Choosing Ethnicity, Negotiating Race: Korean Adoptees in America

Chapter 6: The Ethnic Identities of Adult Adoptees

CHAPTER 6 The Ethnic Identities of Adult Adoptees When asked about his current identification, Brandon Luebke, a twenty-eightyear -old river-rafting guide, stated without any hesitation, “American.” Despite engaging in cultural exploration in early adulthood through college coursework and study abroad, he did not consider himself knowledgeable enough to claim an ethnic label: “To consider myself Korean American . . . I would probably have to know a lot more about Korea itself. You know, I’d want to be able to say that I knew a little bit of the language and knew a little bit about the culture and the way that their society runs itself.” In contrast, identifying as an American felt appropriate to him: “[Identifying as American] means to me that I grew up in America in a very white background and environment, and my values and the way that I present myself and the way that I think of myself are all based on the environment that I grew up in. So, [a] very, very white urban-rural environment.” In this chapter, we examine how Brandon and other adoptees in our study currently identify. In particular, we pay close attention to the meanings that adoptees attached to their identities, the contrasts they perceived between different labels, and the contexts that turned labels into salient identities for them. We also address the impact of earlier exploration, or lack thereof, on their adult identity choices. First, we describe how adoptees characterized their identity options. Second, we examine the cluster of meanings and situations that accompany each of the major ethnic labels—for example (for adoptees), American, Korean, Korean American, and Asian American. Third, we compare the identities of the adoptees with their non-adoptee counterparts. We conclude with a theoretical discussion of how the practice of ethnic identification occurs in certain social conditions that have less to do with questions of ethnic and national loyalty than with continuing social perceptions of Asian Americans, even adoptees, as foreigners. ETHNIC LABELS AND THEIR CONNOTATIONS According to Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut (2001), members of the second generation typically choose one of four common labels as their ethnic identity: (1) a foreign national-origin identity; (2) a hyphenated American identity ; (3) an American national identity; or (4) a panethnic minority-group identity , such as Mexican, Mexican American, American, or Latino (or Hispanic). They argue that changes in label choice reveal trends in identity assimilation, defined as the balance of allegiance to the group versus to the nation. Their findings document the direction of these choices for different groups and reveal how behavior is correlated with labels; however, a shortcoming of their research is that it does not include questions about the reasoning behind the choices. In our examination of adoptee identity development, we recharacterize Portes and Rumbaut’s four types as: (1) a singular ethnic identity, for example, “Korean”; (2) a compound ethnic identity, for example, “Korean American”; (3) a singular national identity, for example, “American”; and (4) a compound panethnic identity, for example, “Asian American.” Whereas Portes and Rumbaut infer the foreignness of a national-origin label like “Korean,” our respondents emphasized its ethnic character—that is, its embeddedness within the American nation. Portes and Rumbaut infer the nationalism of the hyphenated and American labels, but our respondents also emphasized the inclusiveness of the former and registered the efforts it took to be recognized as the latter. And finally, Portes and Rumbaut infer the denationalized quality of the panethnic labels, but again, our respondents emphasized the ethnic embeddedness of such labels and distinguished the label “Asian American” from the singular “Asian,” which was chosen by none of our respondents. We found two additional identity paths that were also compound identities in the sense of identifying equally with multiple labels or identifying with a unique label that signaled mixed-race ancestry. However, these paths drew on the same calculus of choice 114 CHOOSING ETHNICITY, NEGOTIATING RACE that motivated the more common pattern of primarily identifying with only one of the four main labels. We also found considerable variation in the meaning and function of particular labels as identities. Probing the reasons for our respondents’ choices, we distinguished (1) primary identities or the labels with which participants in our study chose to identify from, (2) secondary labels used in special situations but without identification, and (3) disidentifications or labels that our respondents hesitated to employ...