An "orphan" with two mothers: Transnational and transracial adoption, the cold war, and contemporary Asian American cultural politics

American Quarterly

Volumn 61, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 855-880

  Kim, Jodi ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77949606159     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: 10806490     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.0.0110     Document Type: Review

References (38)

1. Toby Alice Volkman, "Introduction: New Geographies of Kinship," in Cultures of Transnational Adoption, ed. Volkman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 1-22.
2. Eleana Kim notes that the number of transnational adoptees in the United States has "nearly doubled from a mean annual rate of approximately 16,000 children in the 1980s to nearly 32,000 in 1998 . . . and these numbers have no doubt increased in the past several years." The United States has been the primary "receiving" country throughout the history of transnational adoption, and the number of U.S. adoptions from foreign countries has exceeded 20,000 per year since 2001. See Kim, "Our Adoptee, Our Alien: Transnational Adoptees as Specters of Foreignness and Family in South Korea," Anthropological Quarterly 80.3 (Spring 2007): 495-531; 527.
3. Adoption discourses have typically separated interracial domestic adoptions, labeled transracial, from international or intercountry adoptions, labeled transnational. This obscures the extent to which most transnational adoptions, particularly from Asia, have historically also been transracial. See Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin, "Introduction," in Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, ed. Trenka, Oparah, and Shin, 1-15 (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006), 3, 5. I have thus chosen to use the term transracial in most instances, rather than transnational, to emphasize the significance of race. When I do use transnational, I do so to reference transnational adoption more broadly as a practice that is mostly but not exclusively transracial.
4. After World War II, Americans began adopting European war orphans, but it was the aftermath of the Korean War that inaugurated transnational adoption as a continuous, institutionalized practice. Since then, the "sending" countries have tended to be the sites of America's cold war military operations and covert actions, particularly in Asia and Latin America. According to Eleana Kim, the history of adoption from South Korea spans five decades, which makes it "the country with the longest continuous foreign adoption program in the world." Since 1954, over 200,000 children have been adopted from South Korea, including 150,000 sent to the United States and the remaining to Europe and, more recently, Australia. In the 1980s and early 1990s, this constituted over half of all international adoptions in the United States. Until 1991, South Korea sent the largest number of adoptees to the United States and in 2000, it ranked third after China and Russia (with more than 5,000 adoptions from these countries), and in 2002, it ranked fourth after China, Russia, and Guatemala. Since the early 1990s, particularly in the wake of negative media attention during the 1988 summer Olympics in Seoul that characterized South Korea as an "orphan-exporting-nation," Korean adoptions have been tightly regulated, numbering about 2,000 per year. More recently, as reported in an October 9, 2008, New York Times article, the South Korean government has made concerted efforts to encourage local adoptions by offering incentives such as monthly allowances and greater health benefits. In 2007, for the first time, the number of babies adopted locally by South Koreans (1,388) exceeded the number adopted transnationally (1,264), and the government has established a goal of eliminating foreign adoptions altogether by 2012. See Kim, "Wedding Citizenship to Culture: Korean Adoptees and the Global Family of Korea," in Cultures of Transnational Adoption, 58-59,
5. and "Our Adoptee, Our Alien";
6. and Norimitsu Onishi, "Korea Aims to End Stigma of Adoption and Stop 'Exporting' Babies," New York Times, October 9, 2008.
7. First Person Plural, directed by Deann Borshay Liem (San Francisco: National Asian American Telecommunications Association, 2000), 56 minutes;
8. and Daughter from Danang, directed by Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco (distributed by PBS Home Video, a copresentation of ITVS and NAATA with American Experience, WGBH Boston, 2002), 81 minutes.
9. I borrow this term, "social death," from Orlando Patterson's classic analysis, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). Patterson argues that slaves are "socially dead" because of their natal alienation, or "loss of ties of birth in both ascending and descending generations," as well as "the important nuance of a loss of native status," of having been born in a particular time and place to a particular people. Natal alienation severs the slave from belonging to, or having rights within, any formally recognized community or sociality.
10. See Slavery and Death, 7. In using this term, I am not, of course, arguing that transracial adoptees and birth mothers are slaves. Rather, I am building upon extensions of Patterson's work that take up "social death" to analyze the persistence of gendered racial domination, violence, and the production of degrees of social nonpersonhood within the context of formal emancipation, freedom, or sovereignty. That is, I am pointing to the ways in which natal alienation and gendered racial governmentalities outside the space of formal slavery persist in creating a variety of "social deaths" for subjugated groups.
11. For a discussion of how this operates specifically in Korea, see Kim, "Our Adoptee, Our Alien."
12. For a discussion of such an expanded notion of reproductive justice, see Trenka, Oparah, and Shin, Outsiders Within, 13.
13. In 1978, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was enacted to restore tribal jurisdiction over the adoption of Native American children. See Pauline Turner Strong, "To Forget Their Tongue, Their Name, and Their Whole Relation: Captivity, Extra-Tribal Adoption, and the Indian Child Welfare Act," in Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, ed. Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, 468-93 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 469, 471.
14. Sara K. Dorow, Transnational Adoption: A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender, and Kinship (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 3, 17, 19, 21.
15. See Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 161.
16. W. W. Rostow, in collaboration with Richard W. Hatch, An American Policy in Asia (Cambridge, MA and New York: M.I.T. Press and John Wiley & Sons, 1955), 5.
17. W. W. Rostow, Richard W. Hatch An American Policy in Asia (Ibid., 11.
18. Laura Briggs, "Mother, Child, Race, Nation: The Visual Iconography of Rescue and the Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption," Gender & History 15.2 (2003): 179-200.
19. Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 152.
20. Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Ibid., 153, 158.
21. See Briggs, "Mother, Child, Race, Nation," 182.
22. David L. Eng uses "privileged" to describe the transnational adoption of Asian babies as a particular kind of immigration. See his "Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas," Social Text 21.3 (Fall 2003): 1-37; 7.
23. For analyses of this commodity logic implicated in transnational adoption, see Volkman, Cultures of Transnational Adoption;
24. Barbara Yngvesson, "Placing the 'Gift Child' in Transnational Adoption," Law & Society Review 36.2 (2002): 227-56;
25. and Kim Park Nelson, "Shopping for Children in the International Marketplace," in Outsiders Within, 89-104.
26. Dorow, Transnational Adoption, 21.
27. For an analysis of how Deann fulfills this labor, see Eng, "Transnational Adoption."
28. Dorothy Roberts, "Adoption Myths and Racial Realities in the United States," in Outsiders Within, 49-56.
29. For a discussion of the role of the state in "producing the physically abandoned child" (236), see Yngvesson, "Placing the 'Gift Child.'"
30. Tobias Hübinette, "From Orphan Trains to Babylifts: Colonial Trafficking, Empire Building, and Social Engineering," in Outsiders Within, ed. Trenka, Oparah, and Shin, 139-49.
31. Christine Ward Gailey, "Race, Class, and Gender in Intercountry Adoption in the USA," in Intercountry Adoption: Developments, Trends, and Perspectives, ed. Peter Selman (London: British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering, 2000), 305.
32. E. J. Graff, "The Lie We Love," Foreign Policy, November/December 2008, http://www.foreignpolicy. com/story/cms.php?story-id= 4508=1
33. Karen Dubinsky, "Babies Without Borders: Rescue, Kidnap, and the Symbolic Child," Journal of Women's History 19.1 (2007): 142-50; 147.
34. Karen Dubinsky, Journal of Women's History Ibid., 143, 146.
35. Since its 2002 release, the film has garnered eight film festival awards and honors, received an Academy Award nomination for best documentary feature, and aired on PBS's program American Experience. See the film's official Web site, http://daughterfromdanang.com/, and the extensive PBS educational Web site, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/daughter/.
36. Gregory Paul Choy and Catherine Ceniza Choy, "What Lies Beneath: Reframing Daughter from Danang," in Outsiders Within, 222-23.
37. Fiona I. B. Ngô, "A Chameleon's Fate: Transnational Mixed-Race Vietnamese Identities," Amerasia Journal 31.2 (2005): 51-62; 57.
38. Choy and Choy, "What Lies Beneath," 222.