In the introduction of Imagining Adoption, Marianne Novy points out three mythic stories of imagining adoption that pervade European and American cultures.
They are “the disastrous adoption and discovery, as in Oedipus, the happy discovery , as in Winter’s Tale, and the happy adoption” (1). These plots prompt us to think about the nature of family and the self. On one hand, “adoption plots dramatize cultural tensions about definitions of family and the importance of heredity” (Novy 2).
Through these imaginations about adoption, we get to realize how our society constructs the concept of kinship. These representations of adoption are also
responsible for the understanding of the relations among the adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents. However, with these representations of adoption comes also the stereotype of imaging adoption. As Novy proposes, how adoption is represented in literature and media affects how people think about adoption; and the way literary works represent the experience might be shaped in part by the cultural images of adoption that are commonly known. Hence, the representation and the social/cultural backdrop are mutually constructing each other. The examination of adoption
narratives not only enable a reflection on how we imagine adoption but also help to develop more inclusive and open perspectives when trying to understand adoption.
Besides, in the wake of an increasing number of transnational adoptions
21 For a detailed study on birth mothers from South Korea, see Hosu Kim’s “Mothers Without Mothering: Birth Mothers from South Korea Since the Korean War,” 139-41.
during 1980 to 2003, more and more narratives about transnational or transracial adoption appear. The complexities of transnational adoption process, the emotional turbulence of adoptees, the competence of adoptive parents in raising children of different races, the bewilderment of adoptees about their identities, the quest for the self, and the experience of searching for birth mothers have drawn a lot of attention and become public concerns. More and more people, including adoptees, adoptive parents, social workers, facilitators, and officials, write about the narratives of transnational adoption. Sara Dorow points out that “the stories and activities that happen between adopted children and the people around them constitute what Hall (1996a) calls identification” (26). According to Dorow, “identification” is a process which happens between “individual psyches and the subject positions invented by culture, politics, and markets” (27). Narratives of adoptees and narratives told by people around them are the “the identificatory work between individual and collective, local and transnational, past and present” (27). Adoption narratives, comingling
personal experience and cultural ideology, became the intersection of the private and the public as they often deal with individuals and the society at the same time.
In addition to the process of identification in transnational adoption
narratives, Margaret Homans’s essay, “Adoption Narratives, Traume, and Origins,”
links adoption narratives with narrative theories and trauma theories. In the essay, Homans explains that Western cultures “tend to equate biological origins with
identity” (5). In narratives such as Oedipus or Harry Potter, taking root trips seems to be necessary for adoptees to know both the origin and who they really are. However, these trips are often followed by disappointment because these searches can not lead to what they want: knowledge of who they are. Adoption narratives hence are often a process of approaching “an irretrievable past,” and a process of “making an origin”
(7). It tends to create “plausible if not verifiable narratives” (7). In other words, the
identity narratives not only tell the experience of the adoptees but also invent the adoption story in a particular way because in the storytelling the adoptees often deals with the past and the present at the same time. To understand the social context of transnational adoption, thus, becomes imperative in analyzing transnational adoption narratives.
In fact, the scope of adoption history and practice appears comprehensive.
The study of transnational adoption and transnational adoption narratives crosses disciplinary lines to include anthropology, history, politics, psychology, and social work. However, in Imagining Adoption, a collection of essays, which studies
representations of adoption in different media, such as films, plays, poetics, adoption rhetoric and novels, there is a common concern about adoptees’ identity. Some argue that identity is primarily biological; others support the idea that heredity and nurture are equally important. Some consider adoption as a personal and social good; others maintain that adoption is viewing adoptees as commodities within international power structure. As Marianne Novy concludes in her introduction of the anthology, “the techniques of literature and of literary and cultural analysis facilitate exploring its complexity” (12). Only with the examination of the strands of difference that characterize the adoptee and the story will we get to realize that the different
experiences in adoption. Experiences of transnational adoption are multiple, divergent and unique. These experiences can not be generalized because every story is unique.
The value of these narratives is of unwavering significance because the representations involve identification, and it includes a reflection of social
imagination of transnational adoption. Transnational adoption narratives are important also because we know that there is always more than what is said in the stories. The experiences of adoptees can never be encapsulated in a single text. Neither can these representations be comprehensive of the aspects involved in the issue of transnational
adoption. The practice of transnational adoption is closely connected to politics, social issues, and cultural contexts. It is also about the life of individuals. However, as the range of the study is extensive and inclusive, what are presented here are but a few of the most significant works on transnational adoption narratives. To study the
representation in the two texts, it is necessary to consider the psychological, cultural, racial, and social contexts within which they are conceived.