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

Whites choose which aspects of the abducted child’s culture to assimilate into family life and which to discard. The children are forced to participate in the racial fantasies of the white parents. White parents dress the children of color up in their “native costumes.” They treat their abducted children like little ethnic dolls. The white parents become perversely expert on the food, language, and customs of the abducted child’s birth culture. They proudly claim to be “learning with my abducted child.”

—Kim So Yung

The above quote is excerpted from Kim So Yung’s “Living Dolls: Transracial Adoption and Cultural Appropriation,” posted on the “Transracial Abductees” Web site. Kim So Yung’s bio lists her as “a faux Korean who was adopted/abducted by white Americans when she was four months old” and as the cofounder of the group, which refers to itself as “angry pissed ungratefully little transracially abducted motherfuckers from hell.”¹ Hers may be viewed as a cynical and extreme perspective on parents’ efforts to honor their children’s birth country’s culture, insinuating that parents engage in these practices more for their own comfort and pleasure than for their children’s benefit.² Ironically, the efforts to teach children about their “cultures of origin” she criticizes are often viewed by adoptive parents as a progressive and corrective approach to the practices of previous generations of adoptive parents. This approach, however, has also been the focus of a set of new critiques leveled by many academics and adoption activists who have expressed concern about the efforts of adoptive parents to educate their children about their “birth cultures” at the expense of attention to race and other issues of social inequality that permeate adoption. Jane Brown, a social worker and white adoptive parent of children from Korea and China, expresses her concerns about adoptive parents’ practices in a more moderate way: “Sometimes parents want to celebrate, even exoticize, their child’s culture, without really dealing with race. . . . It is one thing to dress children up in cute Chinese dresses, but the children need real contact with Asian-Americans, not just waiters in restaurants on Chinese New Year. And they need real validation about the racial issues they experience.”³

As reflected in the quote by Brown, in constructing Chinese cultural identities for their minority children, white parents may merely be reproducing the myth of contemporary multiculturalism, which focuses on the celebration of diversity while skirting issues of white privilege, racial politics, and power. Academic critics have gone further to assert that in constructing Chinese culture for their children, adoptive parents produce decontextualized and aestheticized versions of culture, and engage in consumptive practices at the expense of attention to race. Other studies on adoption are less critical of these practices and more optimistic about the potential that they represent, focusing on the new, hybrid forms of identity that these families create and the work that these cultural productions may do in resolving important adoption-related issues such as the longing for the “birth mother.”⁴

While my own work can be situated within the above concerns and critiques, I also strive to find a middle ground that explores possibilities for movement beyond the difficult and often untenable position within which white adoptive parents find themselves in relation to their efforts to expose their children to “Chinese” culture. The adoption of Chinese children into white families represents the potential for the creation of new identities, not just for adoptees, but, as noted in Kim So Yung’s quote, also potentially for their parents who begin to understand their own identities in new ways. Sara Dorow’s research points to a middle ground in which identities can be transformed, but her work also articulates the limits within which these processes of reproduction and transformation occur. In her comprehensive study of Chinese adoption, she analyzes how parents’ approaches to cultural diversity are constrained by “the deep structuring power of race and racism.” At the same time, she observes that “parents’ organizational activities, social practices, and family stories re-narrate...