In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Rejecting Assimilation, Immersion and Chinoiserie: Reconstructing Identity for Children Adopted from China
  • Lisa D. Falvey (bio)

Beginning in England and Europe in the Eighteenth Century craftspersons and artisans were catering to an insatiable desire for all things Asian (Knox 1994). The well-to-do in Britain and Western Europe actively sought out Eastern — specifically Chinese — designs that represented a cultural capital at the time. To fill the demand, these European artists eagerly (but inaccurately) appropriated and reproduced Chinese-infused motifs on any number of artifacts, from architecture to pottery and clothing (Porter 1999). Like any translation, however, much of “authentic” Chinese culture got lost in these artists’ representations. Even if one might generously describe this movement as imitative flattery, its unfortunate side effect is that it marked and exaggerated difference through an unintended caricature of China and its culture (Ma 2000). Art historians use the “neutral” term Chinoiserie to denote this aesthetic style. Yet, because these designs are often fakes — poor copies of the richness of the Chinese originals — the lack of critical inquiry into the practice of this appropriation is, in itself, a symbol of the reticence to uncover and condemn forms of Orientalism (Said 1979).

Ma (2000) has identified the need to revise the intended meaning of the word from its neutral roots to a more critical connotation. When employed from this critical perspective the term is far more useful as a symbol of the simultaneous fascination and tension Westerners have with Chinese culture. Linguistically, the need for words such as Chinoiserie and Orientalist themselves indicate an “other” that separates the West from the East. Said (1979) notes, for example, that there is no real academic field for “Occidentalists.”

The lingering discomfort that whites in contemporary American culture have with the “Orient” is expressed in a variety of ways. For Americans of Asian descent, for example, hegemonic challenges to the nature of their authentic identity as “naturalized” citizens are under constant negotiation. Americans who are Asian [End Page 275] in ethnicity are subtly asked to prove their identity or are seen as inherently “foreign” (see Lee [1999] for example). Often this difference is negotiated through the dreaded yet ubiquitous question: “Where are you from?” Asian-Americans who try to engage in this negotiation know that “New York City,” “St. Louis,” or “Topeka” are rarely satisfactory responses, as evidenced by the typical followup question, “No, I mean where are you really from?” The meta-message of this dialogue is, of course, that legitimate American identity stems from whiteness and “sameness.”

This clash between the “whiteness” of America and the “foreignness” of Asian descent is often deeply experienced by Asian adoptees (Willing 2004). The cultural expectations Americans place on adoptees — and the adoptive parents’ willingness to act on these expectations — is a sharply reflective mirror of uneasiness with racial difference. Historically, the ways in which the average transracial adoptive parent has handled issues of race and ethnicity has echoed cultural expectations for the containment of this difference, from the “assimilation model” prominent during the wave of Korean adoptees during the 1950s–70s to the “immersion model” so frequently advocated for today. Parents of children adopted from China have used the failed legacy of the assimilation model to promote what only appears to be a radically progressive response, which, as we’ll describe, unintentionally stresses the need to accentuate difference as a way to perform it for white culture. This report, then, questions how the immersion model most adoptive parents use to instill “cultural competence” in their children inadvertently functions as a way to validate exposure to a variety of cultural experiences one might describe as Chinoiserie in nature, and reinscribes and reinforces hegemonic anxiety over the other. We begin by investigating the nature of immersion (as a reaction against assimilation), then demonstrate how current “culture keeping activities” tend only to give an essentialized version of culture (Chinoiserie), and finally suggest counter-hegemonic alternatives to the assimilation and immersion models that may more effectively challenge commonly-held, biased interpretations of race and ethnicity in the U.S.

Assimilation and Immersion

While research suggests that there are a variety of models parents of adopted children from China use in enacting race and...

pdf

Share