Imagining and Enacting Chineseness in the Context of Chinese Adoption

In this talk, Professor Andrea Louie will discuss the construction of identities for children adopted from China

Prof. Louie will address the strategic construction of “Chinese” identities by both Asian American and white adoptive parents in St. Louis, MO and in the San Francisco Bay area for their children adopted from China. In the context of globalization and the acute awareness of adopted children’s connections to China (however fraught), how do adoptive parents imagine both themselves and their “Chinese” children as inhabiting a cosmopolitan, multicultural world? Parents engage in imagining themselves and their children as a family at the same time that they rework their own identities in relation to the increasing presence of “difference” in their own lives. Chineseness is seen as a form of cultural capital at the same time that it remains laden with essentialized ideas tied to concerns about cultural authenticity. This is reflected in the fact that parents’ approaches to “difference” attempt to both tame it and turn it into a resource, as parents try to negotiate their own relationships to difference as cosmopolitan subjects.

At the same time, while there is potential for the construction of Chineseness to take on varied meanings as attached to new understandings of race and racism, Orientalist conceptions of Chineseness as a form of racial and cultural difference continue to shape ideas about Chineseness.

Andrea Louie is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Michigan State University. She is author of Chineseness Across Borders: Re-negotiating Chinese Identities in China and the U.S. (Duke, 2004) and is revising her second book focusing on the “cultural socialization” and racialization of children adopted from China in the U.S. She has recently begun a research project on international Chinese students at Michigan State University.