Global Families

Features

Description

In the last fifty years, transnational adoption - specifically, the adoption of Asian children - has exploded in popularity as an alternative path to family making. Despite the cultural acceptance of this practice, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the factors that allowed Asian international adoption to flourish.

In Global Families, Catherine Ceniza Choy unearths the little-known historical origins of Asian international adoption in the United States. Beginning with the post-World War II presence of the U.S. military in Asia, she reveals how mixed-race children born of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese women and U.S. servicemen comprised one of the earliest groups of adoptive children.

Based on extensive archival research, Global Families moves beyond one-dimensional portrayals of Asian international adoption as either a progressive form of U.S. multiculturalism or as an exploitative form of cultural and economic imperialism. Rather, Choy acknowledges the complexity of the phenomenon, illuminating both its radical possibilities of a world united across national, cultural, and racial divides through family formation and its strong potential for reinforcing the very racial and cultural hierarchies it sought to challenge.

Catherine Ceniza Choy is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of the award-winning book Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History. Review: How has the sight of a little Asian girl with a white American family become so commonplace?

In Catherine Ceniza Choy's sensitive and absorbing study, we learn that transnational adoptions reveal the intertwined stories not only of war, race, foreign policy, liberalism, and immigration, but also of intimacy, loss, and reconciliation. Choy highlights the human, non-governmental, and personal ways in which America's relationships with the world has touched and shaped us. -Naoko Shibusawa,Brown University Global Families is transformative in the strongest sense: it challenges the histories that we conventionally tell about Asian international adoption.

Whether by uncovering the crucial role of mixed-race babies in the origins of Asian international adoption or recovering the story of baseball pitcher-adoptive father Jim Bouton, Catherine Ceniza Choy crafts a unique history focusing on organizational practices and non-state actors. Using International Social Services records as a point of departure, this book provides crucial historical frameworks for any reader interested in adoption, race, migration, and 20th century international relations. -Mark Jerng,author of Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging