The Stories We Adopt By: Tracing “The Red Thread” in Contemporary Adoption Narratives

Abstract

The Stories We Adopt By:Tracing “The Red Thread” in Contemporary Adoption Narratives Macarena García González (bio) and Elisabeth Wesseling (bio) The Kinning of Foreigners Founding a family through adoption does not only entail legal procedures, but also cultural work. During their lengthy “pregnancies,” adopters refashion their individual identities and those of their children-to-be into familial identities. This process of “kinning” is continued long after the arrival of the adoptee.1 Every family-in-the-making renegotiates the identities of its (future) members, but adoptive families are special in several respects. In the absence of biological lineage, adopters depend solely on cultural repertoires for the forging of family ties across the divides of “race,” religion, class, and nationality. Now that adoption in Western societies has become increasingly transnational and “transracial,” because of the dwindling number of infants available for adoption domestically, resemblance can no longer be used to help draw prospective family members from opposite parts of the globe together. In order for an adoptee to be transformed into a next-of-kin, it is first divested of the ties that link it to its birth country and subsequently reinscribed with the particularities of its family and country of destination, a true labor of imaginative “transubstantiation.” This (religious) term is introduced by Signe Howell to bring out the wholesale, almost miraculous nature of the transformations imposed upon adoptees. Furthermore, adopters tend to be even more driven to seek recognition in their parental role than biological parents are, because transnational adoption has always been contested since it began to be practiced systematically in the wake of World War II and the Korean War. Finally, adopters feel [End Page 257] called upon to explain adoption to adoptees to alleviate the trauma of their abandonment in their country of origin. Narrative plays a crucial role in these ongoing processes of identity renegotiation. As Walter R. Fischer’s philosophical, Jerome Bruner and Dan P. McAdams’ psychological, and Margaret Somers’ sociological perspectives on the narrative construction of identity have revealed, individual identity is primarily experienced as a life story that is worked on from early adolescence onward. The ability to craft a coherent and compelling life story is essential to gaining social recognition in Western liberal societies (Somers). Narratives enable persons to stage and enact the personae they want to identify with. This explains why adopters tend to engage quite intensively in various forms of life writing, ranging from published autobiographies to informal ego-documents such as diaries, family photo albums, memoirs, and weblogs. Often enough, such life writings are addressed expressly to and produced for infant adoptees, even if the child is not yet present in the family. Adopters invest considerable labor in fabricating origin stories that shall help the adoptee in her/his process of identity formation. Besides ego-documents, this drive is also manifest in the flourishing niche market of children’s books about adoption for young adoptees that are mostly produced by stakeholders in transnational adoption. These picture books anticipate the painful and awkward questions that adoptees are bound to ask sooner or later. Just like any other child (and perhaps even more so), adoptees want to find out where they come from. Rather than hiding their child’s adoption, which used to be the custom in domestic adoption in the early twentieth century and Korea adoption in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, contemporary adopters frankly acknowledge their child’s foreign roots. With the onset of China adoption in the nineties, adoptees are taught how to (re)tell the story of their adoption as a fact of life to be proud of rather than to ignore their birth in a foreign country as a false start that is best forgotten. Such origin stories assist them in the complex endeavor of somehow reconciling their birth in another part of the globe with their membership in a (most often) white middle-class family in the West (Dorow 25). Origin stories also serve to legitimize global adoption in the eyes of the outside world, which views this mode of family making with increasing suspicion. As the number of children available domestically for adoption continues to decrease, transnational adoption is increasingly...