'I broke a law simply by being born.' In the late 1980s, Shen Yang was born during the fiercest years of China's One-Child Policy. As the second daughter of the family, she was a massive liability - an excess child, a product of illegal birth. From being raised by her grandparents in a remote village as soon as she was born, to being whisked away to her aunt's home in a distant faraway city, Shen Yang's existence was doomed to be shrouded in the utmost secrecy and silence. Armed with a false identity and ID card, she experienced years of neglect and humiliation from her aunt's volatile family who saw her as yet another burden to bear. On top of it all, it seemed her own biological parents had come to forget about her. In a riveting memoir, by turns witty and inspiring, Shen Yang bravely provides a vivid account of the family planning era in China, as she jots down her journey towards overcoming the limits of her upbringing and forging her own identity amidst the sorrows of her childhood. More than One Child is not only Shen Yang's story; it is the untold story of the enormous, yet invisible community of excess-birth children. And this book is Shen Yang's way of saying goodbye to her childhood, and goodbye to an era. 'This is the voice of China's Invisible Generation - vividly written, well balanced, brilliant, humorous and very sharp - it elicits a rollercoaster of emotions that breaks through the silence shrouding the lives of excess children born during the One-Child Policy.' --Xinran (Author of The Good Women of China, and The Promise: Love and Loss in Modern China) "The One-Child-per-Family policy was a tragedy forced upon China's mothers, children and their families. Finally, in this book, Shen Yang has dared to tell the truth, speaking out bravely about the experiences she lived through." --Ma Jian (Author of The Dark Road) "Now that the one-child policy has been relaxed, the stories of these illegal children will soon be a part of China's national collective memory. But to those who grew up tainted with this humiliation, the scars are permanent. One is Chinese writer Shen Yang, who wrote her story in part to extinguish the nightmares that still haunt her." --Vincent Ni, The Guardian

It's no secret that tens of thousands of Chinese children have been adopted by American parents and that Western aid organizations have invested in helping orphans in China—but why have Chinese authorities allowed this exchange, and what does it reveal about processes of globalization?
Countries that allow their vulnerable children to be cared for by outsiders are typically viewed as weaker global players. However, Leslie K. Wang argues that China has turned this notion on its head by outsourcing the care of its unwanted children to attract foreign resources and secure closer ties with Western nations. She demonstrates the two main ways that this "outsourced intimacy" operates as an ongoing transnational exchange: first, through the exportation of mostly healthy girls into Western homes via adoption, and second, through the subsequent importation of first-world actors, resources, and practices into orphanages to care for the mostly special needs youth left behind.
Outsourced Children reveals the different care standards offered in Chinese state-run orphanages that were aided by Western humanitarian organizations. Wang explains how such transnational partnerships place marginalized children squarely at the intersection of public and private spheres, state and civil society, and local and global agendas. While Western societies view childhood as an innocent time, unaffected by politics, this book explores how children both symbolize and influence national futures.

Since the late nineteen sixties, transnational adoption has emerged as a global phenomenon. Due to a sharp decline in infants being made available for adoption locally, involuntarily childless couples in Western Europe and North America who wish to create a family, have to look to look to countries in the poor South and Eastern Europe. The purpose of this book is to locate transnational adoption within a broad context of contemporary Western life, especially values concerning family, children and meaningful relatedness, and to explore the many ambiguities and paradoxes that the practice entails. Based on empirical research from Norway, the author identifies three main themes for analysis: Firstly, by focusing on the perceived relationship between biology and sociality, she examines how notions of child, childhood and significant relatedness vary across time and space. She argues that through a process of kinning, persons are made into kin. In the case of adoption, kinning overcomes a dominant cultural emphasis placed upon biological connectedness. Secondly, it is a study of the rise of expert knowledge in the understanding of 'the best interest of the child', and how the part played by the 'psycho.technocrats' effects national and international policy and practice of transnational adoption. Thirdly, it shows how transnational adoption both depends upon and helps to foster the globalisation of Western rationality and morality. The book is an original contribution to the anthropological study of kinship and globalisation.

With reproductive medical technologies becoming more accessible, assisted donor conception is raising new and important questions about family life. Using in-depth interviews the authors explore the lived reality of donor conception and offer insights into the complexities of these new family relationships.

Adoption, Race, and Identity is a long-range study of the impact of interracial adoption on those adopted and their families. Initiated in 1972, it was continued in 1979, 1984, and 1991. Cumulatively, these four phases trace the subjects from early childhood into young adulthood. This is the only extended study of this controversial subject.Simon and Altstein provide a broad perspective of the impact of transracial adoption and include profiles of the families involved in the study. They explore and compare the experiences of both the parents and the children. They identify families whose adoption experiences were problematic and those whose experiences were positive. Finally, the study looks at the insights the experience of transracial adoption brought to the adoptive parents and what advice they would pass on to future parents adopting children from different racial backgrounds. They include the reflections of those adopted included in the 1972 first phase, who are now adults themselves.This second edition includes a new concluding chapter that updates the fourth and last phase of the study. The authors were able to locate 88 of the 96 families who participated in the 1984 study. Bringing together all four phases of this twenty-year study into one volume gives the reader a richer and deeper understanding of what the experience of transracial adoption has meant for the parents, the adoptees, and children born into the families studied. This landmark work, will be of compelling interest to social workers, policy makers, and professionals and families involved on all sides of interracial adoption.

White Parents, Black Children looks at the difficult issue of race in transracial adoptions--particularly the adoption by white parents of children from different racial and ethic groups. Despite the long history of troubled and fragile race relations in the United States, some people believe the United States may be entering a post-racial state where race no longer matters, citing evidence like the increasing number of transracial adoptions to make this point. However, White Parents, Black Children argues that racism remains a factor for many children of transracial adoptions. Black children raised in white homes are not exempt from racism, and white parents are often naive about the experiences their children encounter. This book aims to bring to light racial issues that are often difficult for families to talk about, focusing on the racial socialization white parents provide for their transracially adopted children about what it means to be black in contemporary American society. Blendingthe stories of adoptees and their parents with extensive research, the authors discuss trends in transracial adoptions, challenge the concept of "colorblind" America, and offer suggestions to help adoptees develop a healthy sense of self.

‘Little Drops is a timely story that is finally being told.’ - Braema Mathi, researcher, writer, and social activist from Singapore
Stories of hope, love, and compassion from a bygone era of Singapore’s history
Little Cherished Children of Singapore’s Past is a compilation of biographies based on historical fact. These never-before-told stories chronicle how fifteen adoptees born from the 1930s to the early 1970s in Singapore found a forever home when their own biological parents could not raise them. These stories recount the plight of families of that era, the strength of friendships and informal social networks, Singapore’s migrant heritage, how lives were thrown into turmoil during the Japanese Occupation, and the struggles individuals had borne during that period.
Unfolding in these stories are the recurrent subthemes of poverty, superstition, how girl children were valued amongst the Chinese, and the magnanimous spirit of families taking in these children. What is most striking and odd about many of these children is that they were sometimes not legally given away. And yet these children would almost always end up in safe, loving, and caring homes of another culture. But rather than struggle between two cultural worlds, these adoptees have almost always had a firm sense of longing and belonging to their families of adoption instead of their families of origin.

A leading expert on the family, Judith Stacey is known for her provocative research on mainstream issues. Finding herself impatient with increasingly calcified positions taken in the interminable wars over same-sex marriage, divorce, fatherlessness, marital fidelity, and the like, she struck out to profile unfamiliar cultures of contemporary love, marriage, and family values from around the world. Built on bracing original research that spans gay men’s intimacies and parenting in this country to plural and non-marital forms of family in South Africa and China,Unhitcheddecouples the taken for granted relationships between love, marriage, and parenthood. Countering the one-size-fits-all vision of family values, Stacey offers readers a lively, in-person introduction to these less familiar varieties of intimacy and family and to the social, political, and economic conditions that buttress and batter them. Through compelling stories of real families navigating inescapable personal and political trade-offs between desire and domesticity, the book undermines popular convictions about family, gender, and sexuality held on the left, right, and center. Taking on prejudices of both conservatives and feminists, Unhitched poses a powerful empirical challenge to the belief that the nuclear family--whether straight or gay--is the single, best way to meet our needs for intimacy and care. Stacey calls on citizens and policy-makers to make their peace with the fact that family diversity is here to stay.

Set in the remote, mountainous Guangxi Autonomous Region and based on ethnographic fieldwork, Families We Need traces the movement of three Chinese foster children, Dengrong, Pei Pei, and Meili, from the state orphanage into the humble, foster homes of Auntie Li, Auntie Ma, and Auntie Huang. Traversing the geography of Guangxi, from the modern capital Nanning where Pei Pei and Meili reside, to the small farming village several hours away where Dengrong is placed, this ethnography details the hardships of social abandonment for disabled children and disenfranchised, older women in China, while also analyzing the state’s efforts to cope with such marginal populations and incorporate them into China’s modern future. The book argues that Chinese foster families perform necessary, invisible service to the Chinese state and intercountry adoption, yet the bonds they form also resist such forces, exposing the inequalities, privilege, and ableism at the heart of global family making.

In 1979, the Chinese government famously introduced The Single Child Policy to control population growth. Nearly 40 years later, the result is an estimated 20 million "missing girls" in the population from 1980-2010. In Local Leaders, Families, and the "Missing Girls" in Rural China, John James Kennedy and Yaojiang Shi focus on village-level implementation of the one-child policy and the level of mutual-noncompliance between officials and rural families. Through in-depth interviews with rural parents and local leaders, they reveal that many had strong incentives not to comply with the birth control policy because larger families meant increased labor and income. In this sober exploration of China's Single Child Policy throughout the reform period, the authors more broadly show how governance by grassroots cadres with greater local autonomy has affected China in the past and the challenges for resolving center-versus-locality contradictions in governance that lie ahead.

Family-making in America is in a state of flux—the ways people compose their families is changing, including those who choose to adopt. Broken Links, Enduring Ties is a groundbreaking comparative investigation of transnational and interracial adoptions in America. Linda Seligmann uncovers the impact of these adoptions over the last twenty years on the ideologies and cultural assumptions that Americans hold about families and how they are constituted. Seligmann explores whether or not new kinds of families and communities are emerging as a result of these adoptions, providing a compelling narrative on how adoptive families thrive and struggle to create lasting ties.
Seligmann observed and interviewed numerous adoptive parents and children, non-adoptive families, religious figures, teachers and administrators, and adoption brokers. The book uncovers that adoption—once wholly stigmatized—is now often embraced either as a romanticized mission of rescue or, conversely, as simply one among multiple ways to make a family.

Legacies of (un)belonging have historical roots and resonate across quite different contexts of transracial and transnational adoption. In Adoption across Race and Nation activists, adoptees, and scholars across a range of fields—history, childhood studies, cultural anthropology, gender studies, social policy, and more— What are the experiences of dual-heritage adoptees, and how have configurations of kinship, culture, and identity shaped their lives? How have transnationally and transracially adopted children approached their Americanness, their American whiteness, their American Blackness, their Asian Americanness? How do “border crises” turn “adoptable children” into revenue streams for countries, exposing the vulnerability of immigrant families of color? Offering case studies of post–World War II and Cold War adoptions of Black German and Black Korean children, Adoption across Race and Nation probes the intersections of race and nation as well as immigration and citizenship. It thus demonstrates that in the past as well as today, adoption, nation, and race continue to operate as relational categories with immediate effects on normative notions of family and kinship, belonging, the role of the state, and social welfare.

Silke Hackenesch, Laura Briggs, Pamela Anne Quiroz, Eleana J. Kim, Kim Park Nelson, Amy E. Traver, Kori A. Graves, Tracey Owens Patton, Rosemarie H. Peña, Peter Selman

The Politics of Adoption, Abortion and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism  uniquely brings together three sites of reproduction and reproductive politics to demonstrate their entanglement in creating or restricting options for family-making. The original essays in this collection—which draw from a wide range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives—are attentive to neoliberalism’s reshaping of economies and intimacies to better understand the politics of reproduction. By looking at particular instances (surrogacy in Mexico, forced sterilization in Peru, and racialized biopolitics in post-Katrina Mississippi, among other sites),  The Politics of Reproduction  focuses on the effects of a radically altered economic landscape on individual choice-making. As a whole, the volume critically engages the question of choice to better understand the costs of a political and ideological climate that encourages, even demands, individual solutions to intractable social problems. Whose choices are amplified in the use of new biomedical technologies and assisted reproduction? Why and how are we discouraged from understanding the economic motivations behind the “choice” to surrender a baby for adoption or to become a surrogate or to seek an abortion? Attentive to the historical, cultural, and ideological conjunctures of reproductive politics,  The Politics of Reproduction  makes a distinctive contribution to feminist analyses of the specific challenges posed by neoliberalism to reproductive possibilities, politics, and justice in the contemporary moment.

In Adoption Fantasies, Kimberly D. McKee explores the ways adopted Asian women and girls are situated at a nexus of objectifications--as adoptees and as Asian American women--and how they negotiate competing expectations based on sensationalist and fictional portrayals of adoption found in US popular culture. McKee traces the life cycle of the adopted Asian woman, from the rendering of infant adoptee bodies in the white US imaginary, to Asian American fantasies of adoption, to encounters with the hypersexualization of Asian and Asian American women and girls in US popular culture. Drawing on adoption studies, Asian American studies, critical ethnic studies, gender studies, and cultural studies, McKee analyzes the mechanisms informing adoptees' interactions with consumers of this media--adoptive parents and families and strangers alike--and how those exchanges and that media influence adoptees' negotiations with the world. From Modern Family to Sex and the City to the notoriety surrounding Soon-Yi Previn and Woody Allen, among many other instances, McKee scrutinizes the fetishization and commodification of women and girls adopted from Asia to understand their racialized experiences.

Korean adoptees have a difficult time relating to any of the racial identity models because they are people of color who often grew up in white homes and communities. Biracial and nonadopted people of color typically have at least one parent whom they can racially identify with, which may also allow them access to certain racialized groups. When Korean adoptees attempt to immerse into the Korean community, they feel uncomfortable and unwelcome because they are unfamiliar with Korean customs and language. The Dance of Identities looks at how Korean adoptees "dance," or engage, with their various identities (white, Korean, Korean adoptee, and those in between and beyond) and begin the journey toward self-discovery and empowerment.

Throughout the author draws closely on his own experiences and those of thirty-eight other Korean adoptees, mainly from the U.S. Chapters are organized according to major themes that emerged from interviews with adoptees. "Wanting to be like White" examines assimilation into a White middle-class identity during childhood. Although their White identity may be challenged at times, for the most part adoptees feel accepted as "honorary" Whites among their families and friends. "Opening Pandora’s Box" discusses the shattering of adoptees’ early views on race and racism and the problems of being raised colorblind in a race-conscious society. "Engaging and Reflecting" is filled with adoptee voices as they discover their racial and transracial identities as young adults. During this stage many engage in activities that they believe make more culturally Korean, such as joining Korean churches and Korean student associations in college. "Questioning What I Have Done" delves into the issues that arise when Korean adoptees explore their multiple identities and the possible effects on relationships with parents and spouses. In "Empowering Identities" the author explores how adoptees are able to take control of their racial and transracial identities by reaching out to parents, prospective parents, and adoption agencies and by educating Korean and Korean Americans about their lives. The final chapter, "Linking the Dance of Identities Theory to Life Experiences," reiterates for adoptees, parents, adoption agencies, and social justice activists and educators the need for identity journeys and the empowered identities that can result.

The Dance of Identities is an honest look at the complex nature of race and how we can begin to address race and racism from a fresh perspective. It will be well received by not only members of the Korean adoption community and transracial parents, but also Asian American scholars, educators, and social workers.

There are no provisions for adoption in English common law, and adoption wasn't legally formalized in England and Wales until 1926. But a century earlier, untimely adoptions navigated the new exceptionalism of childhood in Romanticism. In Haphazard Families, Eric C. Walker explores the history of the adopted child in Romantic-era England. Taking up the stories of both fictional and historical adoptees, he demonstrates how these children, diminished to nonpersons, shouldered the burden of social constructs of nation, family, gender, and class. Walker further demonstrates how Rousseau's infamous failure to follow his own ideals of parenthood shaped British reactions in famous texts such as Frankenstein and Emma. Incorporating perspectives from Romantic scholarship and critical adoption studies and examining the stories of adopted children associated with Queen Caroline, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Jane Austen, the Wordsworth siblings, Mary Shelley, Charles and Mary Lamb, Letitia Landon, and others, Haphazard Families considers how Romantic constructions of childhood supply foundational structures of modern adoptee subjectivity.

How Korean adoptees went from being adoptable orphans to deportable immigrants

Since the early 1950s, over 125,000 Korean children have been adopted in the United States, primarily by white families. Korean adoptees figure in twenty-five percent of US transnational adoptions and are the largest group of transracial adoptees currently in adulthood. Despite being legally adopted, Korean adoptees' position as family members did not automatically ensure legal, cultural, or social citizenship. Korean adoptees routinely experience refusals of belonging, whether by state agents, laws, and regulations, in everyday interactions, or even through media portrayals that render them invisible. In Out of Place, SunAh M Laybourn, herself a Korean American adoptee, examines this long-term journey, with a particular focus on the race-making process and the contradictions inherent to the model minority myth.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with Korean adoptee adults, online surveys, and participant observation at Korean adoptee events across the US and in Korea, Out of Place illustrates how Korean adoptees come to understand their racial positions, reconcile competing expectations of citizenship and racial and ethnic group membership, and actively work to redefine belonging both individually and collectively. In considering when and how Korean adoptees have been remade, rejected, and celebrated as exceptional citizens, Out of Place brings to the fore the features of the race-making process.

In 1994 an American writer named Emily Prager met her new daughter LuLu. All she knew about her was that the baby had been born in Wuhu, a city in southern China, and left near a police station in her first three days of life. Her birth mother had left a note with Lulu's western and lunar birth dates. In 1999 Emily and her daughter–now a happy, fearless four-year-old--returned to China to find out more. That journey and its discoveries unfold in this lovely, touching and sensitively observed book.

In Wuhu Diary, we follow Emily and LuLu through a country where children are doted on yet often summarily abandoned and where immense human friendliness can coexist with outbursts of state-orchestrated hostility–particularly after the U. S. accidentally bombs the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. We see Emily unearthing precious details of her child’s past and LuLu coming to terms with who she is. The result is a book that will delight anyone interested in China, and that will move and instruct anyone who has ever adopted--or considered adopting--a child.