one that requires “forgetting,” in order to present adoptees as harbingersof the global future of Korea.

For many adoptees who go to South Korea, the past weighs heavily,whether as something to actively explore through birth family searches oras something to defer. Many confront their individual histories and under-standings of cultural identity and belonging in ways that they may neverhave done before. This sense of belonging is, in some ways, connected to“Korea” as nation-state and ethnic-cultural paradigm, but it is also pro-duced out of a disjuncture from “Korea.” The social memory of transna-tional Korean adoptees is necessarily fractured, diverse, and deterritorial-ized. And, as Korean adopteeness is increasingly articulated by a collective,global, and deterritorialized community, collective histories, constructedthrough shared storytelling, constitute a kind of “disidentificatory” prac-tice out of which Korean adoptee cultural citizenship emerges.

For most of the participants, the OKF program was an opportunity tocome to South Korea, to meet other adoptees, and to share their stories.For some of them, it was a chance to seek information about their birthfamilies or to try to meet their foster parents. The program, however,was geared toward “cultural training.” Under pressure from her superior,the director of the program laid out very strict rules of attendance andcurfews, making many participants, who were adults in their twenties andthirties, feel infantilized. Not a few participants, therefore, felt their desireswere frustrated or ignored by the camp organizers, who planned anexhausting and tightly packed itinerary that kept them occupied in “cul-tural training” activities for twelve to fifteen hours a day. Because of thetight schedule, groups of adoptees often stayed awake until four or fiveo’clock in the morning to socialize in a relaxed atmosphere and to sharetheir personal stories.

According to the OKF Web site, its intention was “to promote Korea’srich cultural heritage, and to give the resident Koreans abroad a chance toexplore their motherland and gain better understanding of Korea throughlanguage study, cultural training and touring. Through such training,[OKF] aspire[s] to help Korean adoptees understand and appreciate theirKorean identity” (Overseas Koreans Foundation 2001). The programthus constructed the adoptees as tourists, with an emphasis on their lackof cultural competence over an acknowledgment of their intimate andembodied ties to Korea and to their biological families. Moreover, thestatement above points to an underlying assumption that Korean adopteeshave a “Korean identity” that they need to “understand and appreciate”and thus to a central tension between opposing notions of identity aseither biologically given or culturally achieved.

In addition, the program became an opportunity for the Korean


media to dramatize adoptee stories, to spectacularize their lack of culturalknowledge, and to highlight the Korean government’s efforts to welcomeadoptees back to their “motherland.” The media became a problematicpresence, underscoring for many adoptees the instrumentalizing logicbehind the program itself. Indeed, the “adoption problem” in Korea isone that the major broadcasting stations have exploited in recent years.The increasing numbers of adopted Koreans returning to South Koreaevery year are particularly vulnerable to the voracious media appetite formelodramatic content, especially issues surrounding family separation,cultural loss, and transnational contingency.10

For some adoptees, traveling in a group that clearly marked them as“tourists” made asserting their rights to Koreanness very important. Dur-ing the trip to the amusement park, one adoptee from France was talkinganimatedly with other French-speaking adoptees as they were being har-nessed into an adventure ride. The ride attendant, clearly curious abouttheir cultural backgrounds, asked if they were Japanese or American. I wasabout to answer that they were from France, when the French adoptee,fluent in French and English and competent in basic Korean, pointed tohimself emphatically and asserted, in English and Korean: “I’m Korean!Hankuk saram!”

In encounters between adoptees and “Korea,” a play of authenticityand difference merges and collides with discourses of nationalism andglobalization, creating a range of contradictions, in the midst of which, Iargue, an increasing number of adoptees are finding a place to inhabit andmake claims to being “Korean.” Conferences and roots tours serve assites for performances of “culture” and also for the articulation of multi-ple losses—of birth family, of cultural “authenticity,” of psychic whole-ness, of personal history and memory, and of legitimate citizenship. Thesecounterdiscourses oppose the facile attempts of the state and adoptioninstitutions to imbue adoptees with “cultural roots” or diasporic “identi-ties.” “Korea” as the site of primary dislocation thus also becomes a site ofconflicting identifications. Through these encounters one can begin tosee the ways that the Koreanness of Korean adoptees is being conjured,appropriated, and incorporated, and how their complicated histories bothcomply with and resist those appropriations. Adoptees’ disidentificationfrom the construction of Koreanness offered by the South Korean stateproduces a counterhegemonic production of Korean adopteeness, and theproliferation of “sites of collective articulation”––activity in cities aroundthe world and on the Internet––constitutes alternative locations for theproduction of Koreanness, Korean adopteeness, and for the emergence ofa collective history.11

62 Eleana Kim

The Global Movement of Korean Adoptees (I)

The history of adoption from South Korea spans five decades, whichmakes South Korea’s the longest continuous foreign adoption program inthe world. Harry Holt, an evangelical Christian and logging magnate fromOregon, became a legendary figure in Korean adoptee history when heand his wife, Bertha, adopted eight GI babies in 1955. Largely because oftheir efforts, both the Korean and the U.S. governments hastily passedlegislation to facilitate the rescue of these children (Sarri, Baik, and Bom-byk 1998). The Holts soon established the Holt Adoption Agency (nowHolt International Children’s Services), which continues to be the leadingagency for transnational adoption today. Following the first wave ofmixed-race children came full-blood Korean “orphans,” relinquished inlarge part due to extreme poverty, a lack of social service options, and astaunchly patrilineal, “Confucian” society that places primal importanceon consanguineous relations, especially on the status that comes withbearing sons. According to Altstein and Simon (1991, 4), South Koreaallowed “almost unrestricted adoption” of orphaned and abandoned chil-dren from the 1950s through the 1970s.

Whereas the women who relinquished their children in the 1960s and1970s tended to be poor factory workers, by the 1980s, as South Korea’seconomic boom took off, unmarried college-age women were giving uptheir babies. Today, a trend in teen pregnancies has supported the supplyof adoptable babies. No doubt, factors such South Korea’s rapid indus-trialization, uneven economic development, patriarchal attitudes aboutwomen’s sexuality, residual gender ideologies in contradiction with liberalsexual practices, and the recent IMF crisis serve to perpetuate the socialconditions that contribute to the abandonment or relinquishment of chil-dren in South Korea.

Between 1955 and 1998, over 197,000 South Korean children wereadopted in South Korea and abroad, with around 150,000 having beensent overseas. Approximately 100,000 of those adopted were sent toAmerican families, the rest adopted into European families. In the UnitedStates, South Korean adoption accounted for over half of the total inter-national adoptions during the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1989, with mostcountries sending less than one-tenth of 1 percent of live births abroad,South Korea was sending 1 percent of live births (Kane 1993, 336); at itspeak, this totaled over 8,000 children in one year alone.

North Korea had already criticized the South Korean governmentfor its liberal adoption policies in the late 1970s, and the government sub-sequently took steps to reduce the numbers of foreign adoptions by insti-tuting the Five Year Plan for Adoption and Foster Care (1976–81), which


included measures to promote domestic adoption (Sarri, Baik, and Bom-byk 1998). Then, when South Korea achieved international recognitionand honor as the host of the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, it alsoreceived negative scrutiny from the American press for exporting its“greatest natural resource,” its children. Reportedly bringing in $15 to 20million per year, adoption in South Korea had become a business and acost-effective way of dealing with social welfare problems (Herrmann andKasper 1992; Sarri, Baik, and Bombyk 1998).

Due to growing ignominy in the eyes of the international community,the government soon announced a plan to gradually phase out adoption,implementing a quota system to reduce the number of children sent abroadby 3 to 5 percent a year. In addition, state policies in the early 1990s encour-aged domestic adoptions through tax incentives and family benefits andgave preference to foreign couples willing to adopt mixed-race or “specialneeds” children. An eleven-year decline in transnational South Koreanadoption was reversed with the IMF crisis, which caused a concomitantcrisis of overflowing orphanages. In 1996, approximately five thousandchildren were placed in state care, and that figure was projected to be dou-ble in 1998, leading the Ministry of Health and Welfare to announce that it“has no choice but to make changes to recent policy which sought torestrict the number of children adopted overseas” (C.-k. Kim 1999).

Adoption from South Korea has proven to be extremely sensitive toeconomic fluctuations and concerns over the nation’s international repu-tation. As recently as July 2002, following the successful cohosting of the2002 World Cup games, the government announced a series of measuresto further bolster the nation’s image that included a plan to end overseasadoption (Shim 2002). It is too soon to determine whether this new planwill, in fact, lead to the end of international adoptions from South Koreaor whether it, too, will be set back by economic pressures, as has been thecase with other such plans over the past four decades.

What is certain is that South Korea, with the lowest social welfarespending of any OECD country (S. Kim 2000, 26), holds aspirations foradvanced-nation status that render its continued reliance on foreign adop-tion problematic. Economic and material realities suggest that these peri-odic abatement plans will continue to be shortsighted and ineffectual unlessadequate resources are developed for the welfare of women and children.Other problematic hurdles to the curtailment of adoption are related tothe deeply embedded patriarchal ideologies of Korea––the social stigmaassociated with single parenthood, the low status of women, and the“Confucian” rejection of nonagnate adoption—and they render the choiceof single motherhood in Korea a hazardous or wholly unfeasible one formost women.

64 Eleana Kim

Domestic adoptions have been on a slow yet steady increase since1995, with 1,726 adoptions by South Koreans in 1999, yet South Koreanadopters can only partially alleviate the problem of seven thousand chil-dren in need of welfare intervention each year (Jang 2000). Public educa-tion campaigns encouraging greater receptiveness to domestic adoptionhave been instituted by adoption agencies in South Korea, and increasingopenness among parents of adopted children has helped to reduce someof the stigma of adoption in South Korea. Foreign adoptions from SouthKorea have dropped to around 2,000 per year, yet the nation continues torank third in the world––after Russia and China––in the number of chil-dren adopted by Americans annually.12 The international movement oftwo thousand South Korean children is now matched by a reverse move-ment of 2,000 or more Korean adult adoptees who return to South Koreaevery year.

The Global Movement of Korean Adoptees (II)

With generations of adopted Korean children having come of age sincethe 1950s, elaborations of a distinctive “Korean adoptee” identity havebegun to emerge over the past few years. Many are now excavating theirown pasts and critiquing assimilationist models to ask questions aboutkinship, social relations, biological ties, and “family” ideology. Againstthe dominant discourses provided by Korean, American, and KoreanAmerican communities, they are actively exercising a Korean adoptee“voice” in the process of naming and constituting what one Korean Amer-ican adoptee has dubbed a “fourth culture” (Stock 1999). Their experi-ences as “pioneers” of transnational adoption have made them valuableresources for rethinking adoption policy and practice. Some individualsand groups are participating in the current and future practice of Koreanand transnational adoption as advisers and consultants to agencies andparents or as mentors for younger adoptees. And some adoptees are nowadopting children from South Korea themselves, building multigenera-tional Korean adoptive families.

The “fourth culture” of Korean adoptees is one based on a commoncore experience of being adopted and Korean. Yet the balance of thesetwo categories of identity varies among individuals, and for adoptees atboth the Gathering and on the OKF tour, other vectors of identity, suchas regional commonalities, seemed more relevant than being either Koreanor adopted. Nevertheless, the potent pull of “roots” has drawn a signifi-cant number of Korean adoptees to sites such as these to begin to explorequestions of kinship, ethnicity, and identity.


The ability of overseas adopted Koreans to imagine themselves aspart of a transnational community of adoptees and as “Koreans” has onlyrecently been made possible through global flows of communication andmedia and also through the direct intervention of the state, which hasbegun to publicly acknowledge adoptees as part of the modern “globalfamily” of Korea. Transnational flows and circulations have created moreopportunities for adoptees and biological families to find and meet eachother, with electronic registries and the Internet providing faster and moreefficient means of tracking and disseminating information.

In addition, over the past decade, the Internet has facilitated thegrowth of organized groups of adult Korean adoptees around the world.They are beginning to elaborate a counterhistory to the official narrativeof adoption produced by the South Korean state. Since the early 1990s, atleast a dozen adult adoptee organizations and support groups have sprungup worldwide—in Europe, Australia, the United States, and South Korea.Along with numerous listservs, Web sites, newsletters, magazines, and lit-erary anthologies, these “sites of collective articulation” provide spaces forthe voicing and exploration of shared historical origins and common expe-riences with assimilation, racism, identity, and dual kinship. Adoptees ofKorean descent are producing and managing a growing sense of collec-tivity from the available cultural and ethnic categories. They are perform-ing their own form of cultural work on the borderlands “beyond culture”(Gupta and Ferguson 1992) and asserting their position in a global “ethno-scape” (Appadurai 1996) constructed out of discourses of Korean dias-pora and transnationality.

Developing out of a common history and a growing globalized consciousness, this “imagined community” (Anderson 1991) negotiatesand brings to light a complicated and troubled relationship to “Korea” asnation-state, culture, and place. Common feelings of disorientation andalienation from Korean culture are expressed by adoptees who go back toKorea, and desires for “authentic” personhood (Yngvesson and Mahoney2000) frequently surface in adoptee activities of self-narration. These narratives suggest that the ideal of building bridges, of being “flexible cit-izens” (Ong 1999) or postcolonial hybrid subjects may be more com-pelling in theory than it is in lived practice (see Maira 1999). Trans-national Korean adoptees have historical, biological, and ethnic connectionsto their country of birth, yet, for many of them, those connections areabstracted from their everyday lives, having been raised in majority whitecultures in American and European Caucasian homes. A concern withidentity and loss emerges in much adoptee artwork, in which expressivepractice enacts a recuperative (re)production or (re)creation of a memoryof Korea that has been severed or forgotten (E. Kim 2001).

66 Eleana Kim

The Korean adoptee “movement” has been both a community-buildingproject and a political one, exhibiting concerns with both cultural struggleand social policy. Sites of collective articulation and the searches for selfand identity through different aspects of adoptee experience contribute tothe production of what Teshome Gabriel refers to as “a multi-generationaland trans-individual autobiography, i.e., a symbolic autobiography wherethe collective subject is the focus. A critical scrutiny of this extended senseof autobiography (perhaps hetero-biography) is more than an expressionof shared experience, it is a mark of solidarity with people’s lives andstruggles” (cited in Xing 1998, 93). The Gathering and the OKF pro-gram help to illuminate some of the translocal conjunctures that form thebroader context for the emergence of Korean adoptee heterobiography,constituted by their discursive and symbolic practices.

The Gathering

In September 1999, over four hundred Korean-born adoptees from thirty-six U.S. states and several western European countries congregated forthree days in Washington, D.C.13 Heralded as the “first significant anddeliberate opportunity for the first generation of Korean adult adoptees tocome together,” the Gathering of the First Generation of Korean Adoptees,or simply the Gathering, as it was called by participants, did not purport toadvance a specific political or ideological agenda but rather was describedas “a time for us to celebrate that which we all share . . . ” (Gathering 1999;ellipsis in original). Restricted to adoptees over the age of twenty-one and their spouses or partners, with some spaces reserved for “adoptionresearchers” and adoption agency “observers,” the Gathering was one ofthree major international public events of 1999 that, together, represent agrowing Korean adoptee presence and a self-conscious production of whatFraser (1992) calls a “counterpublic.”14

The Gathering was touted as the first conference organized by, andexclusively for, adult Korean adoptees. For many there, it symbolized animportant moment of self-determination in which they asserted theirautonomy from families, agencies, and governments—institutions that,since their relinquishment, had decided their fates and mediated theirrealities. The framing of adoption as an accomplishment was continuallyemphasized in the opening remarks of the conference, often with a senseof wonder, pride, or gratitude. No doubt, these dominant representationsexclude the negative experiences that many adoptees have endured due todisplacement, anti-Asian racism, and the social stigma that accompaniestransracial adoption.


The title of the conference, “The Gathering,” carries with it conno-tations of communalism, nonpartisanship, and quasi-religiosity, under-scored by the Korean translation that accompanied it, “da hamgae” (tahamgge). Translated as “all together,” this phrase is suggestive of a collec-tive voice, or chorus, singing in unison. As articulated by Susan Soon-Keum Cox—then vice president of public policy and external affairs forHolt International, conceiver and primary organizer of the conference,and herself a Korean-Caucasian adoptee who was adopted in 1956—theintention of the conference was to “focus on us,” that is, the adoptees, forwhom the “connection to the birth country is forever.”

This connection to the birth country for individual adoptees, how-ever, has been fraught and difficult and only recently acknowledged by theSouth Korean state. For some adoptees, their actual experiences in SouthKorea have been marked by perceived rejection, outright discrimination,and painful alienation. After returning to their birth country, “Korea,” formany of them, becomes demystified as a place of nostalgia or “home,” asthey come to accept that they are, as one American adoptee put it, “genet-ically Korean, but culturally American.” At the Gathering, “Korea”—asnation-state, as “culture,” and as memory—was diversely articulated bygovernment officials, adoption agency professionals, and adoptees. Anessentialized Koreanness was being drawn upon by all of those con-stituencies but in very different ways, bringing out conflicting interpreta-tions of whether or not Korean adoptees are “Korean” and, if they are,how they are.

The Global Family of Korea

In tandem with this recent proliferation of adult adoptee activity, the KimDae Jung administration has demonstrated a remarkably open attitudetoward adoptees—through policy reforms, public recognition of Koreanadoptees in South Korea, and official statements such as at this confer-ence. A symbolic break occurred in 1998, shortly after President Kim’sinauguration, when he invited twenty-nine Korean adoptees to the BlueHouse and offered them an unprecedented public apology. Along withvisa rights extended to adoptees, the opening of the Adoption Center in Seoul in 1999 indicates the government’s interest in openly addressingthe public stigma of adoption in South Korea.15 This recent recognition ofoverseas adopted Koreans has been credited in part to the advocacy andencouragement of President Kim Dae Jung’s wife, First Lady Lee Hee-ho.At the Gathering, First Lady Lee, presented via video and speaking inKorean with English subtitles, provided a matronly face for the symbolic

An essentialized

Koreanness was

being drawn

upon by all of

those constituen-

cies but in very

different ways.

68 Eleana Kim

“motherland,” embracing adoptees as a source of pride for adoptive par-ents, Korean culture, and the South Korean state.

Her video address emphasized the ethnic roots of Korean adoptees,exhorting them to “forget your difficult past and renew your relations withyour native country in order to work together toward common goals basedon the blood ties that cannot be severed.” Lee emphasized the role ofadoptees in the future of South Korea which, as she stated, is “developingday by day to become a first-rated nation in the twenty-first century. It will be a warm and reliable support for all of you.” Drawing upon a glob-alization ideology coupled awkwardly with metaphors of nurturance, hermessage was embedded in an economic discourse in which the SouthKorean nation continues to aspire to First World status. In this narrative,South Korea, which may have been unable to take care of its own in thepast, is now capable of incorporating and “supporting” its abandonedchildren.

South Korean ambassador Lee Hong Koo echoed the First Lady’ssentiments, adding that the role of Korean adoptees would be to build abridge “between the country of birth and the present country of citizen-ship.” These statements reveal a significant proactive shift on the part ofthe South Korean state in defining the ambiguous position of Koreanadoptees with respect to “the country of birth and the present country ofcitizenship.” The distinction between the two seems to posit an oppositionbetween the birth country—to which, as Susan Cox stated, “the connec-tion . . . is forever”—and the adoptive country in the West, which is thecontingent, “present” one of citizenship rather than of blood. The birthcountry thus stands as an “authentic” source of Koreanness, an inalien-able tie that binds Korean adoptees to the nation and, more overtly now,to the state.

The rhetoric of “success” that echoed throughout the opening ple-nary session was undoubtedly influenced by the elevated class status ofthese adoptees, as indexed by their college educations and professionaloccupations.16 Ambassador Lee noted in his speech, “You demonstratethe capacity to transform oneself from humble beginnings to success.” Inmany ways, then, adoptees would seem to reflect the same progress anddevelopment model offered by the narrative of South Korea’s miraculousand meteoric rise: out of a colonial past through the devastation of war toits ascendance as a newly industrialized “Asian Tiger,” boasting theworld’s eleventh largest economy in 1996. These expressions are tokens ofa larger national project that seeks to interpellate and co-opt adoptees asoverseas Koreans to be integrated into a modern, hierarchically struc-tured Korean “family,” even as the state and adoption agencies frequentlydiscourage or frustrate adoptee searches for their biological families. This


national project indicates a desire to construct certain overseas Koreans asproductive links between South Korea and the global economy, writingthem into a narrative of neoliberal capitalism that excludes “other” Kore-ans—women, biracial Koreans, and nonaffluent diasporic Koreans in theglobal South (see Park 1996). These adopted children, now adults, areframed as cultural and economic bridges to the West, as representatives ofKorean culture, and as potential mediators of global capital. The positionof the Korean adoptee vis-à-vis the state thus reveals the competing dis-courses of nationalism and globalization for a modern, industrializednation dominated by U.S. economic and cultural imperialism.

What emerged during the conference, however, was a disidentificationbetween the rhetoric of the South Korean state and the lived experience ofadoptees, who feel disconnected, culturally foreign, and ontologically dis-placed in South Korea. What constitutes their ties to South Korea is pre-cisely those memories of the “difficult past” that Lee Hee-ho exhorted theadoptees to “forget.” Unearthing those memories is part of the process ofreturn, search, and reunion for many of these adoptees. As Lisa Lowe pointsout, “political emancipation through citizenship is never an operation con-fined to the negation of individual private particulars; it requires the nega-tion of a history of social relations” (1996, 26–27; emphasis in original).The “forgetting” of personal and national trauma is encouraged not onlyin American multiculturalist ideologies but also in the recent attempts bythe South Korean government to produce a homogeneously “Korean” yetheterogeneously dispersed “family” based on shared ancestors, or “blood.”

Against the narrative of “success” and “achievement” that character-ized the opening plenary session, the adoptee-centered workshops compli-cated the meanings of that “success,” with attendees sharing intimate andpainful memories of Korea, their childhoods in America, and the negativeexperiences of living in a white culture––with a “white” name and familybut an Asian physiognomy.17 The experiences of adoptees in South Korea,as expressed in a workshop I attended,18 reflected a sense of disappoint-ment in the failure of the fantasy of “home” to live up to reality. For someit was a very painful time, as they faced their pasts, confronted their feel-ings about being adopted, and worked out complicated issues about race,ethnicity, and culture. Many expressed amazement at finally being in aplace where they looked like everyone else, but also spoke of the difficultyof not “relating” to Koreans or Korean culture. Others had more positiveexperiences, with one attendee insisting that one or two trips would not beenough; he had been back to Korea six times, because “you have to go sev-eral times to understand your relationship to [Korea].”

Overwhelmingly, across all of the workshop groups, adoptees expressedfeelings of discrimination from Americans and feelings of rejection from

These adopted

children, now

adults, are framed

as cultural and

economic bridges

to the West.

70 Eleana Kim

both South Koreans and Korean Americans. The perception of being“looked down upon” was linked by adoptees to interactions with SouthKoreans who treated them as objects of pity. Other adoptees mentionedmeeting South Koreans who were surprised at how well they had grownup, for they had only heard sensationalist stories about sexual abuse andslavery of adopted children by foreigners.

A survey of participants at the Gathering found that 40 percent of respondents said they identified as Caucasian in their adolescence andperceived Asians as “the Other” (Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute1999). For adoptees who grew up isolated from others like them and whoidentified primarily as Americans, therefore, racial discrimination posed aparticularly difficult form of double-consciousness. Even the most empa-thetic parents were perceived as unable to fully relate to the experienceof racism, thereby intensifying feelings of alienation and racial difference.Some described it as a pendulum swinging back and forth between“Korean” and “American” sides. Many agreed with one attendee’s sensethat “Koreans reject the American side, Americans reject the Korean side,”adding that “Koreans reject the adoption side. For them, I [have] no fam-ily, no history.”

Adolescent adoptees who were encouraged to make connections totheir Korean “heritage” by their adoptive parents often rejected thoseattempts, feeling that the culture pushed on them was “overdetermined,”as if they were “the only ones with an ethnic identity.” As one adopteesaid, “Kids just want to fit in and be normal,” and many agreed that theyfelt most comfortable in “mainstream” white culture. Another adopteedescribed her identity as being “about culture, and your culture is notyour face—but you’re pinpointed for that all your life.” But the recogni-tion of a broad historical and cultural shift was clear; as one adopteestated, an “international identity is emerging,” and another informed hiscohort, “Don’t you know? Asian people are ‘in’ now.”

Much of the cultural work emerging at sites such as the Gathering iscentered on the articulation of double-consciousness, as well as a double-orientalizing move, one based on reified understandings of “culture” and“nation.” Adoptees who may feel alienated from Korea as well as from“traditional” Korean or Korean diaspora communities often Otherize“Korea,” even as they attempt to understand what it means “to be Korean.”So, while many adoptees used the metaphor of a pendulum to describethe experience of swinging between Korean and American “sides,” thereis also a tendency to speak of being “Korean” in ethnicized and essential-izing ways. At the same time, however, the Korean state is invested in aself-orientalizing project that is tied to tourist discourses and its ownvision of itself as an “Asian Tiger” (see Ong 1999).


This double-orientalizing move complicates any easy interpretationsof Korean adoptee articulations of identity as subaltern interventions andinstead calls for an investigation of the dialectical relation between thesepractices and the dominant notions of being Korean in the diaspora and inSouth Korea. Louie (2000) writes about the Chinese American youth on“roots” tours to China, arguing that the tours raise “tensions . . . betweenhistorically rooted assumptions about Chineseness as a racial categoryand changing ways of being culturally, racially and politically Chinese (inChina and the diaspora)” (655). Adoptees, occupying an ambiguous andtroubled place in the Korean imaginary, raise similar tensions. As remindersand remainders of South Korea’s Third World past, the “illicit” sexualpractices of Korean women, and American cultural and economic impe-rialism, they are the specters of a repressed history, one on which theofficial narrative of South Korean modernity utterly depends.

Yet adult adoptees now occupy a peculiarly privileged position in the context of the global economy. Having been reared in predominantlymiddle- to upper-middle-class white families, adoptees may lack cultural“authenticity,” but this is seen as a necessary loss in return for the benefitsof material wealth, “success,” and the opportunities afforded by the West.In this way, international adoptees may be considered literal embodimentsof the contradictory processes of “globalization.” The play of identity anddifference that characterizes Korean transnational transracial adoption isone in which Koreanness is a national, political, and cultural discoursethat seeks to interpellate adult Korean adoptees into a productive role inthe global economy, and one that Korean adoptees face when theyencounter other overseas Koreans and especially when they return toSouth Korea.

At the district office of Kangdong-gu, Seoul, South Korea, a conferenceroom was set up for a special citizenship ceremony. A cameraperson fromthe Educational Broadcasting System (EBS), who’d been following thegroup everywhere, was joined here by other camera crews from othermajor stations. I was asked to explain to the adoptees that the reason theywere invited was to receive an identification card and a certificate of hon-orary citizenship (myeonggyekumin) to Kangdong-gu, an outlying districton the eastern edge of metropolitan Seoul. The adoptees were welcomedby the mayor of Kangdong-gu, who, in his ardently delivered speech,went so far as to suggest that each adoptee consider Kangdong-gu to behis or her “hometown” (kohyang).19 “If you get lost, you can tell peoplethat you are from Kangdong-gu.” They should, he said, feel free to con-tact the district office if they had any problems while in Korea. Anothercounselor, who lives in the district, whispered to me, “They can’t even

72 Eleana Kim

help the people who live here—how are they supposed to help them [theadoptees]?” Each adoptee was ceremoniously given a certificate and an IDcard with his or her picture and Korean name––neither of them were offi-cial documents but rather symbolic artifacts intended as a gesture of wel-come to the adoptees.

A volunteer representative for the adoptees, a college student fromMassachusetts, then rose and gave words of appreciation to the mayor onbehalf of the group. She was overwhelmed with the show of generosityand broke down in tears. As the event was wrapping up, a twenty-year-oldmale adoptee from France, now living in Seoul, asked if he could getinformation at the district office about changing his visa status but wastold to contact the office at a later time. The group was invited out to acelebratory dinner/karaoke party, and afterward I asked two Americanadoptees what they thought of the ceremony. One of them, echoing thesentiments of the woman from Massachusetts, said in earnest, “It was so nice of them. I can’t believe it. They really didn’t have to do this.” The adoptee from France and another from Italy offered starkly differentimpressions. They were deeply offended and compared the ID cards totoys, agreeing with each other that “they are treating us like children.”

Perhaps due to the stifling summer humidity or to their poor con-struction, the Kangdong-gu ID cards, laminated pieces of cardboard withpassport-size photos pasted on, started to break apart within a few days.By the end of the trip, the adoptees, despite differences in age, nationality,personal histories, and individual concerns, had come together to expresscollective outrage at the program organizers and the Korean government.After a lengthy meeting from which counselors were prohibited, theyappeared as a united group, confronting the camp organizer with a list ofdemands. They felt that their camp experience had been co-opted andabused by the South Korean government, primarily through the media.They demanded to have a meeting with the president of OKF to presenttheir concerns about the program. Many felt that they had been misin-formed about the program, which had initially advertised on its Web sitethat assistance would be provided for birth family searches. They werethoroughly cynical, believing that “it’s all about money.” More than oneadoptee said, “This is about the media and the World Cup. They’re usingus to show how great adoption is.”

There was a strong sense of solidarity within the group, overcominglatent rifts due to cultural and linguistic barriers between the English-speaking and French-speaking adoptees. Yet some did exhibit ambiva-lence, expressing their gratitude to the Korean government for hosting thetrip and to the director and counselors for their efforts and their friend-ship, whereas others were incensed enough to threaten to leave the group


entirely. One adoptee from Chicago told me that the program was the firsttime he’d felt like he “fit” among a group of people, and for many of theadoptees on the trip, for whom this was the first time they had met otheradoptees like themselves, it seemed to be a very memorable, if not a trans-formative, experience.

An Internet group was set up shortly after the trip ended, and therehas been talk of a transatlantic reunion as well as of coordinated tripsback to Korea. A lively exchange has been maintained, full of informationand advice about, among other things, living in Korea, language programs,job announcements, adoptee conference updates, how to talk to one’sadoptive parents about the desire to search, and the difficulties of dealingwith racism and discrimination in Korea and at home. An adoptee fromChicago has started an adoptee organization there and is networking withother Korean adoptee organizations.

The Diasporic Futures of Korean Adoptees

Korean transnational adoptees present a challenge to anthropological cat-egories of diaspora and hybridity that are used to describe transnationalsubjects marked by dislocation and/or deterritorialization. Perhaps most sim-ilar to “exiles” or “refugees,” adoptees are distinct because of their emi-gration as children. The aspect of agency that grants a measure of rationalchoice to the exile, even under extreme duress, is, arguably, of a lesser degreeand kind for the adoptee. Adoptees’ connection to “homeland” is oftenembodied yet disconnected from practical consciousness, and they oftenlack any images or documents of their preadoption pasts. For this reason,in many Korean adoptee cultural forms, including the program for theGathering, preadoption photos and documents are fetishized and presenta talismanic aura. Often they are displayed as a juxtaposition of “before”and “after” photographs, outlining a trajectory from one location to another,from one name and possible identity to another.

Gupta and Ferguson (1992) discuss the power of imaginary “home-lands” for diasporic or exiled peoples: “The relation to homeland may bevery differently constructed in different settings. Moreover, even in morecompletely deterritorialized times and settings—settings where ‘home’ isnot only distant, but where the very notion of ‘home’ as a durably fixedplace is in doubt—aspects of our lives remain highly ‘localized’ in a socialsense” (11). The first Gathering and the OKF program, I argue, werelocal sites that encouraged the exploration of subjectivity and group iden-tity, mediated through available discourses on cultural citizenship andbelonging. For adult adoptees, located at the borderlands beyond “cul-

74 Eleana Kim

ture,” Korea presents a problematic site of identity, memory, and desire,and for adoptees who have returned to their country of birth, the commonexperience of demystification, largely due to negative experiences withKorean ethnocentrism, leaves many with a stronger feeling of loss and ofbeing without “home.”

In discussing issues of national identity with an adoptee from Ger-many and one from France, I asked, rather naively, if they couldn’t imag-ine themselves as being both Korean and German, or Korean and French,as I try to imagine myself as both Korean and American. The Frenchadoptee asserted, “You need to be situated in a nation. It’s too idealistic to think that you can live in between. You need to be sure in a concretereality.” As the cases of the OKF camp and the Gathering indicate,hybridity, or dual belonging, is often felt to be an uncomfortable in-between state that is an undesirable, or even untenable, location. Unableto be fully “French” in France or even “American” in the United States,they are likewise unable to be fully “Korean” in South Korea or in theKorean diaspora. For another young French adoptee who declared, “Idon’t like France and I don’t like Korea,” the question still remains,“Where can I go?”

A possible answer to that question might be that “home” is where youmake it. Based on this research, I argue that, as Lowe (1996) attests,“Displacement, decolonization and disidentification are crucial groundsfor the emergence of . . . critique” (104) and for the emergence of alter-native histories. And as Barbara Yngvesson suggests, the potential for a “cosmopolitan, counterhegemonic consciousness among adoptees” islatent in the proliferation of discursive activity and shared social practice(2000, 305). Sharing stories and imagining community is, like the pro-duction of “public intimacy” in the disability community that Ginsburgand Rapp (2001) describe, a form of “mediated kinship” that, in this case,offers a critique and remodeling of both kinship and national belonging inSouth Korea and elsewhere.

Public recognition of adoptees in South Korea has also come aboutthrough the work of adoptee activists in Korea who have mobilized forgreater awareness and sensitivity to adoptee issues. GOA’L is now recog-nized as an NGO in Korea, and the newly appointed chair of its board ofdirectors is a member of the South Korean National Assembly. Adoptionis a recurring political issue of major significance, and the continuingconcern with South Korea’s global economic and political position mayresult in more attention to the role adoptees can play in bolstering thenation’s international reputation. In addition, an interest in overseas Kore-ans in general has been growing in South Korea, with special “diaspora”showcases in art exhibits and film festivals that seem regularly to include


Korean adoptee work. There are a number of Korean adoptee artists liv-ing and working in South Korea, performing their own interventions andproducing activist media related to their experiences in South Korea andas adoptees. Some Korean American adoptee groups also articulate a self-conscious bridge-building role between South Korea and the UnitedStates, thus echoing the rhetoric of the South Korean state.

This increasing visibility of Korean adoptees in South Korea and inthe world carries with it the ambivalences and contradictions inherent inpolitical representation and the concomitant dangers of co-optation andappropriation, especially since transnational Korean adoptees are beingcourted by the South Korean government in unprecedented ways andwith unclear motives. As adoptees are further accepted into the “globalfamily” of Korea, their complex histories, as the events of the OKF pro-gram suggest, may become reduced to spectacles of national and culturalalterity, thus denying a history of violence and displacement in favor ofhomecoming and national reunion.

Adoption from South Korea is central to understanding South Koreanmodernity. It continues to be a part of its “postcolonial” history that is atonce repressed yet crucial to understanding how the official narrative ofSouth Korea’s “economic miracle” and “struggle for democracy” erasesthe violence of the military regime and ignores the draconian developmentand misogynistic population policies that produced South Korea’s “suc-cessful” capitalist transformation. As Chungmoo Choi (1997) writes,“Assuming South Korea to be postcolonial eludes the political, social andeconomic realities of its people, which lie behind that celebrated sign‘post’ of periodization, without considering the substantive specificity ofKorean histories” (349). My work is also, therefore, concerned with the“substantive specificity of Korean histories,” in particular, a history thathas bodied forth in the past several years with the unexpected and unprece-dented return of over 2,000 adoptees to South Korea every year, a pre-viously unimaginable scenario for adoption agencies and the government.

Adoptees and social activists in South Korea have criticized the state’scontinued reliance on international adoption as a social welfare policysolution (Sarri, Baik, and Bombyk 1998) and its complicity in the perpet-uation of gendered inequalities. Birth mothers—often working-classwomen, teen mothers, abandoned single mothers, sex workers, and vic-tims of rape—represent the most subordinated groups in an entrenchedpatriarchy and misogynistic state welfare system, and are brought intothe public gaze with the arrival of adoptees and their desire to locate theirsocial and biological connections.

Adoption from South Korea resulted from the initial crisis of orphansand mixed-race GI babies during the Korean conflict and continued as a

76 Eleana Kim

product of rapid economic and structural transformations, as a conse-quence of Cold War population and development policies intended tobuild national “stability.” Adoption flourished as a profitable enterprise inthe 1970s and 1980s, during a period of political repression and massivesocial unrest. As adult adoptees organize a political voice, their collectivecountermemories—composed of individual memories (and lack of mem-ories) of Korea, often tragic and painful preadoption histories, and returntrips to South Korea—are important articulations of personal andnational history that demand further investigation.

Moreover, transnational Korean adoptees challenge dominant ideolo-gies that conflate race, nation, culture, and language in the definition ofwhat it means to be “Korean,” and this distinctive subject-position poten-tially disrupts facile culturalist and nativist assumptions about belongingand identity. There are a number of competing claims to the adoptee’sKoreanness—from the state, adoption agencies, adoptee groups, andadoptee artists—wherein nostalgia, “authenticity,” and “tradition” aremobilized in the production of Korean “culture” and “identity.” Theseclaims have important ramifications for other internationally adopted indi-viduals and adoptive communities who are themselves negotiating thevexing question of cultural heritage.

As the cultural work of Korean adoptees demonstrates, Korean adop-tion has as much to do with reimagining kinship as it does with recastingdiaspora. Transnational families are becoming commonplace in many areasof the world, and the deep ethical ambiguities of adoption are increasinglybeing publicly explored in transnational adoption communities, includingthat of Korean adult adoptees (see Volkman in this issue for a discussionof the Chinese adoption community). Korean adoptees, with their adop-tive families and their biological families, are building “superextended”families (Roe 1994) and also a sense of kinship among themselves. Thiscommunity, based initially on common experience, is extending into onebased on solidarity and shared experience. Recognized as Korean, theyare making claims as Koreans, but with a difference.

Notes

I gratefully acknowledge the James West Memorial Fund for Human Rights forsupporting the research in South Korea on which part of this article is based. Aportion of this paper was presented at Hampshire College in 2001 at the “Where,How, and to Whom Adopted Children Belong” conference/workshop organizedby Barbara Yngvesson and Kay Johnson. I appreciate their generous invitation to present my work there. Many thanks also to Toby Volkman for her invaluablework in making this issue of Social Text possible and for her important critical


feedback. Elise Andaya, Jackie Aronson, and Leo Hsu also offered insightful sug-gestions on earlier drafts of this article. I owe very special thanks to Faye Ginsburgfor her ongoing support and mentorship. Any errors or omissions are my own.

1. Folk weddings such as this one have long been out of fashion in Koreawhere, since the 1960s, syncretic “modern” wedding forms involve Western-styleunions of individuals rather than the symbolic joining of households and patrilin-eages. There was a resurgence of traditional-style weddings in South Korea in the1980s, yet even so a number of the South Korean counselors at this wedding cer-emony were fascinated by the performance, as they had never witnessed one before.See Kendall 1996.

2. The counselors were all native Koreans who spoke English, some ofwhom were volunteers for GOA’L. We were all paid nominally. As the onlyKorean American counselor, I was frequently asked to perform as a Korean-English interpreter and was relied upon by the director of the program to makeannouncements to the adoptees in English. There was also a Korean-Frenchinterpreter.

3. I place “Koreanness” in scare quotes as an indication of the inherentlyunstable field of reference it attempts to denote. For reasons of style, however, Iwill use the term without quotes in the remainder of the paper.

4. “Korea” in this article designates an idealized concept of South Korea asa cultural entity, geographic region, and national political unity. I use “Korea” inquotes to indicate a reified notion that conflates place, culture, and identity anduse South Korea (without quotes) wherever possible to indicate the specificity ofthe South Korean state and its bounded geopolitical territory.

5. There have been a proliferation of “motherland” tours for adoptees inrecent years, and the 2001 OKF camp can in no way be deemed representative.Some, especially those organized by adoption agencies, make birth parent searchescentral to the program; others, like this one, focus primarily on “culture” or lan-guage training.

6. Unlike other overseas Koreans, however, adoptees must be able to provethat they were born in Korea by providing documentation from their adoptionagencies.

7. For a discussion of anthropological theories of cultural citizenship, see Siu2001. Siu writes, “Cultural citizenship extends the conventional understanding ofcitizenship as a legal-juridical category to include the qualitiative and differentialexperiences of citizenship in everyday interactions and situations” (9).

8. There are clear differences in experience and racial formation betweenEuropean adoptees and their North American counterparts that cannot be ade-quately addressed in an article of this length.

9. Certainly, overseas adoptees experience “disidentification” from the hege-monic cultural and racialized scripts in the countries where they were raised, andthis alienation most likely contributes to the desire to connect to “Korea,” tolocate an “authentic” identity. This essay, however, focuses on the local encoun-ters between adoptees and “Korea,” and can only suggest the relationship betweentheir feelings of alterity in majority white societies of the West. For a comprehen-sive study of cultural identity issues among Korean adoptees in Minnesota, seeMeier 1998.

10. Reporters are a significant source of information and assistance foradoptees searching for their birth families. They can help adoptees who are

78 Eleana Kim

unable to navigate the bureaucratic channels due to language barriers. Newspa-pers run advertisements with identifying information and television news pro-grams show brief clips of adoptees on their searches. It seems to be a mutuallybeneficial arrangement, for if the reporter can find the adoptee’s biological family,he or she has clinched a story (see Adolfson 1999).

11. At the second Gathering, it was reported that “some participants startedthinking that they were part of their adoptive country, and then they discoveredthe Korean culture. Today, they realise that they do not associate with being nei-ther Korean nor their adoptive country [sic]; they begin to associate with peoplein Korean adoptee associations” (Sloth 2001, 30).

12. In 2002, however, this trend was broken by a significant increase in thenumber of Guatemalan children adopted into the United States, while SouthKorean adoptions, under the quota system, remained steady. For the first time,Guatemalan adoptions exceeded those from South Korea.

13. The large majority of the four hundred participants were from theUnited States, with around a dozen adoptees from European countries. For thisreason, the perspectives of adoptees in the United States tended to dominate thediscussions. The Oslo Gathering in 2002 was primarily attended by Europeanadoptees, mostly from Scandinavia.

14. The other events were the Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (GOA’L)Conference in Seoul and the Korean American Adoptee and Adoptive FamilyNetwork (KAAN) Conference in Los Angeles. Both are annual conferences thatare now in their fourth year. Fraser writes, “Subaltern counterpublics have adual character. On the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal andregroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training groundsfor agitational activities directed toward wider publics. It is precisely in the dialec-tic between these two functions that their emancipatory potential resides” (1992,110).

15. In December 2002, Roh Moo Hyun was elected to succeed Kim DaeJung as South Korea’s next president. The presidential elections were overshad-owed by increasing tensions between the United States and North Korea follow-ing North Korea’s announcement of its clandestine nuclear weapons program,and were accompanied by massive anti-American protests in South Korea overthe acquittal of U.S. military personnel who killed two Korean schoolgirls in atraffic accident. Many believe that Roh’s successful campaign capitalized onSouth Koreans’ anti-American sentiment and widespread opposition to the Bushadministration’s handling of the North Korean situation. Roh’s election signalspopular resistance to the paternalism that has characterized the relationshipbetween the two nations since the Korean War. Adoption from South Korea tothe United States has always depended on a close political alliance between thetwo countries, and the recent tensions and shifts in this relationship will undoubt-edly have significant effects on adoption policy and practice.

16. According to a survey of the Gathering participants, 70 percent hadgraduated from college, 24 percent had graduate degrees, and 15 percent wereenrolled in university or postgraduate work.

17. It is important to note that although most adoptees at the conferencewere raised by white, middle-class families, there was a great deal of diversitywith respect to color, racial identification, class, and sexuality.

18. The adoptees were divided into six groups according to the years inwhich they were adopted, with a seventh for adoptees’ spouses and partners. I sat


in on one session, a group of over fifty adoptees who had arrived between theyears of 1967 and 1970.

19. Of course, the adoptees, all having been born in Korea, have their ownkohyang.

References

Adolfson, Nathan. 1999. Passing through. 27 min. NAATA. Video.Altstein, Howard, and Rita Simon, eds. 1991. Intercountry adoption: A multi-

national perspective. New York: Free Press.Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and

spread of nationalism. New York: Verso.Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Choi, Chungmoo. 1997. The discourse of decolonization and popular memory:

South Korea. In Formations of colonial modernity in East Asia, edited by TaniBarlow. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century.Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute. 1999. Survey of Adult Korean adoptees:Report on the findings. New York: Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute.

Fraser, Nancy. 1992. Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critiqueof actually existing democracy. In Habermas and the public sphere, edited byCraig Calhoun. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Gathering of the First Generation of Korean Adoptees. 1999. Conference pro-gram, Washington, D.C., 10–12 September.

Ginsburg, Faye, and Rayna Rapp. 2001. Enabling disability: Rewriting kinship,reimagining community. Public Culture 13: 533–56.

Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1992. Beyond culture: Space, identity, and thepolitics of difference. Cultural Anthropology 7: 6–23.

Herrmann, Kenneth J., Jr., and Barbara Kasper. 1992. International adoption:The exploitation of women and children. Affilia 7: 45–58.

Hubinette, Tobias. 2002. The adoption issue in Korea: Diaspora politics in the ageof globalization. Paper presented at the seventh annual Korean Studies Grad-uate Student Conference, Harvard University, 12–13 April.

Jang, Ok Joo. 2000. Government policy to promote adoption. Paper presented atthe International Seminar to Promote Domestic Adoption, Holt Children’sServices, Seoul.

Kane, Saralee. 1993. The movement of children for international adoption: Anepidemiologic perspective. Social Science Journal 30: 323–39.

Kendall, Laurel. 1996. Getting married in Korea: Of gender, morality, and modernity.Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kim, Chang-ki. 1999. Foreign adoption on the increase. Chosun Ilbo, 11 January.Kim, Choong S. 1988. Faithful endurance: An ethnography of Korean family disper-

sal. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.Kim, Eleana. 2001. Korean adoptee autoethnography: Refashioning self, family,

and finding community. Visual Anthropology Review 16: 43–70.Kim, Samuel S. 2000. East Asia and globalization. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and

Littlefield.

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Kim, Yeon-kwang. 2000. Adoption restrictions to be removed. Chosun Ilbo, 7March.

Louie, Andrea. 2000. Re-territorializing transnationalism: Chinese Americans andthe Chinese motherland. American Ethnologist 27: 645–69.

Lowe, Lisa. 1996. Immigrant acts: Asian American cultural politics. Durham, N.C.:Duke University Press.

Maira, Sunaina. 1999. Identity dub: The paradoxes of an Indian American youthsubculture (New York mix). Cultural Anthropology 14: 29–60.

Meier, Dani. 1998. Loss and reclaimed lives: Cultural identity and place in KoreanAmerican intercountry adoptees. Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota.

Modell, Judith. 1994. Kinship with strangers. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Muñoz, José E. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of poli-tics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible citizenship: The cultural logics of transnationality. Durham,N.C.: Duke University Press.

Overseas Koreans Foundation (OKF). 2001. Summer cultural awareness trainingprogram guide.

Park, Hyun Ok. 1996. Segyehwa: Globalization and nationalism in Korea. Journalof the International Institute 4.

Roe, SoYun. 1994. My husband’s families: Kinship in an international Koreanadoptive superextended family. Master’s thesis, University of Southern Cali-fornia.

Sarri, R. C., Y. Baik, and M. Bombyk. 1998. Goal displacement and dependencyin South Korean–United States intercountry adoption. Children and YouthServices Review 20: 87–114.

Shim Jae-yun. 2002. Measures to improve national image unveiled. Korea Times,10 July.

Siu, Lok. 2001. Diasporic cultural citizenship: Chineseness and belonging in Cen-tral America and Panama. Social Text 69: 7–28.

Sloth, Kirsten. 2001. Official report of the second international gathering of adult Korean adoptees. Oslo, Norway: G2 Planning Committee. www.adopteegathering.org/2ndgathering/g2_report.pdf.

Soh, Ji-young. 2000. Domestic adoptions growing. Korea Times, 6 August.Stock, Kimberly K. H. 1999. Rise of a fourth culture: Korean adoptees. Transcul-

tured 1: 11.Strong, Pauline T. 2001. To forget their tongue, their name, and their whole rela-

tion: Captivity, extra-tribal adoption, and the Indian Child Welfare Act. InRelative values: Reconfiguring kinship studies, edited by Sarah Franklin andSusan McKinnon. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Xing, Jun. 1998. Asian America through the lens: History, representations, identity.Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira.

Yngvesson, Barbara. 2000. Un niño de cualquier color: Race and nation in inter-country adoption. In Globalizing institutions: Case studies in regulation andinnovation, edited by Jane Jenson and Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Aldershot,England: Ashgate.

Yngvesson, Barbara, and Maureen Mahoney. 2000. “As one should, ought andwants to be”: Belonging and authenticity in identity narratives. Theory, Cul-ture, and Society 17: 77–110.


This essay considers the place of visual media, specifically child portraitphotography, in the culture of international adoption. In 1999 my hus-band and I began to research transnational adoption for what was to be apersonal process: adoption of a toddler-aged child into our family, whichincluded a three-year-old biological son.1 I found myself immersed in avisual culture in which portraits of institutionalized children available foradoption circulated with surprising ease. Images of “waiting children”performed multiple functions in the adoption process.2 Brochures enclosedwith agency mailings displayed child images captioned with brief bio-graphical or medical data. Agency Web sites offered photolisting links thatin some cases facilitated the sorting of children by sex and region for easeof selection. These images functioned initially as lures, drawing prospec-tive clients3 into the adoption market, helping them to imagine “their”child or themselves as parents of children “like these.” Beyond this, someindividual images became, for some clients, a coveted family photograph,representing an imagined future family member much as a fetal sonogrammight do. Waiting child images also served as tools in medical screening.Many agencies advised clients to submit photographs or video footagethey provided, along with the child’s sometimes sketchy medical records,for evaluation to one of a handful of practices specializing in adoptionmedicine before making a commitment to one child. In this use, the imagefunctions somewhat like prenatal test data, in that it is screened for possi-ble empirical signs of pathology. A physician’s reading of the photographor video thus could factor into a client’s decision to accept or reject areferred child.

Discussions among foreign officials, agency representatives, childadvocates, prospective parents, and parents about child image circulationhave impacted positions, policies, and practice among the agencies andcountries involved in transnational adoption. Concerns have included theproblematic nature of a system where children of poor countries becomecommodities and their images become advertisements in a global market,the enhanced potential for racial and esthetic discrimination in image-basedchild selection, and the child’s right to privacy. Transnational adoptionraises these and other problems deserving critical attention. This essaycontributes to these discussions by addressing the function of image classi-

Lisa Cartwright

Photographs of “Waiting Children”

THE TRANSNATIONAL ADOPTION MARKET


fication relative to client perceptions of a child’s cultural identity and health.First, I consider how child images are categorized by agencies in brochuresand computer data banks, to demonstrate how visual classification givesshape to children’s histories, identities, and futures relative to race, ethnic-ity, health, and ability. Second, I discuss the special needs classification andthe problem of discerning medical or developmental information from pic-tures. Screening and diagnosis of children at a distance is a challenge: thechild’s body cannot be accessed, and language and cultural differences makeinterpreting records difficult. Interpreting casual portraits for medical infor-mation has become a common practice in transnational adoption. My spe-cific example is the screening of child portraits for Fetal Alcohol Syndrome(FAS). This medical technique is beset, I will argue, with the historical prob-lem of pathologizing signifiers of cultural difference. I will consider someproblems in the analysis of “racially mixed” and “Asian” faces. Accom-modating for racial or ethnic differences in the establishment of bodilynorms, or discriminating between visual markers that are believed to signifyidentity and those that are believed to indicate pathology, are the impossi-ble tasks of FAS image analysis.4

I should be clear about my stakes in this essay. I write as a participantcritic in the transnational adoption world, occupying the roles of agencyclient, adoptive parent, and volunteer adoption coordinator. I did not shyaway from the use of child images in any of these roles. My place firmlyinside the world of adoption has done little to diminish my initial and ongo-ing concerns, as a scholar of visual media, about the troubling dynamicsof this image culture. The material I reference could easily be used to sup-port a critique of the practice of transnational adoption or its use ofimages. However, it would be misguided to condemn transnational adop-tion in total, to fault agencies for using images, or to criticize clients forlooking at or for using these portraits. To argue for the restriction of thesepractices would be to overlook the positive potential of global humanitar-ian movements that recognize the uses of global market systems. Torestrict the use of images per se would be to suggest that images, and par-ticularly those of the body, as a form of information have some uniquenegative potential beyond other forms of esthetic and informational mediaand they should therefore be subject to special restrictions. But images areused in a wide range of ways. My aim is to set out some of the troublingdynamics of this adoption image culture. I uncover the explicit and subtleways that children’s fates are determined not simply by the fact of dis-playing their images but by the meanings assigned to them in their inter-secting uses as advertisements, as family artifacts, and as medical infor-mation. Images as information, used as they are in this particular marketand movement, are the main concern of this essay.

84 Lisa Cartwright

Before moving on to my discussion of image classification, it is nec-essary to explain the status of international adoption in the 1990s and thebroader historical context of image use in adoption. The late 1990s saw a tremendous increase in numbers of adoptions into the United States.According to U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service statistics onimmigrant visas issued to orphans, international adoptions in the UnitedStates tripled between 1992, when 6,472 orphans were granted visas, and2001, when 18,699 orphan visas were issued. The bulk of the childrencame from countries in political and economic upheaval. Korea, China,Russia, and Guatemala topped the list. But the less familiar former Sovietrepublics and central and Eastern European countries undergoing politi-cal transitions were newly represented in these figures. The classificationof children from these countries concerns me most. In the 1990s thesecountries experienced, like Russia, soaring poverty rates and erosion ofthe health, education, and child welfare systems in their rocky transition toa market system.5

Parental relinquishment of children to state institutions in the 1990sconveniently matched demands for children in the affluent West—demandsthat outstripped domestic supplies in such categories as “Caucasian” chil-dren. These countries’ inability to adequately care for their own childrenprovided a rationale for the growth of an existing “helping” humanitarianmovement with a cause, the needs of children, that justified tacit disregardfor foreign national sovereignty. This disregard was aided by the moraljustification of international adoption in circumstances where a child’sparents had turned to alcohol or abuse, or simply willful abandonment, inresponse to economic and political upheaval. The statistical tracking ofsocial behaviors in the transition out of communism resulted in widerreporting of high rates of alcohol consumption and abuse, resulting in per-ceptions of alcoholism as a cultural attribute among some populations.6

Alcoholic parents became another rationale for transnational child res-cue, but also generated fears about the potential for FAS in these childpopulations.

At the same time that the specter of alcoholism as a potential culturalpathology took shape, the recent history of Soviet rule and the transitionto autonomy made it easier for Western child advocates to misread oroverlook other, less problematic, national identity signifiers. The childreninstitutionalized in newly independent nations like Georgia and Kazakh-stan, for example, may represent a range and mix of Asian, European, andMiddle Eastern heritages in their looks and cultural identities. Their looks might mystify or intrigue Western clients when they are not unam-biguously marked with familiar attributes of European looks, Caucasianlooks, Asian looks. These children are thus classified in ways that may not

85Photographs of “Waiting Children”

match local understandings of cultural identity,7 or their apparentlyambiguous or unfixed identities may make them more easily viewed byagencies, clients, and human rights advocates as essentially stateless. Pop-ulation shifts during Soviet rule resulted in a high degree of cultural mix-ing in the former republics, making assignations of cultural or regionalidentity a complex process even by agencies and clients who have knowl-edge of, and respect for, regional or newly autonomous national identitycategories.

In some countries, adoption out to more affluent countries was per-mitted as a marginally acceptable means of meeting the needs of some ofthe children abandoned to the state, and circulation of photographs wasacknowledged as a means of getting children placed. These countries haveincluded Kazakhstan, Romania, and, to a much more limited degreeMoldova, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Georgia. Countries permitting imagecirculation in some regions have also included Russia and India. Thevisual style of international adoption was not newly introduced duringthe international adoption boom of the 1990s, however. Throughout thetwentieth century, photographs were used as a means of child documen-tation in circumstances where children were abandoned or lost due towar, natural disaster, refugee movements, poverty, abuse, and other crises.Under some circumstances these identification and classification pho-tographs doubled as selection and placement documents, such as whenrefugee children were entered into the adoption market.8 Since the latenineteenth century, orphan asylums and state and private agencies involvedin domestic adoption and foster placement have used photographs notonly for child identification, documentation, and placement but also forsubsequent institutional record keeping on children adopted. The use ofportraits in the child selection process became more than occasional in the1990s with advances in consumer-grade digital and on-line reproductionand circulation image capabilities. Image use and manipulation becamemore common both in home family picture culture and in small businesspromotion—and adoption is both a family culture and a small businessentity.

These trends in image culture exactly paralleled the 1990s growth ofthe international adoption industry. Historian Julie Berebitsky points outthat since at least the 1920s, U.S. adoption culture has exhibited a tendencyto treat children as consumer goods and to view choice of child as adeserved consolation for families unable to produce children biologically.9

Choice on the basis of visually vetted criteria such as aesthetic and racialpreference, exotic appeal, appearance of health, or compassion in responseto apparent signs of disability or illness is not unique to the postmodernphase of adoption history. But with the rise in the 1990s of Web marketing

Image use and

manipulation

became more

common both

in home family

picture culture

and in small

business

promotion.

86 Lisa Cartwright

and digital image reproduction tools, images became more easily accessed,manipulated, distributed, and more easily analyzed. Thus they becamemore used, and more useful, in the selection process—as market lures, asfamily artifacts, and as medical information.

Classification: The Photographic Archives of Waiting Children

The official circulation of child images in adoption markets can be dividedinto two general categories. The first, photolistings, are general, some-times partial, lists of children that an agency represents. The second, indi-vidual referral images, are selected by the agency based on preferencesprovided by the client and sent to the client along with the child’s medicalrecords, as an assignment that may be accepted or rejected. I will considerthe former category at greater length.

Classification of children is an essential means of maintaining theflow of data, and hence children, across national borders. Images are noto-riously slippery items to classify, particularly when they are produced—like bodies and other “natural” objects—without the aim of classificationin mind. Photolistings are a typical way of organizing children for reviewby type. They are the one system of information about available childrento which a prospective client can have easy access. Photolistings provideground-level information about what “kinds” of children exist to clientswho may not be familiar with regional identities. They also facilitate selec-tion of a specific child from among categories such as sex, nation, and eth-nicity through the sorting functions available on computer lists. It is pos-sible to enter into an adoption contract with an agency and to adopt withoutencountering more than an occasional brochure of images of unidentifiedchildren or with as little visual material as a single referral portrait. But bythe late 1990s, most established, medium- to large-scale U.S. agenciesworking in more than one “market” (country) were using photographs asa means of attracting clients and providing data on children available inthose countries that permitted image distribution.

In three years of reviewing agency literature provided to clients(1999–2001), first as a prospective adoptive parent and then as a volun-teer coordinator, I only rarely encountered a listing of child data that didnot include photographs. I repeatedly experienced and heard accounts ofencounters with a photograph or photographs that suggested this datasource held a pivotal place in the overall adoption process for most clients.In some cases some children listed as available were represented by textonly, with the disclaimer that a photograph was not available, either due tocountry policy or because a picture had not yet been provided. And in


some cases access to an on-line child photolisting was password protected,requiring prior registration with the organization for user access. But inmost cases photographs were present or referenced as part of the expectedpackage of child information, and their reception marked an importantmoment in the client’s adoption process.

Before the 1990s, agency photolisting was based on the model of TheCAP Book, a nonprofit domestic adoption listing of children awaiting par-ents (hence the acronym CAP). Launched in Rochester, New York, in1972, CAP was a nonprofit child advocacy group that published a book-let listing five local waiting children for seven subscribers, including aphotograph and some personal information on each entry. Three yearslater, the New York State Legislature passed a bill requiring the photolist-ing of all children legally available for adoption who had been in fostercare for over ninety days, with the idea that this would increase chances ofpermanent placement. The next year, the state’s Department of SocialServices created its own photolisting booklet. Recruiting adoptive familiesthrough a directory of waiting children’s photos and biographies provedso successful that The CAP Book expanded into a national listing andbecame a model for other government and private agency adoption organ-izations. The CAP Book continues to circulate among adoption agenciesand future adoptive parent groups and through libraries around the coun-try. The list is also available on the Web.10

Refined consumer-grade image software and the introduction of theWeb transformed access to listings by making the ever-changing databasemore easily produced, updated, and distributed. The networked home com-puter made it possible for prospective clients to access listings withoutventuring out to an office, group, or library. Image software made it pos-sible to download and manipulate photographs. For example, one couldcrop a group photograph to create an individual portrait or isolate andmagnify a portrait area for physical detail. As I will explain shortly, thesechanges in technology maximized the photolisting’s function as a classifi-catory catalog with strong visual appeal, offering expanded personalchoice. By the late 1990s, portions of listings like The CAP Book werewidely available on-line without user restrictions in place—that is, withoutpassword protection of the site. Selection by sorting criteria and thusmore strongly by appearances became a possibility not only in domesticadoptions but also in foreign adoption markets where portrait distributionwas sanctioned. Consumer-grade digital cameras initially were not widelyavailable in most of the countries represented; however, high-resolution,easily reproduced portraits appeared with greater frequency as visitingagency staff and clients themselves returned from their adoption jour-neys with digital photographs and videos of children living in orphan-

88 Lisa Cartwright

ages.11 Technology left behind as gifts by clients and agency representa-tives for orphanage use also facilitated the flow of images.

Which children to list and how to present what information are cru-cial questions for agencies. Agencies do not photolist all the children theyrepresent. In some cases agencies opt to list older or otherwise hard-to-place children in the hope that this will increase their chances of place-ment. In other cases certain individuals become poster children, featuredcases that draw in clients who may subsequently be referred to anotherchild. In Web listings, visuals tend to predominate over text, providing moreinformation—sometimes by default. For example, the nonprofit agencyWorld Partners Adoption offers photolistings that mix children from theirsix regional programs in the categories of boys and girls. Children can besorted by sex or region. Each listing features a color portrait with a deco-rative border, accented with a regionally inflected design. The text typi-cally includes a child identification number, birth date, and description,which can be as minimal as: “This little boy is waiting for immediateadoption! Please contact us to find out more information!”

On-line international photolisting is fraught with practical problems,not the least of which is acquiring and representing adequate descriptivedata within the constraints of domestic, foreign, and international prac-tices and policies. By the end of the 1990s, images had become not only ameans of circulating data about children but also emblems of the promiseof transnational adoption to provide more data—and more accurate data.As medical documents in translation emerged as sketchy and unreliabledata sources, images gained a stronger role as apparently direct, unma-nipulated, and universally legible evidence. Records are regarded as unre-liable in a number of ways. Medical and personal records on family his-tory are not always well translated. Even when they are well translated,concepts and classifications of disease vary from country to country, mak-ing it hard to reclassify and thus assess a given child’s medical state. Intheir analysis of the International Classification of Diseases, GeoffreyBowker and Susan Leigh Starr note that classifying and interpreting datacross-culturally is a challenge for clinical researchers. They conclude thatdeveloping a flexible standardized medical vocabulary and a system ofparallel, multirepresentational forms to accomodate nonmatching infor-mation structures is crucial if health organizations want to communicatewith each other across cultural and language differences. But they alsodescribe the destructive consequences classification can effect, as in thecase of race reclassification under apartheid in South Africa.12

We find troubling condensations of race and disease classification intransnational adoption. Accuracy and consistency aside, a child’s recordscan be brief or nonexistent because they were lost or simply not kept, or


because a child did not have medical care. Foreign medical concepts andpractices are not always highly regarded or trusted by Western clients andtheir medical consultants. Regions of some countries, including Russia,have been rumored to list nonexistent medical conditions to justify to stateauthorities why children are up for adoption. In this context, the face ofthe waiting child looms in the world of transnational adoption as perhapsthe only seemingly intractable source of a child’s identity and certainly asidentity’s most apparently legible representation.

In light of this dearth of information, what does one “choose” whenone accepts a referral or chooses a child, before or beyond its appearance?To choose (accept) a child is to choose a national and ethnic identity toadd to one’s family. To choose an agency is to select one or a set of coun-tries, and in selecting a country, one is also selecting a racial group or setof possible racial groups. Most agencies work in one or a handful of coun-tries and those working in more than one usually require clients to specifya country or region as a first step in the referral process. With someexceptions, agencies have no official claims to exclusive representation ofparticular regions, particular orphanages, or even particular children.Agencies are granted permission to represent and ask orphanage person-nel for data on children by state or regional authorities, but this right isnot exclusive or binding, and policies vary and change, resulting in dif-ferent amounts and kinds of data at different times.13 Among countrieswhere agencies have set up markets, or even within a single country wheredifferent regional authorities’ policies vary (Russia or India, for example),differences in policy may result in a situation where one country or regionmay allow posting of pictures and data while another may prohibit it. Thespecific (inter)national “look” of an agency is thus dominated by thenational or regional child “types” that can be posted on brochures and inlists.

Classification is especially vexed for the bigger national agencies thatrepresent children in as many as a dozen countries, because they mustprovide information not only about individual children but first about thecountry or region in general, in order for clients to distinguish amongcountry options and understand what “kinds” of children are available inthose countries. Some agencies provide maps, descriptions of cities andorphanages, and links to national Web sites, tourist information, and evenrecipes as a way of educating their clients about choices within this firstlevel of category. Thus, first and foremost agencies market (or are ambas-sadors of ) national identities, and these identities are often regarded asracial.

It is not possible to cover the range of and changes in foreign policiesregarding image circulation, but it is important to note that agencies are

Agencies

market (or are

ambassadors of )

national identities,

and these

identities are

often regarded

as racial.

90 Lisa Cartwright

restricted in image access, use, and design.14 Restrictions, like any sort ofimage regulation, do not make images disappear but rather create newways of classifying and using them. For example, when Romania declareda moratorium on adoptions in 2001, it halted the entry of new childrenonto its national registry and into agency data banks. But it did allowadoptions of children who were already in the data bank at the time of the freeze. For the next year, agencies pooled their existing child listingsfrom Romania in order to maximize choice for those clients wishing toadopt from that country. This practice follows the same logic as real estatemultiple listings in that it benefits the agency to maximize choice forclients, even if some of the income from fees must be sacrificed to anotheragency.

There is also the rationale that maximizing child exposure is in theinterest of the children, making transnational multiagency marketing amoral choice. The first adoption photolisting to appear on the Internet,Precious in His Sight, is an example of this rationale in action. Started in1994, Precious is a not-for-profit service that pools images of over fourhundred children (with a cumulative total of over eight thousand by late2001) from more than thirty-eight agencies and facilitators, representingchildren in over fifteen countries. The listing is set up as a non-password-protected site that allows users to sort children by age, gender, and “coun-try,” a designation to which I will return shortly.15 Users interested in aparticular child or children are given the option to assemble a personal file(archive) of favorites or to link to an appealing child’s representing agencyimmediately. Precious is unique in that it allows potential parents who arenot yet clients to start with the choice of child image, rather than choosingagency or country first. An explicitly religious organization with a mis-sionary mandate to advocate for the adoption of institutionalized childrenon a global scale, Precious is organized around the child as the main“client” it aims to serve (without a fee, of course). The site presents to itsEnglish-language users a vast, ever-changing archive of available childrenthat is global but also sortable. Children are brought in from a wide rangeof countries and agencies and the data bank reaches an international audi-ence with Web access. The organization claims to get over a million hits amonth and updates its site hourly. Using a free, humanitarian multiple-listing approach like Precious, agencies collectively advertise more chil-dren to a wider base of potential clients beyond those who access theiragency site while also acquiring the stamp of a religious, humanitarianorganization.

Overall data does not exist on the effectiveness of Precious in actualadoptions; however, one agency representative quoted on the Precious


site indicates the site has a high rate of placement: “Just over half of thekids we placed last year were a direct result of Precious—folks seeing thechild and calling us. Another 10 to 15 percent was families that we said‘look at Precious’ and let us know what you think—those families thenproceeded to adopt one of the kids featured.”16

The role of photolistings as advertising for agency services and chil-dren is obvious. As noted earlier, however, this essay will not directly takeissue with market aspects of adoption or with the “problem” of images inthat regard. Rather, my narrower concern is how children are classified ata distance. As noted above, Precious groups children according to coun-try. But the actual countries listed change (in 2002 Kazakhstan and Guate-mala appeared, for example, but Romania and Russia did not), and othergeographic designators (continent names like Africa and Asia or theregional marker “Eastern Europe”) cover big groups of children. Thisinconsistency is not a flaw of the site but an artifact of both political shiftsin some regions (like Eastern Europe) and Western misperceptions aboutcultural likeness across regions (Africa or Asia, for example). These cate-gory-label choices do have particular outcomes in what clients under-stand to be the qualities or identities of the “stateless” children they view.What nationality is that one “sort” of child who attracts them from, say,Eastern Europe? Who, nationally speaking, is that one individual “Asian”child they are driven to pursue? Georgian or Indian? Chinese or Kazakh?And then there is the added feature of classifying children who are alreadysorted by agencies across different classificatory systems. Whereas thedesignation “Asian” may mean cultural heritage in one agency’s system,for another agency it may mean regional location.

The problem of distinguishing among category types raises interestingquestions about assumptions of identity that inform child selection fromregions of the world undergoing rapid political transformation and demo-graphic shifts. My example will be the Precious “country” designations ofAsia and Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic in Asia. Kazakhstan wasnot a part of the world adoption market before the mid-1990s, and henceits children did not appear in the Western image of the “Asian adoptivechild,” which was stereotypically Korean and more recently Chinese andfemale or Indian and female. Prior to Kazakhstan emerging as a classifi-cation in its own right on Precious, a child of European-Russian descentliving in a former Soviet republic in Asia might be classified under theregional grouping of either Eastern Europe (geographically wrong butethnically accurate) or Asia (geographically correct but ethnically inaccu-rate). The “wrong” classification could serve the purpose of groupingKazakhstan’s or Georgia’s European children with their similarly European-descended or European-“looking” counterparts in Eastern Europe, who

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also happen to share their experience of growing up during the transitionout of communism. But this classification would separate “European”Kazakhs from their geographic peers who are ethnically Kazakh—that is,those having Asian “looks” or documented Kazakh (Asian) heritage.Since Russia is currently not a country classification on Precious, we donot know whether that country’s children are classified by family heritageor by region: with, for example, Moscow’s orphanages being classedEuropean and Siberia’s Asian.

To be clear, my intention for this essay’s purposes is not to fault Pre-cious or any agency for not classifying children clearly or correctly—fornot “seeing” cultural difference, not recognizing new nations or discretereligious or cultural groups, not getting the concept of country right. Rather,classifying systems are internally inconsistent and changeable becausethey must keep up with political changes that impact identity formation ata time when the very categorical system that made “nation” the mostmeaningful relative to “identity” is in flux. It is not simply new child iden-tities that form in Western ranking of the children in nations in crisis butnew ways of seeing those nations. One outcome of this is that managingthe flow of children in and out of countries in social upheaval becomesone small way of managing Western understandings of global politics. Amore immediate outcome for our purposes, though, is that images, alwaysnotoriously hard to read for information about cultural identity, wreakeven more havoc in classificatory systems already fraught with internalchanges. Yet, by default and paradoxically, the casual portrait becomeshard data on cultural identity.

Visual classification assigns identities and hence fates to children notonly through assigning cultural identities but also by using images to clas-sify children according to health and ability. In this sense, adoption pho-tolisting is a historically recent example of physiognomic classification.However, it is important to note that physiognomic systems are not all thesame. The design and function of graphic and pictorial systems of bodilyclassification have varied historically. Physiognomies have been designedfor a variety of purposes, ranging from racial classification to the trackingof deviance to the discernment of medical conditions. Critiques of histor-ical instances of physiognomy are numerous and include many stand-points. The practices they consider span centuries.17 One general concernshared by most of these critiques, however, is the seemingly consistenttendency of physiognomies to blur distinctions between race or ethnicity,on the one hand, and pathology on the other. A particular variant of thehistorical race-pathology facial classification nexus emerges in transna-tional adoption medicine.

By default and

paradoxically, the

casual portrait

becomes hard

data on cultural

identity.


Classifying “Special” Children

Among adoption photolisting classifications, the category “special” or“special needs” is most deserving of attention as one that wreaks havocwith classification. For some agencies this category can include not onlythose children with documented physical, emotional, or developmentalillnesses or disabilities but also all children over the age of two. The argu-ment is that after age two a child’s chances for adoption—and his or herchances for a successful adjustment to a family—decline precipitously,making these “older” kids a special case.18 As a child ages in the orphan-age, the chances increase that he or she may have emotional or physicalproblems linked to deprivations of contact, love, and food. Or older chil-dren may come from homes where they sustained years of abuse or neglect.Thus the age classification “two and older” is an indicator of the need toexpect evidence of physical and emotional impairment and the need forspecial parenting skills or services.

With the surge of transnational adoptions out of orphanages in crisiscircumstances in the 1990s, we have seen the emergence of new disordercategories to describe the symptom groups unique to some of these chil-dren who experienced neglect and trauma. RAD (reactive attachmentdisorder) is a disorder diagnosed most frequently in children assigned theacronym PIC (postinstitutionalized children). RAD has earned its owntreatment centers and methods, including methods for training clients intherapeutic parenting. With the emergence of these categories of chil-dren, we also saw the growth of a new pediatric subspecialty, adoptionmedicine. Internet lists and a specialized professional and lay literaturededicated to the needs of the special needs PIC complete the picture.Some in the adoption community would go so far as to say that all “older”postinstitutionalized children are special needs children insofar as all enduredthe traumas of institutional life in impoverished states. Since there is noofficial guideline for such classifications, agencies decide within andamong themselves whether and how to assign children to this category.Indeed, racial mixing in itself can be a criterion for a child’s placement onthe special needs list. In a 2000 special needs list for a reputable agency,an apparently black child in a Russian listing appears alone among theotherwise Caucasian and Asian faces, its color the only “special” factorthat makes this child need special consideration.19

Whereas age may be a predictor of pathology and racial differencemay qualify a child for special classification, some serious existing dis-abilities and illnesses may escape notice entirely and therefore fail to getchildren onto an agency’s “needs” list. These are pathologies that onemight call “invisible”—that is, they make no mark on the body and are

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therefore not apparent as, say, cleft palate would be. They are also thoseconditions that a foreign medical system may not recognize in its currentlexicon of pathologies. Hepatitis C, a virus for which internationallyadopted children are emerging as a risk group, is one such invisible andunrecognized entity. In the United States, the hepatitis viral alphabet hasexpanded from A to H since the 1970s, with each letter representing a dif-ferent virus that impacts the liver.20 C is a relatively new designation, iso-lated in the 1980s; a test was developed for it in 1990. Throughout the1990s and into the early 2000s, the focus in most medical research and inthe media about the virus was on adult carriers of the virus who hadactive cases.

Recognition that hepatitis B and C were present in large numbers ofasymptomatic children was due in part to the fact that an unusually highnumber of children recently adopted from Third World and former com-munist countries were testing positive for the virus. Despite findings thatthe hepatitis C virus can remain in the body inactive for decades, becom-ing a chronic infection in an estimated 55 to 85 percent of those whocarry it, the media have continued to characterize the disease as an adultaffair. Risk behaviors noted are adult activities like drinking alcohol andinjecting drugs. Almost nothing is known about the etiology of hepatitis Cin the numbers of infected children who are known to have the disease orthe behaviors or circumstances that caused their infection, because untilrecently there were no child studies published. Estimates of undiagnosedchildren and adults who carry the virus are startlingly high, especially forAsian populations (for whom the estimate is one in three, with no specificsavailable on which Asian populations are represented in this figure).

Quite often adoptive parents are introduced to hepatitis B and C inthe circulation of professional literature written by specialists in adoptionmedicine and mailed to them by these specialists in the process of vettinga referral.21 This adoption medicine literature on hepatitis C is way aheadof the representation of the virus in other medical areas and in journalis-tic domains in its grasp of the virus’s impact on children and in under-standing the complex interlocking roles of region, race, poverty, and insti-tutional medical practices. Needle sharing, a lifestyle issue associated withadult drug users who contract hepatitis C in the United States, for aperiod had been a common practice in many orphanages during vaccina-tions. But there is no means of vetting a referral for the hepatitis viruseswith any certainty, either through the image or through medical records.Most countries in which international adoptions occur are not equipped totest for, recognize symptoms of, or treat any of the hepatitis viruses.Therefore the diseases would not show up in medical records (exceptwhere an agency staffs an orphanage with its own specialists). If an “invis-


ible” disability or illness is not part of a country’s medical lexicon, thenthe child who has it escapes special needs classification in the absence ofperceptible symptoms.

A paradox of the special needs classification, then, is that the imagecan as readily “lie” about a child’s health as it can reveal pathology. Yet thespecial needs classification can make or break a decision to adopt. For thechild classified as special needs who is adopted, the designation can deter-mine its future, setting into motion an educational plan, familial expecta-tions, and even, as we shall see below, laying out an imagined history ofcultural and familial pathology—even before the child enters the home.

From Referral Photograph to Diagnostic Tool: The FAS Face

Potential signs of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome may lead some portraits toland a child on the special needs list, perhaps in addition to medical dataindicating some of the developmental or behavioral problems linked to thissyndrome. Whereas the captioned photolisting invites appearance-basedselection and facilitates the process of personal choice in the adoptionprocess, the referral photograph usually accompanies a fuller set of med-ical data on a child. These might include a worksheet on which prospec-tive parents have indicated preferences in sex, gender, cognitive and phys-ical health, and race or ethnicity. These forms are usually accompanied bya disclaimer explaining that the child or children identified by the agencymay not meet the selected criteria and may have conditions unknown to the agency. In identifying a child to refer, agencies may rely on socialworker consultations, or they may consult the clients’ home study, a doc-ument that includes a detailed personal narrative and client family pho-tographs.

The significant difference between the photolisting and the referralphotograph, then, is in its use, not its content. A photolisted image that aclient identifies as his or her choice becomes a referral when the agencyofficially recognizes the match and puts a “hold” on a specific child for aclient, who is then sent other documentation sources. It is at this point thatthe client is advised to forward this documentation, including the photo-graph, to adoption medical specialists for review and consultation. Incases where a child is selected for and presented to the client, the clientmay choose to accept or decline the referral. On one level this processwould seem to preclude the ethical problem of appearance-based selec-tion. But it also opens up other areas of concern, including the choice toreject on the basis of a previously unidentified medical condition that isdiscerned in the image by the consulting physician.

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Like the sonogram, the photograph as referral document is providedovertly as a potential screening or diagnostic device. The image may bescreened for the ethnic or visual “fit” of the child to the family, based ontraits like eye and hair color—or the attraction of family members to achild who is identifiably “other.” But that is not its intended use. Estheti-cally informed racial selection is an accepted fact of life in the world oftransnational adoption. Medical screening overlaps with esthetic selectionwhen a condition is appearance linked, as in the case of cerebral palsy,Down syndrome (which I will consider shortly), or any number of otherconditions. Even more strongly than prenatal screening tests like amni-ocentesis, the adoption referral photograph, when subject to medicalscreening, opens up the prospect of choosing a child based on its healthstatus. There is by now an extensive literature on the ethics of selectiveabortion based on prenatal screening and sonogram evidence of anom-alies, as well as the troubling use of sonograms for sex selection (which,interestingly, is linked in the public mind to national biases). A less closelymonitored issue is the process of child selection in adoption, wherein it isthe norm for clients to select their child’s nationality, age, gender, and eth-nicity. Status vis-à-vis health and cognitive and physical ability, whilelisted as a possible preference area, is an even more difficult “choice”area. Some clients do specify desiring a child with a particular disability ordisease. However, the preference for a “healthy” child is a hard one to fillwith any certainty: hence agency disclaimers about not being contractuallyheld to matching client preferences. FAS is one of the few conditionsinvolving disabilities that is claimed to hold the explicit possibility of asolid visual diagnosis; hence it perfectly fits the model of visual screeningfollowed in adoption medicine.

Prenatal ultrasound flourished in the 1980s and 1990s partly becauseit provided experientially and visually compelling evidence of the medical(and some have argued psychosocial) aspects of the future child. Waitingchild photographs serve a parallel function in the adoption context insofaras they also serve as medical and psychosocial evidence. What I trace inthis final section is the life of the image as it provides such evidence notonly about the child but also about its mother and by inference its nationalculture.

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is a designation whose diagnosis, especiallyin the absence of a child body, is both common and notoriously trickybecause it is a syndrome—a set of possible conditions, not a fixed diseaseentity. FAS examples below are not all drawn from adoption cases. How-ever, they will all have relevance to the reading of images of waiting chil-dren. This is because FAS features powerfully in both adoption discourseand discussions of cultural patterns of alcohol consumption as pathologi-


cal behavior.22 Alcohol consumption is higher in populations undergoingeconomic crisis, and maternal alcoholism is one reason for child aban-donment or removal from the home. Given statistical reporting, it is notsurprising that the question “Did a child’s mother drink during her preg-nancy?” is asked with frequency about children born into certain popula-tions or regions. Simply to ask the question sets the client on a problem-atic path of probability reasoning. It takes us from assumptions based oncultural patterns to deductions about a specific birth mother’s behavior.The evidence to answer the question exists, of course, only in the data onthe child, which are unlikely to include a report on maternal behavior. Thechild’s image thus becomes a data-source of medical and psychosocialinformation about another stranger, its mother. To “find” FAS in the orphanchild image is tacitly to diagnose the behavior of the absent mother associally pathological. In an era when genetic explanations predominate,the diagnosis may also imply a genetic predisposition to drink in thechild’s culture and in the child.

Statistics reported in adoption literature can draw waiting parentsinto looking for FAS in the waiting child image. Russian Ministry of Edu-cation figures tell us that an estimated 30 to 40 percent of children inorphanages come from what translates as “alcoholic families.” It is esti-mated that 50 percent of children in Russian orphanages are surrenderedby or taken from their mothers. The two statistics together suggest that ahigh rate of fetal exposure to alcohol may exist in children living in Rus-sia’s orphanages. This deduction is borne out by the relatively high per-centage of children diagnosed with FAS and FAE (fetal alcohol effect)among Russian adoptees as compared to the figures for children adoptedfrom countries including Guatemala and India.23 Facial features have beenregarded as the most reliable indicator of FAS, other than direct evidenceof maternal behavior, since the syndrome’s earliest appearance in the med-ical literature. The first recognition of the effect of alcohol on the infant following exposure in utero was in 1968.24 Five years later, the majormedical report defining a syndrome associated with maternal alcohol con-sumption during pregnancy appeared, reporting a pattern of alteredgrowth and facial features among infants. The infants had small heads,short eye openings (palpebral fissures), a flat mid-face, and extra skinfolds close to the nose. Other physical features were observed, but it wasthe facial features that were consistently identified.25

In the three decades since this study was published, the criteria defin-ing FAS have changed very little. This guideline for defining FAS wasproposed in 1989: First there must be a documented history of alcoholuse in the maternal history. Then there should be signs of abnormality ineach of three categories:

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1. Prenatal and/or postnatal growth retardation below the tenth per-centile when corrected for gestational age;

2. Central nervous system involvement (including developmentaldelay, behavioral dysfunction, intellectual impairment, structuralmalformations, or brain malformations found on imaging stud-ies);

3. A characteristic face, described as including short palpebral fis-sures, flattened philtrum (area between nose and lips), elongatedmid-face, flattened maxilla.26

Two points are relevant to my concerns: First is the directive thatone must have documented history of maternal alcohol consumption firstbefore moving on to the other criteria. This would make diagnosis impos-sible in cases of adoption where maternal history is not available. Secondis the last category, a characteristic face. Researchers who work on FASrepeatedly return to the face as the most reliable indicator of FAS. Incases of adoption referrals, the image of the face is often a readily availablesource for this kind of diagnosis. Two of the leading FAS researchers cur-rently, Susan J. Astley and Sterling K. Clarren of the University of Wash-ington at Seattle, begin their second edition of a widely recognized diag-nostic guide for FAS with a short definition of the syndrome roughlyequivalent to the one above, without the clause requiring proof of mater-nal behavior.27 They then lay out the limitations to diagnosis: classificationstandardization is the hitch. “There is no standardized clinical definitionof FAS,” they explain. “Rather, there are diagnostic guidelines” that are“not sufficiently specific to assure diagnostic accuracy or precision.” Inter-pretation of the features of FAS, hence its diagnosis, varies widely fromclinic to clinic, they explain.28

Most important for this essay is Astley and Clarren’s observation that“there is a lack of objective, quantitative scales to measure and report themagnitude of expression of key diagnostic features.”29 Their concern iswith the lack of specificity in the definition’s description of facial features.They note: “The guidelines for the facial phenotype are [equally] non-specific. How many facial features should be present, how severe must thefeatures be and what scale of measurement should be used to judge theirseverity? One need only read the clinical literature or review medicalrecords . . . to see how variably these criteria are interpreted, applied, andreported.30

Astley and Clarren submit their own diagnostic scale, providing thequantitative precision lacking in the syndrome’s definition. (See figure 1.)Photography of the face and computer analysis of the photographic imageare the main techniques employed in the analysis of one of the four key


Figure 1. Astley and Clarren’s scoring chart for the philtrum

areas in which FAS is tested: facial features. FAS facial features are scoredalong a scale as absent (1), mild (2), moderate (3), or severe (4). To makethis designation in a consistent and quantifiable fashion, they instruct theclinician to take a standard black-and-white photograph of the child’sface. The image is then measured using a pictorial scale provided in thedocument.31 They instruct that the lips must be gently closed and notsmiling to conform to the standard of the scale.32 Images are provided todemonstrate how a subject’s smile would distort philtrum depth in theimage, resulting in an inaccurate rating. A five-point scale scoring phil-trum smoothness as well as a scoring system for upper lip thinness andupper lip circularity completes the measurements used to rank the moutharea of the photograph. The authors introduce the technique of measur-

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Philtrum and upper lip PhiltrumLikert score

Upper lipLikert score

Philtrumluminosity

Upper lipcircularity

ing and scoring pixel luminosity in the image to further quantify differ-ences in depth through means other than the eye’s subjective response, atechnique that surely raises more problems than it solves unless lightingand exposure levels are replicated with utter precision.

The biggest challenge to FAS classificatory precision is markers ofracial or ethnic difference. The portrait is used to measure length of eyeopenings (palpebral fissures), a loaded feature not only for discerningFAS but also for discerning cultural identity. I will use the example of theeyes to get to the core of the cultural problem that concerns me in thismethod of diagnosis. The authors provide a chart providing normal lengthof the palpebral fissure, with the advice that this measurement should be“adjusted for age and, when possible, race.”33 Elsewhere in the documentare references to resources for adjusting measurements according to age.We are also provided with a method to adjust for parent-specific adjust-ment of height. For example, if a child is unusually tall we might look totheir genetic contribution before reading this height as abnormal. But nosuch methods or instructions are given for race-specific adjustments. Thisis not surprising. Can we really expect that such a thing as a normal pal-pebral fissure length could exist for particular racial groups? How wouldwe even determine what constitutes a race to begin with, given the culturalmixing of most societies in which this diagnostic text would be con-ducted? The opportunities for quantitative specificity are limitless: Imag-ine a parent-specific adjustment scale for the palpebral fissures of a childborn to Asian and Middle Eastern parents. But then what is an Asian?Imagine a scale that accounts for ancestor-specific adjustments in theAsian eyes of a Kazakh whose heritage can be traced to Mongolian, Turk-ish, and perhaps also undocumented traces of a European-Russian ances-tor. Of course, documentation of ancestry would be hard to confirm incases of adopted children, who we can be certain make up an importantsector of the population given this diagnostic test. There would be noparent-specific adjustments for these subjects, no race adjustments whoseaccuracy could be confirmed.

These were my thoughts as I looked at the stretched features, thescrunched “Asian” eyes that hailed me in the waiting child portrait thatwas the one piece of documentation that preceded my daughter’s entryinto our family in the spring of 2001. I noted the asymmetry of her faceand its unusual countenance and wondered to myself and with my hus-band and our medical specialists: Was this her usual expression or was shesimply making a face? It was impossible to know. I noted the relativelysmooth philtrum that would surely score low on the FAS diagnostic scale.This and her flat mid-face were, of course, nothing more than the featuresof a certain sort of Asian face, the Mongolian features of the Kazakh eth-


nic group, making the interpretation of her face for FAS impossible throughthe Astley and Clarren scale.

At the same time that I saw this image I reviewed the FAS literature,encountering there the face of a cultural group also believed to be ancientlydescended from Mongolian ancestry. However, rather than escaping clas-sification by the phenotype, this face was its prototype. This was theAlaska state public health and social services Web page demonstratingthe typical features of FAS. A color digital drawing of the FAS phenotypein childhood was apparently also coded as an Inuit face in its features andcolor. The site included no textual evidence that this association of FAS toan ethnic group was intended.34

J. Langdon H. Down described what he called Mongolism (Downsyndrome) in his 1887 Letsom lectures, entitled “On Some of the MentalAfflictions of Childhood and Youth,” and I turn to this and his earliertexts now because it references the very cultural groups under discus-sion. The ethnic group referenced in Down’s account, Mongolians, isalso held to be the ancestral source of both Inuits and Kazakhs. In his“Observations on an Ethnic Classification of Idiots,” Down wrote:

I have for some time had my attention directed to the possibility of making aclassification of the feeble-minded, by arranging them around various ethnicstandards,—in other words, framing a natural system. . . .

I have been able to find among the large number of idiots and imbecileswhich come under my observation . . . that a considerable portion can befairly referred to one of the great divisions of the human race other than theclass from which they have sprung. . . .

The great Mongolian family has numerous representatives, and it is tothis division, I wish, in this paper, to call special attention. A very large num-ber of congenital idiots are typical Mongols.35

Of the “Mongolian” eye, Down wrote: “The eyes are obliquely placed,and the internal canthi more than normally distant from one another. Thepalpebral fissure is very narrow. The forehead is wrinkled transverselyfrom the constant assistance which the levatores palpebrarum derive fromthe occipito-frontalis muscle in the opening of the eyes. The lips are largeand thick with transverse fissures. . . . there can be no doubt that theseethnic features are the result of degeneration.”36

The racist implications of Down’s analogy are clear; Down believedcertain racial groups to be innately inferior, most notably Mongols. WhatI wish to emphasize here, though, is that Down was in fact a humanitarianadvocate of education for his subjects, and his analogy between racial andpathological physical classes led him to dispute scientific theories uphold-ing distinctions among races:

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Apart from the practical bearing of this attempt at an ethnic classification,considerable philosophical interest attaches to it. . . . If these great racialdivisions are fixed and definite, how comes it that disease is able to breakdown the barrier, and to simulate so closely the features of the members ofanother division. I cannot but think that the observations which I haverecorded, are indications that the differences in the races are not specific butvariable.37

Astley and Clarren try to correct the problem of FAS’s indistinct phe-notype by giving us a method that allows us to read a photograph for lev-els of distinction even the trained eye would miss. Yet they caution thereader that “no two individuals with FAS present with the same constel-lation of anomalies and disabilities.” They return us to the face not only asthe only reliable indicator of FAS but also to FAS facial anomalies as theonly features that reliably distinguish FAS from other conditions that looklike it. “With the likely exception of the facial phenotype,” they write, “noother physical anomalies or cognitive/behavioral disabilities observed in anindividual with prenatal alcohol exposure are necessarily specific to (causedonly by) their prenatal alcohol exposure.” However, after noting that “themethods of diagnosing fetal alcohol syndrome and related conditions arisefrom the larger fields of teratology and dysmorphology (clinical genet-ics),” they alert the reader that “it is essential to remember that isolatedfeatures in many birth defect syndromes overlap with FAS.”38

In other words, while facial markers are the only sure signs of FAS,they can also be markers of other pathologies that are congenital in theirsource. A few examples of the conditions they list as often easily confusedwith FAS include Aaskorg syndrome, fragile-x syndrome, fetal hydantoinsyndrome, and Noonan syndrome. The latter is one of the conditionsthat artist Nancy Burson documents in her 1990 series Faces, in which sheuses a plastic Diana camera to produce low-resolution, perspectivally dis-torted black-and-white images of children with facial anomalies in theirhome settings. There is not space to discuss these images at length here,but they deserve notice for the way that they counter the obsession withdetailed quantitative data that characterizes the Astley and Clarren diag-nostic technique.

In the absence of proof of maternal alcohol consumption, visual signsmay point to these possible diagnoses as readily as FAS in the reading ofchild images in adoption medical screening of referral photographs. Yetnational statistics predispose the reading toward FAS as the probable diag-nosis. In the diagnosis of FAS in children adopted and in the home, chil-dren are physically available for testing of cognitive and motor skills andfor visual assessment of their bodies directly. In the case of an adoptionreferral, however, the photograph and hence the appearance of the face is


the only place other than the medical record where an assessment can beventured. The visual diagnosis of FAS in adoption medicine troubles mebecause it raises more problems than it resolves.39 It opens the door tomisdiagnosis and blaming the absent birth mother, a figure already vul-nerable to vilification, for disabilities that may be attributable to othercauses out of her control. It opens the door also to diagnoses that take thewhite body as the norm, allowing for misreadings of pathology in childrenof Asian, “unknown,” or “mixed” ethnicity. It invites the implicit codingof “non-Caucasian” “racial” features as features of pathology, or it makesthese faces exceptional, placing them outside the scope of diagnosis. Med-icine has been down this road of racial physiognomy before, where racialsigns blur with pathology and certain groups constitute either prototypesor absences in the larger picture. Further, as noted earlier in the exampleof my daughter, facial diagnosis cannot account for the vagaries of expres-sive movement in children or the roulette game of what expression willappear on a child’s face at the moment the shutter clicks.

The concern I wish to highlight here is the problem of “squeezing”the image for more refined levels of classification, refining it until that hid-den difference emerges that finally separates the cultural philtrum fromthe pathological philtrum, an impossible measure of distinction. If we cangain something from looking back at Down’s original formulation of so-called Mongolism, it is that visual evidence will never provide that lastmeasure of difference that would let us take medical classification byappearances to that level of certainty. To seek it out is to reify the fixing ofphysical difference that divides one race from another, pathology frommere difference. Surely Down’s physiognomy should be held up as amodel of classification’s damaging inclinations toward discrimination. Butcan we say the same about his conclusions regarding the limits of racialclassification? It is striking that the unfixing of racial classification allowshim to see pathology as a racially linked characteristic, for it would suggestinstead a kind of panhuman prevalence of pathology. Perhaps this is thereassurance that lessens present-day fears surrounding adoption: to racial-ize or make cultural pathology is to make the potential for disease seempredictable and controllable.

“Squeezing” the adoption photograph for difference, for visible evi-dence that medicine cannot otherwise provide, does not reflect a new con-cern, as the example of prenatal testing reminds us. Nor is it a new con-cern in adoption. Berebitsky writes about the emergence of screening testsfor predicting infant mental development in the 1920s, tests that werebelieved to be helpful in allaying parental fears of acquiring adoptive chil-dren who “looked” fine but who would not develop and thrive normallydue to some inherent, inherited condition.40 At the turn of this century we

104 Lisa Cartwright

have been no less invested in the hunt for techniques that help us to read,assess, and predict the health and psychosocial status of children in theadoption market. What has changed is the regard of appearance and itsregister, the portrait, in place of the body as the object we scrutinize in theabsence of the distant child body. To seek a more refined, cross-culturalsystem of classification in medicine is, as Bowker and Starr argue, a neces-sity. But it is an irony of advanced digital imaging and twenty-first-centurymedicine that we would return to the humble photographic portrait,where we come up against the old problem of marking health according tothe measure of racialized difference, in hopes of finding guarantees aboutdistinctions between health and normalcy.

Notes

1. In adoption discourse, the term biological is used as a preferred substitutefor natural to describe children born to the custodial parent(s). The implication isthat adoption is no less natural than biological birth.

2. The term waiting child is often used in place of orphan or abandoned child.It shifts the emphasis from the child’s past history and current circumstances to achild’s implied state of mind, constructing it as a subject who desires a (new)family.

3. I use the term client to cover references to prospective or “waiting” par-ents. Not all people who consider adoption and peruse agency literature andWeb sites are officially clients, however, in that not all have entered into a con-tract with an agency.

4. A section of this article that could not be included here out of considera-tion of length considers the interpolation of clients as “waiting parents” hailed bythese images. I argue that these images construct adoption agency clients whoperuse the photolistings not only as parents but also as moral spectators in apublic mission of transnational child rescue. Adoption’s visual culture bringsclients who engage in the “personal” process of child selection into a global mar-ket sanctioned by its additional status as a humanitarian movement. Images ofindividual children are pivotal in the conceptual transition that rationalizes mar-ket as mission and choice as cause. This status distinguishes the adoption marketfrom another, similar, Web market in humans that is more typically regarded asexploitative: Internet mail-order brides.

5. Total IR3 and IR4 immigrant visas issued to orphans 1992–2001, INSdata as reported by Holt International, www.holtintl.org/insstats.shtml. On thestatus of children in some of the countries in this report through the mid-1990s,see Child Poverty and Deprivation in the Industrialized Countries, 1945–1995, ed.Giovanni Andrea Cornia and Sheldon Danziger (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).

6. The point that statistics reflect more intensive screening of this populationcurrently is, of course, arguable since it cannot be proven without prior statistics,which do not exist. As support I cite the DHSS Report #1 (1997), 5, whichnotes that the high rates of FAS in Alaska may reflect the especially intensivescrutiny this population had been subject to (by the Indian Health Service).


7. Classified according to what system? The politics of medical classificatorysystems as they impact perceptions of cultural identity will be the explicit con-cern of the last section of this paper. On the broader question of classification’simpact on meaning and knowledge, particularly with reference to biomedicalknowledge, see Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Starr, Sorting Things Out:Classification and Its Consequences, Inside Technology Series (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT, 1999). About the word Caucasian: this problematic category’s use echoesthe term’s origin in 1795 with anthropologist Johann Bluenbach, who thought theoriginal home of the hypothetical Indo-Europeans was the Caucasus (Webster’sDeluxe Unabridged Dictionary, 2d ed. [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979],287).

8. See Everett M. Ressler, Neil Boothby, and Daniel J. Steinbock, Unaccom-panied Children: Care and Protection in Wars, Natural Disasters, and Refugee Move-ments (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 108, 305, and 325–26.

9. Julie Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture ofMotherhood, 1851–1950 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000), 4–6 and92–93. Two points worth noting: (1) Infertility is one of many reasons providedby clients for their choice to adopt, but it is not the only reason. A humanitariansentiment to help needy children without contributing to population growth isanother; and (2) Berebitsky’s account makes it clear that the market structure ofadoption is not recent but has existed throughout the history of adoption in theUnited States.

10. See www.capbook.org.11. Not all orphanages permit parents to document their residents; policies

on this vary widely. Images of waiting children are acquired through variousmeans by agencies. The identity and status of the agent who takes and distributeschild photographs varies. In some agencies, an orphanage director or employee isthe source of child selection and photographs. In orphanages run by a missionarygroup the agent responsible for taking and sending images might be a nun or vol-unteer member of the religious community. Distinctions between paid employeesand volunteers become moot in cases where government wages dry up but staffmembers continue their work unpaid, whether out of humanitarian selflessness,hope of a free meal or access to foreign donations, or a desire to hang on to aposition should payment resume. Since reputable agencies must list only thosechildren who are verifiably available for adoption within the terms of the region’spolicies, the foreign coordinator might also be charged with the job of investigat-ing the legal status of the child with regard to its kin. In some countries, seekingout the birth mother or family members for verification of the child’s abandon-ment can be a prerequisite of adoption. Another source of images and data mightbe the agency’s own visiting personnel or a paid in-country coordinator, a personwho is typically a woman and usually a citizen of that country. She is not in theemploy of the orphanage or the ministry of education but rather is a free agentwho contracts with the agency. She may develop strong ties and influence at theorphanage or orphanages throughout her region insofar as she wields the powerto select and place children. In most cases this process results in direct cash rev-enues (a portion of an agency’s foreign fee charged by the agency to the client) tothe orphanage and/or the region’s education ministry. The coordinator is thus a free agent who comes to be viewed as a powerful figure in the hierarchy oforphanage personnel and among local officials who oversee adoption processes.

106 Lisa Cartwright

In some cases agencies employ American specialists who live and work in thecountry and who personally evaluate the children listed. Finally, images and datacan be brought to the agency by adoptive parents—clients who produce infor-mation and images of waiting children to bring home to the agency. These clientscan be important sources of information and credibility for the agency, verifyingclaims about orphanage conditions and child status and providing a parent’s per-spective on a given child or orphanage.

Whereas the institutional photographs of available children usually take theform of medium close-ups against a blank wall, client photographs more oftendepict children in their everyday activities or dressed in regional outfits to enter-tain the visiting adoptive parents. Captions might include social and culturalrather than medical and psychological descriptors, drawn from the clients’ obser-vations imagining how a given child might appear to a prospective parent orviewing orphanage culture through the eyes of a tourist. These client photo-graphs can be an important marketing source of images of waiting children inthat, like tourist media, they show local flavor and color, placing children in theirindigenous social context.

12. Bowker and Starr, Sorting Things Out. On disease classification, see part1, especially 51–161. On apartheid, see chapter 6, 195–225.

13. Child representation is for purposes of child exchange. The role ofmoney in this process is recognized by all parties to be problematic. The lan-guage of “donation” used in contracts minimizes the appearance of child buyingand selling. Most agencies require a fee for their services and a fee or donationfor the foreign government and/or the orphanage. In some cases clients are askedto hand carry the foreign fee or donation (which can range from a few hundredto a few thousand dollars) directly to its recipient, eliminating the agency as feebroker.

14. Regarding policy in general: the Convention on Protection of Childrenand Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption was developed at theHague Conference on Private International Law in May 1993. The conventionestablishes standards to curb abuses in international adoption practice by requir-ing a central authority in each country to coordinate intercountry adoption policyand practice; by providing for a system of accreditation for intercountry adoptionpractitioners; by requiring that consent to adopt be informed and freely given; byprohibiting “improper financial or other gain” and requiring that only costs andexpenses, including reasonable professional fees, be charged; and by requiringpreservation of medical and other records. The status of photographs as recordsis unclear. Enforcement of this convention is up to individual countries in dialogwith agencies and U.S. authorities. The United States signed the convention in1994 (the same year that the Multiethnic Placement Act in support of interracialadoption passed both houses of Congress), and in 2000 Congress passed andPresident Clinton signed the Intercountry Adoption Act to implement it.

15. This practice of classifying children exists also in agency client applica-tion forms, in which agencies ask clients to classify themselves and the child theyimagine. The categories reveal something about the agency’s value system as wellas that of the foreign country in which an adoption is being sought. For example,some agencies and foreign countries require clients to specify their religious affil-iation. Others do not. Marital status, illness and disability status and types, gen-der, age, and profession all are weighted differently by different agencies and


different countries. Some countries have lists of medical conditions adoptive par-ents may not have.

16. See www.precious.org.17. The classics include Alan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October

39 (1986): 3–64; John Tagg, Burdens of Representation: Essays on Photography andHistories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Sander Gilman’spublications, including Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Differ-ence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); David G. Horn, SocialBodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1994); Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla, eds., Deviant Bodies(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); and Suren Lalvani, Photography,Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996). For astudy in a different tradition, see Ruth Wendell Washburn, René A. Spitz, andFlorence L. Goodenough, Facial Expression in Children: Three Studies (New York:Arno, 1972).

18. See, for example, Ronald S. Federici, Help for the Hopeless Child (Dr.Ronald Federici & Associates, 1998); and Barbara B. Bascom and Carole A.McKelvey, The Complete Guide to Foreign Adoption: What to Expect and How toPrepare for Your New Child (New York: Pocket, 1997). Gregory C. Keck andRegina M. Kupecky, Adopting the Hurt Child: Hope for Families with Special-NeedsKids (Colorado Springs, CO: Piñon Press, 1995).

19. Cradle of Hope International, special needs photocopy brochure (2000).20. See Gregory T. Everson and Hedy Weinberg, Living with Hepatitis C: A

Survivor’s Guide, 3d ed. (New York: Hatherleigh, 2002).21. A small selection of this important research: J. A. Jenista, “The Immi-

grant, Refugee, or Internationally Adopted Child,” Pediatric Review 22.12(2001): 419–29; J. A. Jenista, “Preadoption Review of Medical Records,” Pedi-atric Annals 29.4 (April 2000): 212–15; R. J. Sokol, “Adoption of Hepatitis BVirus-Infected Foreign Born Children,” Pediatrics 85.5 (1990): 890–92.

22. This has been the case especially since the 1989 publication of The Bro-ken Cord: A Family’s Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (New York:HarperCollins). In his memoir, Michael Dorris, a former Dartmouth professor,tells the story of his adoptive Native American son whose behavioral, develop-mental, and physical problems, ultimately diagnosed as FAS-related, shaped hisidentity and the Dorris family’s life. Through Dorris’s popular memoir and themovie based on it, his son (who died at age twenty-three because he failed toremember to wait for the green light to cross the street) became the nationalFAS poster child. He was the emblem of the damage maternal alcohol consump-tion could cause in one’s child and one’s own or another (adoptive) family.

23. See Murray Feshbach, ed., The Environmental and Health Atlas of Russia(Moscow: PAIMS, 1995). FAE is a diagnostic category that was introduced todescribe cases where the apparent impact of maternal alcohol consumption is lesssevere than in FAS. The category is regarded by some as specious in its lack ofclear criteria.

24. P. Lemoine, H. Harrousseau, J.-P. Borteyru, and J. C. Menuet, “Lesenfants de parents alcooliques,” Ouest medical 21 (1968): 476–92.

25. Kenneth L. Jones and David W. Smith, “Recognition of the Fetal Alco-hol Syndrome in Early Infancy,” Lancet, 3 November 1973, 999–1001.

26. R. J. Sokol and S. K. Clarren, “Guidelines for the Use of Terminology

108 Lisa Cartwright

Describing the Impact of Prenatal Alcohol on the Offspring,” Alcoholism: Clinicaland Experimental Research 13.4 (1989): 597–98.

27. Susan J. Astley and Sterling K. Clarren, Diagnostic Guide for Fetal AlcoholSyndrome and Related Conditions: The 4-Digit Diagnostic Code, FAS DiagnosticNetwork, University of Washington, Seattle, January 1999. See also Astley andClarren, “A Case Definition and Photographic Screening Tool for the Facial Pheno-type of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome,” Journal of Pediatrics 129.1 (1996): 33–41. Onthis study, adoption pediatrician Jane Aronson writes: “The number of childrenused in the study were small (42). Was there enough of a racial mix in the study?No. There were no children who were adopted from Russia in the sample. Per-haps this tool will become useful in the future with more refinement, but rightnow, I would hesitate to embrace this technique” (Jane Aronson, “Alcohol RelatedBirth Defects and International Adoption,” www.russianadoption.org/fas.htm).

28. Astley and Clarren, Diagnostic Guide, 1. 29. Ibid., 2.30. Ibid.31. Ibid., 26.32. Ibid., 25.33. Ibid.34. See hss.state.ak.us/fas/whatis.html, accessed November 2001.35. Regarded as the earliest clinical description of what he called “mon-

goloid idiocy,” Down’s essay, “Observations on an Ethnic Classification ofIdiots,” was published in London Hospital Reports 3: 259 – 62, in 1866, andreprinted in The Journal of Mental Science 13 (1876): 121–23. It was reprintedagain in Mental Retardation in February 1995. Also see Down’s Mental Affectionsof Children and Youth (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1887). His terms “mongoloid”and “mongolism” were used until the late 1980s. Down was also concerned withpreventing mental retardation by restricting maternal alcohol drinking.

36. Down, “Observations on an Ethnic Classification of Idiots.”37. Ibid.38. Astley and Clarren, Diagnostic Guide, 4.39. Photographic typologies of child pathology have always been compli-

cated by the fact that children by definition grow and change, making a registerof fixed signs hard to produce. One of the techniques that has evolved in thevisual typology of FAS signs is the tracking of facial changes over time, as chil-dren known to have the syndrome progress to adulthood.

40. Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own, 1.


By the end of the 1980s, just as in numerous other donor countries, it wasto a great extent the increasing presence of foreign adoptive parents thatled Brazilian policy makers to turn their attention to the plight of thecountry’s children and refine policies concerning in-country adoption. Atthe time, Brazil was in fourth place among the world’s largest furnishers ofinternationally adopted children (behind Korea, India, and Columbia). Tothe growing consternation of government authorities, by the early ninetiesgreater numbers of Brazilian children were being legally adopted by peo-ple in France, Italy and, to a lesser extent, the United States (Kane 1993).1

Rumor had it that even more were being smuggled illegally over the bor-ders. However, despite lingering tendencies in the poorer and more remoteparts of the country, by 1994 the tide of international adoption had turned,reducing the outgoing flow of children to a slow trickle.2

A series of factors contributed to the decline of intercountry adoptionin Brazil. Local-scale influences included nationalistic zeal against whatwas seen by many as a predatory threat from abroad, the enforcement ofincreasingly stringent legislation (including widely publicized jail sen-tences handed out to public officials involved in irregularities), and thegrowing popularity of national adoption. On the global level, one shouldnot ignore the importance of international legislation aimed explicitly atcurtailing the South-North flow of children3 as well as the sudden avail-ability for adoption of an immense number of Chinese and Russian chil-dren (see Fonseca forthcoming).

Although today Brazil is no longer counted among the world’s majorfurnishers of internationally adopted children, a close look at local child-raising practices and national policies on adoption still raises many issuesrelevant to the field. For example, fifteen years of intensive intercountryadoptions have left their mark on national legislation. A clause in thecountry’s 1990 Children’s Code stating that poverty alone should, underno circumstances, justify the loss of parental authority has been attributedby certain analysts (Abreu 2002) to the reaction against the plundering ofBrazilian children by “rich” foreigners.4 Another even more consequentiallegacy of Brazil’s experience with intercountry adoption concerns the highvalue placed by contemporary policy makers on in-country adoption and,in particular, plenary adoption, seen by many as the ideal solution for chil-

Claudia Fonseca

Patterns of Shared Parenthood

among the Brazilian Poor


dren in dire need.5 In this sense, it would seem that although the wave ofintercountry adoption has receded, it has left in its wake, embedded incontemporary legal regulations, certain globalized principles based on themodern nuclear family that may or may not be relevant to many of thecountry’s citizens.

The possible difference explored here between national adoption leg-islation, in tune with cosmopolitan sensitivities, and local-level practices ishighly relevant to general debates in the field of intercountry adoption. Inmany respects, the ethnographic material presented here portrays a realitysimilar to that described in other Third World countries that continue tosend children abroad.6 Furthermore, the gap in Brazil between nationallegislation and local-level sensitivities may be taken as symptomatic of theeven wider gap between values embedded in international conventions onintercountry adoption and those of poverty-stricken sending families inThird World countries.

Elsewhere, I have considered in greater detail the attitude of foreignadoptants as well as the evolution of Brazilian adoption laws (Fonseca2001, 2002). In this article, on the basis of my ethnographic fieldwork amongthe urban poor of Porto Alegre, Brazil, I dwell on examples that illustratelocal child-raising dynamics.7 Pointing out how extremely poor womenresort to a wide range of strategies—from charitable patrons and state-run boarding schools to mutual help networks involving a form of sharedparenthood—my purpose is to contribute to the rethinking of national aswell as intercountry adoption from the bottom up.

A Helping Hand

I was drawn to the subject of lower-income families not exactly by designbut by force of circumstances. It was in the early 1980s. I had recently set-tled in Porto Alegre with my (“native”) husband and two toddlers andwas preparing my first classes of anthropology to be given at the federaluniversity when the doorbell rang. On my front porch I encountered agaggle of youngsters, ranging from ages four to ten, who appeared to bein a skirmish about who was to hold a slightly dented toy plastic truck. Asprightly preteen, the evident leader of the pack, after attempting to shushher juniors, turned to me in a businesslike fashion: “Good afternoon,neighbor. Could you give us a hand [dar uma mão]? Would you have anytable scraps, empty bottles, or old newspapers for us to take home?”

This young Afro-Brazilian girl, whom I came to know as Luciana,was my first entrance into the squatter settlement where she lived, about ahalf-mile away. As she and a varying group of youngsters added me to

112 Claudia Fonseca

their list of “customers,” coming to frequent my house on a near-dailybasis, I also moved into their homes. I had not yet acquired the demeanorof the usual upper-class patrão (boss), and between my American-stylecasual dress and halting Portuguese, it seemed people didn’t quite knowhow to place me. Luciana did her best to teach me how to make blackbeans more appetizing, and many of her neighbors appeared to take greatglee in aping my heavy accent. It took me some time to learn that I hadpenetrated into what was supposed to be one of the city’s poorest andmost violent favelas, wherein most public employees—teachers and healthworkers—refused to set foot.

Luciana, as it turned out, was a sort of baby-sitter for her little broth-ers and occasionally other children in the neighborhood. To “keep the kidsout of mischief [ para não fazer arte],” she would come home from school,gather them up, and take them on her daily rounds.8 Everyone, sheinformed me, pitched in to keep the family going. Her mother oftenworked as a street-sweeper, earning as much as a minimum salary (aroundU.S.$60 per month), although she had stopped for a few months after thebirth of her last baby. Her stepfather worked on construction sites, wherehe was paid on a daily basis and laid off with no pay each time it rained.His highly irregular income would cease with the completion of a buildingor, simply, when the patrão, temporarily out of funds, would suspendactivities. Luciana also had a brother close to her in age who, for half aminimum salary, peddled the town’s major daily, but it was her contribu-tion—of food, clothes, and recyclable junk sold at a nearby depot—thatwas the mainstay of her family’s subsistence.

The “helping hand” Luciana and her neighbors received from theirwell-off “clients” who, like myself, lived in middle-class residential districtsclose to the squatter settlement, was but one of their extralocal resources.Another important bit of support came from the state in the form of insti-tutional facilities (FEBEM) where children could be left, provided theirparents proved sufficient need.9 I soon discovered that a good number ofthe vila residents had “studied” at this “boarding school” (internato).Luciana’s stepfather, for example, claimed to have learned beekeepingduring one of his stints at the orphanage. At the time I met her, one ofLuciana’s older brothers was living at the state orphanage (“Mother saysit’s the only way to keep him out of mischief”), coming home almostevery weekend to visit. Luciana explained that she too had stayed for awhile at the orphanage and could chime in with personal experience whenher neighbors spoke of the place’s advantages: regular food (includingyogurt—apparently a luxury item), separate beds for each child, andguaranteed schooling.

In fact, Luciana’s mother, after separating from her second spouse,

113Shared Parenthood among the Brazilian Poor

had left all her four children at the institution. Luciana was brought homewithin a year to help take care of her mother’s new baby. Some time later,two of her brothers simply walked off the institution’s premises, findingtheir way back to their mother’s house. The younger of the two stayedwith his family, but the older brother (who “never got along with ourstepdad”) opted to return to the orphanage—considered, by this time, asort of annex to the family abode. The destiny of the fourth “boarded-out” child, however, had not been foreseen by anyone in the family. Theyoungest—a fairly light-skinned, healthy infant—did not come home.Having gone over six months with no family visits, he was declared to be“in an irregular situation” and given to an adoptive family. Although nei-ther Luciana nor any of her family had a clue as to the child’s where-abouts, they continued to include him in the family count, updating hisage and musing about how things would be when (not if ) they were onceagain together.

I was nonplussed by this last bit of information. Although I had longsince learned to take journalistic hyperbole about Brazil’s “30 millionabandoned children” with a grain of salt,10 I found it easier to believe thatchildren living at the state institution, and especially those given in adop-tion, were genuinely orphaned or abandoned. (Brazil’s major child careinstitutions are not normally called “orphanages,” but the young residentswho live there are referred to in public parlance as “abandoned children.”)The experience with Luciana’s family and others like hers provided mewith a different angle on the situation.

Little by little, as I canvassed the next sixty families, or nearly halfthose living in this vila, it became clear that, especially among the morepoverty-stricken, the state orphanage played a prominent role in familyorganization. Parents—in particular, women who had recently separatedfrom their spouses—would thus share child-raising responsibilities withthe public services: aiming, in the case of older children, to “give them aneducation” or “keep them in line” and in the case of younger ones, toensure sheer survival.

Such a use of state facilities is hardly uncommon in the history ofpoverty-stricken populations. During the nineteenth century, for example,institutional administrators throughout the Western world accused the“undeserving poor” of using the orphanage to shirk their parental dutiesand thus attempted through different measures to narrow clientele to whatthey considered their legitimate concern: “genuine” orphans. Nonetheless,the overflow of poverty’s victims—those people who normally had little or no access to the minimum of society’s benefits (jobs, schools, healthcare)—continued, until very recent times, to periodically seek relief inthese large institutions: orphanages and workhouses (Donzelot 1977;

114 Claudia Fonseca

Blum 1998). In other words, state institutions for youngsters have tradi-tionally catered to both the poor and the orphaned. Just how today’s con-cerned observers, from journalists to policy makers, manage to conflatethe two categories under the heading of “abandoned” children is morethan a question of semantics.

During the 1980s, authorities at the state orphanage, complainingthat families used them as a free boarding school, were doing everythingpossible to discourage this sort of “abuse.” In an apparently progressivespirit, the country’s 1990 Children’s Code (Article 101) reinforced thispolicy, proclaiming that institutionalization was to be seen as a last resort,to be used solely as a provisory and exceptional measure, for children enroute to a “substitute” (read “adoptive”) family. The state of Rio Grandedo Sul was among the first to put the new Children’s Code into effect,investing heavily in reform of the institutional network. The creation ofsmall family-type units now permitted a small number of state wards toenjoy a near middle-class lifestyle, with comforts ranging from computersto horseback riding. However, as the cost of maintaining a child soared towell near U.S.$1,000 per month, it became apparent that—more thanever—the government had an interest in keeping the number of interns ata minimum, both by narrowing the definition of those to be admitted andby facilitating the process of those to be discharged. Within this context,adoption—as long as it was by Brazilian nationals—appeared to be apolitically correct solution. The thorn in the side of this policy, however,remains to this day: how to define an “adoptable” child.

Brazil’s 1990 Children’s Code (Article 45) clearly stipulates the needfor the parent or guardian’s legal consent in order for a child to be adopted.This consent may be waived in the case of parents who are unknown orwho have been stripped of their paternal authority for having abandonedtheir child or neglected its basic needs. The question is, how to defineabandonment and neglect? Already considered vague in the European con-text (Manaï 1990), the legal definition of abandonment is even moreproblematic in poverty-ridden areas of Latin America, where children“abandoned” to state institutional care are not, in general, the out-of-wedlock offspring of adolescent mothers but rather third- or fourth-bornchildren of women who simply cannot afford the extra burden.11 Poverty,even at the millennium’s close, remains widespread, leaving nearly one-third of the Brazilian population with a per capita income of less than $2a day.12 Although legislation in Brazil expressly states that poverty is not asufficient motive for stripping parents of their rights,13 researchers haveobserved that even when they classify the parents as “caring,” social work-ers may well equate extreme poverty with “abandonment” or “neglect”and recommend a child’s removal from its home (Cardarello 2000).

Even when they

classify the

parents as

“caring,” social

workers may well

equate extreme

poverty with

“abandonment”

or “neglect.”


A good number of mothers, such as Luciana’s, may admit they are attimes unable to cope and so would not oppose their child’s institutional-ization. However, whether or not contemporary child welfare policies fur-nish the sort of “helping hand” they have in mind is a question we shallconsider further on. For the moment, we look into informal social net-works to investigate other child care resources to which a woman mighthave access and the perceptions of family and kinship behind them.

Multiple Mothers

I met Claudiane, a radiant seven-year-old brunette, in 1994, during field-work in another working-class neighborhood of Porto Alegre. I had droppedin on Dona Dica, a stately grandmother, to hear more about her thirty-sixgrandchildren and eighteen great-grandchildren, of which one was inevitablythere in her company. As she put it, “I’ve always had grandchildren withme. Sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes, none at all. They comeand go.” Imitating the researcher, her present eight-year-old companion, alad nicknamed Batata (Potato), thrust a microphone under his grand-mother’s chin and demanded, “Tell me about your life.” Dica, busy pour-ing lemonade into narrow plastic cones, scarcely paused before teasingback, “I make popsicles, fight with you (because you’re a rascal), sell drinks,and raise chickens and ducks.”

By this time, two of Dica’s grown daughters had arrived on the scene.Living nearby, they had converged that afternoon at the water faucet intheir mother’s front yard, where they were dying their hair in new, exper-imental shades of red. Learning of my interest in child-sharing practices,their reaction was immediate. Calling boisterously to one of the four chil-dren playing underfoot, they coaxed her, “Claudiane—come over hereand tell this lady . . . How many mothers do you have?” Visibly enchantedat being the center of attention, the little girl bubbled: “Three.” And,placing a finger aside her chin to better ponder the question, she added:“The mother who nursed me, the mother who raised me, and the motherwho gave birth to me.”

Volcira, the older of the two sisters, was quick to fill me in on thedetails. She hadn’t minded helping out when Claudiane’s mother, wantingto spend a weekend at the beach, had asked if she could leave her two-week-old daughter for a few days. Volcira, feeling the house a bit emptyafter the recent departure of her teenage daughter, was married at thetime and, what’s more, her bus driver husband had a regular income.Having just borne a child of her own, Volcira’s younger sister had plentyof milk and so offered to pitch in as wet nurse. Time passed and the little

116 Claudia Fonseca

girl just “stayed on”: “She’s my daughter. She sleeps and eats in myhouse, and she calls me ‘mother.’” Since Claudiane’s three mothers wereneighbors, a triangular sort of arrangement ensued, which had lasted,when I met them, for seven years.

The point to be gleaned from this ethnographic example is that amother in difficulty need not necessarily institutionalize her child. Rather,in many cases, she can count on a social network in which, between rela-tives, godparents, employers, and neighbors, she is bound to find an addi-tional mother for her child. Grandmothers are the first to be involved. Ihave in my notes innumerable stories of young couples who were livingwith the wife’s or husband’s parents. In such situations, the grandmotherwould very likely be the primary caretaker of the couple’s first children,and it would not be unusual for a youngster to stay on living with her evenafter its parents had separated or moved on to an independent abode. Onegrandmother thus explained the kinship terminology used by her differentgrandchildren:

I call my oldest grandchild my “son-grandson” [ filho-neto] because, after mydaughter separated from her husband, I took her kids in to raise. He and hissister call me “Mother” and refer to my daughter as “Mother Eloi.” I raisedthe other grandson since he was born. My daughter, who was living with me,had to work, and I’m the one who took care of him. When she and her hus-band moved out, he just stayed on. I’m his mother. He calls my daughter [hismother] “Aunt Elsi.”

Aside from grandparents, there are always a number of people whomay be ready to share child-raising responsibilities. It is no accident thatmany children are baptized two or even three times. Besides the cere-mony in the Catholic church (often put off for years because of expenseand bureaucracy), people may baptize their children at home in a domes-tic ceremony presided over by an experienced friend or relative (Fonsecaand Brites 1989) and/or at the Afro-Brazilian cults. Each ceremony creates new ties between the child’s compadres (cofathers) and comadres(comothers), making official their shared rights and responsibilities in thechild’s future. Because of previous generations’ high adult (as well asinfant) mortality, many people I met had been bereft in early childhood ofone or both parents, and so the network of willing tutors had proved a life-saving safety net.

For the outside observer, the nonchalance with which people treatchild circulation is striking. I have seen, for example, two young women,getting to know each other, complete their list of identifying questions(“On which street do you live?” “Are you not the daughter of so-and-so?”“How many children do you have?”) with a final inquiry: “And are you


raising all your children?” A good number of youngsters claim to havedecided, they themselves, where they wanted to live. It is not unusual tohear even a six- or seven-year-old explaining: “Auntie asked me to visit, Iliked it, so I just told my mom I was going to stay on.” People will includein their own life histories a list of various households in which they lived asa child—with a predictable variety of commentaries. Some foster parentsare remembered as wicked slave drivers, some as fairy godmothers, butmost are described in quite matter-of-fact terms. Like Claudiane, many,many people will speak of two, three, and four “mothers” with no particu-lar embarrassment or confusion. Against such a background, one wondersif it makes sense to single out the nuclear family as an analytical isolate.

Just as elsewhere in the Western world (Schneider 1984), biologicalfiliation is considered a fundamental part of individual identity. Peoplemake no confusion as to who, among their diverse mothers, is the pro-genitor. And although, for a variety of reasons, fathers may not be soprominent in a person’s biography, one’s male genitor still has consider-able importance for the definition of personal identity, belonging, andintegration into social networks. Nonetheless, the mother-father dyad isnot necessarily the fundamental reference in a child’s life. On the contrary,household arrangements and the day-to-day decisions involved in raisinga child reveal the nuclear family as a fragile unit, frequently overshadowedby the dynamics of the extended kin network, activated for and perpetu-ated through child circulation.

The historical depth and widespread presence of child circulation inBrazil has been investigated of late by a number of researchers (Fonseca1993; Meznar 1994; Kuznesof 1998; Goldstein 1998). The discovery, inmy own university, of at least half a dozen colleagues raised by “mothers”to whom they had been unofficially confided in infancy convinces methat until a generation or so ago, the practice was by no means confined toBrazil’s lower classes.14 Faced with evidence of a widespread “foster cul-ture,” one begins to wonder how legislators managed to draft an adoptionbill that is so explicitly oriented by nuclear family values—in the definitionof who signs the adoption release (the biological mother and/or father),how many mothers and fathers a child should have (one set), and who isqualified to be adoptive parents (a heterosexual couple or single woman).The next ethnographic example, which takes us back to my first field site,is designed to demonstrate that the very distinction embedded in contem-porary law between fosterage and adoption is based on a conceptuallyrigid definition of family that may be difficult for the various relatives ofchildren such as Luciana, Batata, and Claudiane to grasp.

One begins to

wonder how

legislators

managed to draft

an adoption bill

that is so explicitly

oriented by

nuclear family

values.

118 Claudia Fonseca

The Negotiation of Terms

Three years had passed since my first contact with Luciana and her fam-ily. Having grown to know a good number of people in the neighbor-hood, I began to appreciate the mutual help networks that crisscrossed thesocial fabric of the vila’s daily existence. Nelci seemed to be an importantfigure, often mentioned by her neighbors, but I’d had trouble meeting herbecause, holding down a salaried custodial job as well as cleaning differentclients’ houses, she was rarely at home. That July afternoon, thanks to aWorld Cup football game, I—as well as many people in the vila—had aday off from work and so, at last, I found this petite, bespectacled blackwoman at home.

Her two-room wooden shack, measuring around fifteen square yardswith a corner kitchen equipped with everything but running water, wasindeed one of the nicest in the neighborhood. Nonetheless, in contrast tomany of the vila’s other well-off residents—who were preoccupied bymarking social boundaries—Nelci, when she was home, kept her doorwide open. A neighbor’s two teenage boys, evicted from home by theirstepfather, had found a few days’ refuge here. Another neighbor’s little sister, ordered to stay home and baby-sit her three nieces and nephews,had grown frightened by nighttime sounds and fled to Nelci’s for help.During the two hours I spent in my hostess’s front room, I witnessed aparade of visitors. Aside from two friends in their forties who’d beeninvited over “for a bit of white wine,”15 she received a teenage mother,come to boil water for her newborn child; a scrawny lad (about ten) look-ing to borrow someone’s soccer ball; the local mãe-de-santo;16 and an(unidentified) woman with her two-year-old, both of whom stayed but amoment. Around six, Nelci rose and, responding to the smell of roastedmeat that wafted in through the window, yelled to her backdoor neighbor:“Where’s dinner? I’m starving!”

My point with this description is not only to show how much differenthouseholds are connected to one another through daily routines but toemphasize the setting in which, just as Mauss (1950) pointed out, chil-dren fit into an exchange system in which all sorts of goods and servicescirculate. With her narrative energies centered on the long and painfulstory of how she recently lost a one-month-old child, Nelci herself is fairlysuccinct on the subject of child circulation. She announces simply that hereldest is being raised by his paternal aunt, the second—who should behome tomorrow for a weekend visit—is “studying” at the orphanage, andher three younger children—a twelve-year-old boy and two daughters(aged seven and nine)—all live with her. Her two guests, however, go intogreat detail about dealings with the rival moms of their offspring.


The first of the two, Edi—an imposing mulatto woman who flauntsher extra kilos with raucous exuberance—abruptly changes her mood toindignation as she recalls the absence of her youngest daughter:

When I separated from my husband, nine years ago, I was really hard up. Isent one daughter to my mother’s, another I placed at the orphanage, and thelittle one—I left with my comadre. I called that woman “grandmother” andshe called me “daughter” because she really loved me. The two boys stayedwith me because it’s easier to raise them, but you can’t have girls runningaround loose in the vila. In the beginning, I placed the girls in proper homesbecause I had to work. But when things got better, I wanted to bring themhome. By then, “Grandmother” was attached to my little girl and asked tokeep her, so we made an agreement, nothing written, but we understood eachother. The idea was that my daughter would stay there until Grandmotherdied, and then she’d come back to me. The trouble is that my comadre passedaway and I didn’t even find out about it. Her daughter didn’t notify mebecause she knew I’d want my little girl back. Now she’s gone to the courts,saying the girl is hers!

The third woman sitting at Nelci’s front room table, a wan and wirymaiden lady who lives with her married sister, clucks her tongue in sym-pathy at her friend’s plight:

If I were you, I’d settle things out of court, like I did. Zequinha, you know, ismy little boy. I took him in when he was no more than a month old. Hismother was only sixteen when he was born, and she had no husband. Whatelse was she going to do? Now she’s living over on the next street with herhusband and two kids. She’s getting along fine these days and I heard rumorsshe was wanting Zequinha back, so you know what I did? I hid this big knifein my skirt, and I went over to her house. She was in the front yard and Icalled her to talk, “Come over here, dearie.” When she got close, I grabbedher by the neck, showed her the knife, and said, “What’s this story I hear thatyou’re wanting Zequinha back?” And guess what! She said, “Don’t be silly. Igave him to you and he’s yours, forever.”

The three women collapse in laughter. Evidently no one is troubled bythe fact that the two friends are pleading their cases from opposite sides ofthe argument: the first claiming, with everyone’s agreement, that mãe éuma só (there’s but one mother), the second insisting with her audience’sequally enthusiastic approval that mãe é quem criou (the mother is whoeverbrings [the child] up). Their lively banter brings out the different princi-ples that must be taken into account in the study of child placements,principles that provide the guidelines for the continual renegotiation of achild’s status.

120 Claudia Fonseca

In many cases, child circulation, accompanied by a back-and-forthflow of goods and services, appears to create no undue tensions. A grownson might simply visit his own mother more regularly if she is raising hischild, a maiden aunt might feel obliged to help her struggling niece if thelatter has made her the gift of a child. Blood ties and generational differ-ences help clarify the terms of the child transfer—establishing a clearhierarchy of a child’s different mothers. However, in a context wheremany adults do not possess a birth certificate or an identity card, andwhere formal contracts are practically unheard of, the unwritten terms ofa particular placement may well give rise to conflicts.

Edi, for example, recognizes that she was in dire need at the time ofher daughter’s placement. Just as many other mothers refer to such amoment, Edi presents the placement as being to her daughter’s advantage.The girl would be safe, go to school, and have regular meals, receiving theminimum benefits that her mother could not, at the time, hope to provide.It was understood that Edi’s comadre had taken on the burden of raisingthe child in order to help. In such situations, however, a change in cir-cumstances may abruptly invert the idea of who is helping whom. Chil-dren are, after all, highly cherished for the affection and company theyprovide. People—whether couples with a fertility problem, young brideswho have not yet become pregnant, women who have recently sufferedthe loss of a child, or grandmothers whose own children have all movedout—very often look for a baby or child to raise “as their own.” Thus, abirth mother has every reason to see her child’s placement as a “gift” justas much as a burden in the foster family.

Edi appears to consider that she did her comadre a favor by allowingher daughter to stay on even when there was no longer a pressing need.Just how much contact she then maintained with her daughter is unclear.In other cases I registered, women, having confided their child to whatthey considered a reliable family, might disappear for a couple of years. Ifthe foster family lived any distance away, the cost of a visit would be con-sidered prohibitive. Also, some women explained their exit from theirinfant’s life by evoking a need to respect the “new” mother’s autonomy: “Isaw that having two mothers around just wasn’t going to work, so I movedout.” Edi states repeatedly that she didn’t “abandon” her child—that sheremained in touch throughout the years—yet one can only wonder thatshe didn’t learn about her comadre’s death until some time after it occurred.It is quite possible that, just as I observed in other cases, she did not seephysical proximity as a priority issue in the mother-child bond.

The daughter of Edi’s comadre did not evidently see things in thislight. No doubt, from her point of view, her family had for years treatedthe child “as their own” and, in so doing, had collectively acquired parental


prerogatives. Moreover, it is quite possible that, having partaken in thechild’s upbringing, she considered herself a mother to the girl just asmuch as her own mother had been. Although the placement had startedout, by consensus, as temporary, it had in time acquired the aspect of apermanent transfer. Edi, like other birth mothers in this situation, mighthave marked her presence, even at a distance, by contributing to herchild’s support. In such cases, it is not so easy for the child’s foster familyto claim priority rights. However, considering that most mothers havegiven their children up because of extreme hardship, it is difficult to imag-ine how they are to assure their child’s caretaker regular financial support.Thus, in a process reminiscent of Pacific Islands societies (Jeudy-Ballini1992), as food and shelter build the parent-child bond, the principle mãeé uma só may gradually cede to the notion that mãe é quem criou.

Here we note the fundamental ambiguity between the partial andtemporary transferal of parental responsibilities involved in fosterage andthe total and permanent arrangement involved in adoption. The same sort of ambiguity, we might add, fueled Nelci’s second guest’s worries thatZequinha’s mother would want him back.

These disputes do not concern a child’s genealogical status, whichgenerally goes unquestioned. They are, rather, about parental status. Whoshall have the right to custody and, even more, to the child’s primary loy-alties throughout life? Child circulation produces a sort of double (ormultiple) affiliation as the youngster, despite the usual filial affection forhis (or her) “real” mother (as the “mother who raised me” is often called),sees himself as authorized at any time to rekindle contacts with his con-sanguineous relatives. This possibility explains why I would often findadult siblings in the same neighborhood, living side by side, despite thefact that they had been raised in different households.

Local Social Dynamics and Public Policy

The observation of these various disputes, which seem to be an intrinsicpart of traditional child circulation, raises key questions for public policy.In the first place, we might ask if the government, wishing to mediatechild care practices, should not concentrate efforts on fosterage—appar-ently quite coherent with local values—rather than adoption. A look atrecent policies convinces us that, on the contrary, legal fosterage hasbecome less and less a viable option for poverty-stricken families seekinggovernment aid. In Porto Alegre during the 1980s, there existed a varietyof child placement programs—some better, some worse. Besides the large,state-run orphanage, government funds helped support a series of phil-

Who shall have

the right to

custody and,

even more, to

the child’s

primary loyalties

throughout life?

122 Claudia Fonseca

anthropic “schools” that boarded young people from economicallydeprived families. There was also a state-funded program of foster fami-lies in which certain women—often those who were already running oneof the many informal crèches to be found in lower-income districts—received a monthly stipend of half a minimum salary (U.S.$30) per childto look after youngsters whose families were not coping at the moment.

State-coordinated fosterage, long considered a poor stepsister toadoption, is today practically nonexistent. A recent study on child place-ment in the state of Rio Grande do Sul found that in 1994 there were 350children in institutional care, “awaiting placement in a substitute family.”Just what sort of substitute family authorities had in mind is indicated by a comparison of fosterage and adoption rates. That year, three childrenhad been given in adoption for each child placed in state-funded fostercare (243 adoptees as opposed to 80 children in foster homes) (Car-darello 2000). Today, while adoptions remain at some 200 per year, insti-tutional care is once again on the rise, and foster homes, reduced to fourin number, have been all but phased out. Policy makers explain that fosterfamilies (generally from the lower-income brackets) are simply not up topresent standards. The fact that the last group of substitute mothers cre-ated budgetary problems by banding together and demanding minimumworkers’ benefits no doubt also weighs somehow on the issue. The netresult is that policy makers no longer consider fosterage an acceptableoption for public investments.

It would seem then that, more and more, poverty-stricken mothersare faced with an either/or situation. Either such a woman keeps her child,hoping for different sorts of “helping hands” to allay the ravages of finan-cial misery, or she gives up her child in legal, plenary adoption, whichdecrees a total and permanent rupture of ties. The choice is, of course,difficult, but as legislators and social workers point out, mothers do tech-nically consent to these terms. Even when they do not sign the adoptionrelease, they do not generally contest the judicial process that strips themof parental authority. May we not then construe this behavior as totalindifference or even implicit acceptance of the adoption procedures thatare to follow?

My experience leads me to believe that most parents who have beendivested of their parental authority do not grasp the finality of this legalmeasure. The same could be said of the release a woman signs to allow forher child’s adoption. Researchers have demonstrated that even in NorthAmerica, where the concept of plenary adoption was first generated, birthmothers may complain they did not understand the terms of the adoptionprocess (Modell 1994; Carp 1998). Brazilian mothers—descendants offamilies in which, since at least the nineteenth century and probably


before, child placement has been an integral part of socialization rou-tines—have far more reason to misconstrue the law. In a process com-pletely outside state control, children would be placed by their mother or parents in a substitute household, sometimes for long periods of time.The substitute parents might try to stipulate restrictive conditions—theymight, for example, claim that birth parents should have no further con-tacts or rights over the relinquished child. But time would usually provesuch preventive measures ineffectual, and it was expected (often with rea-son) that sooner or later the child would renew contact with his consan-guineous network. How then are such parents to construe the idea of apermanent, irreversible break?

These stories are not designed to show birth mothers as helpless vic-tims, much less to sanctify the biological tie. There are, no doubt, any num-ber of circumstances that might justify the temporary or even permanentplacement of children in a substitute family. Ethnographic studies inBrazil and elsewhere suggest, however, that there are many different waysof administering a child’s transferal from one family to another (Yngves-son 1997, 2002). Legal plenary adoption, notwithstanding the widelyaccepted belief that it “imitates nature,” is but one—and, I might add,quite arbitrary—formula.

In this article, I have implicitly asked if the basic premises of plenaryadoption are intelligible to precisely those people who are most concerned:the poverty-stricken families from which adoptable children are drawn. Isit conceivable that a judicial sentence can permanently sever the social tiesinvolved in blood relationships? Or that adoptive parents will substituteentirely for their child’s biological parents? For that matter, is the distinc-tion between fosterage and adoption—presented as obvious in most legaland many academic debates—so clear to the actors involved?

Legislators and social workers throughout the world have, of late,honed their instruments of perception in order to better separate negligentfrom “simply” poor parents, and so avoid the abusive use of adoption.Such efforts are certainly laudable. However, I suggest that if this criticalreflection is to reap fruits, it must be extended to other tacit assumptionsin the field of child welfare, such as the very terms of the adoption con-tract. By speaking of local-level practices in terms of social dynamics(rather than cultural void), I hope to lend legitimacy to nonhegemonicdiscourses, include these “other” voices in contemporary debates, and—consistent with traditional anthropological concerns—use the confronta-tion between different worldviews to rethink some of our own rarely chal-lenged truths about family and parenthood in the field of adoption.

124 Claudia Fonseca

Notes

1. According to existing estimates, approximately 7,500 children were legallyadopted by foreigners in the ten years between 1980 and 1989 (Kane 1993),while in the five-year period between 1990 and 1994, more than 8,000 childrenleft under similar conditions (Ministério da Justiça—MJ/DFF/DPMAF/NICI).

2. In 1990, the Ministry of Justice delivered 2,143 passports to Brazilianchildren officially adopted by foreign nationals. In the year 2000, this number hadsunk to 463.

3. The 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respectof Intercountry Adoption, the 1988 Brazilian Constitution, and Brazil’s 1990Children’s Code all contain clauses encouraging policy makers and adoptionworkers to choose substitute families within the adopted child’s original country.

4. One can only wonder, however, what impact this clause has had on actualpractice, as researchers point out that to this day many children withdrawn fromtheir original families come from homes in which parental neglect is barely dis-tinguishable from the effects of dire poverty (Cardarello 2000; Abreu 2002).

5. Plenary adoption—which decrees total rupture between birth parents andthe adoptive family (including the child and its parents)—has been universalizedin Brazil through successive legislation. The law 4.655 of 1965, speaking of“adoptive legitimation,” created the possibility of substitute filiation. The 1979Children’s Code introduced plenary adoption as one of several forms of adop-tion, whereas the 1990 Children’s Code proclaimed it the country’s sole legalform of adoption. For more on this subject, see Fonseca 1993, 2002.

6. See, for example, the report and conclusions of the Special Commissionon the Practical Operation of the Hague Convention of 29 May 1993 on Protec-tion of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, 28November–1 December 2000.

7. Porto Alegre, with a metropolitan population of some 3 million, is the rel-atively prosperous capital of Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul.Sporting many social indicators (infant mortality, life expectancy, and so on)well above those of the poorer northeastern parts of the country, the city none-theless shares in common with other Brazilian capitals an enormous “informaleconomy” (absorbing nearly 50 percent of the workforce) and a tremendous gulfin living conditions between the rich and poor.

8. Public schools in Brazil never provide more than a half-day of schooling.Luciana, at age nine, was still in first grade, attending class (“when it doesn’train”) from 8:30 A.M. to noon.

9. FEBEM is Fundação Estadual do Bem-Estar do Menor. Locals normallyrefer to the institution by its name. However, in order to facilitate comprehension,I shall to refer to it in this article as the state orphanage.

10. For a criticism of these numbers, see James and Prout 1990 and Rosem-berg 1993.

11. A 1985 survey including over 150,000 Brazilian women who had givenup a child before its first birthday found that the great majority had done sobecause of sheer misery (Campos 1991).

12. In 1998, approximately 71 million Brazilians were living below the


poverty line, with insufficient funds to provide the basic minimum of food, lodg-ing, clothes, and school supplies (Barros, Henriques, and Mendonça 2000).

13. See Article 23 of the Children’s Code.14. See Cadoret 1999 for similar episodes among middle-class families in

contemporary Spain.15. Substance abuse, commonly associated with child placement in North

America (see Bartholet 1999), is far less relevant in the Brazilian context. Therewas no evidence of chronic substance abuse among any of the women I describein this article.

16. “Mother of saint” refers to the religious leader of one of the innumerousgenerally home-based Afro-Brazilian cults that are a common element of neigh-borhood life.

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Documents

Eleana J.kim, Lisa Cartwright, Claudia Fonseca, Barbara Yngvesson Transnational Adoption Social Text, Spring 2003 2003