Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America by Catherine Ceniza Choy (review)

In Global Families, Catherine Ceniza Choy posits that global events after World War II, including the Vietnamese and Korean conflicts, created a complex platform for the perpetuation of a lucrative, yet problematic, adoption industry. Calling for a more integrated and global analysis of adoption studies and Asian American studies, Choy challenges the popularized media representation of the easily assimilated Asian adoptee, who is thankful for his or her opportunities in America. Through new and thoughtful analysis of documentaries, adoption records, and other narratives contrary to the model adoptee story, Choy argues that American media representations of assimilated adoptees problematize Asian American adoption networks by erasing the true difficulties many adoptees face when confronted with a new and conflicting American identity. Thus, Global Families adds to adoption studies by providing the oftentimes forgotten, or simply ignored, perspective of the adoptees themselves and seeks to integrate adoption studies into a larger discussion and analysis of Asian American studies including literature, film, and historical documentation.

Choy’s first chapter, “Race and Rescue in Early Asian International Adoption History,” discusses the motivation compelling Americans to adopt mixed-race children produced by American servicemen and Asian women following the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts. As many Americans in the aftermath of these wars portrayed the humanitarian efforts to adopt war orphans as a “rescue” mission, Choy points out that the United States rooted its efforts in hegemonic suppositions that Asian nations needed the United States to rescue the children that poorer Asian nations were unable to care for. Choy further highlights the U.S. rescue myth by citing popular opinion that the mixed-race children born to local mothers were perceived as an embarrassment to the home nation and would be mistreated as undesirable offspring if not adopted. Such narratives of prejudice, however, do not take into account the ways in which the American servicemen, particularly the many men who abandoned their mixed-race sons and daughters, contributed to the discrimination these children encountered. The U.S. media, reflecting U.S. prejudices, depicted Asian countries as unsophisticated and socially primitive, making the arrival of the unwanted children in the United States into an act of liberation. It is further problematic, Choy argues, that the rescue motif helped create justification for a U.S. occupation of Japan and a Cold War presence in Asia.

In chapters 2 and 3, Choy further applies her discussion of the rescue motif to the growth and popularity of Chinese adoptions beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. International Social Services (ISS) established a Hong Kong agency beginning in the 1950s but noticed that many Chinese parents felt compelled to give up their children for adoption because of poor economic conditions or the presumed knowledge that the children would enjoy a better life in the United States. ISS, then, first sought to provide aid to families in China before sending children abroad for adoption. The U.S. media presented China as poor and dirty—as no place to raise children—as they had done with other Cold War Asian countries, like Korea. These same news outlets portrayed a seamless integration of Chinese adoptees into their new American home, oftentimes neglecting the true difficulties that many children faced, such as remembering their birth families and trouble overcoming the language barrier.

As many social service agencies, such as ISS-USA, rose in the aftermath of World War II and the Cold War, the United States became an international adoption nation. This means that the United States became a key contributor to mediating adoptions and the leading country for overseas adoptions. Chapter 4, “Global Family Making,” highlights the growing interest in Asian orphans that ultimately led to the commodification of these children; Josephine Baker, a prominent dancer in the mid-1900s, and her husband, for example, adopted twelve children of different nationalities. Some news sources called them a “tribe,” and other media...