Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference

Chapter 5. Adoptive Families in the Public Eye

145 5 Adoptive Families in the Public Eye Parents of children with a different ethnicity constantly get asked questions by curious ­ people, some friendly, some ignorant, some that are eager to share their own history. However, the implicit message, no matter how well intended the question, always is “you don’t look like you belong together.” Please think about that next time you have the urge to ask. The plea above was shared by “Anne,” a reader commenting on the New York Times adoption blog series, Relative Choices (relativechoices.blogs.nytimes.com). In this series, eleven adoptive parents, birth mothers, and adoptees shared thoughtprovoking essays on adoption. The comment above was in response to Jeff Gammage’s contribution, “A Normal Family” (December 2, 2007). Gammage, a white China-adoptive father and reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote of the questions he receives in public from both strangers to adoption and those involved in the adoption world who are curious about the relationship he has with his Chinese-born daughters. By December 6, four days after his essay was originally published, Gammage’s post had generated 118 responses. Some commenters , like the one above, wrote in to support Gammage; some thanked him for articulating their experiences so well. Others just as forcefully commented that ­ people who pose questions to 146 Culture Keeping adoptive families are merely curious and well-meaning. These commenters argued that everyone gets asked questions when out and about with their children and that Gammage should just “lighten up.” The heart of Gammage’s essay and the battle of wills in its comments section point to how family form shapes the tenor of public interactions. When in public, all families are on display, open to unsolicited comment from strangers—to questions, stares, even violence—or conversely the lack of such attention due to their family form or the behavior of individual family members. This monitoring is especially acute when adults are in public with young children. In this surveillance of family form and behavior, we see how parents are held accountable for their ability to comply with familial norms. Norms about the family are, of course, variable; they are not static nor are they identical across communities. The idea that the white, middle-class, monoracial, heterosexual family constitutes the only real “American Family” is shifting—somewhat . There are places in the country, for example, where interracial , adopted, blended, single or gay parent families are, if not the norm, then widely seen, tolerated, and even accepted. In other communities, however, these “nonnormative” families are actively discouraged, sometimes through violence. This chapter examines how the white, middle-class mothers in New England who spoke with me—members of families who do not match the hegemonic “American Family” along the lines of monoraciality and biological kinship­ —have public encounters that speak to ideological norms of the family. The Interracial Surveillance of China-Adoptive Families The families with children adopted from China who spoke with me drew considerable attention in public spaces—attention that suggests that others are engaged in the surveillance Adoptive Families in the Public Eye 147 of families to assess the degree to which they fit the ideological normative family mold. White adoptive parents in my study reported a surveillance they felt when out in public with their Asian children. This surveillance was characterized by a near constant trickle of inquiries directed at them in public spaces—grocery stores, playgrounds, airplanes, parking lots— about their adoption experiences and their children. The questions families receive range from the innocuous to the offensive . Lorraine Burg described this attention and the burden she felt it placed on her family: So everywhere we go ­ people look twice at us and it has become sort of the norm. So we’re used to it. But ­ people ask questions, you know: “Is she your daughter?” “Is your husband Chinese?” They ask her, you know, other kids say, “That’s not your real mother.” So all of those things sort of impact us more than any other piece, just because it’s so daily and so constant. It is the interracial aspect of these families and what it signals to others—nonbiological kinship and international adoption— that drives this surveillance. Unlike families (either biological or adopted) in which all members appear to be biologically related due to shared racial classifications, the members of these families feel as if they cannot hide their nonbiological mode...