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: 978-0-8047-8605-8

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, using three socialjustice frameworks—egalitarian, utilitarian, and libertarian. She argues that thedifferences in the frameworks rest on the interpretation of fairness, decency,and compassion. In an egalitarian framework, liberty, opportunity, income,wealth, and the bases of self-respect “should be distributed equally unless anunequal distribution is to the advantage of the least favored.” In a utilitarianframework, the driving assumption is that the “distribution of resources is justwhen the parameters are directed to the greatest good for the greatest number.”Who is the greatest number and what constitutes the greatest good are mattersfor interpretation rather than objective facts. Finally, a libertarian approach tosocial justice assumes that if individuals have “rightfully acquired the resourcesthey possess, they have the freedom to decide how to dispose of them” and thegovernment should not intervene in determining the distribution of resources(Hollingsworth 2003: 211).

Hollingsworth embraces the egalitarian framework but modifies it to recognizethat in many circumstances, including adoption, the playing field is notlevel. Adopting families may benefit from existing inequalities such as povertyin sending countries; the condition of disenfranchised children; gender oppressionand discrimination that select for the vulnerability of some children andnot others; the lack of access of children to knowledge about and contact withtheir birth families; the “interruption” of the right of children to identify withtheir racial, ethnic, or national group; and the growing abduction, sale, andtrafficking of children.

The United Nations Convention and the Hague Convention represent effortsto address these injustices. Nevertheless, Hollingsworth concludes thatthey have not had much impact because they are difficult to implement effectively.For example, a critical dimension of social justice linked to adoptionprocesses is the need for social change in sending countries that would alleviatepoverty and diminish the probability that children would be abandoned bytheir birth families or taken from their birth countries. That is, in the best of allpossible worlds, children would be able to be raised by their natal families andin their culture of origin. Given that this is not the case, Hollingsworth arguesthat parents who adopt internationally should recognize the “losses incurred byinternationally adopted children and their birth families” and they should “beaware of the importance of culture to children and of children to their culture”(Hollingsworth 2003: 216).

Only gradually are adoptive parents coming to recognize the losses thatmake adoption possible for them. In contrast, many adoptees themselves arepushing hard to open the general public’s eyes to the conditions that led themto be adopted. In addition to wanting a greater voice in how adoption and practicesassociated with it are viewed ideologically, some are working to changeeconomic conditions in their place of birth.

Adoptive parents I spoke with struggled with the binary oppositions andethical dilemmas described above that went hand in hand with the laws thatstructured adoption, although they only recognized them as such after they hadadopted. Almost all of them were uncomfortable with the fusion of monetarytransactions and gifts in the adoption process, the unpredictability of regulationsand their enforcement, the undercurrent of competition that structuredhow prospective adoptive parents were forced to present themselves as idealparents, and the specter of child trafficking. CA and AA adoptive parents alsofound themselves confronting the complex issues surrounding the identityof their children, and the “plural and ambivalent” struggles they faced in theUnited States (Briggs 2006).

Some scholars who study the legal codes that underpin adoption argue thatit should be viewed solely as an economic practice, a regulated “trading system.”Their view is that the discourse of regulation has simply been moderatedor replaced by terms more palatable to Americans for whom the cultural domainof family formation lies outside of commodity exchange. Deborah Spar(2006), for example, thinks that supply and demand must guide the laws thatdetermine transactions and that the causes for supply and demand need not beaddressed. As she explains,

In purely economic terms, adoption is the most rational aspect of the babytrade. There is a vast unmet demand for children and a ready supply of themscattered across the world. By matching demand with supply, adoption wouldappear to be the ideal solution to infertility, a match of immeasurable valueon both sides of the transaction…. The “buyers” don’t really want to purchasetheir babies. The suppliers don’t want to sell. And governments around theworld consistently condemn baby-selling as a crime akin to slavery. But stillthere are surplus children in the world, and would-be parents who want toadopt them. And so adoption has generated an ersatz market of sorts, a systemof structured trades…. Money changes hands in this market-without-a-name,but the money is rarely buying children per se and the system is subject to alabyrinth of formal controls—far more, in fact, than exist in nearly any othersector of the baby business. (Spar 2006: 176)

Spar lays out the paradoxical situation in which a highly regulated “business”has historically operated in a “laissez-faire” manner with a hodge-podgeof regulations and public and private agents and institutions, and in which humanitarianismis well mixed with the dynamics of consumerism. Concludingthat it is impossible to separate economics from politics in the “baby business,”she argues for more uniform and systematic regulations of adoption as a matterof “property rights” both inside the United States and internationally:

Embed this market in an appropriate political and regulatory context, toimpose the rules that will enable the market to produce the goods we want—happy,healthy children—without encouraging the obvious risks…. If we canmake the baby business work better—if we can match parents and childrenmore consistently, at a lower cost, and with less uncertainty—then politicalsupport for the market is likely to grow. And if we clarify the politics, distinguishingwhat is acceptable from what is not, the market will inevitably workbetter. (Spar 2006: 197)

Spar relies on a neoclassical economic model. For her, the adoption market operatesbadly because of intractable political ideologies and uneven regulations,and her goal is to arrive at laws and enforcement mechanisms that make it workmore smoothly. She does not address the context in which these ideologies ariseand the baby business unfolds.

In contrast, a host of scholars, while they are concerned about the effectivenessof laws, argue that participants in adoption (and law-making) shouldrecognize first and foremost that adoptions, especially transracial and transnationalones, are “neocolonial undertakings” that create impossible situationsfor adoptees (Briggs 2006; Marre and Briggs 2009). The very promotionof supply and demand as the best way to regulate adoption also reduces childrento objects of exchange. In the spirit of critical race theory and legal studies,they point to the economic and political ideologies that then set the stagefor facilitating particular kinds of transactions between sending and receivingcountries and groups. They argue that while adoptive parents have becomemore aware of the geopolitical conditions that permitted them initiallyto adopt, and of the need, once they adopt their children, to prepare themfor the consequences of racism in the United States, they are nevertheless insufficientlycognizant of the painful conditions of identity formation amongadoptees and the myriad ways that the exertion of authority silences adopteesand censures the knowledge to which they are privy. Tobias Hubinette lays outhis position along those lines:

My main argument is that adopted Koreans have been fully acculturated andsocialized into a self-identification as white. At the same time as having a Koreanbody, they are incessantly liable to a whole regime of Orientalist imaginariestrying to fetishize them into an ethnic stereotype. Furthermore, being anon-white body, an ever-present discourse of Immigrantism wants to racializethem into an Asian and non-Western immigrant. Lastly as an ethnic Korean,nowadays they are also warmly interpellated by a Korean diaspora policy thatessentializes them into and hails them as overseas Koreans…. I regard thisacquisition of a white self-identification by adopted Koreans as a completesubordination to white hegemonic power, and as a magnificent symbol of thefinal triumph of the colonial project. (Hubinette 2007: 158)

Laura Briggs (2006: 345) expands on Hubinette’s arguments, pointing tothe deleterious effects of media images, as well of child trafficking, but herthinking is based on the experiences of Chinese adoptees rather than Koreanadoptees. She asks: “What burden does the “Chinese girl toddler” bear in commercials,Olympic promotions, etc.? What does it really mean to depict herin [the] context of the new ‘American family’?” She finds that globalization,while it has distributed wealth and information internationally, has created,once again, dualisms, but ones that differ from those of the past. Rather thanpresenting oppositions between pure/impure and white/racially mixed, thedualisms now revolve around the contradictory notions that “internationallyadopted children can become the inheritors of their adoptive parents’ nationalculture and, on the other hand, understanding them as exilic, diasporic refugeeswhose inheritance is necessarily plural and ambivalent” (Briggs: 346).Briggs also states that people in general, and adoptive parents in particular,have “turned a blind eye to trafficking,” yet “none of this is particularly new.As Ann Stoler has continued to remind us, raising the ‘orphans’ of colonizedpeople is a very familiar practice” (Briggs: 348).

Thus, even as international law in the form of the Hague Convention attemptsto address the heterogeneity of adoption practices and regulate themin order to protect child, birth parent, and adoptive parent, the law itself isenforced on a playing field that is already deeply saturated with histories ofcolonialism, economic inequalities, racial ideologies, and national reproductivepolicies. These conditions create unevenness within and between both sendingand receiving regions that cannot be addressed by laws alone.

Multiethnic Placement Act/Interethnic Adoption Provisions

A second law that has played a major role in structuring adoption practices,especially AA adoptions within the United States, is the Multiethnic PlacementAct/Interethnic Adoption Provisions (MEPA/IEP). In 1994, the U.S. Congresspassed MEPA in light of the high number of African American children in thestate welfare system without adoptive families. The law was intended to preventthe matching of children and to increase transracial adoptions. In 1996,Congress passed IEP (the Interethnic Adoption Provisions), more stringentlyenforced legislation that was part of welfare reform. MEPA, at a minimum,converted into law the notion that racial matching and, by extension, culturalcommonalities, should be irrelevant in adoption.
(Continues…)Excerpted from Broken Links, Enduring Ties by Linda J. Seligmann. Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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