CAPTURING KINSHIP: VISUALIZING THE HISTORY OF CHINESE ADOPTION IN CANADA
by
Emilie J. Lanthier
A thesis submitted to the Department of History
In conformity with the requirements for
the degree of Master of Arts
Queen’s University
Kingston, Ontario, Canada
(April 2021)
Copyright ©Emilie J. Lanthier, 2021 Abstract
The Chinese government enacted the one-child policy during the late 1970s and early 1980s to curb the growth of the country’s swelling population. This extreme form of family planning marked the beginning of a radical social experiment that profoundly affected Canada’s social and familial landscape. In the forty years since China instituted its one-child policy, Western media remains obsessed with narratives about saving girls from China’s draconian state policies. As such, my MA research asks what claims images of needy children have made on Canadian audiences, and to what degree their meanings and interpretations were contoured by broader processes and ideologies. Special attention is paid to how the presence and visibility of the female Chinese adoptee have altered notions of Chinese Canadian identity, international humanitarianism, and interracial kinship, through a visual discursive analysis of the images that have saturated our national retina and animated the practice of Chinese adoption in Canada. I will demonstrate how visual mediums are historically rooted communication structures that act as alternative sites of ideological production and exchange, whereby constructions of needy children are transformed through a complex matrix of image-making and image-consuming practices. In this way, the visual representation of the Chinese adoptee becomes an opening through which to investigate both the historical record of intercountry adoption in Canada and the timeless power of symbolic children. Exploring Chinese adoption in Canada at the intersection of transnational adoption scholarship, visual discourse analysis, and adoptee subjectivities is a novel way of grappling with the history of intercountry adoption. In other words, surveying the visual landscape of adoption and its reciprocal constitutions is a way of getting at the public debates Chinese adoption has engendered, the actions and interests of private actors, and the collective memories and mythologies held by adoptees.
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Table of Contents
Abstract ...... ii Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 2 Literature Review ...... 12 Chapter 3 Framing Pity Through the Humanitarian Gaze ...... 18 Constructing a National Humanitarian Gaze ...... 20 How Moving Images Mobilize ...... 25 How Images Individualize ...... 32 How Images Influence Political Posturing and Policy ...... 39 Conclusion ...... 51 Chapter 4 The Goldilocks Conditions of Chinese Adoption ...... 54 The Long Shadow of Canada’s “Yellow Peril” ...... 58 From “Yellow Peril” to “Yellow Fever” ...... 65 The Goldilocks Conditions of Adoption...... 67 Narrating Choices: “Good China”, “Bad China” ...... 77 Conclusion ...... 81 Chapter 5 Kinning Culture and Storied Origins ...... 84 Culture Keeping in the Era of Multiculturalism ...... 87 Celebration Through Parody and Pastiche ...... 94 Consummating Kinship by Consuming Culture ...... 97 The Balancing Act of Story Telling ...... 101 Mainstreaming Chinese Adoption in Pop Culture ...... 105 Somewhere in Between ...... 107 Conclusion ...... 112 Chapter 6 Conclusion ...... 115 Bibliography ...... 120
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Chapter 1
Introduction
The British television documentary, The Dying Rooms, made tidal waves in 1995 when it premiered on Chanel 4 in the United Kingdom, and later in 1996 when it emerged on local television networks in Canada and the United States. By taking audiences into the private spaces of China’s state-run orphanages, undercover filmmakers
Brian Woods and Kate Blewett helped to pull back the country’s iron curtain to reveal, in uncomfortable starkness, the gross and systematic neglect of a growing number of abandoned children. Images of severely malnourished bodies and despondent child faces were widely publicized in American and Canadian news media coverage. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag reflects on how harrowing photographs and shocking images of death cling to our modern ethical feelings and strengthen our shared conviction that human suffering is an aberration;1 to many Canadian onlookers what the Dying
Rooms had to offer was indeed an aberration. Thus, feelings of care and compassion dovetailed with horror and indignation; pushing some Canadians to pursue adoptions from China. Between 1992 and 2009 adoptions from China soared to over eleven thousand and accounted for over one third of all international adoptions in Canada.2
1 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 40. Sontag writes that all images that display the violated and mutilated body are pornographic since they are at once repulsive and alluring. The book’s searing mediations on the spectacle of suffering during times of war is a thoughtful companion and update to her earlier essays on the voyeuristic nature of photography; On Photography (1977). 2 “International Adoption,” The Monitor, October 14, 2003, http://web.archive.org/web/20070420210142/ www.cic.gc.ca/english/monitor/issue03/ 06-feature.html. In 2003, The Monitor – the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ bimonthly magazine – reported that Canadians had adopted 6,245 children from China in the period between 1993 and 2002. Despite representing less than 1% of Canada’s total immigration, data from Statistics Canada indicated that Canadians had adopted nearly 21,000 children from abroad between the years 1999 and 2009. About 8,000 of these international adoptions were from China. 1
Introduced in 1979, China’s one-child policy remains the symbolic cornerstone of a complex and consequential state project bent on modernizing China by controlling the country’s swelling population. Between the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and the country’s first official population survey carried out in 1953, China’s population increased a whopping 100 million in four years and stood at over 600 million.
According to British-Chinese journalist, Xinran, China’s population continued to grow from 700 million in 1966 to 1.2 billion in 1979.3 As part of a broader birth planning program, the policy varied over time and place until its official dissolution in 2015. From the late 1980s and well into the early 2000s, China’s surplus of abandoned and orphaned
Chinese baby girls culminated in a slew of bilateral adoption agreements between the
People’s Republic of China (PRC) and fourteen Western countries.4 Yet, North American discourses around Chinese adoption has understood the one-child policy as monolithic and absolute, ignoring the complex web of state and local coercion, resistance, evasion, and child concealment in Chinese communities and cities, and among many Chinese families. In contrast to the pervasive narrative of China’s “throwaway daughters,” families in China’s more remote areas often had several children. While conducting interviews for her book China Witness, Xinran encountered several individuals who confirmed her suspicion that the one-child policy waxed and waned over different geographies: “[o]n my visit back to China in December 2009 I had four different taxi drivers in four different cities — Tianjing, Nanjing, Anhui, and Guangzhou — who all
3 Xinran, Messages from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Love and Loss (New York: SCRIBNER, 2010), 22. 4 Karen Miller-Loessi and Zeynep Kilic, “A Unique Diaspora? The Case of Adopted Girls from the People’s Republic of China,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 10, issue no. 2 (2001): 247. EBSCO Publishing. 2
came from the countryside and each of them told me the same thing: that they have more than three children. They said that the one-child policy can be avoided by money and power in their hometown! Not all twenty somethings in China are only children; there are also many with hordes of brothers and sisters.”5 However, she notes that in eastern
China’s urban areas, “enforcement was and is draconian.”6 Thus, elision of the complexity of the policy on the lived realities of Chinese families has strengthened the pervasive Western narrative of China’s “throwaway daughters.”7
Significantly, the momentous socio-political shifts taking shape in China collided with Canada’s own post-war transformations in the spheres of governmentality, legal reform, international posturing, and popular discourse. These internal changes, which were partially wrought on by a national reorientation towards humanitarian internationalism and a new spirit of multiculturalism, permeated every aspect of ordinary life in Canada, including the private domain of the family. In this way, the systematic relocation of thousands of children from the margins of China to the privileged, mostly white, spaces across the North America, Europe, and Australia became an intimate form of exchange; it not only involved the physical movement of children, but also saw the widespread circulation of ideas, assumptions, and discourses around the meaning and value of adoptable children.
In the forty years since The PRC instituted its radical one-child policy, Western media has remained obsessed with narratives about China’s “throwaway daughters.”8 My
5 Xinran, Messages from an Unknown Chinese Mother, 23. 6 Xinran, 23. 7 Kay Ann Johnson, China’s Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the One- Child Policy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 9. 8 Miller-Loessi and Kilic, “A Unique Diaspora,” 243. 3
MA research asks what claims images of the “needy,” the “beautiful,” and the “lucky”
Chinese adoptee have made on Canadian audiences, and to what degree their meanings and interpretations were contoured by broader historical processes, political exigencies, ideological assumptions, and individual desires. Additionally, reading transnational adoption over and through raced and gendered representations of Chinese adoption reveals the extent to which adoptable children have saturated our national retina and animated the practice adoptive kinship in Canada. In this way, images and objects themselves become historically rooted forms of communication and alternative sites of ideological production and exchange.9 Thus, the complex matrix of image-making and image-consuming practices revolving around Chinese adoption not only materially transformed Canadians’ relationship to faraway children, but left many modern Canadian families ideologically charged in new and novel ways. By casting a critical gaze towards figurations of the Chinese adoptee in print, television, film, and through various practices and consumer goods, the symbolic power of these children brings to the fore broader questions around the place of race, gender, identity, and kinship in the politics and practices of transnational adoption.
To historicize both the representational power of symbolic children and the real and imagined values we ascribe to adoptable children, this study engages with the growing interest in kinship and adoption studies, drawing on a wide range of scholarly sources. Situated at the intersection of transnational adoption studies, ethnographic research on Chinese adoption, visual discourse analysis, Canadian domestic and foreign affairs, and Canada’s historical record of Chinese migration and diaspora, the narrative
9 Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Message) and W. J. T. Mitchell (What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images). 4
triangulates between Canada’s changing socio-political and cultural landscape, the actions and interests of Canadian adopters, and the confluence of race and gender in the politics of Chinese adoption. Tracing the history of Chinese adoption in Canada through images, objects, and the media reveals the extent to which high politics and matters of the family have been constantly engaged in a dialogue over issues of race, gender, culture, and privilege; and poses a direct challenge to adoption’s metanarrative of selfless love across distance and difference.
In a lecture delivered at Queens University for the Inaugural Global History
Initiative Workshop in 2017, Dr. Jeremy Adelman suggests that the proliferation of visual technologies like photography and film brought new visual awareness to faraway places and people, helping to foster a novel sense of global interdependence. But more importantly, he argues that the significance of a single image lies in the stories that undergird it.10 Mediations on symbolic children in adoption discourses reveal how adoption imagery has been variously mobilized in the service of universal humanitarianism from the end of the Second World War to the dawn of the new adoption millennium in the 1990s. Chapter Three, “Framing Pity Through the Humanitarian
Gaze,” turns a critical eye towards the images that have captured child migrations from
Asia to Canada in order to demonstrate how the logic of humanitarianism has long been woven into the fabric of international adoption. Specifically, adoptions from Korea, Hong
Kong, and Vietnam remain important flashpoints in Canada’s historical record of intercountry adoption; they reflect moments when the interactions and connections
10 Adelman, Jeremy, “The Witness and the Other: Photography and the Origins of Humanitarianism,” History Talks: Queen’s University, 2017, YouTube Video, 20:35, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= TqBbcFhspvA&ab_channel=HistoryTalks%3AQueen%27sUniversity. 5
between Asia and Canada were particularly intense, and when there was a corresponding increase in awareness and interest in the global welfare of children among the Canadian public.11 Additionally, the manner in which care and compassion was reoriented towards children from Asia is relevant to this study since the visual narratives they produced legally structured and ideologically tinted Chinese adoption’s visual discourse. Fusing the personal with the political, intercountry adoption helped to transform ordinary Canadians into proto-cosmopolitan global citizens, whose responses to distant child suffering sought to reflect a more expansive vision of an ethical global community.12
But why did these images – images of “needy” Chinese orphans – strike a compassionate chord with Canadian observers? What set Chinese children apart qualitatively from other adoptable children in Canada and abroad? And importantly, how were Canada’s national interests, parental desires, and the conditions in sending nations translated into a coherent visual hierarchy of adoptable children? Chapter Four, “The
Goldilocks Conditions of Chinese Adoption,” explores how the needs and desires of
Canadian adopters took primacy over the interests of adoptable children, and how the appeal of Chinese babies was visually expressed in racial and gendered terms. I argue that visual empathetic identification with China’s “throwaway daughters” cannot be understood in isolation from Canada’s long-standing history of racial exclusion towards
Chinese Canadians, nor can it be separated from the historically rooted “Oriental” imaginings that have given way to a panoply of cultural depictions in mainstream society.
11 Veronica Strong-Boag and Rupa Bagga, “Saving, Kidnapping, or Something of Both? Canada and the Vietnam/Cambodia Babylift, Spring 1975,” American Review of Canadian Studies 39, no 3 (2009): 271- 273, Taylor & Francis Group. 12 Tarah Brookfield, Cold War Comforts: Canadian Women, Child Safety, and Global Insecurity (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2012), 190. 6
As such, gendered and raced imaginaries conditioned these novel kinship bonds, revealing a set of fundamental contradictions at the heart of Chinese adoption narratives.
Articles in popular magazines and images of happy adoptees with their happy “forever families” have not only sanitized Canada’s racialized and gendered history of Chinese exclusion but have also helped to retrench older racial hierarchies and stereotypes.
Yet, I also suggest that conceptualizing choice and rescue, and care and consumption in purely racial and gendered terms is too simplistic. Concerns over health, age, and the socio-political conditions in sending nations were central to “chasing” and
“choosing” China. In the media, Chinese babies were discursively elevated above the older cohort of Canadian domestic adoptees and Eastern Europe’s “abject” orphans.
Many reports conveyed the widespread preference for Chinese children by juxtaposing
China’s healthy girl babies and the country’s highly centralized adoption program, against the myriad risks involved in the adoption of racially white Romanian children.
News reports and television specials not only visually linked Romania’s orphans with a failed Communist state in disarray, but also associated these youngsters with a host of physical and psychiatric impairments, that appeared to many would-be Canadian adopters, too dire to overcome. Conversely, coverage of Chinese adoption centered images of clean and light-filled orphanages with cute, well-dressed children up for the taking. In this way, Chinese adoptees – whose racialization as Chinese would have once girded the possibility of absorption in Canadian society – were considered adoptable because of it. Thus, this chapter demonstrates how the politics of kinship structuring these transnational adoptions entered a visual dialogue that commingled with the language of race and gender. The racialized and highly gendered images of Chinese
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adoption have simultaneously helped to legitimate adoptions from China while supporting Canada’s image as both benevolent and inclusive.
By way of assessing the manifold ways in which dominant ideologies around kinship, motherhood, race, and multiculturalism have been folded into post-adoption practices, the final chapter “Kinning Culture and Storied Origins,” explores the array of
Chinese cultural productions and representations around Chinese adoption’s culture- keeping agenda. In complex and contradictory ways, post-adoption communities, cultural events, adoption storybooks, movie merchandise, along with the consumption of silky qipaos, Chinese barbie dolls, and chopsticks have all, to varying degrees, altered the parameters of normative family kinship in Canada. In no uncertain terms, Chinese adoption has simultaneously politicized the family while depoliticizing issues around adoption and motherhood, race and multiculturalism, and culture and class.
Furthermore, the narrativizing of adoption through children’s storybooks suggest profound power asymmetries between sending and receiving nations, and between
Chinese birth mothers and white adoptive mothers who exist at opposite ends of adoption’s poles. Karen Dubinsky reminds us that intercountry adoption should be just as much about the individuals and nations who gained children as it should be about the ones who lost them.13 Although deeper probing into the complicated realities of adoption in China is beyond the narrow scope of this study, broad-based inquiries into China’s interlocking web of state policy, historical memory, and personal pain inform readers about the knotty terrain of balancing the happy adoption narrative and the painful unknowns of a child’s origin. China scholar and adoptive mother, Kay Ann Johnson
13 Karen Dubinsky, Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 2010), 10. 8
(China's Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the One-
Child Policy, 2016), has paid close attention to the dark underbelly of China’s birth- planning program and its profound impact on Chinese families; while British-Chinese journalist Xinran (Messages from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and
Loves, 2010) has interrogated the stories and lived experiences of the countless Chinese women whose lives were shaped by their country’s family planning policies. Mediating adoption’s visual landscape with a sense of how the one-child policy played out in China throws into sharper relief the contradictions embedded in adoption narratives. Finally, although this study mostly revolves around the visual and material discourses constructed for and around Chinese adoptees, efforts to engage with adoptee voices are most pronounced in this final chapter.
The conceptual framework of this thesis draws on the vast body of literature on visual discourse analysis, including photo theory, and is loosely informed by Michel
Foucault’s theory of historical genealogy and the notion of histories of the present. A genealogical study through the prism of the visual not only historicizes Chinese adoption, but it simultaneously brings to the fore a range of ideas, conflicts, and power struggles between adoption’s private and public protagonists in response to this remarkable phenomenon. The moral and ethical issues inherent in Canadian foreign aid and modern iterations of Western humanitarianism; the power and the place of symbolic children in our collective imaginary; the potency of Canada’s ‘myth’ of multiculturalism; and the private negotiations over belonging and identity, which are timely and important issues for which Canadian academics hare now scrutinizing. By disrupting modern assumptions and interrogating the diffuse power relations within which normative discourses of
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Chinese adoption have hitherto operated, this thesis will demonstrate how images of the beloved Chinese adoptee have shaped Canadian national and familial identities in significant and consequential ways.
This inquiry is not dedicated to unearthing the complex feelings and experiences of those very real children who migrated across vast distances into the loving arms of strangers, nor does it aspire to a simple retelling of the origins of intercountry adoption in
Canada. Instead, my goal is to identify and deconstruct the repertoire of images and visual media which have informed Chinese adoption discourses, and which now constitute a growing body of historical material. Probing Chinese adoption’s visual discourse becomes an opening through which to investigate broader issues around
Canada’s post-war humanitarian aspirations, the country’s self-fashioning as a bastion of multicultural inclusivity, and the affective politics of interracial kinship. Additionally, the sources used in this thesis should be considered as laying the important groundwork for a new kind of national, affective, archive. This study takes the political and representational significance of the female Chinese adoptee as a vantage point from which to survey Canada’s historical record of intercountry adoption and to think anew about the timeless power of symbolic children.
At this point, I feel compelled to reveal my stake in this research, and how my unique positionality as historian and Chinese adoptee has undoubtedly influenced the structure and narration of the research findings that follow. I was one of those 11,471 adopted children who migrated from China to Canada during this period. Born in 1996 in the county-level city of Jiande in the province of Zhejiang, in East China, I spent the first
14 months of my life at the Jiande City Social Welfare Institute; followed by my adoption
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in the fall of 1997. In no uncertain terms has my dual identity as a transracial female adoptee been profoundly shaped by the themes and issues raised in this thesis. Until now,
Chinese adoption has been filtered through the subjective lens of adoptive parents, social workers and academic researchers. I hope this study will be an insightful companion to the extant literature on transnational adoption by expanding the scope of Chinese adoptee representation in both academic and popular discourses.
My study uses the visual and material landscape of Chinese adoption as starting points from which to consider the broader triangulation between the global, domestic, and familial implications of international adoption. It contextualizes the material conditional under which ordinary Canadians pursued adoptions from China; how adoptees have been constituted through images and objects; and how global exigencies intertwined with domestic realities over and through racialized and highly gendered images of real children. In this way, visualizing “needy” children has facilitated the outflow of thousands of Chinese children within a continuously evolving matrix of geopolitical events that have done much to shape the private interests of Canadian nationals and the global interactions among foreign nations. Exploring Chinese adoption in Canada at the intersection of humanitarian aid, race, gender, and interracial kinship through a visual discourse analysis is a novel way of grappling with our historical record of intercountry adoption and is the subject of this thesis.
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Chapter 2
Literature Review
Foundational to understanding Chinese adoption as a global phenomenon with national resonance is the history of domestic and international adoption in the Canadian context. Veronica Strong-Boag (Finding Families Finding Ourselves: English Canada
Encounters Adoption from the Nineteenth Century to the 1990s, 2006) marshals together policy papers, legislation, adoption records, royal mission reports, first-person accounts, and the media to highlight the myriad issues – familial, racial, gendered, classed, religious, political, and legal – that have marked the history adoption; which she argues, was a “central and too often under-appreciated institutional in English Canada.”14
Relevant to this study are Strong-Boag’s chapters, “Gendered Lives” and “Religion,
Ethnicity, and Race,” but especially her chapter, “Foreign Affairs,” which traces
Canada’s historical claims to foreign-born children, and the Canadian penchant for viewing itself as an outstanding exemplar of humanitarian generosity towards the world’s
“needy” children.15 Canada’s role as a benevolent recipient in the global exchange of children began in earnest during the Second World War with British child-evacuees and expanded its reach during the Cold War years when the country became a strong supporter of international peacekeeping and truce supervision.16 The work of historians and political scientists like Robert Bothwell (Canada Since 1945: Revised Edition, 1989) and Michael Barnett (Empire of Humanity A History of Humanitarianism, 2011) have
14 Veronica Strong-Boag, Finding Families, Finding Ourselves: English Canada Encounters Adoption from the 19th Century to the 1990s (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press Canada, 2006), xi. 15 Strong-Boag, Finding Families, Finding Ourselves, 174. 16 Robert Bothwell, Canada Since 1945: Revised Edition, 2nd ed., Sept. 1, 1989. 12
charted the ebbs and flows of Canada’s post-WWII foreign policy agenda; while academics like Dominique Marshall and Kirsten Lovelock have considered the political salience of migrating children and the corresponding enthusiasm among ordinary
Canadians. Similarly, Tarah Brookfield (Cold War Comforts: Canadian Women, Child
Safety, and Global Insecurity, 2012), Margaret Peacock (Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War, 2014), and Laura Madokoro
(Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War, 2016) have all demonstrated how the ideology of rescue during the Cold War years was directed towards children in Korea,
Hong Kong, and Vietnam; and variously mobilized through Foster Parents Plan ads, newspaper articles, and television news media coverage. Their important research has brought renewed attention to the conditions under which children, some Canadian and others not, were lost, longed-for, and loved. And importantly, their work has reaffirmed how the exchange of children across time and space has never been uncommon, uncontested, and without multiple motivations.
Relatedly, the insights of historians of childhood and youth inform this research; their work has made the critical distinction between histories of children and children’s experiences, and historical inquiries into childhood. Anne Higonnet (Pictures of
Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood, 1998) and Patricia Holland
(Picturing Childhood: The Myth of the Child in Popular Imaginary, 2004) have explored the history of childhood through the visual subtexts embedded in pictorial representations of childhood. According to Holland, the history of childhood is primarily about adult views on what children are and how they should be, and for which visual discourse analysis is well suited to investigate. This project also marshals together studies that
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explore the power of imagery and the role of visual iconography in transforming real children into symbolic icons. Mediations on the power of photography and film by cultural critics and literary theorists like Susan Sontag (On Photography, 1977;
Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003), bell hooks (“Eating the Other: Desire and
Resistance,” 1992), and Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, 1967), have informed my interpretation of adoption’s visual discourses; their ideas about race, and culture, and the power of seeing have illuminated the manifold ways photography, images, and material objects have structured our psychic experience of transracial transnational adoption. Their work has also inspired the asking of several important questions related to Chinese adoption’s visual discourse: how do images and objects become part and parcel of a wider visual narrative within a specific historical context? And what do the symbolic weight of images bring to bear on adoption’s central actors? Any attempt at historicizing Chinese adoption cannot be undertaken without paying due attention to the rich scholarship produced by historians of race, and those who have committed themselves to investigating histories of transracial adoption. The work of
Karen Dubinsky (Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas,
2010), Laura Briggs (Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transracial and
Transnational Adoption, 2012), and Vilna Bashi Treitler (Race in Transnational and
Transracial Adoption, 2014) have all provided keen insights into the racialized politics of intercountry adoption and the symbolic significance of migrating children.
Yet, these sources have not interrogated as rigorously the complex interplay between race and gender in the practice of transracial adoption – a central facet of
China’s migrating orphans – nor have they tried to locate Chinese adoption’s double-bind
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of race and gender within the broader history of Asian diaspora and the Chinese Canadian experience. This visual discourse analysis considers Chinese adoption as an important chapter in our nation’s domestic and social history, locating it within and alongside the longer history of the Chinese in Canada. In order to appreciate how the presence and the visibility of the Chinese adoptee has altered notions of multiculturalism, identity, and familial belonging, key historical texts on Canada’s social and political attitudes towards the Chinese in Canada will be explored in some depth. When viewed against the racialized politics of Chinese adoption, historical inquiries undertaken by scholars of the
Chinese in Canada like Peter S. Li (The Chinese in Canada, 1994), Patricia Roy (The
Oriental Question, 2003; The Triumph of Citizenship, 2007) and Timothy J. Stanley
(Contesting White Supremacy: School Segregation, Anti-Racism, and the Making of
Chinese Canadians, 2011), reveal how Chinese adoption’s racial and gendered constructions were parallel and linked processes to a host of “Oriental” imaginings rooted in the longer history of a country not yet shorn of its racist past. These histories reveal the ways Chinese Canadian and Chinese adoptee experiences speak to one another in a shared and overlapping transnational framework.
Finally, gender has been no less important to the narrating of China’s girls. Since
98% of the 120,000 children who left China through international adoption were girls,17 gender becomes a useful category of analysis to think anew about the history of Chinese adoption and the narrative formation of adoption storytelling. To this extent, my research is deeply indebted to the work of Sara Dorow (Transnational Adoption: A Cultural
Economy of Race, Gender, and Kinship, 2006) that has done much to bring the double
17 Heather Jacobson, Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008), 23. 15
issue of race and gender to the forefront of transnational adoption’s scholarly agenda. Her ethnographic research on Chinese adoption in the United States acknowledges how the gendered reality of these exchanges feminized visual discourses in paradoxical ways that seemed to alternate between “good” and “bad” China. The work of sociologist Xiobei
Chen (“Not Ethnic Enough: The Cultural Identity Imperative in International Adoptions from China to Canada,” 2015) has also been insightful. She has suggested that debates over desire and power shifted to take place over and through the aestheticized, non-white, female bodies of Chinese adoptees. However, scant attention has been paid to the historically rooted racial and highly gendered visual constructions of Chinese adoption in the Canadian context. Thus, my focus on the visual and material focus throws into sharper relief how Chinese adoption’s racialized and gendered visual discourses were informed by a range of interests, desires, and realities.
This research is firmly grounded in primary sources that span a wide range of media and mediums. If the Chinese adoptee has made her mark in the public realms of domestic and international policy, her image has also engendered a steady stream of cultural depictions in the Western media through film, documentaries, television shows, and children’s books. Agency brochures, adoption guides, post-adoption community newsletters (Family Outreach International; Families from China), and online support groups have also joined in the effort of constructing conceptual meanings around Chinese adoption. But as Chinese adoptees come of age during this identity-centric moment where the politics of race, gender, and identity are hot to the touch, the proliferation of online content created by and for Chinese adoptees has complicated adoption’s dominant discourses. Thus, adoptee-authored blogs, Facebook groups, and online communities
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have become charged sites of visual encounter and claim-making and are doing much to keep the history of their adoptions at the forefront of our cultural consciousness.
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Chapter 3
Framing Pity Through the Humanitarian Gaze
International adoption’s highly personal and affective brand of humanitarianism revolutionized the ethic of long-distance care and non-biological kinship. However, it did not appear out of thin air; it was the product of an earlier spirit of internationalism that pervaded Canadian foreign policy in the years following the Second World War.
Visuality in the form of documentary film, photography, and the advent of televised news media coverage not only vivified the realities of distant wars and human suffering, but it also had the perceived effect of shrinking the globe to such a degree that compassionate gestures could extend beyond the purview of the nation-state to reach distant “Others.”18
In this way, Canada’s outward commitment to international humanitarianism was dependent on two interrelated factors: the proliferation of suffering in the news media, and the construction of children as the ideal victims. How have abstract notions of humanitarianism altered what adoption imagery asked of Canadians, and in turn, what did individual Canadians do with those images in the service of larger goals?
This chapter locates the visual landscape of Chinese adoption within the broader history of Canadian humanitarianism; demonstrating how figurations of “needy” children have operated on multiple registers and to different effects. They mobilized compassion by universalizing individual suffering; they fostered intimate long-distance kinship bonds; they altered domestic and international policy; but they have also engendered a steady stream of controversies. I contend that compassionate responses to depictions of
18 Adelman, “The Witness and the Other,” 19:52. 18
modern episodes of child suffering sought to reflect a more expansive vision of an ethical global community while validating a distinctly Canadian national identity. Moreover, I suggest that the nature of international humanitarian outreach in response to the plight of children often hinged on the needs and proclivities of the Canadian state and individual
Canadians. Thus, humanitarian gestures were neither completely altruistic nor did they express a singular motivation.
Section one provides a brief account of how the politics of aid found expression through visual representations of the world’s vulnerable children; some of whom became the prime targets of humanitarian relief. Identifying the origins of global compassion in
Canada and charting its development through humanitarian outreach establishes the conceptual framework for understanding the force of Chinese adoption’s visual landscape. Section two considers how documentary films have been effective catalysts for mobilizing care and compassion towards the world’s “needy” children. By comparing the visual and narrative framing of Seeds of Destiny (1946) and The Dying Rooms (1995),
I suggest that filmic depictions of child suffering did two important things: they jolted audiences by generalizing child victimhood under layers of horror, while the polemic nature of these films sought to mobilize immediate aid responses from their audiences.
But how did “those” child victims become “our” adopted child? Section three considers how Canadian foster parent programs and Chinese adoption referral photos helped to transform faceless sufferers into real children through long-distance intimacy. Finally, I discuss the mounting influence of the news media and photojournalism in the construction of vulnerable children in Hong Kong, Vietnam, and China. I suggest that the visual encounters between Canadians and “needy” children from Asia strengthened the
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humanitarian discourse and provoked a range of responses that altered domestic and international policies on immigration and child welfare.
Instead of striving for a full picture of Canada’s historical record of intercountry adoption, this chapter focuses on instances that clarify the triangulation between humanitarianism, adoption, and visuality. Moreover, since this study revolves around the visual landscape of Chinese adoption, discussions in this chapter will focus more seriously on visual representations of Asian children. The narrative shifts between moments when the interaction between several countries in Asia and Canada were particularly intense, and when there was a corresponding increase in awareness and interest in the global welfare of children among Canadians. Drawing parallels between the history of Canada’s humanitarian outreach in Asia and adoptions from China reveals how the visual and discursive landscape of adoption has both conformed to and altered, conventional notions of Western humanitarianism. The manner in which Canada’s humanitarian ethos took shape over and through images of children is the subject of this chapter.
Constructing a National Humanitarian Gaze
Canada’s modern globalist ethos is central to understanding the role of humanitarian imagery in international adoption’s visual discourse. Since the early 1940s,
Canada has pursued national and international objectives through a variety of multilateral activities.19 Both Thomas F. Keating and John English have invoked the words of
19 Thomas F. Keating, Canada and the World Order: the Multilateralist Tradition in Canadian Foreign Policy, 3rd edition. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2013), 7, HathiTrust. For Canada’s post-war foreign policy posturing, and the country’s forays in international politics over the last half-century, see Robert 20
Canada’s former ambassador to the United Nations Stephen Lewis in their writing when in 1985 he declared that Canadians “…have…a lasting and visceral commitment to multilateralism which is ingrained, and endemic to the Canadian character.”20 This statement speaks to earlier sentiments expressed by Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1965 shortly before. Though Trudeau never made bones about his skepticism towards Canada’s involvement with the United Nations and around multilateralism more generally, his sentiments were downplayed when he expounded the country’s moral obligation towards multilateral cooperation at the University of Alberta’s sixtieth anniversary. During the convocation address, he urged Canadians to “recognize that, in the long run, the overwhelming threat to Canada will…come from…the two-thirds of the peoples of the world who are steadily falling farther and farther behind in their search for a decent standard of living.21 Canada’s national ethic of compassion has been expressed in the language of multilateral cooperation, international development assistance programs, foreign aid initiatives, and global peacekeeping missions, and remains an important cornerstone of Canada’s domestic and international policy. These factors alone have allowed Canadians to confidently lay claim to a long tradition of caring about the health and well-being of foreigners.
The tenets of internationalism, narrowly defined within the parameters of Euro-
American conceptions of liberal democracy, espoused a universal concern for the victims of calamities in other countries.22 Internationalism thus became a banner under which
Bothwell, Canada Since 1945: Revised Edition (Toronto, 2001); Jack L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer, Empire to Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s (Virginia, 1994). 20 Quoted by Stephen Lewis, quoted in Keating, Canada and World Order, 1. 21 Quoted in Clyde Sanger, Half a Loaf: Canada's Semi-Role among Developing Countries (Toronto: Ryerson, 1969), 203. 22 Nossal and Roussel, The Politics of Canadian Foreign Policy, 151. 21
much of Canada’s post-war foreign policy was pursued and justified. Moving in lockstep with internal pressures and external transformations, Canadian iterations of humanitarian outreach have varied over time. Indeed, throughout the long twentieth century, international human rights violations have caught the attention of the Canadian public at large, with public opinion polls consistently showing that Canadians have a deep interest in global politics.23 However, Stephan Paquin et al., have argued that this interest has been both episodic and unsystematic. It has always hinged on a complex matrix of strategic calculations and moral concern.24 In other words, Canada’s international posturing as it has related to humanitarian outreach has always come second to the country’s own interests and the interests of its citizens. As such, In the aftermath of the
Second World War, revisions to key social welfare policies revolving around income security and redistributive wealth programs at home played off against Canada’s increased geopolitical significance abroad. Importantly, these transformations were frequently made visually manifest through the images of children.
The large-scale migration of children to Canada emerged during the Second
World War through child evacuee programs for British Children, closely followed by several provisions for Europe's orphans in the immediate aftermath of the War.25 Evacuee programs for British children escaping wartime conditions represented the beginning of
Canada’s humanitarian outreach towards children in war-torn countries. In 1940, Canada became the first commonwealth country to offer assistance to Great Britain which,
23 Kim Richard Nossal and Stéphane Roussel, eds., The Politics of Canadian Foreign Policy 4th edition (Montreal, QC: McGill-Queens University Press, 2015), 98. 24 Nossal and Roussel, The Politics of Canadian Foreign Policy, 117. 25 Kirsten Lovelock, “Intercountry Adoption as a Migratory Practice: A Comparative Analysis of Intercountry Adoption and Immigration Policy and Practice in the United States, Canada and New Zealand in the Post W.W. II Period,” International Migration Review volume 34, issue no. 3 (2000): 915. 22
according to writer and philanthropist Gillian Wagner, saw the placement of nearly 4,000
British children with Canadian families.26 But Canada’s generosity did not extend to
Allied refugees or children of color; according to Wagner, this reflected the
“exclusiveness of the bond between Britain and the Dominions.”27 However, the programs did prompt the creation of some government provisions that allowed for the gradual entry of non-British children orphaned by the War. Supported by various financial programs and educational resources, 1,086 Jewish and 1,000 Roman Catholic orphans were granted entry into Canada during this period through Orders-In-Council.28
Two things are notable about these early humanitarian gestures. First, the entry of
Europe’s orphans into Canada tended to be reactive and therefore subjected to several conditions. Their care and financing largely fell under the auspices of advocacy groups and religious societies that bore the responsibility of ensuring that children would not become burdensome to the state.29 Second, early child migration flows constituted only
European children and did not culminate in many adoptions.30 Canada’s long-standing race-based immigration policies prevented the migration of Asian children for settlement or adoption during this period; not until the late 1960s did international adoptions become a salient feature and an established practice in Canada. So, although children as the natural recipients of international relief and humanitarian aid was not an entirely new phenomenon before the War, Dominique Marshall reminds us that the undergirding
26 Kristen Lovelock, Intercountry Adoption as a Migratory Practice: A Comparative Analysis of Intercountry Adoption and Immigration Policy and Practice in the United States Canada and New Zealand in the Post W.W. II Period,” International Migration Review 34, no. 3 (2000): 915, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2675949 27 Gillian Wagner, Children of the Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), 248. 28 Lovelock, Intercountry Adoption as a Migratory Practice, 915, 29 Lovelock, Intercountry Adoption as a Migratory Practice, 907. 30 Lovelock, Intercountry Adoption as a Migratory Practice, 916. 23
universalist logic and the public endorsement of that logic did mark “a peculiar moment in the history of modern ideas about childhood.”31
Bolstered by its contributions during the War and unencumbered by the kinds of domestic reconstruction debt faced by its European allies, Canada settled into its new role as a respected middle-power with ease. In an effort to preserve and promote the values it had fought hard to defend during the War, Canada’s national identity was actively being redefined to complement the burgeoning ideology of liberal internationalism and universal human rights. Yet, the desire to construct a more humane and peaceful world was part and parcel of a broader strategy to neutralize rising Cold War tensions; for which the language of child rights was supremely well suited to articulate. Like all narratives, Canada needed a robust repository of images from to selectively draw upon for their own interests. In this way, images of children and the imaginaries they engendered became ensnared in Canada’s foreign policy aspirations and the nation’s global status as an emerging middle-power. Refocusing attention on the world’s children as a benign source of humanitarian relief simultaneously minimized the political nature of aid and reinforced the portrayal of humanitarianism as a driving force behind Canada’s political maneuvering.32 To this extent, the instrumentalization of humanitarian imagery
31 Dominique Marshall, “The Language of Children’s Rights, the Formation of the Welfare State, and the Democratic Experience of Poor Families in Quebec, 1940-55,” Canadian Historical Review 78, no. 3 (September 1997): 409. Marshall argues that the language of child rights became a “social fact” and a serious subject of engagement at all levels of Canadian society by the mid-1940s. She adds explains how the ideology and practice of “child rights” was part and parcel of the broader post-War social reform movements that comingled with “public endorsement of the language of universal human economic and cultural rights.” 32 Jean-Philippe Thérien and Alain Noël, “Welfare Institutions and Foreign Aid: Domestic Foundations of Canadian Foreign Policy,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 27, no. 3 (1994): 532, doi:10.1017/s0008423900017893). 24
by nations and their nationals would consistently be worked out over and through images of “needy” children.
How Moving Images Mobilize
Set against the backdrop of a ruinous Europe or in the cramped quarters of a dingy Chinese orphanage, raw documentary footage of child starvation, neglect, and abuse were at once harrowing and heartbreaking. They possessed their adult audiences by provoking a constellation of emotional responses that demanded to be channeled into passionate protest and not merely acknowledged and sooner forgotten. To elicit the kinds of humanitarian responses and compassionate identification necessary for supporting the global welfare of children, Seeds of Destiny and The Dying Rooms did two things. First, they maximized the horror of child neglect to such a degree that the individual children and the historical moments from which they emerged were made peripheral, thus eliding the root causes of their suffering. Second, they were deeply polemical in that they expressed, through image and narration, searing moral indictments against the individuals and nations presumed to be responsible for the victims’ suffering. Additionally, heavy- handed moralizing was intended to inspire action and thwart the kinds of emotional anesthesia that could set in if compassion wasn’t translated into action.
Documentary films depicting the human cost of the Second World War trickled into cinemas and private screening rooms in Canada and the United States during the
1940s. Produced for UNRRA in 1946, Seeds of Destiny was a landmark achievement for the relief agency's special division devoted to child welfare. The film premiered at the
Whitehouse in 1946 and was viewed by over 11 million Americans and Canadians over a
25
period of two years.33 Though rarely shown in theatres, the film raised over 200 million dollars globally through private donations and fundraisers, and even snagged an academy award for best documentary film in 1947. Hollywood film director turned military
Corporal, David Miller, and eight men from the United States Army Corps who also had various Hollywood credits to their name, captured the gruesome effects of the War on the lives of Europe’s youngest and most vulnerable. Shot on location across fourteen
European countries over three months, a barrage of images depicting young children stunted by nutritional deficiencies and left physically crippled by shrapnel flash across the screen.
Notably, parent-less children are given special attention both explicitly through narration and implicitly through grainy footage. Narrations highlighting children
“separated by parents whose names they don’t even remember”34 accompany grayscale sequences of lone children stoically facing the camera or staring off into the distance.
Their dirty faces, tattered clothes, and missing limbs were not only shocking because they testified to the overwhelming number of children affected by the War, writes Tarah
Brookfield, but they also shocked because they challenged basic universal ideals of childhood favored by most Canadians.35 Children as sentimental icons of suffering juxtaposed “the peaceful middle-class suburban homes and schoolyards in North
America,” and placed the burden of responsibility squarely on the shoulders of individual
Canadians.36 And while the film’s attack on Axis leaders intended to moralize viewers
33 Tarah Brookfield, Cold War Comforts: Canadian Women, Child Safety, and Global Insecurity, (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 113. 34 David Miller, “Seeds of Destiny,” filmed in 1946, YouTube video, 2:55, posted July 9, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt0pkx4rIp8&t=666s. 35 Brookfield, Cold War Comforts, 111. 36 Ibid. 26
and jolt them from feelings of indifference or disbelief, the implicit message behind
Seeds of Destiny was popular mobilization through aid.37 “Donating to UNRRA,” implores the narrator, “will prevent these children from turning into future Hitlers,
Mussolinis and Tojos.” The film concludes with one final appeal to viewers, that “even stronger than the atomic bomb is the human heart.”38
Fifty years later, the fusion of humanitarian imagery and documentary film gave way to a new visual grammar intent on narrating the horrific suffering of distant children.
But this time, it was China’s surplus of abandoned baby girls who brought the spotlight to bear on long-distance child suffering. In 1995 in the Guangdong Province of China, one of the country’s richest regions, three undercover British filmmakers posing as American charity fund-raisers captured a grim discovery at a state-run orphanage in Shanghai.
Bundled under layers of urine-soaked clothing, an 18-month-old baby girl lies immobile in a small, dimly lit room. As the cameraman approaches the child, audiences are powerfully confronted with Mei Ming's mucus-covered eyes, parched lips, and a severely malnourished body that bears the evidence of a starvation and cross neglect.39 The camera lingers on Mei Ming’s face as she lets out one last feeble cry.40 Brian Woods tells viewers that “Mei Ming gave up the fight for her life four days after [filming]…she died of plain neglect.” “Her parents” he explains, “had abandoned her and when [they]
37 Ibid. 38 David Miller, “Seeds of Destiny,” filmed in 1946, YouTube video, 19:17, posted July 9, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt0pkx4rIp8&t=666s. 39 Blewett, Kate and Brian Woods, “The Dying Rooms,” filmed 1995, YouTube video, 35:35, posted June 19, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd_nptd2q0M. 40 Karen N. Peart, “Eyewitness: The Dying Rooms,” Scholastic Update, March 22, 1996. 27
telephoned, the orphanage denied she had ever existed. The only memory of her now is this film.”41
Since its television debut in 1995, The Dying Rooms has aired in thirty-seven countries with a combined viewership of over 100 million people.42 The magnitude of the documentary’s final closing frame sharply reflects how film becomes a powerful site of visual encounter and claim-making. Writing for the Atlantic in 1996, Anne Thurston describes how woefully unprepared she was for the silence and withdrawal at the notorious “dying rooms.” Thurston, who volunteered at a local orphanage over a period of several months in 1994, describes the rows of apathetic and listless babies who, cloistered in a separate wing and away from the livelier and less sick children, no longer are and who barely moved. “They had no expectation of being comforted or saved or even any obvious awareness of the two women passing by.” “They were miniature versions of the "Muselmänner” of the Nazi concentration camps, the ones who stopped struggling, gave up living, waited only for death--the ones from whom other inmates recoiled…Now I, too, recoiled, in an involuntary lapse of compassion.”43 In a very real way, photos that capture the inevitability of death, whose subjects we know are condemned to die, are perhaps the most haunting of all; especially if the condemned individual is a child.44 In a similar manner, Michael Barnett has discussed how certain photographs can be used like a memento mori. He takes as an example the “Warsaw
Ghetto Boy”; one of the most iconic and widely recognizable photographs of the
41 Blewett and Woods, “The Dying Rooms,” 36:51. 42 “The Dying Rooms & Return to the Dying Rooms,” True Vision London, accessed August 2, 2020, https://truevisiontv.com/films/details/57/the-dying-rooms-return-to-the-dying-rooms. 43 Anne F. Thurston, “In a Chinese Orphanage,” The Atlantic Monthly volume 277, issue no. 4, April 1996, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/04/in-a-chinese-orphanage/376563/. 44 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 52. 28
Holocaust. With both hands raised in meek surrender to a German soldier wielding a gun, the young boy stands out among the throngs of nameless people being rounded up.
Barnett considers how images of people condemned to die jolt us into a deeper awareness of our own conditions.
The filmic account of the atrocities in Chinese orphanages contributed to a growing mass of concerned Canadians. But for audiences to both grasp the seriousness of these distant abuses and then protest them, filmmakers needed to craft a simple but haunting visual narrative that maximized the horror they had witnessed firsthand. This process cast orphans as helpless victims and allowed spectators to embody the role of savior. Audiences tacitly understood that their benevolence had the power to save lives and, importantly, transform themselves into citizens of the world. Throughout the 1990s,
Sara Dorow conducted a series of interviews with adoptive parents who were also repulsed and moved by what they had witnessed in documentary. Jackie Kovich, a single woman who adopted her daughter from China in 1998, explained that her choices were largely influenced by her watching of The Dying Rooms:
[A]bout three months after I came back from a business trip to China, I went to see my sister. And she said, “Oh, did you see the thing on TV about the Chinese orphanage?” And I said, “Yeah, and you know, those children are so beautiful. There are no ugly Asian children.” And my sister said, “Why don’t you adopt one?” Okay? And I’d never mentioned anything to her [about wanting to adopt]!45
A strong, personal, sense of humanitarian obligation couple with familiar imaginaries swirling around China and Chinese people seemed to crystalize around the film. Dorow writes that most of the interviewees expressed “long-standing but selectively invoked
45 Dorow, Transnational Adoption, 37. 29
thread[s] of adoption discourse[s]…[that] fulfilled national and familial discourses of generous humanitarian outreach.”46
But for all the sympathy films like The Dying Rooms galvanized among audiences, they also invited criticism from a range of other spectators. The Historian
Ulrike Weckel has dedicated much of her career to film history and historical audience perception; publishing over 15 articles alone on Allied Liberation footage.47 In writing about how documentary films like Concentration Camps (1945) and German
Concentration Camps Factual Survey (1945) used horror to universalize the victims of
Nazi persecution, Ulrike Weckel argues that Allied atrocity films perpetuated the kinds of dehumanization victims were subjected to. She notes that filming tended to direct their lens towards the “heaps of naked corpses, emaciated bodies, shaved heads and inmates hovering on the edge between life and death,” instead of focusing on individual stories and experiences.48 By failing to identify and individualize those being portrayed, victims were rendered as passive and pitiable. Their individuality and, ironically, their humanity, sank into obscurity.49 Laura Madokoro has also considered how the global circulation of images of Chinese refugees in 1962 depoliticized their plight and consigned them to the realm of visuality. She writes that depictions of refugees as “helpless victims” made it difficult for them to be “approached as historical actors rather than simply mute victims.”50 Thurston’s likening of Chinese orphans to Nazi concentration camp inmates’
46 Dorow, Transnational Adoption, 37. 47 “Ulrike Weckel,” Visual History of the Holocaust, accessed October 14, 2020, https://www.vhh- project.eu/team-members/ulrike-weckel/ 48 Ulrike Weckel, “People Who Once were Human Beings Like You and Me,” in Humanitarianism and Media: 1900 to the Present, ed. Johannes Palmann (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 108. 49 Weckel, “People Who Once were Human Beings,” 110. 50 Laura Madokoro, Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 125. 30
gestures to the onerous demand images of horror make on viewers. Her juxtaposition implies the difficulty of giving voice to child victims, while Madokoro reminds us of the tragedy of denying individuals that voice.
Similar criticisms have been lobbed at The Dying Rooms, where selectively invoked images of horror simplified rather than clarified the complex world of adult politics and the historical processes that produced them. Published in the New York Times
(1996) television critic Walter Goodman considered the 38-minute documentary to be both unbalanced and unpolished. He argued that the result of the team’s undercover journalism “is as much polemic as report.”51 He felt that the representative nature and significance of distressing clips and horror scenes was not clear – “[d]o they come from a few ill-run orphanages, struggling with shortages and incompetence? Or are these the inevitable consequences of Beijing’s attempts to hold down the size of their population?”52 Disturbing shots of children chained to bamboo potty-chairs and interviews confirming the unbearable conditions in China’s under-staffed and poorly equipped orphanages sharpened familiar images about the state of childhood in
Communist countries, and about China and Chinese culture more generally. In her article
“Mother, Child, Race, Nation: The Visual Iconography of Rescue and the Politics of
Transnational and Transracial Adoption,” Laura Briggs argues that the popularization of images of “need” on television mobilized ideologies of “rescue” by directing attentions away from the structural explanations and root causes of that “need.”53 The Dying Rooms
51 Walter Goodman, “The Film at the Root of the Outcry Over Orphans,” The New York Times, Jan 24, 1996, C16, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times. 52 Goodman, “The Film at the Root of the Outcry Over Orphans,” C16. 53 Laura Briggs, “Mother, Child, Race, Nation: The Visual Iconography of Rescue and the Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption,” Gender & History 15, no. 2 (2003), 10.1111/1468-0424.00298. 31
retained its ability to spur audiences to action largely because it made them feel. In this way, visually maximizing the horror of human suffering through documentary film has been an effective means through which strangers came to care about the plight of real children; but these films did not leave much in the way for deeper understanding or context. By depicting China as backwards, authoritarian, and above all murderously misogynist, The Dying Rooms told Western audiences everything they needed to know about Chinese culture and society. But of course, it didn’t say everything.
How Images Individualize
However, certain images can also humanize distant suffering, creating intimate linkages between “needy” children and adults who long to care for them. Canadian enthusiasm for child welfare dampened after the War but still maintained a visible presence in foreign policy matters. By the early 1950s, expanded U.S. military presence in Asia collided with newly formed child welfare organizations in Canada. Sending money to programs like Toronto’s Save the Children Fund and the Unitary Service Foster
Parents Plan became commonplace for many citizens and helped keep visions of child rescue alive in the hearts and minds of ordinary Canadians.54 Under Prime Minister Louis
St. Laurent, foreign aid gradually moved away from Europe and extended into parts of
Asia. Laurent saw foreign aid as an effective tool for combating the growing threat of communism in Asia and securing the country’s reputation as generous. In a speech delivered at the Canadian Club in Toronto in March 1950, the Prime Minister felt that
Canada could do its part to help Cold War efforts by investing in Asia: “…hundreds of
54 Strong-Boag, Finding Families, Finding Ourselves, 194-195. 32
millions of people have become increasingly aware of their poverty even as they were obtaining their independence...We must try to demonstrate that in the Western world we possess the real solution to the problem and that it is from us and not from Soviet imperialism that economic and social progress are to be expected.”55 By 1953, South
Korean had become the top recipient for Canadian foreign aid projects.56 Professor of
Canadian history and foremost scholar on Canadian Cold War participation, Robert
Bothwell, has suggested that Canada’s philanthropy in South Korea was not primarily motivated by charitable impulses or an “intrinsic concern for Korea and Koreans.”
Rather, the country’s interest in Korea sprang from an “…interest in the UN, first, and in relations with the United States, second.”57
During this period, foster parent schemes were new development assistance mechanisms that gave state action a clear philanthropic dimension. These programs became powerful forms of aid that sought to provide financial support and emotional care to children affected by the spillover effects of fighting in Europe and later in Asia. Led by the Unitary Service Committee (USC) and Foster Parents Plan International (FPPI), programs encouraged Canadians to send monthly stipends to children to help subsides the cost of a child’s care in a state institution or aid their families with necessities. The idea of “adopting” a foreign child with the hope of positively sharing in their upbringing proved appealing to the program’s 3,100 Canadians members.58 Popular support for the program was generated through fundraising campaigns and advertisements in local and
55 Canada, Information Division, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Consequences of the Cold War for Canada: speech to the Canadian Club in Toronto, Library and Archives Canada, March 27, 1950, https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/primeministers/h4-4015-e.html. 56 Brookfield, Cold War Comforts, 147. 57 Robert Bothwell and John English, eds., Canada Since 1945: Power, Politics, and Provincialism, Revised Edition, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 58 Strong-Boag, Finding families, Finding Ourselves, 195. 33
national newspapers. A 1956 Globe and Mail article featured a heartwarming photo of a festively clothed family holding up a photo of their Korean foster son. Although his name is not mentioned in the article, the family Christmas photo suggests that the program facilitated his absorption into the Round family. The clipping is accompanied by a glowing endorsement of the USC’s Canada-wide campaign to raise $100,000 by
Christmas Day, along with a smattering of happy Korean foster-child stories.59 For example, Canadian readers were introduced to eight year old Lee who was abandoned by her mother at a hospital in South Korea after she fell ill; but thanks to the care and compassion extended to her by her Edmonton foster-parent, she was now “… a healthy and co-operative girl, well-liked by all her schoolmates.”60 The piece reassures future
Canadian foster-parents that long-distance kinship will be supported by “the case history and picture of [their] child and…letters and small gifts.”
As such, money was not the sole or even the most important aspects of sponsorships.61 In Cold War Comforts: Canadian Women, Child Safety, and Global
Insecurity, a highly researched work on Canadian women’s mobilization during the Cold
War, Tarah Brookfield explores women’s campaigning efforts around child rights in places like Korea, Hong Kong, and Greece. Brookfield pays close attention to the relationship between Canadian foster-parents and their “adopted” children living outside of Canada. The exchanging of photos and letters between parents and children were central to these novel forms of humanitarian outreach. They acted as visual encounters that offered Canadians a rare, but otherwise limited, glimpse into the daily lives of
59 “Christmas for Orphans Possible Through Fund,” The Globe and Mail, December 6, 1956, P9, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Globe and Mail. 60 “Christmas for Orphans Possible Through Fund” 9. 61 Brookfield, Cold War Comforts, 132. 34
foreigners living half-way around the world. Brookfield argues that exporting love through UN-based activism fulfilled foster-parents’ “dual obligations as Canadians and global citizens.”62
However, given the temporary nature of foster-parent programs, long-distance bonds rarely culminated in permanent immigration sponsorships or international adoptions. Furthermore, Brookfield writes that Canadian foster parents were discouraged from thinking about the possibility of relocating the recipients of their “goodwill” since
Canada’s race-based immigration policies would have been rigid barriers to securing legal adoptions.63 Implicit to the logic of foster parent plans was the idea that maintaining a degree of physical distance between the senders and receivers of aid was necessary; it helped to smooth over material disparities and cultural differences between foster-parents and their far-away foster-child, while simultaneously obscuring larger global asymmetries between donor and recipient countries. Without the threat of the child’s physical dislocation, Canadian foster parents could flex their philanthropic muscle by emotionally investing in charitable causes from a distance. Inspired by the work of
French sociologist Luc Boltanski and his writings on the moral and political implications of playing spectator to distant suffering, Lisa Cartwright’s contributions to the field of visual culture highlights the liminal space occupied by images of waiting children.
Cartwright argues that seeing the world as increasingly ‘borderless’ had a profound influence on the transnational management of children. Undergirding the logic of foster parent programs, Boltanski asserts that bearing witness to spectacles of suffering has
62 Brookfield, Cold War Comforts, 133. 63 In Finding Families, Finding Ourselves: English Canada Encounters Adoption from the 19th Century to the 1990s, Strong-Boag notes that not until 1968 did the first Korean orphan enter Canada for permanent adoption. 35
never assumed that “the spectator should drop everything and take himself to the unfortunate’s side.”64
On the other hand, flip through any number of parent-authored articles and memoires on Chinese adoption and you will likely stumble across a headshot of a small
Chinese baby pepping out from behind layers of sweaters. Better yet, ask any of these adoptive parents to locate the moment when they first experienced that transcendent flush of bonded fate with their child. There is a good chance they will point to the moment they held in their hands, for the very first time, a passport-sized photo of their soon-to-be child. Although images of individual children can expose the vast distances separating the donors and the receivers of international aid, they also had the power to dissolve them in order to meet mutual needs.65 Among the limited information provided to prospective adopters throughout China’s lengthy adoption process – parents are given general information related to the child's name, age, date of birth, the name of their orphanage and province, and in some cases, medical records – the referral photo is the shinning centerpiece at the heart of the pre-adoption package. Sara Dorow has dedicated an entire chapter to the real and symbolic power of Chinese adoption referral photos. Despite the various and important tasks adoption referral photos perform, Dorow writes that they ultimately “ground the parents in the reality of their adoption” and allow them to imagine that child as their own.66
Adoptive parents have frequently made reference to these precious tokens of kinship in writing and in speech. 44-year-old single mother, Beth Deyo, says that she was
64Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 17. 65 Dorow, Transnational Adoption, 112. 66 Dorow, Transnational Adoption, 109. 36
moved to pursue adoptions from China after “[h]aving seen news stories about all the little girls available in China.” Upon receiving a photo of her then nine-month-old daughter, Xi Xi, Beth “thought she was the most beautiful thing, but looked scared, and all [she] could think was, ‘Oh, I want to help this child.’”67 Importantly, referral photos simultaneously managed the range of expectations parents had before, during, and after the adoption process, while also addressing latent anxieties over the global exchange of children.68 However, the referral photo did not automatically signify the promise of emotional investment and material exchange between nations and families;69 crucially, it invited intense scrutiny over the health and fitness of the child. Unlike foster-parent schemes, international adoptions carried the risk of absorbing children who suffered from serious health problems or disabilities. In many ways, the visual landscape of international adoption has collapsed traditional forms of moral intervention in response to child suffering while erecting newer ones in its place.
In a time when cross-border adoptions were still highly unusual in Canada, photographs and letter correspondence between ordinary Canadian citizens and “needy” children in South Korea helped to foster intimate connections without the commitment of integrating foreigners into the folds of Canadian society. Canada’s humanitarian involvement in Korea demonstrates how global humanitarian outreach has never required physical proximity between the senders and receivers of aid. In fact, organizations often discouraged the kinds of long-term commitment asked of by international adoption. The constellation of state interests and personal desires did not fit comfortably with
67 Janet Siroto, “Meet My Daughter,” Redbook, May 1998, 114, Women’s Magazine Archive. 68 Dorow, Transnational Adoption, 69 Dorow, Transnational Adoption, 107. 37
transnational adoption; Canadians were prepared to export long-distance care while existing barriers to immigration made permanent placements highly unlikely during this period. Although photos of South Korean foster children and Chinese adoptee referral photos helped to transform distant “nameless and faceless” children into “our child,”70 the work they did was distinct and reflected a particular moment in time. The photos and letters Canadians received from their Korean foster children individualized children but expressed charitable actions at a distance, while adoption referral photos from China worked to suture those divides so that would-be adopters and Chinese orphans could be united. However, the intensity with which would-be adopters scrutinized their referral photo indicates that they too worked to mitigate the risks associated with the emotional investment in, and transnational management of, “needy” children. In this way, photos helped parents both imagine distant children and their role in constructing familial belonging despite differences and distance. Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service
Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, W.T.J Mitchell, has written extensively on a wide range of topics relating to the fields of media theory and visual culture. In What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Mitchell asks what everyday pictures want from their audiences, and likens images to mediums that act as an in-between or go-betweens; “a space or pathway or messenger that connects two things – a sender to a receiver.” Thus, personalizing and individualizing children through pictures was central in articulating different kinds of sentimental exchanges over long
70 Dorow, Transnational Adoption, 107. 38
distances between parents and “needy” children. Pictures do not merely lie between the sender and receiver; they include and constitute them.71
How Images Influence Political Posturing and Policy
Since the term humanitarianism first emerged in 1844, five years after the invention of photography,72 the two have made strange bedfellows. But they have given way to a discourse of global compassion that has found expression in the work of photojournalists. Photojournalism as a relatively modern phenomenon emerged from different developments in visual technologies and the rise of the Western globalist ethos.73 The triangulation between humanitarianism, photojournalism, and the media has become an important prerequisite for extending assistance to distant suffering. Johannes
Paulmann has written extensively on the interplay of humanitarianism, photography, and the various strategies the modern news media employs in their coverage of global crises.
He argues that by evoking emotions and stirring public debate, “media plays a crucial role in providing information about other people’s plight and setting public agendas.”74
Thus, while layers of geography insulated most Canadians from the dramas playing out overseas, the tumultuous events of the latter half of the twentieth century were broadcasted in vibrant detail on television and in print media. Prominent among them and
71 W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 204. 72 Paul Betts, “The Polemics of Pity: British Photographs of Berlin, 1945-47,” in Humanitarianism and Media: 1900 to the Present, ed. Johannes Paulmann (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 126. 73 Patricia Holland, Picturing Childhood: The Myth of the Child in Popular Imagery (London: I.B. TAURIS, 2006), 19. 74 Johannes Paulmann, “Humanitarianism and Media: Introduction to an Entangled History,” Humanitarianism and Media: 1900 to the Present, ed. by Johannes Paulmann (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 1. For more on See, Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid in the Twentieth Century (2016); Humanitarianism and Media: 1900 to the Present (2018); Cultural Sovereignty Beyond the Modern State: Space, Objects, and Media, (2020). 39
significant to this inquiry was the widespread reporting and televised news coverage of the Hong Kong refugee crisis and the War in Vietnam. Unfolding against the backdrop of the Cold War, visual representations of the difficult conditions in Asia did many things.
They spurred political debates at the domestic and international level; they garnered unprecedented moral and material support on behalf of non-governmental organizations and ordinary Canadians, and they increasingly resulted in international adoptions. In other words, the proliferation of visual media during the Cold War made saving children especially attractive, thereby helping to pry open the country’s doors to international adoptions from Asia.
Following the years of strife and political upheaval initiated by the Chinese
Revolution in 1911, the fall of mainland China to communism in 1949 triggered surges of migrant outflows from the PRC to Hong Kong. In her critically acclaimed book Elusive
Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War, Laura Madokoro addresses the evolving policy debates at international, national, and local levels in response to the unfolding situation in mainland China and Hong Kong.75 Following intense debate between London and Hong Kong over how to deal with the millions of refugees from “Red China” who had streamed into ‘Crown Colony’ over twelve years, the Hong Kong government adopted a strict policy of “indiscriminate returns.” 76 Despite UNHCR’s cautioning against returning refugees to mainland China under the principle of nonrefoulment,
Western governments were sympathetic to the plight of migrants but generally disinclined to offer widespread asylum in their own countries. Madokoro argues that
75 Gordon Houlden, review of Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War, by Laura Madokoro, University of Toronto Quarterly 87 (2018): 421. 76 Madokoro, Elusive Refuge, 132. 40
reluctance on behalf of many settler-colonial governments to accept Chinese immigration and asylum claims, “…served [as] a reminder that the embrace of global humanitarianism disguised, rather than replaced, ongoing reservations about the desirability of certain migrants and citizens.77
As truckloads of refugees were forcefully rebuffed at the Crown Colony’s borders, Hong Kong officials became particularly sensitive to the probing lens of the camera. Despite their best attempts at barring journalists from entering the region by imposing strict bans on media coverage, photojournalists continued to swarm the frontier, and their work circulated widely.78 Dramatic shots of Chinese migrants at Hong Kong’s borders engaged Western audiences in different ways. Footage of fleeing migrants became a staple on nightly news networks, while photographic evidence of their desperation filled the colored pages of popular magazines like Newsweek, Life, and New
York Times. But it was the stills of Chinese children separated from their parents that evoked the most sympathy and hardened anti-communist sentiments. “HONG KONG:
REFUGEES REJECTED” was the title splashed across a three-page spread in the June
1962 issue of Life magazine. Chock-full of harrowing images of fleeing migrants, the article describes in sympathetic tones the tragedy and disappointment of thousands of
Chinese refugees whose efforts to escape “Red China” had gone awry. Specifically, it was the photo of a small boy crouched and teary-eyed that proved especially poignant:
Alone and Scared: A little boy weeps after getting separated from his father the night before while crossing the Hong Kong border. Now, trying to hide with a group of strangers in some bushes, he refuses to eat, drink or speak to anybody, believing that if he does, he will never see his family
77 Madokoro, 17. 78 Madokoro, Elusive Refuge, 132 41
again.
Captured by American freelance journalist, Larry Burrows, the grammar of human suffering was visually and rhetorically expressed through the boy's dual displacement from his country and his family. Patricia Holland asserts that the significance of a photo relies on the discursive interplay between text and image; with the former being especially reliant on the latter for significance. She argues that since language often directs the viewer towards a range of possible meanings, photos give substantive meaning to the text. 79
The whole debacle provoked international commentary and calls to action by a range of actors. Organizations like The Chinese Refugee Relief dramatized migrants’ desperate conditions and insisted that Western democracies should extend the same sympathies to the Chinese as they had with European and Cuban refugees.80 Furthermore,
The Hong Kong-based organization actively advanced an anti-communist agenda in the hopes of “marrying the refugee issue with America’s crusade against communism.”81 But visual constructions of migrant children also prompted a series of policy debates in
Canada, spurring new national rhetoric on the country’s racialized immigration policies.
Formally, Canadian immigration legislation did not mention orphans, and unaccompanied children were not welcome in Canada for the goal of adoption.82 In this way, international debates ignited by Chinese migrants culminated in mounting criticism back home in Canada. Speaking for the liberal left in 1954, social democrat and leader of
79 Holland, Picturing Childhood, 5. 80 Madokoro, Elusive Refuge, 135. 81 Madokoro, 62. 82 Lori Chambers, A Legal History of Adoption in Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 2016), 135. 42
the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), Major James William Coldwell not only expressed support for sending financial aid to orphans, but he also endorsed their adoption. He felt that “Bringing a child into this country” was better “because there are homes that are seeking children for adoption. He believed that children raised in
Canadian homes would certainly “become...first class citizen[s] of the country.”83 The
Canadian Welfare Council (CWC) – a government advisory board populated by social workers and child advocates – also exerted much effort in lobbying the Prime Minister to facilitate international adoptions between Canada and Hong Kong.84 Sad images of
Chinese children orphaned by fleeing parents were leveraged by the Council for fundraising initiatives. One pamphlet featuring a young Chinese migrant was particularly searing; the girl’s tear-streaked cheeks and melancholic gaze accompanied the slogan,
“Communism Failed Her…Will We?”85
Swayed by the images of children captured by photojournalists and the work of the CWC, 1960 turned out to be a year of milestones in Canada’s historical record of
Chinese immigration, and by extension, international adoption. The United Nation's
World Refugee Year in 1960 and the introduction of the Canadian Bill of Rights reflected the federal government’s efforts to quiet criticism over Canada’s White Policy on immigration, and an attempt to demonstrate Canada’s outwardly oriented humanitarian concern for Chinese migrants. By July of that year, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker announced the country’s official opening to refugee children for adoption, “regardless of
83 Chambers, A Legal History of Adoption in Ontario, 137. 84 Tarah Brookfield, “Maverick Mothers and Mercy Flights: Canada’s Controversial Introduction to International Adoption,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 19, no. 1, (2008), 313. 85 Brookfield, “Maverick Mothers and Mercy Flights,” 313. 43
their origin, subject to provincial regulation.”86 On July 16th, 1960, The Globe and Mail triumphantly announced that “Canada Throws Open Adoption Doors to World
Refugees.” The article informed readers that Canadian families who wished to adopt orphans of Chinese or Korean origin could do so, on the condition that they are full orphans with refugee status and that “suitable Canadian children [were] not available.”87
Additionally, adopting refugee children was also complicated by “the exclusive provincial jurisdiction with respect to legal adoption.”88 Nevertheless, these policy changes did result in the placement of twenty-five Chinese children with Canadian families across seven provinces by 1965.89 Brookfield suggests that Diefenbaker’s capitulation on immigration was likely motivated by “the idea of helping win the Cold
War, one heart at a time…”90
One of the most visually arresting photos relayed to Canadians through photojournalism was Nick Ut’s Pulitzer-prize-winning photo, “Napalm Girl.” On June
8th, the Associated Press (AP) journalist captured nine-year-old Kim Phuc running from an American Napalm attack in 1972. Her face contorted in pain; the young girl runs naked with outstretched arms down the highway in her home village of Trảng Bàng in
South Vietnam. The image made front-page news around the world, with Susan Sontag writing that the photo “probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war
86 Langevin Cote, “Canada Throws Open Doors to World Refugee Orphans,” The Globe and Mail, July 16, 1960, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Globe and Mail. 87 Cote, “Canada Throws Open Adoption Doors to World Refugees.” 88 Ibid. 89 “A snapshot of international adoption in Canada,” accessed November 16, 2019, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/a-snapshot-of-international-adoption-in- canada/article547154/. 90 Brookfield, “Maverick Mothers and Mercy Flights,” 313. 44
than a hundred hours of televised barbarities.”91 Unlike the older brand of Western paternalism depicted in American Cold War propaganda, Ut’s raw portrayal of a
Vietnamese child suffering at the hands of American aggression highlighted Canada’s own culpability in the conflict, which certainly complicated the West’s tidy narrative of saving children from the evils of communism and became the backdrop against which
Canadian enthusiasm for child rescue would surge in new and unexpected ways.
The symbolic power of visualizing children through popular media stories and photographs is expertly researched by Margaret Peacock in Innocent Weapons: The
Soviet and American Politics of Childhood during the Cold War. Peacock writes that the proliferation of sensational media stories and images of children coming out of Vietnam were marshaled together in the service of fighting communism. She argues that children and youth became central in articulating a visual and rhetorical dialogue that painted the
West as a benevolent provider and protectorate of children in South Vietnam.92 Thus, one of the most consequential and controversial forms of anti-Cold War activism that emerged in response to Vietnam was the hard lobbying of state officials by individual
Canadians. In particular, four mothers turned child-activists were at the forefront of child- saving efforts in Vietnam: Sandra Simpson, Naomi Bronstein, Bonnie Cappuccino, and later, Helke Ferrie. In 1969, Simpson, Bronstein, and Cappuccino founded Families For
Children (FFC). The Montreal-based agency focused on poor children and youth from
Bangladesh and Vietnam by supporting local orphanages and arranging aid drives and adoption transfers to North America. The Success of FFC inspired Burlington Ontario
91 Susan Sontag, On Photography 1st edition, (New York City: Farrar, Straus and Giroux under license from Pan Books Limited, 2001), 31. 92 Margaret Peacock, Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 194. 45
mother and adoption advocate, Helke Ferrie, to establish her own private adoption agency, Kuan Yin Foundation. Tarah Brookfield has argued that these private adoption agencies became ultimate sites of Cold War activism, where Canadian internationalism and white maternal righteousness were harnessed over and through images of symbolic children. Similarly, Veronica Strong-Boag and Rupa Bagga argued that the Country’s turning towards refugees from Indochina, namely Cambodia and Vietnam, had been precipitated by powerful images of the “petit être sans defense perdu dans la jungle des relations internationals.”93 Until the widespread adoption of Romanian oprhans and later
Chinese babies during the 1990s, Vietnam was the most significant relinquishing country for international adoptions in Canada.94
Sentimentalizing Vietnamese children through this new visual grammar was also meaningful in the lives of ordinary Canadians. Ontario couple, Del and Donna Wolsey, were deeply moved by the suffering of children in foreign countries. In an interview with
Globe and Mail in 1974, the couple recalls how their decision to adopt was largely influenced by photos they had seen in a newspaper article during their time as students at the University of Western Ontario. “We saw a picture in the London Free Press of a child in Vietnam who had been badly injured. This made us take concrete steps.”95 One month before the interview, the Wolsey’s had welcomed their 10-month-old son, Thilo, who arrived from an orphanage in Vietnam. Thilo joined the Wolsey’s other adopted children,
Amina whom they adopted from Bangladesh in 1972, and Julee, whom the article describes as “a sturdy 2-year-old from Korea.” When asked why they chose to adopt
93 Strong-Boag and Rupa Bagga, “Saving, Kidnapping, or Something of Both?” 276. 94 Lovelock, “Intercountry Adoption as a Migratory Practice,” 930. 95 Kathleen Rex, “These children come wrapped in red tape,” Globe and Mail, December 5, 1974, W1 ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Globe and Mail. 46
internationally instead of adopting a Canadian child of mixed parentage, Mrs. Wolsey admits that she always envisioned wanting children from “far away.” She adds that their shared religious background also played an important role: “when we were young[,] we went to a little church and we were always having missionaries coming to show us slides of children who needed homes.”96 The Wolsey’s express how the co-construction of
Canadians as fundamentally caring and Asian children as necessarily “needy” was fueled by a spirit of humanitarianism that presented the former as noble and the latter as lucky.
Yet, the politics of international adoption and the images they conjure up have always been a terrain of intense debate and contestation.
While the mass airlift of 700 displaced children from Asian sites of Cold War conflict to Canada in the 1970s resulted in an outpouring of public concern for orphans, it was offset by increasing scrutiny and condemnation.97 By the end of the 1970s, even adoption's biggest advocates had become skeptical about the moral and ethical implications of foreign aid. In an article for the Globe and Mail published in 1978, FFC coordinator Naomie Bronstein expressed growing cynicism around the popularity of
Vietnamese child-saving missions among ordinary Canadians. According to Bronstein, the vogue of saving orphans had transformed them into commodities, with countries like the United States and Australia vying to outdo one another in the global market of desirable children. She was quoted as saying that “[t]he feeling in Saigon…is that the children are just being used for a big show.”98 Pushback against adopting Vietnamese children was also made visually manifest in satirical cartoons that gestured to the
96 Kathleen Rex, “These children come wrapped in red tape,” W1. 97 Brookfield, Cold War Comforts, 190. 98 “Operation Babylift ends with 1,700 orphans flown abroad,” The Globe and Mail, April 8, 1975, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Globe and Mail. 47
asymmetrical power relations between nations and nationals. For example, Keith Bendis’
1975 cartoon “Vietnamese Orphan Souvenirs,” reinforces the idea that “desirable” and
“needy” children are transformed into commodities through the process of adoption.
Bendis’ cartoon depicts an American couple ‘browsing’ a display of Vietnamese children, with the wife pointing to a child and exclaiming how “that one would look nice in the living room.”99 The cartoon’s biting tone is amplified by signs that read “That one would look nice in the den,” “Limited Supply,” and “Remember your stay in Vietnam forever.” The image was published by Mohawk Nation in the Native American periodical
Akwesasne Notes and featured in Tarah Brookfield’s book Cold War Comforts: Canadian women, child safety, and global insecurity, 1945-1975.
Twenty years later, images of China’s abandoned children had similar political implications that extended into the realm of international policy. In January of 1996,
Human Rights Watch-Asia published a scathing report detailing the indiscriminate human rights abuses in China’s state-run orphanages. The official report entitled Death by Default: A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China's State Orphanages, painted a vivid portrait of orphaned and abandoned children as the unwitting victims of a “secret world of starvation, disease, and unnatural death.”100 Teaming with allegations of starvation practices and maligned neglect, the report deemed the conditions in Chinese orphanages as “one of the country’s gravest human rights problems.”101 In October of 1996,
Maclean’s Magazine described how “international adoption agencies were bombarded
99 “Another Native People Lose Their Children,” Akwesasne Notes, Early Summer 1975, 26–27. Cited by Tarah Brookfield in Cold War Comforts: Canadian women, child safety, and global insecurity, 1945-1975. Brookfield thanks Karen Dubinsky for sharing the cartoon by Keith Bendis featured with this article. 100 Human Rights Watch, Death by Default: A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China’s State Orphanages, (ISBN1-56432-163-0), January 1996. 101 Charlene Fu, “Children not hurt, Chinese say: 'Crazy' former employee concocted tales of mistreatment at orphanage,” Associated Press, January 9, 1996, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Globe and Mail. 48
with phone calls from outraged Canadians who wanted to adopt the children.”102 The one-page article is anchored by two images that were previously featured in the Human
Rights Watch-Asia report. Allegedly taken at the Shanghai institute in 1992, the photos capture two emaciated children who appear to be on the brink of death by starvation and gross neglect; the children’s half-shut eyes, despondent expressions, and protruding bones were eerily like the closing scene of The Dying Rooms. The editors at Maclean’s clearly understood the meaning-making power of a single image; and crucially, they knew their Canadian readership would understand, too. However, the horrors that lay behind the closed doors of China’s orphanages were a poorly kept secret even before The
Dying Room. In 1992, China was annoyed with allegations of baby-selling and blocked international adoption for two years. But, as Rod Mickleburgh writes in an article for the
Globe and Mail in 1996, “…in an overpopulated country where an estimated 15 million baby girls have been abandoned since 1980, the steady supply of well-off foreigners eager to adopt may be too appealing to give up.” Thus, these and other discursive depictions of China’s orphanages as “little more than killing fields”103 ignited a media firestorm that set the world of adoption ablaze and prompted new supranational regulations on intercountry adoption.
As adoption scandals and rumors of child trafficking schemes continued to multiply in the news media, states saw a need to further mainstream child welfare concerns into international adoption standards. Drafted in 1993 and entering into force
102 Sharon Doyle Driedger, “Bodies of evidence: China denies that its orphanages are death camps,” Maclean’s, January 22, 1996, 52. 103 Rod Mickleburgh, “Chinese orphanages called ‘killing fields: Children deliberately left to die, human- rights report says,’” The Globe and Mail, January 8, 1996, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Globe and Mail. 49
three years later in 1996, The Hague’s Convention on the Protection of Children and the
Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption sought to establish a legal set of safeguards for the protection of orphaned children through a system of cooperation among contracting states. To ensure the lawful movement of children from their country of origin to the receiving state, the Convention clarified how adoption regulations should be divided among states and the way these functions should be performed.104 By May
2018, the Convention had been ratified by ninety-eight states with three signatory states;
South Korea, Nepal, and Russia. International consensus on the best interest of the child was not only an acknowledgment of the importance of global child welfare but also reflected a deepening of connections between contracting states. In other words, the largescale endorsement of transnational adoption at the international level complimented states’ own domestic needs and interests. International policy simultaneously addressed
China’s surplus of female girls and provided a possible remedy for Canada’s declining birth rate. In this way, the mainstreaming of intercountry adoption, which was largely nourished by visuality, reflected a co-constitutive process whereby international conventions encouraged global unity among states while also addressing local realities and domestic needs. However, it is worth noting that Canada along with the United
States, did not legislatively address the welfare of migrating children from abroad.
Kristen Lovelock notes that child welfare policy relating to intercountry adoption did not
104 Hague Conference on Private International Law, Convention on the Protection of Children and Co- Operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, (Hague Conference on Private International Law, 1993), 33, https://assets.hcch.net/docs/77e12f23-d3dc-4851-8f0b-050f71a16947.pdf.
50
emerge at the national level in Canada; matters relating to intercountry adoption remained under the auspices of provincial legislation on domestic adoption.105
Conclusion
The extent to which images of “needy” children have possessed their audiences in significant and powerful ways is complex and far-reaching. They stimulated genuine care and compassion towards the plight of strangers while fostering intimate kinship bonds both near and far. And while images of children have mobilized public support that has affected politics right up to the level of international policy, they have always engendered controversy. Thus, historical accounts of international adoption should be viewed as moving in parallel with Canadian humanitarian outreach, since adoption policies and practices have both conformed to, and challenged, Canada’s domestic realities and foreign policy goals. The country’s increasing geopolitical visibility and significance was closely tied to the brand of internationalism that emerged after 1945 as a response to the traumas of the War and the growing bipolar hostilities between The United States and the
Soviet Union. Comparing the visual and narrative elements of The Dying Rooms against the Seeds of Destiny illustrates the symbolic weight of children whose universalized suffering had the power to move affected audiences to action. For our purposes, they have also clarified how Canada’s claim to “needy” orphans in China was not only streaked with the logic of borderless altruism, but that left larger social, political, and historical contexts on the periphery.
105 Kristen Lovelock, “Intercountry Adoption as Migration,” 928. 51
South Korea, Hong Kong, and Vietnam have also been implicated in Canada’s humanitarian efforts, with concerned Canadians often framing their actions as mostly altruistic and compassionate, and definitely not political. Extending aid to foreign children always occurred under certain circumstances and did not always, or even mostly, occur in permanent adoptions. In particular, Cold War geopolitics and the explosion of photojournalism during the Vietnam war intersected with adoption’s iconography of suffering and salvation; representations of Asian children in Western media became contested sites of visual encounters that reverberated beyond national borders. For example, visualizing migrant children in the news media from Hong Kong in the 1960s and later from China in the 1990s had powerful emotional overtones; it sensitized
Western audiences to the global plight of “needy” children and shaped policy debates at the United Nations and within Canada’s national government. The adoption of Chinese children during these periods reflects the global reach of imagery and its reciprocal effect on national and international negotiations. Adoption-as-international-humanitarianism came to be defined by the actions and interests of non-governmental actors who brought their own mixed motivations to bear on these images.
The humanitarian signifiers that percolated the visual narration of Chinese adoption mirrored the visual language of post-war relief efforts in striking ways; the similarities suggest that modern practices of adoption have been variously understood by recipient states and would-be parents as a novel and intimate form of humanitarianism.
The visual landscape of child rescue transformed ordinary Canadians into proto- cosmopolitical global citizens, while simultaneously rendering children as passive receivers of Western altruism. How one imagines “rescuable” and “needy” children is far
52
more complex than the humanitarian discourse would have us believe, since the feelings, actions, and controversies they stir say more about the web of social relations, political realities, and adult imperatives in which they are enmeshed.
53
Chapter 4
The Goldilocks Conditions of Chinese Adoption
If images of needy children were part and parcel of Canada’s political posturing in the post-war period, the country’s national policies and practices around adoption were largely shaped by the demands and needs of their nationals. In the new adoption millennium, thousands of children have migrated from the margins of China to gentrified neighborhoods across Canada. In the previous chapter, I explored how Canada’s globalized humanitarian discourse shaped and sustained a visual culture that sought to move and mobilize ordinary citizens to care about the plight of “needy” children in Asia.
Although the altruistic dimension of this “openness” towards international adoption is questionable, individual Canadians adopted 20,000 children internationally from over 12 different countries between 1993 and 2002.106 Over this decade-long period, China remained the top sending nation for Canadian adopters, accounting for over a quarter of all international adoptions in the country.107 So, how did parental needs shape adoption narratives? Why were Chinese children imagined as infinitely more desirable than other children in need? How were parental desires translated into a coherent visual narrative that sought to substantiate their affective claim-making? And importantly, how did race and gender figure in their choices? Were racial and gendered imaginings a prerequisite for choosing China, or did they emerge as a response to a specific set of material conditions and parental motivations?
106 Robin Hilborn, “Our Children from Abroad,” Adoption Helper Guide 3, (1999). 107 According to statistics provided by Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Canadians adopted 6,245 children from China between 1993-2002. Other noteworthy sending countries during this period were India (1,868), Russia (1,398), Haiti (1,372), the Philippines (984), the United States (786), and Romania (693). 54
Since the 1950s, Asian countries have dominated the global landscape of adoption, accounting for over 65% of all intercountry adoptions to Canada in 2004.108
This rise in intercountry adoptions, explains Peter Selman, “was largely driven by the rapid increase in the number of children from China.”109 The large-scale adoption of
Asian children by Westerners has, at least in part, thrust the politics of racial difference to the forefront of adoption scholarship. Vilna Bashi Treitler argues that when exchanges involved racially white parents – people who mostly resided in the wealthiest and most industrialized nations – adopting non-white children, racial thinking was continuously at play.110 Moreover, readers are drawn to a range of racial discourses parents repeatedly invoked when discussing their reasons for adopting from China. Many parents, although not always consciously, touched on essentialist conceptions of China as an ancient but accessible culture whose people were seen as a model minority in white mainstream society.111 For Treitler, race was brought to bear on the social, political, and economic forces that produced adoptable children and in turn shaped the ways parents chose to raise them.112 Similarly, Heather Jacobs, author of Culture Keeping: White Mothers,
International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference, has written about how the model minority stereotype influenced would-be adopters’ desire for Chinese children.
According to some of her research participants, the fact that family and friends believed
Asians to possess special qualities like industriousness, intelligence, and docility, set
108 Peter Selman, “Intercountry adoption of children from Asia in the twenty-first century,” Children’s Geographies 13, no. 3 (2015): 313, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2015.972657. 109 According to statistics provided by the 23 receiving states, China was the origin of more than 60% of children sent from Asian between 2003 and 2011. This proportion has fallen from 71% in 2004. 110 Vilna Bashi Treitler, Race in Transnational and Transracial Adoption (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 3. 111 Treitler, Race in Transnational Adoption, 4. 112 Treitler, 5. 55
them apart qualitatively from other racial and ethnic minorities and sold them on Chinese adoption.”113 Elsewhere, Sarah Dorow has emphasized the appeal of Chinese adoptees within the larger discourse of transracial families in the United States. She argues that
Chinese children were more “adoptable” not only because of their racialization as Asian, but also because they were non-black. That is, it was not only a desire for infants that pulled potential adopters abroad but a desire to avoid the adoption of black children that pushed them to China.114
In many ways, these scholarly contributions have done the hard work of teasing out the racial and gendered implications embedded in adoption discourses, and providing the important intellectual foundation for this inquiry into the politics of kinship and identity in Chinese adoption’s visual discourse. Yet, much of the academic research on race in Chinese adoption has too often reduced parental preference and desire to abstract notions of progressive multiculturalism or self-serving imperialism. In her groundbreaking study, Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the
Americas, Karen Dubinsky moves beyond earlier adoption debates that toggled between
“imperialist kidnap” and “humanitarian rescue.” In a similar manner, this chapter seeks to complicate the place of race and gender in Chinese adoption scholarship by challenging overly simplistic narratives that have interpreted choice and rescue, and care and consumption in purely racial and gendered terms. I suggest that at the outset, the desirability of Chinese babies among many Canadians was not primarily motivated by adoptees’ dual identity as Asian or female, but more accurately reflected the choices
113 Heather Jacobson, Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008), 34. 114 Sara Dorow, “Racialized Choices: Chinese Adoption and the ‘White Noise’ of Blackness,” Critical Sociology 32, no. 2-3 (March 2006): 357-379. 56
available to individuals who wanted children. However, it was within this framework of choice that individual interests entered into a visual dialogue with the language of race and gender to legitimate adoptions from China and support Canada’s image as both benevolent and inclusive. By considering the place of race and gender in Chinese adoption alongside other considerations like age, health, and program type – all of which were equally salient at the time – the tendency to prioritize the needs of those seeking particular children over the needs of just any child is made clearer.
Part one explores the linkages between Chinese adoption and the historical record of the Chinese in Canada. A brief overview of the overlapping histories of trans-Pacific migration and international adoption demonstrates how the acceptance of the Chinese in
Canada has always hinged on a complex matrix of material conditions and personal needs which become visually expressed in highly racialized and gendered terms. Moreover,
Chinese adoption’s racial and gendered constructions were parallel and linked processes to the long history of “Oriental” imaginings. Thus, the integration of Chinese children into predominantly white, middle-class families often reproduced Western-centric knowledges about Chinese people and their culture; while simultaneously obscuring
Canada’s darker history of anti-Asian policies and Chinese malignment. Alternatively, part two provides a comparative analysis on the visual discourse of Chinese and
Romanian adoption programs to illustrate the way racial considerations were regularly subordinated to other matters revolving around age, health, geopolitics, and the nature of individual adoption programs. These considerations led to a resurrection of narratives, concepts, and images that recalled the culture of Orientalism that productively managed the selective inclusion of Chinese orphans and the deliberate exclusion of Romanian
57
children. The final section explores how domestic and individual parental needs furnished a visual culture that saw the revival of racial and gendered thinking that toggled between positive and negative images of China.
In other words, material conditions in both sending and receiving countries mingled with parents’ longing that promoted the desirability of Chinese babies, while cultural intrigue, racial hierarchies, and gendered images translated these needs into adoption narratives that were at once conflicting and contradictory. Race and gender have shaped adoption’s visual culture, but the personal and political needs of adoptive parents remained the key driving forces behind the construction of Canadians’ visual classification of “needy” children. But images never talk back. As the oldest cohort of
Chinese adoptees enter young adulthood, the crucial question of how they themselves imagine their dual identities as Chinese Canadian and female will be paramount. How
Canada’s evolving adoption landscape reflected a reorientation of desire towards China over and through racialized and highly gendered images of adoptable children is the subject of this chapter.
The Long Shadow of Canada’s “Yellow Peril”
Although international adoption writ large has never accounted for more than 2% of Canada’s total immigration statistics,115 adoptions from China have altered the country’s familial landscape to such a degree that the phenomenon has become an outright social norm. According to Catherine Ceniza Choy, author of Global Families: A
History of Asian International Adoption in America, international adoptions from Asia
115Statistics Canada, International Adoptions, (Statistics Canada, Catalogue no. 90-209-X), https://www150.statcan.gc.ca /n1/pub/11-402-x/2012000/chap/c-e/c-e02-eng.htm. 58
have transformed the racial and ethnic landscape of many Western countries to the extent that the pervasiveness of the adopted Asian child now regularly prompts curious probing by strangers. The assumption that Asian children must be adopted has become so commonplace in Western society that Choy, who is ethnically Filipino and whose husband is fourth-generation Korean and Chinese American, was once asked of her biological daughter, “from where did your daughter come?”116 But in a country like
Canada where covert forms of discrimination and racial prejudice always threaten to disrupt the country’s multicultural veneer, and where Chinese malignment still looms quietly in our national psyche, it is difficult to believe that by the early 1990s many
Canadians were rushing to China’s doorstep to adopt children. The work of historians studying the Chinese in Canada such as Peter S. Li, Timothy J. Stanley, Patricia E. Roy, and Laura Madokoro have done much to disrupt this veneer by revealing how racial and ethnic designations among immigrants have always mattered a great deal politically, economically, and socially to the Canadian state. In his seminal work on the Chinese in
Canada, Peter S. Li boldly asserts that “aside from the indigenous people, no other racial or ethnic group had experienced such harsh treatment in Canada as the Chinese.”117
In this way, the energetic embrace of Chinese adoptees not only “[stood] in stark, and perverse contrast to the immigration policies aimed at others from their countries”118 writes Dubinsky, but also challenged Canada’s historical legacy of Chinese exclusion.
Furthermore, Dubinsky has argued that “[i]n countries such as Canada and the United
States, with a history of hostility towards Asian immigration, the ‘innocent victim of
116 Catherine Ceniza Choy, Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 1. 117 Peter S. Li, The Chinese in Canada, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5. 118 Dubinsky, Babies Without Borders, 20. 59
Communism’ was not a shoo-in. An effective discourse of pity had to create foreign children not just as needy, but also non-threatening and race-less.”119 Sara Dorow has also observed how the socio-political transformations in North America recast the
Chinese from sources of peril to “model minorities,” which had the effect of making
Chinese adoptees seem supremely “rescue-able.”120 In many ways, the Chinese adoptee’s rescue-ability was rooted in the perception of the Chinese as the ultimate “model minorities.” By mapping race and gender onto adoption’s visual landscape – a landscape which clearly reflected a strong preference for Chinese baby girls – we begin to understand the racial ideologies and material realities that transformed the targets of
“yellow peril” into desirable “pink-ribbon babies.”
The Chinese first began trickling into Canada in 1788 in the Nootka Sound area of
British Columbia. These early migrating artisans and traders were closely followed by
Chinese gold prospectors from San Francisco in 1859;121 with widespread emigration beginning in the 1880s when thousands of young men, hailing from Fujian, Guangdong, and the Pearl River Delta in southern China arrived on Canada’s West Coast as part of a broader international labor migration. Of these 20,000 men who arrived during this early wave of trans-Pacific migration, the majority came to fill labor shortages for the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway.122 Initially, Chinese immigrants were not looked down upon in overtly racist terms or treated with the kinds of hostility they would later be subjected to. Despite subdued sentiments against them, Peter S. Li writes that
119 Dubinsky, Babies Without Borders, 96. 120 Sara Dorow, “Racialized Choices: Chinese Adoption and the ‘White Noise’ of Blackness,” Critical Sociology 32, no. 2-3 (2006): 371. 121 Library and Archive Canada, Immigration History: Ethno-Cultural Groups: Chinese (Ottawa: Library and Archive Canada), https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/immigration/history-ethnic- cultural/Pages/chinese.aspx#a. 122 Lloyd Lee Wong, Trans-Pacific Mobilities: The Chinese and Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017), 4. 60
early newspaper reports were generally favorable.123 Though tinged with racial stereotypes, early articles in the London Times, the Victoria British Colonist, and the
Victoria Gazette all described the Chinese as “industrious” and useful to Canada.124
However, once construction on the railroad was completed in 1885 and Chinese labor was no longer useful, their presence in Canada quickly turned into a source of anxiety for many white Canadians.125 Barrington Walker writes that “in a variety of formal and informal settings” the Chinese were “…routinely described…as inscrutable, cunning, sexually perverse, filthy, and prone to vice and criminality, including gambling and illegal drugs.”126
By way of confronting Canadians’ racial attitudes which had hardened considerably by the end of the year, the Canadian government’s efforts to stem the high tide of Chinese immigrating was a foregone conclusion. As a result, a $50 head tax was levied against all Chinese persons entering the country as part of the first Chinese
Immigration Act passed by Parliament in 1885. The Chinese were the only ethnic group who were forced to pay such a tax based solely on their country of origin. Though the tax climbed as high as $500 after 1903, it failed to halt Chinese immigration entirely. In
1923, the Act was abandoned and replaced with the harsher Chinese Immigration Act of
1923. Under the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese persons were banned outright from entering Canada. The policy had serious effects on the Chinese already residing in
Canada: they were pushed to the margins of society, forced to live in overcrowded
123 Li, The Chinese in Canada, 23. 124 Li, The Chinese in Canada, 23. 125 Barrington Walker, “Immigration Policy, Colonization, and the Development of a White Canada” in Canada and the Third World: Overlapping Histories, ed. Karen Dubinsky et al. (North York: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 42. 126 Walker, “Immigration Policy,” 42. 61
Chinatowns, and denied work or, conversely, were blamed for robbing more “deserving” white Canadians of work due to the lower wages Chinese workers were forced to accept.
Lisa Chalykoff has noted that due to the lack of documentary evidence authored by
Chinese contract laborers, it is difficult to get a sense of their feelings and lived experiences during Canada’s exclusion era. She argues that the silencing of Chinese migrant voices reflects the “relative unavailability of unofficial, personal documents conveying the points of view of early Chinese migrants.”127 As a result, a national insistence that Canada has always been a home for all the world’s migrants can be left unchallenged.
Despite the discursive gaps within the extant literature on the early Chinese experience in Canada, the widespread proliferation of political cartoons and commentary in the American and Canadian popular press is available and does provide an opening through which to view anti-Chinese developments. In 1877, the Illustrated WASP – a San
Francisco-based weekly satire magazine founded in 1876 – published its first anti-Asian cartoon in 1877 entitled, “The Equal of Persons.” The cartoon depicts four separate scenes of Chinese engaging in unseemly activities that cast them as violent, filthy, and deceitful outsiders. A national antipathy towards Chinese immigrants was also visually expressed in Canada. In 1879, Canadian Illustrated News published “The Heathen
Chinese in British Columbia,” by artist James L. Weston. The cartoon depicts Amor de
Cosmos telling a Chinese immigrant to leave British Columbia because he refuses to assimilate; When the “Heathen Chinese” asks Amor de Cosmos “Why you sendee me
127 Lisa Chalykoff, “Encountering Anomalies: Cultural Study of Chinese Migrants to Early Canada,” in Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Constructing of Canada, ed. Veronica Strong-Boag et al. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998), 155. 62
offee,” he is told that he is not assimilating because he “won’t drink whiskey, and talk politics and vote like us.” Both cartoons operate insidiously to construct Chinese people as inherently violent, filthy, criminal, and above all, incapable of assimilating into the country’s dominant white society. Although economic anxieties and political consideration were likely the primary arbitrators behind the negative representations of the Chinese in the popular press, they were made visually manifest through the grammar of race and racism.
WWII remains a significant turning point in the historical record of the Chinese in
Canada since it brought into sharper relief the country’s national cognitive dissonance around Chinese foreigners. On the one hand, Chinese immigrants were seen as the inscrutable and unassimilable “Other,” whose culture and values were constantly at odds with Canada’s white mainstream society. On the other hand, they were valuable because they supported the country’s war efforts at home and abroad. Patricia Roy reminds us that
Chinese Canadians purchased some ten million dollars’ worth of victory bonds, held events and fundraisers to support the cause, and by 1944 over six hundred Chinese men enlisted as “active” members to fight overseas.128 The military alliance between Canada and the United States against Japan after Pearl Harbor further complicated Canada’s relationship with their Chinese communities. Appearing in Life magazine two weeks after the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor, two portraits are juxtaposed beside each another: one
Chinese the other Japanese. The two-page pictorial entitled, “How to Tell Japs from
Chinese,” was a response to the rise in violent crimes against Chinese Americans who were being mistaken for Japanese. “In order to dispel some of this confusion, Life here
128 Patricia E. Roy, The Triumph of Citizenship: the Japanese and Chinese in Canada, 1941-67 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014), 154. 63
adduces a rule of thumb from the anthropomorphic conformations that distinguish friendly Chinese from enemy alien Japs.” By “informing” readers of the subtle physical differences between America’s “tall Chinese brothers” and the “short Japanese admirals,”129 the article not only reinforced the Western tendency to position non-whites within a strict racial hierarchy by conflating all people of East Asian descent within a racial taxonomy, but the reporter’s tacit acceptance of violence against the Japanese encouraged a shifting away from anti-Asian agitation towards the Chinese to focus more squarely on the Japanese.130
Canada’s domestic realities and international posturing during the War moved in lockstep and helped to kick off the government’s slow lifting of legal disabilities on the
Chinese. In 1947, The Chinese Immigration Act was repealed, and Chinese Canadians were granted the vote. Although Canada’s slow lifting of legal disabilities can be read as a gradual acceptance of Asians in Canada, the country’s exclusive immigration policies remained one of the last vestiges of institutional discrimination in public policy. In other words, although Canadians gradually accepted the Chinese as citizens worthy of respect, their government was not offering an open-door policy for Chinese immigrants.131
Barriers to immigration and full naturalization were still largely intact by the time the flow of Asian children began trickling into the country by the 1960s.
129 “How to tell Japs from the Chinese,” Life, December 22, 1941, 82. https://books.google.ca/books?id=Y04EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA81&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage& q&f=false. 130 Robert G. Lee, “The Cold War Origins of the Model Minority Myth,” in Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 148. 131 Patricia E. Roy, The Triumph of Citizenship: The Japanese and Chinese in Canada, 1941-67 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014), 305-306. Roy records the story of a Chinese resident of Timmins, Ontario. The man recalls how the Second World War was a turning point for the Chinese in Canada; when China fought against the Japanese “the Whites in Timmins came to their senses …It is a sad thing to say that it took a war for them to turn around and consider the Chinese worthy humans.” The interview reveals both the seriousness of these policies on the lived experiences of Chinese Canadians, and the degree to which anti-Chinese racism was baked into the social fabric if the country. 64
From “Yellow Peril” to “Yellow Fever”
The gendered politics of kinship and the exotic imaginaries swirling around Asian women and girls are two interrelated themes that emerge in the historical representations of Chinese immigration and Chinese adoption. During the years of the Chinese Head Tax and well into the era of Chinese exclusion, Canada’s social landscape was a hostile environment for those racialized as Chinese. The country’s racist exclusion of Chinese migrants, coupled with the pervasive threat of violence or further restrictions by
Canadian government officials and individual Canadian citizens, culminated in the gendering of Chinese communities in Canada that become bachelor enclaves.132 Women were also discouraged from migrating due to the anti-Chinese racism that occasionally erupted in individual acts of physical violence against Chinese women and children.
Namely, British Columbia became a site of reoccurring racially motivated violence against Chinese schoolchildren; some children were assaulted on their way to school, while others endured life-threatening injuries. Timothy J. Stanley recalls that “…in 1915 a twelve-year-old racialized Chinese schoolgirl was so seriously injured when she was stoned by a group of white boys that she required major surgery to save her life.”133 In this way, anti-Chinese racism served the dual purpose of reinforcing the pariah status of those racialized as Chinese and creating a hostile social climate that discouraged the migration of Chinese women and girls to Canada.
132 Timothy James. Stanley, Contesting White Supremacy School Segregation, Anti-racism, and the Making of Chinese Canadians (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 136. 133 Stanley, Contesting White Supremacy, 132. 65
Though few Chinese women arrived in Canada between 1885 and 1923, the select few who did were commonly denounced as prostitutes and thus positioned outside the bounds of normative Canadian society. In the 1885 Report of the Royal Commission on
Chinese Immigration, Chinese women are only mentioned in relation to prostitution:
“Out of a total of 10,550 Chinese in the Province,” stated Commissioner Gray, “there are altogether only 154 Chinese women, of whom 70 are prostitutes, scattered throughout the
Province entirely among their own countrymen many as concubines, that relationship being among them deemed no offense, and no discredit”134 Lisa Chalykoff notes that the voices of women who migrated from China to Canada during the 19th and early 20th century are noticeably absent from the scholarly literature. She has remarked that the presence of Chinese women is only referred to regarding relevant statistical evidence, or within the context of a patriarchal discourse on “family life.”135 Relatedly, highly sexualized images of Chinese women as prostitutes and sex workers are rooted in an older history of Oriental imaginings and continues to pervade our cultural consciousness through the mainstream media, cinema, television, and popular culture. Solidly directed towards the Orient, the colonial gaze nourished a visual landscape where pornographic fantasies and sexual terrors were made socially and politically manifest in the United
States as well as in Canada. From Anna May Wong to Lucy Liu, the Chinese woman narrowly oscillates between the hypersexual Dragon Lady and the submissive China Doll or Geisha Girl.136 But these “Oriental” fantasies have been rearticulated in familiar ways
134 Library and Archives Canada, Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration (Ottawa: Report and Evidence),1885. 135 Lisa Chalykoff, “Encountering Anomalies: Cultural Study of Chinese Migrants to Early Canada,” in Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Construction of Canada, ed. Veronica Strong-Boag (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998), 155. 136 66
within Chinese adoption’s own visual landscape. Heather Jacobson writes about how some adoptive parents expressed an irresistible prejudice in favor of Chinese children because they were “cute and special.”137 The long-standing fetishization of Asian women and girls in broader public discourses was made visually manifest in Chinese adoption’s visual culture. Jacobs reflects on how “Asian adoptions by whites are often characterized as a fashion trend in the popular press, with Chinese daughters characterized as the latest
“must-have accessory.”138 Thus, the inability of countless Chinese migrants to bring their families to Canada was a purposeful fracturing of Chinese families; the suggestion that
Chinese children would become permanent additions to thousands of Canadian families several decades later would have been inconceivable at the time, sharpening the dichotomy between Chinese immigration and adoptions from China.
The Goldilocks Conditions of Adoption
However, racial and gender considerations alone cannot fully explain the shift from “yellow peril” to “pink ribbon babies;” the widespread transnational adoption of non-white children by Westerners challenges the broad assumption that a strong preference for white children has always dominated adoption decisions. In fact, the influx of non-white children migrating to Canada during this period helped to pry open the country’s doors to previously unwelcomed foreigners. In the post-war period, the interests and concerns of parents coincided with national interests and material realities that led to the adoption of thousands of foreign-born children.
137 Jacobson, Culture Keeping, 45. 138 Jacobson, Culture Keeping, 42. 67
Until the 1940s, the definitional scope of adoptable children was restricted to
“children whose background had been thoroughly investigated and who showed no signs of intellectual or physical pathology.”139 Those with disabilities and unknown histories, along with mixed-race and non-white children, writes Karen Balcom, were generally excluded from consideration and remained on the fringes of adoption.140 By the 1950s, parallel developments in social work practices coupled with changing public attitudes around kinship ties and expanded notions of “adoptability” led to increased popular and professional toleration around interracial adoption.141 Kristen Lovelock has noted that rising infertility rates, reliable contraception and abortion, and changing family forms all impacted the availability of children ripe for domestic adoptions. According to the research undertaken by Michael P. Sobol and Kerry J. Daly for the National Adoption
Study of Canada, domestic adoptions have fallen precipitously since at least the 1970s.
Between 1981 and 1990, the number of children in Canada placed into adoptive homes dropped from 5,376 in 1981 to 2,836 in 1990.142 The authors cite that decreasing fertility rates among adolescents, an increase in the use of contraception, and the greater likelihood of birth mothers choosing to keep their children help explain domestic adoption’s downward trajectory in Canada.
These trends are further amplified by the fact that “hard-to-place” and “waiting children” – orphans who were older than one year old and/or physically, emotionally, or cognitively challenged – increasingly accounted for a greater percentage of adoptable
139 Karen Balcom, The Traffic in Babies Cross-Border Adoption and Baby-Selling between the United States and Canada, 1930-1972 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 196. 140 Balcom, The Traffic in Babies, 197. 141 Balcom, The Traffic in Babies, 197. 142 Michael P. Sobol and Kerry J. Daly, “Canadian Adoption Statistics: 1981-1990,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 56, no. 2 (1994): 494, doi:10.2307/353115). 68
children in Canada.143 In a 2000 issue of Adoption Helper, Canada’s premier adoption guide, Executive Director of the Adoption Council of Canada, Judy Grove, estimated that there were over 50,000 children in the country’s foster care system, with an additional
20,000 permanent wards of the state. Of those in the foster care system, she said that only
1,700 of those children would be adopted out of the system per year. 144 Grove added that the advanced age of children coupled with the fact that most of them came from poorer backgrounds where substance abuse and family histories of mental health disorders were common made them unattractive to the average Canadian adopter.145 Thus, considerations over age, accessibility, and health often took primacy over race in domestic public adoptions. Thus, prospective parents began lobbying their governments to create provisions that would enable them to secure children from other countries.146
For Canada’s part, international adoption also seemed like a viable way to address the country’s demographic dearth while supporting its image with respect to multiculturalism and international humanitarianism. International adoption was thus framed as a national good that would satisfy the needs of Canadian nationals.
Assessing Canadian adoption trends with respect to China and Romania provides another opening through which to consider how age, health, and geopolitics were anterior consideration to racial matching. By the early 1990s, China and countries in Eastern
Europe were the premier suppliers of adoptable children for parents in Europe and North
America. Beginning in 1990 following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the overthrow of the Ceausescu government in 1989, Romania became an important sending
143 Sobol and Daly, “Canadian Adoption Statistics: 1981-1990,” 497. 144 Adoption helper guide, no.35. 145 Adoption helper guide, no. 35. 146 Lovelock, “Intercountry Adoption as a Migratory Practice,” 933. 69
nation to many Canadians seeking children. Concurrently, China opened its doors to
“waiting parents” under Deng Xiaoping’s more relaxed Chinese foreign policy in the early 1990s. Signe Howell has drawn parallels between the political and ideological situations in both countries. As communist dictatorships with highly centralized administrations, both states exerted heavy-handed approaches to family planning through a variety of state-sanctioned policies and programs. Under Ceausescu’s pro-natalist policies enacted in 1966, Romania’s birth quota rose to 5 children in 1986, and abortions were banned. Signe Howell, in The Kinning of Foreigners, notes that the prevalence of illegal abortions among Romanian women resulted in many parentless children who were abandoned or surrendered to the state.147 Conversely, China’s state-directed social engineering under the one-child policy sought to limit the number of children parents could have. Despite differences in demographic ambitions, both China and Romania’s repressive family-planning policies saw large numbers of abandoned children placed into overcrowded and understaffed state-run institutions that reeked of neglect. The plight of
Chinese and Romanian orphans was effectively relayed to Canadian adopters through dramatic visual exposés in print media and on television; images of Chinese and
Romanian orphans were met with emotionally driven responses that culminated in direct interventions by horrified spectators. But, while both the Romanian and the Chinese orphan became modern emblems of the world’s neglected children, the divergent images they conjured up in the Western imaginary reveals the degree to which visual classifications became ensnared in the global market of adoptable children.
147 Signe Howell, The Kinning of Foreigners: Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 217. 70
International controversies swirling around children in need first emerged from
Romania after video footage of institutionalized and malnourished children made their international debut on European and American television programs. Eerily similar to The
Dying Rooms, which would air five years later, the plight of Romania’s “forgotten children” was visually documented in a three-part 20/20 television special broadcast on the ABC network in the fall of 1990. For the first time in 44 years, Romania’s iron curtain had been yanked back to reveal the devastating consequences of the regime’s
“pro-natalist” policies. Led by ABC correspondent Tom Jarriel and a team of American reporters, “Shame of a Nation” aired unflinching video footage of wanton child suffering and gross neglect at six of the country’s 50 state-run institutions. By gaining intimate access into these “warehouses” for the so-called “deficient and unsalvageable,”
Canadians bore witness to a brutal show of inhumanity. A child with grotesquely crippled limbs laid motionless on a dirty mattress, while another child flits across the screen in a desperate attempt to avoid bath time. These places, says Jarriel, are not unlike Nazi concentration camps. He adds that the official number of 8,000 institutionalized children purported by the Romanian government is much closer 40,000, according to Western sources.148
The media onslaught of heart-wrenching images of Romania’s discarded children saw an explosion of interest among would-be adopters;149 triumphant adoption stories in the Canadian press abounded. By June of that year, Maclean’s Magazine reported that
148 “20/20: Shame of a Nation: The Story of Genocide by Neglect (1990),” The Minnesota Governor's Council on Developmental Disabilities, 2021, https://mn.gov/mnddc/parallels2/one/video/2020shameofthenation.html#:~:text=20%2F20%3A%20Shame %20of%20a,Viewer%20discretion%20advised.&text=In%20this%2020%2F20%20Report,following%20th e%201989%20Romanian%20Revolution. 149 Alanna Mitchell, “Parents: Adoptions May Sow Seeds of Grief,” The Globe and Mail, March 7, 1991, A1, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Globe and Mail. 71
“10 Canadian couples had succeeded in adopting 13 Romanian children” and “[d]ozens more Canadians and an estimated 2,500 people from other countries [were] in Romania negotiating the bureaucratic labyrinth of the new regime.”150 Another article featured in the magazine published a photo of a B.C. mother of two, Cheryl Magnussen, holding the family’s newest edition in her arms. Magnussen discovered two-year-old Alexandra in
June while visiting a local orphanage in Romania. Initially suffering from malnourishment and weighing only 20 lbs., the writers reassure their readers that
Alexandra will be joining the growing cohort of Romanian children in the West “who are a living testimony to the cruelty of a system that is now part of the ashes of history.”151
At the height of Romania’s adoption frenzy, the Globe and Mail reported that would-be Canadian adopters had made thousands of phone calls inquiring about the possibilities of adopting Romanian children, while up to 1,000 children had found permanent homes in Canada in just over a year.152 “Shame of a Nation” and the coverage that followed, writes Lisa Cartwright, spawned “a sort of “compassion borne of horror” whereby Romania’s social orphans were not only transformed into objects of pity, but became “the object of an obsessional fantasy.”153 But some took note that this
“obsessional fantasy” might be driven by racial considerations instead of compassionate ones. In 1991, the Globe and Mail exposed the skepticism on the part of some experts who worried that “would-be parents [were] so taken with the children’s white skin they refuse[d] to recognize that the youngsters may have serious problems.” Although many
150 Hal Quinn, “A cruel legacy: Canadians fight to adopt Romanian orphans,” Maclean’s, August 20, 1990, https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1990/8/20/a-cruel-legacy. 151 Quinn, “A cruel legacy.” 152 Mitchell, “Parents: Adoptions May Sow Seeds of Grief,” A1. 153 Lisa Cartwright, “Images of ‘Waiting Children’ Spectatorship and Pity in the Representation of the Global Social Orphan in the 1990s,” in Cultures of Transnational Adoption (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 192. 72
organization “sprung to match Canadian parents with Romanian babies” those at the helm of the operations articulated similar concerns over the social acceptability of adopting white orphans instead of Asian, Latin American, or Black children. They argued that the explosion in interest in Romanian children expressed racial biases since these were
“people who would not have flocked to Peru, Chile, Brazil…”154 Psychologist at Simon
Fraser, Dr. Elinor Ames who traveled to Romania to assess Romanian orphans, warned parents that these children, although white, “are more seriously deprived than babies in other countries.” Her message to Canadian adopters that “dark-skinned children” were in
“far better condition[s]” did not fall on deaf ears.
Thus, it wasn’t long before the fantasy of long-distance love and humanitarian rescue of Romanian children would go awry. Almost overnight, depictions of Romanian orphans suffering from a range of physical and cognitive disabilities saturated the media and, in the eyes of many Canadians, transformed these objects of desire into harbingers of destruction. The harsh backlash from Canadian adopters came hot on the heels of media reports and medical findings that emphasized the range of physical and psychological impairments suffered by Romanian orphans. An article in Women’s Day Magazine published in 1997 provides an example of the kinds of anxious rhetoric swirling around these international adoptions: “While most international adoptions have been successful, some have left heartbreak in their wake and parents ill-prepared to deal with the many challenges, post-traumatic stress syndrome and hyperactivity, learning disabilities and fetal alcohol syndrome are just some potential problems.”155 The piece includes
154 Mitchell, “Parents: Adoption May Sow the Seeds of Grief,” A1. 155 Barbara Dean, “International Adoption: Can love beat the odds?” Women’s Day, April 22, 1997, 212, Women’s Magazine Archive. 73
testimonies from adoptive parents whose experiences were less than ideal. One mother likened her experience of adopting two girls from Ukraine to a “Trojan horse,” describing how she and her husband thought they were “bringing a wonderful gift into [their] family, when in reality the adoptions were “almost the means of [their] destruction.”156Another article in the Globe and Mail detailed the adoption “nightmare” of a Kingston, Ontario couple who adopted two girls from Romanian orphanages in 1989.
Carle aged 11 and her sister Candance, 10, exhibited “indiscriminate friendliness,” and were “physically reckless, prone to violent rages and eat voraciously.”157 The story eventually made its way into Canada’s Adoption Helper guide as a warning to prospective adopters. Anne Higonnet considers the co-constructive relationship between notions of desire and innocence. She writes that because “[c]hildren could only become desirable if they were genuinely believed to be innocent, [i]nnocents itself become the object of desire. This paradoxical desirability of innocence put an irresolvable tension at the heart of Romantic childhood.”158 In this way, the physical and psychological wellness of orphans became the all-important yardstick against which parents could measure childhood innocence, thereby designating desirability. In the case of Romania’s abandoned children, love was not enough.
With the steady stream of assaults in Western media against Romania’s handling of abandoned children, coupled with the proliferation of post-adoption horror stories by adoptive parents and the increasing pressure from the European Union to end the
156 Deane, “International Adoption: Can love beat the odds?” 212. 157 Jane Gadd, “A Rescue Mission’s Troubled Aftermath,” The Globe and Mail, August 1998, A1, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Globe and Mail. 158 Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998), 132. 74
country’s market in babies, Romania placed a moratorium on all international adoptions in 1991. For all its own controversies and scandals revolving around human rights abuses in dingy orphanages, favorable media reports on Chinese adoption contrasted and amplified the abjectness of Romanian children. In 1997, the Adoption Helper Guide polled six support groups and nine adoption agencies in Canada to find the “elusive best country” for adoption. Unsurprisingly, China came out on top, followed by Romania,
Guatemala, and then Russia. Among the myriad of reasons for choosing China – a willingness to work with older parents, predictable adoption process with relatively short waiting periods, and the overwhelming number of infant girls – the health of these children was the most common explanation for choosing China among survey participants. Adoption agency workers across the board recommended China believing that these children were “healthy, happy and adjust[ed] remarkably well to their new lives in Canada.”159 Children’s Bridge workers, Jennifer Dawson-Bent and Martha Maslen added that the Philippines and The United States were also attractive countries for
Canadian adopters, but that many of the children were older than two. Along with the growing number of adoption professionals whom all drew positive health pictures of
Chinese children, many adoptive parents cited health as being overwhelming significant in their decision to choose China. Reflecting on her experience traveling to China to adopt her daughter, New York City native and adoptive mother, Barbara Jones, considered the overall experience to be a massive success, since all the children in her
159 Jennifer Dawson-Bent and Martha “Guide to Intercountry Adoption,” Adoption Helper, 1997. 75
adoption group had been healthy and happy, despite the “unsettling stories about sick children.”160
In the new adoption millennium, it has been in Canada’s interest to shape national policies and practices around adoption to address domestic demands and needs.161 As
“hard-to-place” children began to dominate public domestic adoptions, the growing unease around Canadian children became an important prerequisite for adoption’s demand-driven global economy that seized the Canadian adopting public. Yet, the desire for these children was quickly snuffed out by the emotional and psychological baggage they threatened to bring into their adopting families. Parents’ desires collided with the social, political, and economic realities at home and abroad, pulling many adopters away from Eastern Europe and pushing them to China. The fact that Chinese adoptees were younger, healthier, and mostly female, appealed to would-be parents and served as a useful counterpoint to those “other” children from those “other” countries who might, in comparison to the Chinese adoptee, be beyond the pale of rescue. Importantly, news media images worked in tandem with and reflected, parental proclivities, the political realities in sending nations, and above all, concerns over health. Together, these created a visual discourse that helped to manage children in states of crisis.162 In particular, the case of China and Romania’s adoption programs highlight how adoption’s visual landscape was informed and directed by material conditions and constraints and became enmeshed with the complex matrix of social hierarchies that privilege some groups over others. Images of horror coming out of Romanian’s state-run institutions moved many
160 Barbara Jones, “A Small Happiness,” Good Housekeeping, December 1995, 116-119, Women’s Magazine Archive, 116. 161 Lovelock, “Intercountry Adoption as a Migratory Practice,” 911. 162 Cartwright, “Waiting Children,” 188. 76
Canadians to action but failed to sustain long-distance compassion. In fact, images of needy children become the means through which children were classified and organized.
Within the global market of adoptable children, images pre-structured the bifurcation of orphans into desirable and undesirable children. Yet, at no point has race been consigned to adoption’s dustbin and made irrelevant. Both race and gender were made manifest in
Chinese adoption’s visual discourse as a productive means to justify adoption decisions.
Narrating Choices: “Good China”, “Bad China”
“Nowadays, even our kids are made in China!” joked the saleswoman as she folded the made-in-China jacket I had just bought. She was quite right. Quebec is home to a very large cohort of girls adopted in China…They are our new princesses, these lovely black-haired dolls raised as only children by adoring parents. They are beautiful, they are loved and probably spoiled, and they are good at school. And Quebec in lucky to have more of them than any other province.163
While the popularity of China’s adoption program was primarily born from a desire for young and healthy infants coupled with an uncomplicated adoption process, the work of justifying the absorption of Chinese children into white kinship was largely accomplished through the realm of visuality. However, visually constructing “needy” children who were at once racialized and gendered was complicated since the child’s difference had to be “seen” and “felt” in ways that legitimated her desirability. Sara Dorow observes that the racialized politics of being an Asian child adopted into a white family of privilege parallels the gendered politics of being an abandoned girl child of an unknown and likely poor Chinese family.164 Adding to this, I suggest that the confluence of both race and
163 Lysiane Gagnon, “Filial Pity: China’s babies are hard to get,” The Globe and Mail, January 15, 2007, A17, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Globe and Mail. 164 Dorow, Transnational Adoption, 175. 77
gender has complicated Chinese adoption’s visual narratives since the identity of these children simultaneously feminized and racialized narratives in paradoxical ways that alternated between “good” and “bad” China. On the one hand, an enduring fascination and reverence for China's rich history and beautiful “Oriental” culture have led to the cherishing of China by adoptive parents. On the other hand, the fact that most adoptees were girls conjured up negative images of a backward and patriarchal China; girl babies were cast as the unwitting victims of communist state coercion.165 However, these visual narratives have been used productively by adoption’s central actors to justify desire and choice. Magazines, agency brochures, and adoption websites have joined in the effort to construct conceptual meanings around Chinese adoptees to justify balancing material realities and parental needs.
Historically, gender has mattered to Canadian adopters. Reports have long indicated a strong preference for daughters over sons. This gender favoritism gestures to a range of assumptions around girls’ innate qualities of gentleness, obedience, and affection, and has increasingly been tied to age, as well.166 In a similar manner, romanticized images of Chinese adoptees as “beautiful, passive, and intelligent,” represented a continued perpetuation of racial hierarchies that worked to justify the idea that Chinese babies make the ideal candidates for adoption and rescue. For many white
Canadian families, the Chinese adoptee promised the hope of a “well assimilated, upwardly mobile, politically nonthreatening, [and] definitely not black” child.167 Even orphanage personnel in China have remarked on the fact that “their” children are
165 Dorow, Transnational Adoption, 176. 166 Strong-Boag, Finding Families, Finding Ourselves, 97. 167 Xiaobei Chen, “Not Ethnic Enough: The Cultural Identity Imperative in International Adoptions from China to Canada,” Children & Society 29, no. 6 (2014): 631, doi:10.1111/chso.12102. 78
particularly desirable among foreigners because they know that “Chinese children are intelligent and hard-working,” and above all, “very beautiful.”168 Adoptive mother,
Catherine Heighway remarked in a 1996 issue of Adoption Helper that she and her husband chose China because they wanted a little girl. She added that “the orphanage appeared very clean…”169 Other parents like Collen Murdoch referred to their daughter as “our China doll,” lavishing compliments on her daughter’s “beautiful, huge dark eyes
[and] tiny heart-shaped mouth…”170
When thinking and writing about Chinese adoption, there was also a tendency among parents, journalists, and scholars alike to blame China’s surplus of abandoned girls on an imperceptible culture’s backward gender preferences. Barbara Jones articulated these commonly held beliefs about China when she explained to the readers of
Good Housekeeping that although “[t]he Chinese preference for boys is thousands of years old,” the one-child policy “made the Chinese people want baby boys – and not want baby girls – even more.”171 According to Jones, the plight of these “unwanted” girls and the eagerness with which the Chinese government was pursuing international adoptions,
“moved her.”172 Another adoptive father described his experience traveling to China with his wife in 2004 to adopt their 17-month-old daughter, Mei, in a December issue for
Reason. Jacob Sullum was awed by the interest and concern the Chinese adoptees inspired by Chinese locals: “I could not understand what these bystanders were saying, but the gist of it was clear: “What adorable little girls!” Their reactions seemed to fly in
168 Howell, The Kinning of Foreigners, 215. 169 Catherine Heighway and Wallace Mackinnon, “Hello, my name is Emily!” Adoption Helper, “China, Thailand,” January 1996, No. 19 170 Collen Murdoch Leclair, “Our China doll,” Adoption Helper, “We adopted from China…you can too!” June 1999, No. 34. 171 Jones, “A Small Happiness,” 116. 172 Jones, “A Small Happiness,” 116. 79
the face of everything Western adopters thought they knew about Chinese people and their culture. “The reason we had come to China, I had assumed, was that these girls were not wanted there…[t]he bystanders’ delighted reaction to Mei and the other girls from her orphanage seemed to contradict this assumption.”173 The new father began to think anew about the conventional narratives about Westerners saving the country’s unwanted girls; he was beginning to think adoptions from China were far more complex than Western parents would have it, adding that it was not the Chinese themselves who abhorred their girls, but rather it was the Chinese government’s oppressive family planning policies which were to blame for the surplus of abandoned children.
Both parents’ preconceived ideas about China reflect the range of misconceptions and cultural stereotypes expressed by many adopting parents in magazines and interviews. Scholars of Chinese adoption like Xinran and Kay Ann Johnson have tried to complicate the narrative by emphasizing the fact that the desire for sons among Chinese couples did not necessarily precluded their desire for daughters. In fact, Johnson writes that many childless couples in China and those seeking to adopt a second child are happy, and even eager, to adopt a baby girl. As such, hundreds of thousands of abandoned girls were “directly, if secretly, adopted locally without ever entering an orphanage, while thousands of those who did enter state orphanages were also adopted domestically, despite the restrictions placed on those allowed to adopt.”174 She argues that “these girls have grown up as wanted and valued daughters in Chinese adoptive families just as the internationally adopted girls have grown up as valued daughters in adoptive families in
173 Jacob Sullum, “Thank Deng Xiaoping for Little Girls,” Reason 37 (December 2007): 42. 174 Johnson, China’s Hidden Children, 11. 80
the United States, Canada, and Europe.”175 Thus, while interested in China and even lured by the country’s exotic appeal, most parents had only a superficial knowledge of
China’s history, society, and cultural traditions.
Conclusion
The explosive demand for China’s girls by Western adopters has been declining steadily since peaking in 2004.176 Part of the decline was due to China’s Adoption Law instituted in 1998, which permitted the domestic adoption of a second child by Chinese couples. Additionally, China has severely tightened their criteria for individuals and couples seeking to adopt their children; new regulations on the sexuality, marital status, age, economic status, and physical and psychological fitness has forced many would-be adopters to look elsewhere. British-Chinese journalist and author on Chinese women,
Xinran, has also observed that the decline of international adoption in China came on the heels of radical shifts in the country’s adoption policy after 2006. China’s economic boom on its eastern seaboard improved living standards and meant far fewer orphans to adopt, while new policies aimed at opening up northwest China and negative media coverage around Chinese adopted children in local newspapers culminated in fewer children available for adoption.177
An overview of the Chinese in Canada has provided a basis for critical reflection on the discursive and visual representations of Chinese adoption in the media and popular culture. Since positive images of the Chinese adoptee both clash and coincide with historical depictions of the Chinese immigrant, Canada’s historical record of anti-Chinese
175 Johnson, 11. 176 Peter Selman, “Intercountry adoption of children from Asia in the twenty-first century,” 319. 177 Xinran, Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother (New York: Scribner, 2010), 141-142. 81
racism is useful for understanding how the relational nature of race and gender is continuously engaged in a complex image-making and image-consuming process. The willingness to embrace Chinese foreigners into the folds of Canadian society has always hinged on a set of cultural assumptions and racial stereotypes, but the ways in which these have been visually deployed and interpreted by individual Canadians have depended upon the peculiar social, political, and economic circumstances in which they occurred. In comparison to the alien status bestowed on Chinese migrants, the Chinese adoptee’s multi-faceted identity – racially Chinese, ethnically Canadian, and female – represents a challenge to her racialized status as a “permanent foreigner.” Separated by decades but linked by a common history, the energetic embrace of Chinese children cannot be understood in isolation from the racist exclusion of Chinese migrants because although they are informed by different circumstances, adoption’s racialized and highly gendered visual landscape remains part and parcel of the long history of the Chinese in
Canada.
On the other hand, this chapter has shown that the racial and gendered visual discourses around Chinese adoption have been a convenient response to the needs and desires of individual Canadian adopters. Images as an effect of broader exigencies help to explain Canada’s adoption discourses on China and Romania, where images of needy children became an important means through which adoptable children were organized along “adoptable” and “unadoptable” lines. Within the global market of adoptable children, images pre-structured the bifurcation of foreign orphans into desirable and undesirable kin. By broadening the scope of choice and care to include the host of material considerations, we see how images both resisted and reified familiar racial and
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gendered imaginaries that ultimately worked to portray Chinese children as model adoptees. Moreover, the popular representations of Chinese adoptees expressed older
“Oriental” imaginaries that oscillated between good and bad China narratives.
And yet, Nancy Riley reminds us that adoption’s visual culture is also padded with intimate portraits that express a range of other human emotions. Equally authentic and familiar were photos of anxious mothers waiting for their children in government offices, and teary-eyed fathers holding their daughters for the first time. Thus, Riley is right to suggest we should not collapse “… the larger social issues, histories, and norms, that underlie adoption processes and the actions of individuals…For most people who adopt, China simply provide[d] the opportunity for parenthood.”178 Images of adoptable children have always balanced a myriad of needs, ideologies, and realities in both sending and receiving nations, while shaping the social and symbolic meanings the adult world readily ascribes to real children. The decision to adopt from China was rife with ironies, contradictions, and a range of asymmetries, as well as well-intentioned action.
Yet, if Chinese adoption as modern phenomenon existed at the nexus of discourse and real life, how was it expressed and represented in post-adoption ideas and practices? The ways in which Canada’s multicultural ethos and the discourse of Orientalism has structured Chinese adoption’s culture-keeping agenda will be explored in greater depth in the following chapter.
178 Nancy E. Riley, “American Adoption of Chinese Girls: The Socio-Political Matrices of Individual Decisions,” Women's Studies International Forum 20, no. 1 (January-February 1997): 99. 83
Chapter 5
Kinning Culture and Storied Origins
Broad acceptance of Chinese adoption as a unique, but increasingly normative, form of global family formation has fundamentally transformed the landscape of adoption, both domestic and international, from a site of secrecy to a cause for celebration. The mainstreaming of Chinese adoption in Canada’s national popular discourse and the overall cultural ubiquity of the Chinese adoptee writ large was due in large part to the media attention lavished on Chinese girls, and the panoply of Chinese cultural productions and representations in both the public sphere and in the intimate domain of the family.179 Cultural anthropologist at Columbia Toby Alice Volkman, herself an adoptive mother of a Chinese girl, remarked in an essay on the culture of
Chinese adoption that “until the wave of Chinese adoptions[,] there had never been another cohort of transnational, transracial adoptees that arrived in the United States in such large numbers, in so few years, roughly the same age and largely the same gender.”180 This was also true in Canada where the highly visible, racially marked, and politically non-threatening, female Chinese adoptees not only migrated from East to West and South to North but also moved to the center of a commercially driven cultural fascination with Chinese adoption. However, migrating children bring very little cultural knowledge with them despite being symbolically marked by it. Thus, the work of keeping culture necessarily fell under the purview of their adoptive parents.
179 Toby Alice Volkman, “Embodying Chinese Culture: Transnational Adoption,” in Cultures of Transnational Adoption, ed. Toby Alice Volkman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 82. 180 Toby Alice Volkman, “Embodying Chinese Culture,” 82. 84
Glossy images of the happy Chinese adoptee in the arms of her happy adoptive parents filled the pages of newspapers and popular magazines, while entire commercial industries pivoted to satisfy the growing demand from, mostly white and middle-class, parents determined to connect their newly minted transnational families with symbolic markers of an “authentic” Chinese culture. The consumption of adoption storybooks,
Chinese Barbie dolls, Mulan movie merchandise, silky qipaos, and “Oriental-style” home décor constituted a rich repertoire of embodied practices and cultural displays that become the bedrock of a concerted post-adoption culture keeping agenda. Likewise, discourses revolving around Chinese adoption have been inscribed in the media through film and television programs.
This chapter assesses the ways in which dominant ideologies around kinship, motherhood, race, and multiculturalism were made visually and materially manifest through the enactment of culture-keeping in the private sphere of the family and the multicultural public. I suggest that Chinese adoption’s visual and material landscape, which was underwritten by multiculturalism’s liberal discourse of inclusion across difference, have contributed to a fundamental altering of normative family kinship and individual identity. The push to “keep culture” in Chinese adoption was enacted in the intimate apolitical space of the family but extended into the public realm of commercial consumption and the media. In this way, Chinese adoption has simultaneously politicized the family while depoliticizing issues around adoption and motherhood, race and multiculturalism, and culture and class. By gaining entrance into the once privatized sphere of the family, the Chinese adoptee was transformed through images and objects from a poor and root-less foreigner to a privileged Canadian citizen. But the psychic
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weight of images and objects also transformed the family into a site of cultural diversity and liberal inclusion.
This chapter begins with a streamlined definition of what is meant by the term
“culture keeping” in the scholarly literature on transnational adoption, and how the term has been understood and deployed by adoption’s main actors. What follows is a general overview of some of the larger shifts within Canada’s historical record of adoption, and the role multiculturalism has played in the visual and discursive shift from secrecy to celebration. Next, I consider how the performance of culture by white adoptive parents through Chinese celebrations and the market’s aestheticized commodification of Asian culture, allowed Chinese adoption to enter into a new visual dialogue with the project of multiculturalism. Although the images and objects that structured Chinese adoption have taken a myriad of forms, they remain codded representations of an essentialist Chinese culture inlaid with older “Orientalist” sentiments. Notably, storybooks became central to the culture-keeping agenda since they acted as important memory archives that helped to visually and discursively transmit robust origin stories. Part three looks at how storybooks as cultural artifacts did the work of balancing parental desires, knowledge about Chinese adoption, and the myth of multiculturism. They paradoxically honored and minimized the child’s past and her connection to an elusive birth mother. Finally, I consider what the images and objects produced by and for Chinese adoption have brought to bear on Chinese adoptees themselves.
Although the celebratory praxis of adoption culture-keeping may not have succeeded in transmitting “authentic” cultural experiences, it has created a unique diaspora whose experiences have differed in surprising ways from their Korean adoptee forebearers.
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Indeed, identity-centric questions in Chinese adoption discourses have been explored by academics and adoptive parents, but only recently have they been taken up by adoptees themselves, many of whom are raring to bring their own experiences and subjectivities to bear on the racialized and highly gendered dimensions of their adoption. My own positionality as a Chinese Canadian adoptee frames this final chapter in two important ways. On the one hand, it is an intellectual attempt at addressing some of the discursive gaps in the academic literature on transnational adoption. On the other hand, it is a personally motivated desire to locate my own experiences and insights within a broader discursive context.
Culture Keeping in the Era of Multiculturalism
In countries like the United States, Spain, the Netherlands, and indeed Canada, families formed through Chinese adoption became one of the most visible and widely commented-upon signs of multiculturalism and globalization.181 Christina Klein, author of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961, remarked that these multiracial and multinational adoptive families not only entailed the flow of
Chinese children into Western nations, but crucially deepened their “emotional, financial, and cultural investment in China.”182 This investment in and commitment to China was expressed through various acts of “culture keeping.” In her book, Culture Keeping: White
Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference, Heather
Jacobson describes the practice, which has become standard in transnational adoption
181 Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 270. 182 Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 270. 87
communities, as an active process of cultural engagement to establish and maintain connections to a child’s birth culture. Her working definition of culture-keeping suggests that the practice was understood by adoption’s central actors as productive in two important ways. Firstly, it engendered a strong sense of identity and self-worth in children whose identities were marked by difference across racial, ethnic, and familial lines. Secondly, culture-keeping could speak to, and make sense of, the uncomfortable silences that pervaded an adopted child’s origins.
However, the ways in which parents have chosen to narrate their child’s identity and relationship to China is complex and resists easy classification. Sara Dorow has tried to quantify the degree to which adoptive families either absorbed or rejected China. She identifies four narrative frames – assimilation, celebrating plurality, balancing act, and immersion – to help delineate “the parameters of a repertoire of cultural identities available”183 to adoptive families. She notes that most of the adoptive families she interviewed “fell in some way into the middle two of these approaches and understood assimilate and immersion as “extremes.”184 Despite these differences, nearly all of
Dorow’s interviewees expressed a desire to expose their children to “authentic” aspects of Chinese culture by deliberately weaving what Anna Anagnost calls “cultural bites” into the narrative fabric of their everyday lives in varied, but highly selective, ways.185
As a set of prescribed practices enacted and embraced by adoptive parents, culture-keeping is a relatively new phenomenon that emerged from the discourse of multiculturalism and the historical debates swirling around transracial adoption beginning
183 Dorow, Transnational Adoption, 216. 184 Dorow, Transnational Adoption, 216. 185 Ann Anagnost, “Scenes of Misrecognition: Maternal Citizenship in the Age of Transnational Adoption,” Positions 8, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 413, https://doi-org.proxy.queensu.ca/10.1215/10679847-8-2-389. 88
in the mid-century. Prior to the 1950s, child apprehensions and domestic adoptions in
Canada were couched in shame and secrecy, and thus conceived as intensely private affairs arranged by doctors, lawyers, and social workers.186 In this era of closed adoptions, the stigma around unwed motherhood, the shame of relinquishing children, and the potential for “fairytale happy endings,” co-mingled in a way that deepened the gulf between birth parents and adoptive parents. As such, genetic and genealogical information remained scant, and adoptees were pressed to abandon any curiosity they might harbor about their pre-adoption pasts. Encouraging the act of forgetting was similarly endorsed by child experts and welfare professions who believed that rejecting
“unsatisfactory” pasts would be less psychologically damaging for children and would facilitate their smooth transition and subsequent immersion into their new families. Put differently, Veronica Strong-Boag writes that the closed nature of earlier adoptions was compounded fears of “problematic or brutal beginnings” which not only compromised a child’s “fresh start,” but also impinged upon adoption’s fantasy of happy endings.187 For these reasons, efforts at secrecy on the part of child welfare authorities went uncontested for decades and had the effect of deterring, or altogether hampering, later searches for birth parents.188 Efforts to assimilate on behalf of adoptees were supported by adoption procedures that sought to racially match children as closely as possible to adoptive parents. If differences did exist, notes Jacobson, “they would be subverted, downplayed, hidden, and ignored.”189 However, the porosity of such racial, ethnic, and national boundaries upheld by standard adoption procedures were thrown into sharp relief by the
186 See Karen Balcom The Traffic in Babies. 187 Veronica Strong-Boag, Finding Families, Finding Ourselves, 217. 188 Veronica Strong-Boag, Finding Families, Finding Ourselves, 217. 189 Jacobson, Culture Keeping, 3. 89
influx of foreign-born children and a new spirit of progressive liberalism that was seeping into the Canadian public discourse in the second half of the twentieth century.
Formally established in 1959, Montreal’s Open-Door Society (ODS) was among the first adoption agencies in Canada to popularize interracial adoption, and the placement of non-white children into white families.190 Karen Dubinsky notes that the society’s embrace of racial unity through the maintenance of strong ties with Montreal's black communities signaled a decisive shift in public discourses around adoptive kinship.
The ODS was the inspiration behind, and an important precursor to, the creation of similar organizations committed to interracial and transnational adoption, like Toronto’s
Committee for the Adoption of Colored Youth (CACY), Canadadopt, Families for
Children (FFC), and Terre des Hommes (TDH).191Additionally, the shift from
“difference” to “similarity” in Canadian adoption practices reflected various anti-racist and cultural nationalist movements taking place just south of the border in the United
States. British-American sociologist and feminist, Ruth Frankenberg, has described this shift as a move from “essentialist racism” to a discourse of “sameness” predicated on
“color-blindness.”192 But the new esprit of non-differentiation and “color-blindness” kept issues of race, culture, and class, ethnicity, and displacement on the periphery. This helped neutralize the child’s racial and ethnic difference while preventing the private sphere of the family from entering into dialogue with these issues. In other words, the process of integrating non-white children into mainstream society through assimilation
190 Dubinsky, Babies Without Borders, 60. 191 Strong-Boag and Bagga, “Saving, Kidnapping, or Something of Both?” 273. 192 Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 14. 90
remained the conventional wisdom of the day among many white adopters throughout the
1960 and 1970s.
Korean American adoptees have been the largest and most vocal cohort of transracial and transnational adoptees, and their experiences parallel and contrast Chinese adoption in complex ways. Adopted the Movie (2008) is a compelling film with a comparative focus on Korean and Chinese adoption. Directed by Barb Lee, filming alternates between husband-and-wife, John and Jacqui Trainer, from Nashua, New
Hampshire, who are preparing to adopt their daughter from China, and the Feros, who adopted their now thirty-two-year-old daughter, Jennifer, from South Korea in 1975.
Excitement and anticipation tint the Trainer’s experience of traveling to China after years of struggling with infertility, while heartbreak and discord frame Jennifer’s struggle to make her aging parents understand the difficulties and ongoing displacement she feels as an Asian woman and a Korean adoptee. Especially tragic is Jennifer’s desperate attempts at connecting with her adoptive mother who is dying, and who says she has never seen
Jennifer as anything other than her daughter. The relationship between Jennifer and her adoptive father is similarly fraught; she is unsuccessful at making her father understand the core validation she is searching for and the pain of being an outsider in two families and two cultures. The dual displacement Jennifer feels is most pronounced when she, her father, and her uncle take a trip to New York City to learn more about the Fero’s family lineage. While dining at a Korean restaurant one night, Jennifer leans over her father and gestures to a group of young Koreans enjoying a meal a few tables over. “Look at that table, daddy, they’re all real Koreans, they’re speaking Korean.” She admits she feels lonely sitting at the table with her father and uncle: “they’re all these people that look like
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me, but I have nothing in common with them.” Jennifer hangs her head in her hands; her uncle and father fall silent.193Jennifer’s story is both compelling and painful, but largely representative of the color-blind ethos that defined earlier transnational adoptions. In juxtaposing the experiences of Korean and Chinese adoption, Adopted the Movie provides a gripping account of how transnational adoptions practices have shifted from assimilation to celebration, and what these different approaches have brought to bear on adoptees and their families. “If people adopt today,” says Jennifer, “I expect them to do better.”194
The adoption of girls from China beginning in the 1990s coincided with the discourse of multiculturalism, where the language of culture, identity, and ethnicity had become more deeply entrenched in Canadian politics. Canadian multiculturalism as a sociological fact, an ideology, and a state policy has evolved and changed since its official adoption by the government during the 1970s and 1980s.195 Within the country’s bilingual framework, Canadian multiculturalism was committed to the funding for ethnocultural groups for cultural maintenance, the removal of cultural barriers that would allow for the full and equal participation of all Canadians, cultural interchange, and official language training for all immigrants.196 This new emphasis on cultural maintenance and ethnized citizenship not only supported transnational adoption but encouraged it – transracial adoptees could become the emblems of a nation shorn of its racist past. Chinese adoption as a sign of liberal multiculturism was further supported by
193 Lee, Barb, “Adopted the Movie,” Point made Learning, 2020, YouTube Video, 57:54, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKoAVdpXq_4&t=3084s&ab_channel=PointMadeLearning 194 Lee, “Adopted the Movie.” 195 Library of Parliament, Canadian Multiculturalism (Ottawa: Library of Parliament, 2018), 1, https://web.archive.org/web/20180803180842/https://lop.parl.ca/Content/LOP/ResearchPublications/2009- 20-e.pdf. 196 Library of Parliament, Canadian Multiculturalism, 3. 92
the Chinese government’s framing of adoption as a “gift” and a symbolic bridge between two cultures. China placed strict licensing requirements on foreign adoption agencies and required all would-be parents to travel to China to legally finalize adoptions.197
Importantly, Karen Miller-Loessi and Zeynep Kilic note that traveling to China as part of the adoption “package deal” often included ritualized ceremonies where adoptive parents were encouraged to “honor the child’s Chinese heritage in her adopted country.”198 Thus, the relationship adoptive parents cultivated with China during their two-week stay established a strong identification with China.
The discursive framing of Chinese adoption that both acknowledged and celebrated their adoptions and “birth cultures” seemed worlds apart from the colorblind ethos that reigned supreme during the earlier decades of adoption. Andrea Louie considers Korean and Chinese adoption as representing two distinct but connected adoption flows from Asia; they emerged from two different historical periods and were informed by different discourses around family, assimilation, and adoption. In many ways, Korean adoptees’ collective experiences of forced assimilation and racial and cultural alienation served as salient cautionary tales for parents adopting from China, compelling many of them to think anew about how to navigate and absorb their child’s racial, cultural and ethnic differences.199 Yet, Louie warns newer adoptive parents, especially those who have adopted children from China, not to use the Korean experience as a “straw man” to elevate themselves above the earlier cohort of adoptive parents. Was the reorientation from assimilation to culture-keeping a true sign of a country shorn of its
197 Miller-Loessi and Kilic, “A Unique Diaspora?” 247. 198 Miller-Loessi and Kilic, “A Unique Diapsora?” 247. 199 Jacobson, Culture Keeping, 4. 93
racist past? How exactly have native-born white Canadians visually and discursively narrated the story of adoption in a way that sits comfortably between the poles of abandonment and adoption, East and West, birth mother and adoptive, within the ideological framework of liberal multiculturalism and the social context of the family?
Celebration Through Parody and Pastiche
By the dawn of the new adoption millennium, practices aimed at cultivating strong ethnic and cultural ties to China were not only vigorously encouraged by social workers and post-adoption communities but were also framed as a moral duty by adoptive parents. Chinese adoption conferences, information sessions, electronic mailing lists, and adoption blogs became important sites of connection and knowledge sharing among adoptive parents. In particular, adoption groups and annual adoption reunions topped many adoptive families’ culture-keeping agenda. In 1998, Adoption Helper did a spotlight feature on a Families with Children from China (FCC) support group based in
Nova Scotia. The group’s social events included a celebration in honor of the Mid-
Autumn (Moon) Festival, held in September, and a Chinese New Year’s event in January.
In true Chinese fashion, the New Year’s event was by far the more impressive of the two, boasting three performances by Nova Scotia’s Chinese Society youth group, tiger face painting – it was, after all, the year of the tiger – and craft tables with dragon puppets and
Chinese goddess banners. Also on offer was a potluck spread that included friend dumplings and New Year’s candy.200 According to the piece, parents were inspired to establish the group because they “wanted to continue the experiences they share in
200 Mary Miller,“We celebrate our first year,” Adoption Helper, no. 13, June 1998. 94
common on a regular basis as well as provide a cultural connection to their heritage.”201
Much like other ethnic and migrants communities, adoptees were tied together by a common set of experiences arising from a shared history and geographical origin.
However, unlike traditional ethnic communities, the bonded social ties in adoption groups were negotiated by individuals who lay outside the culture they were trying to simulate. “It is not the migrants who undertake these activities as Chinese people,” write
Miller-Loessi and Killic, “but their American, Canadian, Irish adoptive parents.”202
In this way, adoption groups became important sites of cultural translation and transformation. The selective translation of Chinese norms, traditions, and practices by adoption’s non-national and non-ethnic parents combined notions of Chinese culture and aspects from their own culture and family traditions.203 These hybridized practices and traditions were then transmitted to Chinese adoptees who became the markers and symbolic bearers of multiculturalism. But that translation was often imperfect since it involved the selective editing of history and culture. The notion that multiculturalism is a duality that encourages cultural diversity while simultaneously containing cultural difference is eloquently put forth by critical theorist Homi K. Bhabba in an interview with Jonathan Rutherford in 1990. Bhabba explains how cultural diversity can only be encouraged and entertained by the dominant culture when the host society can locate that culture within a grid defined by their own ethnocentric norms, values, and interests.204
This is why, he adds, racism still runs rampant in so-called multicultural societies.
201 Mary Miller, “We celebrate our first year,” Adoption Helper, no. 13, June 1998. 202 Miller-Loessi and Killic, “A Unique Diaspora?” 248. 203 Andrea Louie, How Chinese Are You? Adopted Chinese Youth and Their Families Negotiate Identity and Culture (New York; London: New York University Press, 2015), 164. 204 Jonathan Rutherford “The Third Space: Interview with Homi K. Bhabha,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart Limited, 1990) 208. 95
Culture-keeping’s celebratory praxis that operated under Canada’s banner of multiculturalism has been the target of derision and well-founded criticism from a wide range of academics and scholars. In her article “Not Ethnic Enough: The Cultural Identity
Imperative in International Adoptions from China to Canada,” Xiobei Chen has suggested that Canada’s changing attitudes and approaches to racial and ethnic difference through adoptive kinship were largely shaped by the Canadian culturalist ethos,
“Oriental” imaginings about Chinese peoples and their culture, and the Asian model minority stereotype.205 She argues that although Canada’s heightened attention to cultural identity has given way to greater acceptance of cultural difference, the prevailing power dynamics that socially privilege some groups over others remain unquestioned.206 Peter
S. Li has also noted that neither the spirit of multiculturalism –famously espoused by
Prime Minister Trudeau in 1982 – nor the enactment of The Canadian Multiculturalism
Act in 1988, truly expanded Canada’s narrow cultural framework. Instead, Chinese culture became a novelty, whose popular appreciation hinged on its exotic appeal and the
“Oriental mystique.”207
Jane Brown, a social worker who specializes in adoption issues and an adoptive mother, observed the tendency among some adoptive parents of wanting to “celebrate, even exoticize, their child’s culture, without really dealing with race…” “It is one thing,” she says, “to dress children up in cute Chinese dresses, but the children need real contact with Asian-Americans, not just waiters in restaurants on Chinese New Year;” they also
205 Chen, “Not Ethnic Enough,” 627. 206 Chen, “Not Ethnic Enough,” 631. 207 Li, The Chinese in Canada, 143. 96
need to be validated about the racial issues they confront.208 The presence and the visibility of the Chinese in Canada became a multicultural attraction that helped to bolster
Canada’s brand of ethnic inclusivity, but whose legitimacy in white mainstream society would always be called into question. Therefore, the embrace of Chinese children through adoptive kinship cannot be understood in isolation from Canada’s historical exclusion and malignment of the Chinese. When interpreting the visual discourse of
Chinese adoption against the backdrop of history, culture-keeping practices do not appear indicative of some radical transformation in social attitudes around difference or wholly representative of a genuine attempt at racial reconciliation. Instead, they were “merely reproducing the myth of multiculturalism.”209
Consummating Kinship by Consuming Culture
Despite the various cultural performances pursued by adoptive parents, embracing
China through selective editing was mostly worked out through the narrow sensibilities of their white parents. Culture-keeping did not approximate an “authentic” Chinese cultural experience; most adoptees likely did not speak mandarin at home, learn how to cook Chinese dishes, generally had weak ties to their local Chinese communities, and were probably not familiar with Chinese practices and values such as frugality, humility, respect for elders, and hard work.210 Instead, many parents turned to the market to find their own systems of reference to China. Chinese CDs, Asian dolls, and Chinese-themed films and television programs become important visual and material conduits linking
208 Louie, How Chinese Are You? 23. 209 Andrea Louie, “Pandas, Lions, and Dragons, Oh My!”: How White Adoptive Parents Construct Chineseness,” Journal of Asian American Studies 12, no. 3 (2009): 286, doi:10.1353/jaas.0.0047. 210 Louie, How Chinese Are You? 8. 97
adoptive families in the West to their child’s ethnic origins in China. According to
Dorow, “the private consumption of the Mulan package mediated the kinds of public representations parents wanted for their children.”211 Journalist and Professor of
Anthropology, Andrea Louie has provided valuable insights into how adoptive parents, both white and Asian American, have animated China for their adopted daughters, and the pleasure they derived from celebrating China. Between 2001 and 2009, she conducted interviews and participant observations for a longitudinal ethnographic project on
Chinese adoption in the Midwest. Speaking with many Chinese adoptive families across
St. Louis and the Bay area, Louie says that spotting “a panda flag or a doormat with a
Chinese character in front of the house” would confirm she had arrived at the correct location for the interview.212 Indeed, many of the homes Louie visited were outfitted with an array of objects that were symbolic of an “authentic” Chinese culture and heritage.
However, she also observed how the parents seemed more enthusiastic about these symbolic references than their Chinese children. In one interview, Louie inquired about a
Chinese doll collection belonging to a young adoptee named Amy. “Yes, Mom really liked those dolls,” said Amy; her father quickly reminded his daughter that she too liked them.
Embodying Chinese culture was chiefly defined through the acquisition of certain material objects like Chinese dolls, chopsticks, and “ethnic” garb. These consumptive practices reveal the superficial and cosmetic nature of Chinese adoption’s culture-keeping agenda, and the tendency of parents to essentialize Chinese cultural traditions and practices. Stanley Fish classifies this form of cultural engagement under the heading of
211 Dorow, Transnational Adoption, 248. 212 Louie, How Chinese Are You? 166. 98
“boutique multiculturalism.” This multiculturalism, he argues, “…is the multiculturalism of ethnic restaurants, weekend festivals, and high-profile flirtations with the “Other.”213
For Fish, this brand of superficial multiculturalism is problematic because the respect and appreciation it accords to difference is highly selective and can be withdrawn at any moment. Yet, adoptive parents saw these images and objects as central to their culture- keeping efforts; they recalled their child’s birth culture; it was a way to educate their children about China and Chinese culture, and it would stabilize the child’s ethnic identity. But importantly, these symbolic markers of China in the form of material culture also had the power to transform their white parents.
The interlocking issues of race, “Otherness,” and mass consumer culture are succinctly explored by renowned American academic, feminist, and social activist, bell hooks, in her essay “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” published in 1992 in Black
Looks: Race and Representation. hooks begins the essay by boldly asserting that
“[w]ithin current debates about race and difference, mass culture is the contemporary location that both publicly declares and perpetuates the idea that there is pleasure to be found in the acknowledgment and enjoyment of racial difference.”214 Within the West’s commodity-driven context and its enduring fascination with the exotic appeal of non- white peoples and places, the psychic “pleasure” derived from acknowledging and enjoying racial difference is chiefly mediated through the commodification and consumption of “Otherness.” Products that encouraged parents to embrace their child’s ethnic Chinese heritage were not only marketed as a way for parents to maintain their
213 Stanley Fish, “Boutique Multiculturalism,” in Multiculturalism and American Democracy, ed. Arthur M. Melzer, et al. (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 69. 214 bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 21. 99
child’s connection to their birth culture, but Jacobson also suggests that commodifying
Chineseness also appealed to adoption’s white, middle-class clientele because it added an
“interesting splash of foreign ethnic color.”215 hooks argues that this paradigm of consumption, which she terms “consumer cannibalism,” reveals the tensions that exist between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation – tensions that are further exacerbated when it comes to matters of the heart. Additionally, she points out that this specific brand of domination can be productive since it fuels a “resurgence of essentialist cultural nationalism.”216 Through hooks’ critical lens, the acquisition and superficial consumption of traditional outfits, chopsticks, household decorations, and cuisine were part and parcel of a highly racialized cultural repository that not only tried to knit together Chinese adoptees’ bifurcated identities but importantly taped into parents’ desire to both consume and to be transformed by China.
These highly selective forms of cultural engagement reflect the ideological contradictions of multiculturalism and its practical limitations in Canadian society.
Firstly, the ethos of multiculturalism encouraged parents to pursue what art historian Hal
Fosters has described as “purity and primacy through a process of parody and pastiche”217 by essentializing Chinese culture and ethnic practices, thereby conflating it with race. Secondly, these visual and consumptive practices concealed the power asymmetries at play in the family, and the larger structural inequalities that uphold them.
Chinese adoption’s culture-keeping agenda was not linked to some radical questioning of forced assimilation practices or colorblind approaches but seemed to rely on narratives
215 Jacobson, Culture Keeping, 54. 216 bell hooks, 370. 217 Hal Foster etal., Art Since 1900: Modernism Antimodernism, Postmodernism 3rd ed. (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2004), 77. 100
that often conformed to archaic “Oriental” fantasies and Chinese stereotypes. But is the desire for contact with those deemed racially and/or culturally “Other” – and the pleasure one may derive from that contact – necessarily “wrong”? hook would say not so. Despite the tendency of Western cultures to exploit notions of “Otherness” through visual images and texts, hooks writes that exploring and desiring difference can be a powerful force for resisting, subverting, and dismantling overriding systems of domination.218 Dorow sums this up nicely when she writes that while the consumptive practices undergirding adoption reflect certain white racial and middle-class privileges, they also have the transformative power to undo those privileges. 219
The Balancing Act of Story Telling
Memory archiving through storybooks was also part and parcel of a broader culture-keeping effort taken up by adoptive parents for their Chinese daughters.
Ethnographic research on Chinese adoption reveals that many parents expressed a need to provide a cohesive origin story for their adoptive children, believing that it would act as a
“central conduit” between the individual child and the new multicultural family.220
However, I argue that that storybooks were also important since they helped families work out the tensions between seeing the transracial family as a site of liberal inclusion, and the gendered and classed politics that led to her adoption in China. In particular, the
Chinese birth mother figures importantly in Chinese adoption. Her image must be honored and celebrated, but also mediated against since her presence invites discomfort
218 hook, “Eating the Other,” 39. 219 Dorow, 246. 220 Dorow, Transnational Adoption, 200. 101
around the circumstances that enabled the abandonment and adoption in the first place.
Crucially, Adoption story books have done the hard work of creating belonging in the absence of sameness and celebrating China alongside the knowledge of abandonment.221
I Love you Like Crazy Cakes was one of the most popular adoption books marketed to Chinese adoptees in the early 2000s. Beautifully rendered in dreamy watercolor tableaus, author Rose Lewis recounts from beginning to end the story of traveling to China to adopt her daughter. Written in simple prose, the story describes how she wrote to officials in China to ask if she could adopt one of the babies “who lived in
[the] big room with lots of other babies.”222 When she meets her daughter for the very first time, she is overtaken with emotion and immediately falls madly in love: “I was so happy that I cried the moment I took you in my arms…you cried, too.” After mother and daughter arrive home to a flurry of fanfare from excited relatives, and once everyone has gone home, she rocks her daughter to sleep and sheds tears for the “Chinese mother that could not keep [her].” The story ends with a mother’s promise that she will always remember her daughter’s birth mother, and that she hoped this distant mother knew her daughter would be “safe and happy in the world.”
Other popular children’s books like Mommy Near, Mommy Far: An Adoption
Story, written by Carol Antoinette Peacock, and Allison by Allen Say were also widely read books that dealt with issues of belonging, identity, and motherhood. These stories harnessed the symbolic and discursive power of the Chinese birth mothers in ways that toggled between the “chosen child,” “mother’s love,” and “destiny.” It was hoped that this “magical language” in adoption storybooks would allow the transnational adoptee,
221 Dorow, Transnational Adoption, 200. 222 Rose Lewis, I Love you Like Crazy Cakes (New York: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2000). 102
who is marked by difference and “Otherness,” to be absorbed into the “intimate space of the familial.”223 The Chinese birth mother’s decision to relinquish her child is narrated in favorable tones, and always couched in the language of sacrifice, destiny, lack of choice.
Narratives that affirm the legitimacy of the bond between white mothers and their
Chinese daughters must be continuously reinforced, absorbed, and upheld by both parent and child.
Adoption storybooks did not reflect individually specific histories or truly accurate accounts of adoption’s intricate web of actors and events, but they did provide a coherent and easily digestible re-telling of the past that has shaped collective knowledges about a child’s journey from abandonment to adoption. Importantly, constructing meaning around the child’s dislocation from China and subsequent relocation to Canada through a shared family narrative simultaneously legitimated the formation of nonbiological kinship, while blunting the pain of abandonment and unknown origins. In this way, the adoption narratives articulated in children’s storybooks have shaped the internal logic of how Chinese adoptees understand their origins; how they position their biological and birth families between their abandonment and adoption. Storybooks also reveal the degree to which adoptive parents toggled between the ideology of exclusive kinship and the reality of an unknown Chinese birth mother who belongs to a culture that is at once backward and patriarchal, yet beautiful and ancient. Chinese birth mothers have served as the elusive link that knit together the adoptees’ past and her present reality. The birth mother must be folded into the narrative in a way that does not threaten adoptive kinship but quiets longing. Chinese adoptee’s unsettled past awkwardly tugs at
223 David Eng, “Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas,” Social Text 21, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 2, Project Muse. 103
universalizing notions of the family, motherhood, and the dream of transnational kinship formation. Thus, I Love you Like Crazy Cakes, Mommy Near Mommy Far, and Allison have tried to balance a myriad of competing desires by socially reproducing what parents wanted for their children, while also allowing them to gracefully sidestep the more uncomfortable questions transracial and transnational adoption inevitably bring to the fore; the difficulty parents had in narrating issues of abandonment, identity, race, and family reveal the knotty terrain of adoption.
Adoptive mothers have also vocalized the fraught triangulation between themselves, their daughters, and the unknown Chinese birth mother, in informal interviews, blog posts, magazine articles, and self-authored books. For Karin Evans, adoptive mother and author of The Lost Daughters of China: Abandoned Girls, Their
Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past, the omnipresence of her daughter
Kelly’s birth mother has always figured uncomfortably in the family’s collective imaginary. During her two week stay in China, Evans is struck by the throngs of women she passes in the street going about their daily businesses – “farmworkers in the fields and factory workers in the towns[,]…university students bent over their books, teenagers on the run, mothers on the nightshift coming home at dawn.” They recalled all the possible identities of her daughter’s elusive mother who remains cloaked in mystery.
Evans thinks about the individual circumstances of these women, and wonders if any of them could have abandoned a three-month-old baby.224 Little information is readily available for adoptees to learn about their Chinese birth mother; deep-seated cultural stigma surrounding adoption in China plus an impenetrable bureaucracy that ferociously
224 Karin Evans, The Lost Daughters of China: Adopted Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing past, (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2008), 81. 104
guards the government’s scant adoption records has meant that finding information on abandonment and adoption in China is “like looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack,” says Xinran. Her book, Messages from an Unknown Mothers: Stories of Loss and Love, is one of only a few popular sources available to adoptive families who are interested in knowing more about the lives of the Chinese women who gave up children during the era of the one-child policy. She details the conditions under which women were forced to surrender their daughters, and the pain and longing it has left in its wake.
But how asks David Eng, might the transnational adoptee come to have psychic space for two mothers?225
Mainstreaming Chinese Adoption in Pop Culture
Since images and objects produced for real Chinese children have made their mark in the private domain of the family and in public commercial markets, cultural depictions of them have also made their way into the cultural discourse through film and television. Leaping from North America’s multicultural landscape and bursting onto big and small screens alike, Chinese adoption has become a widely represented phenomenon in our pop culture visual repertoire. From raunchy sitcoms (The Simpsons) to animated children’s television shows (Arthur) and racy HBO comedy dramas (Sex and the City), the Chinese adoptee has become a ubiquitous archetypal character on television and in film. Her dislocation from China to the white, privileged spaces of gentrified neighborhoods across Europe and North America is meant to represent a modern and racially progressive update to the classic rags-to-riches success story. Take for example
225David L. Eng, “Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas,” Social Text 21, no. 3 (2003): 13, doi:10.1215/01642472-21-3_76-1. 105
Charlotte York Goldenblatt, television’s favorite New York WASP who rounds out Sex and the City’s fab-four. As one of HBO’s most beloved television shows, and certainly one of its most controversial during its six-year run, Sex and the City not only awed, inspired, and wildly entertained audiences with its impeccably dressed cast of highflying and independent Manhattan women, but it’s popularity also hinged on the show’s engagement with “hot button” political issues and timely cultural debates, including adoption. Discussions about adoptions from Asia first emerged in the fourth season when
Charlotte’s then mother-in-law, Bunny, remarks in earnest that her distaste for mandarin food mirrors her dislike of mandarin children. A biological son, she explains, would carry on the family name unlike a “daughter[r] of the South Pacific.”226 Following a series of failed attempts at becoming a mother through natural pregnancy, in vitro fertilization, or domestic adoption, Charlotte’s fantasy of maternal bliss is finally realized when she and her second husband are approved to adopt a baby from China. Lily Goldenblatt’s bright pink bedroom in her Park Avenue home located on the Upper East Side, Swedish nannies, and designer baby clothes was not only congruent with the show’s penchant for material excess and lavish living but gestures to the privileges accorded to foreign-born children by dint of Western neoliberalism and racial inclusivity.
Alternatively, satirical depictions of adoptions from China are regularly invoked on the big screen at the general amusement or indignation of audiences. For example, a scene from the 2007 hit movie, Juno, drew heavy criticism when the title character tells the rich suburban couple vying to adopt her unborn child that they should have gone to
China instead since she hears they give away babies like free iPods. “You know,” says
226 “Just Say Yes,” Sex and the City, directed by Michael Patrick King, (HBO, 2001), DVD. 106
Juno, “they pretty much just put them in those T-shirt guns and shoot them out at sporting events.”227 This casually incentive remark made by an ignorant teenager expresses a widely held assumption about the ease with which prospective parents in the West come to acquire children from China and speaks to broader issues swirling around the commodification of Chinese children.
Somewhere in Between
In her 1991 essay “The Evidence of Experience,” Joan Scott reflects on the place of individual experiences in historical scholarship, and the problems arising from historicizing that which has been obscured from the historical literature.228 The central question for Scott is how to treat evidence that “rest[s] its claim to legitimacy on the authority of experience.”229 For her, examining the discursive systems and the historicity of the referential frameworks that produce experience should be the goal of the historian.230 In other words, experience is not something individuals possess, but rather it is something that is produced through discourse. Thus, in trying to historicize the kaleidoscope of experiences belonging to Chinese adoptees, I have drawn my attention to the process of identity formation and the ways in which conceptions of the adoptee-self have been constituted through visual discourse and material artifacts within the Canadian context. However, I am moved to think that histories that aim to capture the full complexity of the human experience do benefit from individual accounts which are discursively positioned within a wider historical framework. This final section is
227 “Juno controversy gets Academy’s attention,” The Globe and Mail, February 16, 2008, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Globe and Mail. 228 Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 776. 229 Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 776. 230 Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 776. 107
concerned with how Chinese adoption’s visual and material landscape has shaped adoptee subjectivities within the larger discourse of race, gender, and multiculturalism. I ask how these practices continue to inform the myriad ways in which adoptees have chosen to embrace, revise, and contest the process of being and becoming a Chinese
Canadian adoptee.
On the multicultural question, Stuart Hall has remarked that it has been the experience of the members of diasporic communities to adopt “shifting, multiple, [and] hyphenated positions of identification.”231 Given my academic and personal stake in grappling with the multiple modalities of transracial adoptee identification, I turned to adoptee authored blog posts, Facebook groups, and opinion pieces. As I poured over the rapidly expanding digital “sound cloud” of adoptee voices, I was struck by the diversity of stories which ranged in tone and intensity; some adoptees mourned the loss of their pasts, others were more critical, expressing anger and indignation over the celebratory praxis of Chinese adoption culture-keeping, while a few seemed very content with their dual and hyphenated identities.
Founded in 2011, China’s Children International (CCI) was one of the first international support, networking, and community organization created by and for
Chinese adoptees. By providing programs and projects that allow its members to connect with others in the community, the organization operates in a similar manner to the communities established by their adoptive parents. For the purpose of this project, CCI’s monthly E-magazine was a valuable source for recovering and engaging with adoptee
231 Stuart Hall, “The Multicultural Question, in Essential Essays Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 114. 108
voices within the greater international adoption community.232 In particular, their 2019
Fall/Winter “Identity” issue amplified issues around race, identity, and adoption. Raised in Libertyville, Illinois, Mirae Deimel was adopted from Manning, Guangxi, and says that her favorite thing about being multicultural is “being part of two different cultures and being able to identify with both.” She tells adoptees that they should take the time to find themselves: “there is a journey to be discovered and it doesn’t have to happen all at once.”233 Lucy Gerber of New England also spoke about her adoption in positive tones.
Adopted in 2002 at the age of one from Xi’an, China, Lucy was discovered on the steps of a government building like countless other Chinese babies. Although she acknowledged that her life would have been “drastically different had [she] not been adopted, she says her parents struck the perfect balance: “[t]hey taught me about my
Chinese heritage and we celebrated Chinese New Year and the Lunar New Year when I was little.” Lucy proudly asserts that she is equally American and Chinese, and pledges to always honor her roots.
Similarly, Sarah Lawler says she loves how her identity intersects and overlaps in different ways, including the blurring of racial lines. She attributed “finding herself” to connecting with other adoptees. 234 Others like Gabby Malpas, have remarked on the value of connecting other transracial adoptees. She says that her “[l]ifelong emotions of anger from racism and microaggressions began to soften after connecting with transracial
232 CCI (China’s Children International) E-Magazine, “How do you Identify?” Fall /Winter 2019 published February 13, 2019. http://chinaschildreninternational.org/cci-emagazine. 233 Mirae Deimel, China’s Children International E-Magazine, Fall/Winter 2019. 234 Sarah Lawler, CCI (China’s Children International) E-Magazine, “How do you Identify?” Fall /Winter 2019 published February 13, 2019. http://chinaschildreninternational.org/cci-emagazine 109
adoptees from around the globe.”235 Creating art has also allowed her to reflect more deeply on her adoption, and the place of her adoptive parents and her birth mother.
Entitled simply “Choice,” Gaby submitted a watercolor and gouache painting of nine
Chinese teacups outfitted in unique lacquers and designs. According to Gaby, the piece represents her life choices and the freedom of living on her own terms, while the number nine signifies longevity in Chinese culture. She says that despite cracks in some of the teacups, they have been mended with love and care, thus making them even more beautiful.236 Five other adoptees submitted works of art to the magazine; art has become a visual medium through which some adoptees have found a way to express their emotions, make sense of their adoptions, and connect themselves to their unknown pasts.
However, some of the interviewees expressed more ambivalence over the blurring of racial lines. Lily Mannis’ comments about forgetting she was Chinese raises important questions around the knotty identity terrain of transracial adoption: “I lived in a white household, in a predominantly white neighborhood. It wasn’t that I didn’t actually know that I was Chinese, it was that I identified myself more in the white faces that surrounded me than what I saw when I looked in the mirror.”237 The challenge of embracing a racial and cultural identity that exists at the uncomfortable juncture between Chinese and
“white” was similarly explored by Chinese American adoptee, Lily Vogt, on her blog
“Vogt 4 Better Health.”238 A recent graduate of Hope College with a degree in kinesiology, Lily was adopted from Guangzhou, China when she was 18 months old. Lily
235 Gabby Malpas, CCI (China’s Children International) E-Magazine, “How do you Identify?” Fall /Winter 2019 published February 13, 2019. http://chinaschildreninternational.org/cci-emagazine. 236 Ibid. 237 Lily Manis, CCI (China’s Children International) E-Magazine, “How do you Identify?” Fall /Winter 2019 published February 13, 2019. http://chinaschildreninternational.org/cci-emagazine. 238 Lily Vogt, “The Journey to Self-Acceptance: An Asian Adoptee Narrative,” Vogt 4 Better Health (blog), May 27, 2020, https://vogt4betterhealth.weebly.com/blog/self-acceptance-an-asian-adoptee-narrative. 110
writes about how her parents were exceptionally loving and attuned to “the roadblocks that often give rise with transracial adoption.” They bought movies that took place in
Asia or had Asian actors, read adoption storybooks, and purchased toys that looked like her. Yet, she also writes that being told by a friend that she often forgets Lily is Asian
“was one of the best compliments [she] had ever received at the time.” “I was so excited because that meant I finally belonged. I wasn’t seen as the weird Chinese girl— I was accepted.” After college, Lily’s move from the comfortable white, middle-class neighborhoods in the Mid-West, to Toronto marked a turning point in her life as a
Chinese adoptee. Initially awed by the Canadian metropolis’ ethnic and cultural diversity,
Lily quickly discovered the harsh realities of embodying a dual identity in a foreign country when she is stopped by an Asian peer and told she is a “banana.” Lily is horrified when she learns that the term is an offensive moniker ascribed to ethnic East Asians who have “abandoned their Asian cultural identity or lost touch with it in order to adopt a
Western cultural identity.” She explains in the blog post that to be unceremoniously labeled “banana” dismissed her longing to connect with her Asian heritage while simultaneously reaffirming the fact that she did not fit neatly in her white community. So, despite Lily’s parent’s best efforts to connect her with China at a young age, it neither prepared her for the casual racism as a Chinese woman nor the social exclusion as a
Chinese adoptee.
Adoptees have also brought their critical gaze to bear on adoption’s culture- keeping agenda. Grace Newton and Sophie Johnson, both Chinese American adoptees, have taken issue with the practice of celebrating adoption’s all-important “Gotcha Day.”
Grace, who is the author of the popular blog, “Red Thread Broken,” writes that the term
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itself is problematic because it gestures to the act of “capturing” or “tricking” someone with some measure of deception and coercion. According to Grace, the term “Gotcha
Day” not only fails to accurately describe the practice of adoption – extending love – but it also recalls the uncomfortable fact that many adoptions have elements of kidnapping and coercion.239 More importantly, these celebrations, although probably very pleasurable for parents, can be a painful reminder of an adoptee’s abandonment and dislocation.
Grace also adds that the event recalls child commodification since “children are not something to simply be gotten like a computer or kitchen appliance.”240 Sophie puts forth a similar argument about the song-and-dance of the “Gotcha Day.” She describes the celebration, which marks the anniversary of the arrival of the adoptee into her new family, as a day of fake smiles; it overlooks the loss experienced by adoptees while eliding the sad conditions under which the child was surrendered: “It’s been said that adoption loss is the only trauma in the world where everyone expects the victims to be grateful and appreciative. I am grateful and appreciative, but I also want to remind people that someone’s happiness over building their family through adoption may also be someone else’s sorrow over losing their child for circumstances they couldn’t control.”241
Conclusion
Unlike the restricted post-adoption landscape inhabited by Korean adoptees and their families, Chinese adoptive families have gone to greater lengths to explore and
239 Grace Newton, “What’s Wrong with Gotcha Day?” Red Thread Broken (blog), November 8, 2013, https://redthreadbroken.wordpress.com/2013/11/08/whats-wrong-with-gotcha-day/. 240 Newton, “What’s Wrong with Gotcha Day?” Red Thread Broken (blog). 241 Sophie Johnson, “‘Gotcha Day’ Isn’t a Cause for Celebration,” last modified 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gotcha-day-isnt-a-cause-f_b_6094206. 112
experience their child’s birth culture through seeing, hearing, and tasting representations of China.242 This final chapter has explored adoption narratives produced through the con-constructive relationship between Chinese adoption’s visual and material landscape, and the varied post-adoption cultural-keeping practices undertaken by adoptive parents.
In many ways, the symbolic and highly aestheticized consumption of Chinese adoption reflects a Western fantasy of racial inclusion across difference that “has little room for celebrating the political and economic forces” that produce adoption in the first place.243
Through the practice of culture-keeping, the family moved from an apolitical site of intimacy and entered into dialogue with the politics of race, multiculturalism, gender, and class. The transracial adoptive family became a site of negotiation, intervention, and translation by both reflecting and transcending the fraught terrain of high politics;244 culture-keeping has neutralized the political dimensions of transnational adoption.
Seen in this way, Chinese adoption’s culture-keeping agenda was not linked to some radical questioning of earlier assimilationist practices or colorblind approaches but instead seemed to rely on weak notions of racial diversity and the misappropriation of cultural and ethnic heritage. But in their white, middle-class homes and communities, it would have been difficult for Canadian adopters to imagine a more “authentic” and pleasurable way of celebrating Chinese cultural heritage while honoring their child’s difference and avoiding the Korean experience. And while adoption storybooks have attempted to unite two disparate personal and historical narratives in order to create one unitary memory, they have generally reflected parents’ own desires and anxieties. Thus,
242 Andrea Louie, How Chinese Are You? 5. 243 Karen Dubinsky. Babies without Borders, 19. 244 Stuart Hall, “The Multicultural Question,” in Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 99. 113
adoptee voices illuminate how the complex interplay between kinship, race, and culture has been visually and materially simulated, recalled, and localized in Chinese adoption culture-keeping. The question now is to what degree these forms of culture-keeping have either helped or hindered adoptees’ ability to confront the complex issues swirling around their racially marked, gendered, and national identities.
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Chapter 6
Conclusion
How do ordinary individuals become emotionally moved by certain images, and intensely motivated to respond in ways which are both highly political and deeply visceral? How is the desire to adopt certain children created through images, and relatedly, how do those images shape and sustain distinctions among adoptable children?
How do images organize and interpret individual and collective memories, experiences, and identities, and why do these terrains remain conflicted sites of multiple claims by multiple actors? Engaging in a visual discourse analysis of Chinese adoption makes visible the discursive character of Chinese adoption in Canada, and the ways in which she has been variously appropriated, assimilated, and made into the image and likeness of her parents and society.245 According to Jennifer Ann Ho, author of Racial Ambiguity in
Asian American Culture, the transracial adoptee is, in a sense, colonized, but “for her own good, out of love.” She is dislocated from her homeland, given a new name, language, religion, and worldview.
This thesis has considered how symbolic children are reconstituted through the photographic lens by asking how people in disparate places come to form intimate and ethical attachments to strangers. By turning a critical eye towards the images that have captured child migrations from Asia to Canada since the Second World War, the continuity between Chinese adoption’s visual landscape and that of earlier child-saving initiatives demonstrates how the logic of humanitarianism has long been woven into the fabric of international adoption. Documentary films The Dying Rooms and Seeds of
245 Jennifer Ann Ho, Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2015), 115
Destiny became visually representative of a brand of humanitarian compassion that complimented Canada’s outward commitment to international humanitarianism, since both were dependent on the proliferation of visual imagery in the news media, and the construction of children as the ideal victims and beneficiaries of Western aid. Their effectiveness largely hinged on the ability to foster compassion by seizing their audiences with universalizing images of child suffering. Thus, both Seeds of Destiny and The Dying
Rooms became drawn-out, emotionally dramatic sagas that compiled horror on top of horror. Visually maximizing assaults against children worked to communicate their pain in a convincing manner by reducing them to nothing more than shadowy figures that were in desperate need of saving. More recent documentaries like Nanfu Wang and
Jialing Zhang’s One Child Nation (2019) reveals how the residual horror from the era of
China’s one-child policy still arouses a considerable degree of intrigue and consternation among Western audiences.
Images of “needy” children in far-flung lands also had the power to create intimate kinship bonds between the senders and receivers of humanitarian aid, but their ability to narrow the physical distance between would-be-parents and waiting-children was largely dependent on the interests and actions of donor states. In the case of South
Korea, images and letter correspondence between orphans and their Canadian foster parents stirred care and compassion, but the humanitarian impulse towards these “needy” children did not initially create the conditions for their permanent placements in Canada.
Furthermore, Korea, Hong Kong, and Vietnam represented important flashpoints in
Canada’s historical record of intercountry adoption and were the important precursors to adoptions from China, since the visual narratives they produced have informed the visual
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discourse of Chinese adoption. Photojournalism later transformed images into a visual grammar that articulated a liberal vision of an American-dominated post-War world order that could be leveraged for a variety of public policy and foreign policy initiatives.”246
So, while the ethic of humanitarianism transformed Chinese orphans into objects of pity, Canadian domestic concerns and individual interests also constructed these children as objects of desire. In many ways, health, age, and type of program were primary concerns among would-be Canadian adopters; the selective inclusion of some children and the deliberate exclusion of others produced children who were considered more rescuable and more valuable than others. However, these preferences were often articulated and made visually manifest in racial and gendered terms. Thus, representations of Chinese adoptees in mainstream discourses shifted back and forth between positive and negative images of China, but it did so within a constantly evolving matrix of political exigencies and parental desires. Asian identity as fascinating and flexible dovetailed with Canadians’ long-standing preference gave way to a slew of
“Good China,” “Bad China” narratives, and supported the image of China as a backward regime at the helm of a deeply patriarchal culture and an inhumane birth planning policy.
By mapping the visual discourse of Chinese adoption at the intersection of adoption’s racial and gendered preferences, and health, age, and type of adoption program, sheds light on the impossible contradictions at the heart of international adoption, and the constructed desire for Chinese children among Canadian adopters.
246 Briggs, “Mother, Child, Race, Nation,” 180. 117
In many ways, the symbolic and highly aestheticized consumption of Chinese adoption reflects a Western fantasy of racial inclusion across difference, but that “has little room for ‘celebrating’ the political and economic forces” that produce adoption in the first place.247 Thus, the racialized and gendered Chinese adoptee is transformed into a symbolic icon distinguished by her accorded upwardly mobile lifestyle, her racialization as Chinese that is simultaneously exotic but politically non-threatening, and her slightly older but socially liberal and well-educated parents. However, she continues to be singled out for her superficial foreignness and seemingly exotic cultural identity in an era of liberal multiculturalism.248 Conversely, the ubiquity of Chinese adoptions in North
America has also made her the target of derision and the butt of edgier jokes in other spaces. In this way, film and television became yet another site where Chinese adoption was understood through the ethos of liberalism and the celebration of multiculturalism in a way that obscured the global inequalities, structural racism, and gendered dimensions that mark this transnational phenomenon.
Transnational adoption is not only a legal practice pursued by individuals who want children, but it also a lived experience that encompasses a great deal of pleasure and pain, love and loss for all parents as well as for their children. As such, this project has also tried to center adoptee voices by engaging with their own experiences. Adoption narratives have shaped the internal logic of how Chinese adoptees understand their origins; how they position their biological and birth families between the poles of abandonment and adoption; and importantly, how they are beginning to revise the practices around their own adoption. Adoptee subjectivities are constructed through their
247 Karen Dubinsky, Babies without Borders, 19. 248 Chen,“Not ethnic enough,” 633. 118
association and identification with certain visual experiences which constitute them as adopted. To be adopted is not only a fact for many people, but it is also an identity that is produced, negotiated, and lived. “Chinese daughters themselves will one day speak up and search out the truth about their homeland,” says dissident author Harry Wu. “When they are twenty-five, they’ll join together, and they will tell the world what’s going on:
Why are we here? We love the United States, we love our American parents, but what about the other baby girls? Under what kind of circumstances did we come to the United
States? Where are our sisters?” Thus, the Chinese adoptee can now be understood as representing a new cultural grammar – she is a special kind of migrant at the heart of a special kind of diaspora, who can indeed speak.
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