Broken Links, Enduring Ties

American Adoption across Race, Class, and Nation

By Linda J. Seligmann

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8606-5

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................viiIntroduction...............................................................11 Power and Institutions...................................................292 Fate and Faith: Adoption and Popular Religiosity.........................543 China: Culture and Place in Imaginaries of Exoticism.....................834 White Russians...........................................................1145 Black and White Crossings................................................1456 Broken Links and Adoption Narratives: The Power of Storytelling..........1727 Doing School: Family Trees and Playground Banter.........................2058 The Anchors of Virtual Communities.......................................2199 The Children's Search and the Formation of Diasporic Communities.........246Conclusion: Ties that Bind.................................................282Appendix: Characteristics of Adoptive Families Interviewed.................291Notes......................................................................295References.................................................................313Index......................................................................329Photographs appear following page 136......................................

CHAPTER 1

Power and Institutions

Kimchee and grits, the Four Questions in Hindi, these are the fun, the joyoussides, of our diasporas and our ethnicity. We're right to celebrate them. But wemustn't forget to talk about power.

—Barbara Katz Rothman 2005: 171

To talk about power as it intervenes in adoption is to account for how it circulatesin a society, giving rise to classification systems through which knowledgeis organized, value judgments exercised, and laws passed and enforced.We must also consider how people come to challenge power and in what circumstances.This chapter looks at three key settings that structure the journeysof parents as they make their families through transnational and transracialadoption: (1) laws that govern adoption and that sometimes contradict oneanother; (2) the workings of adoption agencies and brokers; and (3) mainstreammedia outlets. It is intended as a general overview rather than an in-depthand exhaustive account. Schools and the Internet constitute two othermajor sites of power and are the subjects, respectively, of Chapters 7 and 8.

The economic and political conditions that structured transnational andtransracial adoption were not immediately apparent to many adoptive parents.Even if they were able to articulate their concerns, they struggled to arrive atethical practices in the face of state, national, and international laws that sometimescontradicted each other. Some laws tried to make the welfare of childrena priority, yet what was in the best interest of children was a subject of ongoingdebate. Other laws were a response to strong nationalist sentiments, yetremained rhetorical because countries did not have the resources to enforcethem. Still other laws attempted to address identity issues but came up againstentrenched educational and informal socialization practices.

An elaborate yet unpredictable legal scaffolding had to be climbed andmaneuvered successfully in order to adopt a child in the United States. Theselaws had ramifications for how adopted children were socially and culturallydefined. Some were intended to deal with the growing concern about childtrafficking. A wealth of literature addresses the legal dimensions of adoption.What follows here is a discussion of two major laws—one international andone national—that structure the adoption process and have an impact on thestatus and identity formation of adoptees.

The Hague Convention

The most important law governing international adoption is the Hague Conventionon Intercountry Adoption. The Hague Convention was preceded bythe United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), passed in1989, whose intent was to put a stop to "wrongful" adoptions. In the wakeof media accounts revealing the horrendous conditions of Romania's orphanages,where children were warehoused after the fall of Nicholas Ceausescu, alsoin 1989, together with the eagerness with which Westerners flocked to adoptthem and entrepreneurs to capitalize on the situation, it became clear that theCRC was insufficient to enforce ethical adoption practices. In 1993, nations,including the United States, began crafting what became the Hague Conventionin 1994. In order to become a signatory to the Convention, a nation hadto commit itself to cooperate "to prevent the abduction, the sale of, or trafficin children" for international adoption. The United States signed the treaty in1994, yet waited until 2000 to ratify it, and did not implement its requirementsuntil April 1, 2008. The Hague Convention includes a passage requiring thatnations make every effort to keep children with their original family; that aCentral Authority be charged with overseeing international adoptions; and thatparents honor their child's cultural heritage.

The biggest problem with the Convention is that it allows signatories tothe Convention to continue to transact adoptions with nations that either arenot members (of about 195 countries, only 81 are members) or that have notyet signed the Convention. These include, for example, Ethiopia, Haiti, Korea,Nepal, Russia, Haiti, and Vietnam, from which many adoptions to the UnitedStates take place. Many "sending" regions also prohibit "receiving" countriesfrom adopting from them if the latter have not ratified the Convention. Thiswas true of the long period during which the United States had not ratified theConvention.

According to E. J. Graff, more than two-thirds of U.S. international adoptionscome from non-Hague countries, where a significant number of adoptionscandals have taken place. Graff (2010) lays out the loopholes and problemswith the Hague Convention and with international adoptions involving non-Haguecountries or those that have not yet ratified it, including the certificationof adoption agencies as partners. Availability of resources, certification, the interventionof immigration offices and officials in non-Hague adoptions, training,and oversight of due process intervene in the effective implementation ofthe law and the prevention of corruption. In short, all participants in adoptionprocesses are far more vulnerable to the violation of due process if both partiesare not full members of the Convention, as the ban on Russian adoptions in2013 demonstrated so well.

Weighing Social Justice: Ethics and Rights

Laws create the conditions for different kinds of rights to be either protectedor ignored. Leslie Hollingsworth (2003) offers an analysis of what social justicemeans for the parties involved in transnational adoption,...