Cultures of Transnational Adoption (review)

Cultures of Transnational Adoption is a very welcome addition to the growing literature on adoption, weaving narratives of identity, kinship and globalization into what are often highly personal and reflective accounts of the lives of the authors and their informants. It is never easy to get the balance between the autobiographical and academic register, but the rhetorical skill and theoretical sophistication displayed in many of these essays is often virtuosic, leading to both an emotional and intellectual appreciation of the complex issues involved in transnational adoption. As Elizabeth Alice Honig remarks in her short end piece, "Phantom Lives," "Transnational adoption has been on the margins of cultural consciousness for many generations" (214). Honig uses the example of a discussion in the novel Anne of Green Gables, in which the possibility of adopting a "Home Boy," i.e. one of the many "surplus" children sent from England to its overseas colonies, is mentioned. The voices of these children and of the hardships they often endured are only now coming to light, but their experience of a disrupted biography and of the phantom life they started but never completed in their country of origin, is similar to that of the current generation of transnational adoptees.

The book is divided into three parts, with an introduction by the editor in which she charts the changing culture of adoption in late twentieth century North America from the "as if born to" ideal of closed adoptions, to the notion of multiple, socially constructed identities in which countries of origin and perhaps birth relatives continue to play a place in the imagination and experience of the adopted person and his or her parents. The "cultures" of transnational adoption cannot be separated from wider political and economic forces that shape supply and demand in relation to "adoptable" children, or from the impact of globalization. International travel and the rise of the Internet has shortened the circuit between the "adoptable" child and "approved" parents, between sending and receiving countries, between birth parents, their children and new families.

In Part One, "Displacements, Roots, Identities," three essays by Barbara Yngvesson, Eleana Kim and Toby Alice Volkman look at the experience of children adopted from Chile and their parents on a "roots" tour to their country of origin, at organised cultural tours for Korean adoptees, and at the efforts made by North American families with children adopted from China to enact aspects of their children's "birth culture." All three chapters tackle the thorny issues of the nature of kinship, the relationship between biological and social parenting, and the shadowy presence of the third party in the adoption triangle, the birth mother or birth family—often transposed onto a whole country or culture. Adoptive families find themselves simultaneously asserting the possibility and indeed the daily reality of forming deep and meaningful parent-child relationships with a child who comes not just from another woman's body, but from another country, and at the same time recognising the prior and continuing umbilical pull that links their child physically and psychologically with another person and place. The need to understand and come to terms with this, often unknown, woman, seems to be as great for many adoptive mothers as it is for their children (contrary to the social work script that usually assumes adoptive parents will seek to deny this rival presence). And it is largely women we are talking about. It may be a coincidence but the contributors to this volume are all women, it is the birth mother above all who is the focus of real and imagined searches, and it is disproportionately female adoptees who feature in these narratives. While the majority of children adopted from China are female, and more generally girls are often favoured over boys by adoptive parents, it is also clear that the "cultures" we are talking about are also predominantly female cultures. It is women who take responsibility for forming and maintaining connections, whether in "ordinary" families or those formed by adoption, whether domestic...