How Chinese Are You? Adopted Chinese Youth Negotiate Identity and Culture by Andrea Louie (review)

How Chinese Are You? joins a growing body of anthropological literature on transnational adoption (see Kim 2010, Marre and Briggs 2009, Seligman 2013, Volkman 2005a, Yngvesson 2010), including studies of the adoption of Chinese children to the United States (Dorow 2006). Louie’s distinctive contribution to this literature is her comparative focus on white American and Asian American adoptive parents.¹ She asks how these parents differently approach the challenge of fashioning Chinese identities and culture for their children. Conducted over an eight-year period in the California Bay Area and St. Louis, Missouri, the research has an important longitudinal perspective. Most of the children whose parents Louie met in the earlier phase were still quite young, as adoption from China to the US only began in substantial numbers in the mid-1990s. By the final phase of her research, in 2009, these children had grown into young teens, with voices and opinions of their own to complicate—and make more interesting—the efforts of their parents.

Louie’s interest in these issues builds on her earlier work on Chinese Americans who travel to China on “roots” trips and on her broader concerns with Asian American culture, politics, and history (Louie 2004). In the first two chapters, she contextualizes her project both in terms of these interests and the emerging literature in the field. Throughout the book she positions herself sensitively, as a Chinese American anthropologist, aware that her interlocutors may respond to her in particular ways—either as embodying some sort of Chinese American “authenticity” to which they aspire, or as not “really” Chinese or Chinese American. Louie does not speak fluent Chinese, she is married to a half-Chinese man who grew up in Salvador and has relatives in Kentucky, and her young (not adopted) son is not quite sure of his identity. Louie struggles to decide whether she should be providing him with Chinese language lessons to help him “craft his identity” (2), and she asks how her struggles connect to or differ from those of adoptive parents, both white and Asian American.

Questions about cultural identity and race will be familiar to both scholars of adoption and adoptive families, as for more than two decades adoption professionals in this country (and elsewhere) have exhorted adoptive parents to teach their children about their “birth culture” and to foster the child’s respect and love for her country of origin. Parents get these messages from many quarters: adoption social workers at home, the media, organizations like Families with Children from China, entrepreneurs selling China-themed picture books and panda pajamas, adoption officials in China. Embedded in these admonitions are unspoken and unclear assumptions about culture and identity. Must families perform a celebratory version of “culture”? Incorporate “values” assumed to inform a Chinese approach to family and the world? Acknowledge and address long histories of racialization and discrimination in the US?

The desire to shape Chinese identity is etched into the adoption process from the start. In Chapter 3, “Beginnings,” Louie accompanies a group of parents on their two-week adoption trip to China. In Chapters 4 and 5, we meet a number of adoptive parents, primarily Asian Americans in the Bay Area and whites in St. Louis. In contrast to white parents, Louie argues, Asian Americans have the “privilege of authenticity” (90): they look Chinese (or Asian) and they have at least some degree of family history and tradition to draw upon. One Chinese American mother commented: “I cannot help but be authentically Chinese…I can do anything I want, I don’t have to eat jook [Chinese rice porridge] or anything” (88). This “privilege,” Louie contends, “enables [Asian American parents] to flexibly interpret both new and old practices as representing Asian or Chinese traditions for their family” (91).

While both sets of parents engage in “the production of new forms of Asian American culture” (138), Louie asserts that white parents have less flexibility as...