Open Access“Unspoken Understanding”: The Evolution of Chinese American Adoption Communities
Author(s) -
Annie Abruzzo
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
swarthmore undergraduate history journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2693-244X
DOI - 10.24968/2574-0113.2.2.1
Subject(s) - nexus (standard) , china , race (biology) , identity (music) , gender studies , sociology , work (physics) , psychology , political science , aesthetics , mechanical engineering , philosophy , computer science , law , embedded system , engineering
While scholarly work on adoption, transnational adoption, and specifically international adoption from China has been robust, it has tended to focus on studying parents and parenting. This paper analyzes the resources used by both parents and children to discuss race, culture, and adoption, and seeks to understand the effects of these parenting strategies on Chinese American adoptees, who have begun to reach young adulthood in the last ten years. Examination of the recent growth of adoptee communities reveals that a shared and complex adoptee identity is a more powerful nexus than shared Chineseness.