Migration of ‘Somebody’s Children’: Entangled Histories of Motherhood through Chinese Adoption in the United States in the 1990s

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the entanglement of Chinese and American motherhood through Chinese adoption in the United States in the 1990s, during what Sino-American relations scholars frame as ‘the Long Cold War era’. The Long Cold War era refers to a long durée view of the structural Cold War derivatives in Asia that defies the linear and neat Cold War periodisation from 1947 to 1991. From the 1990s to 2015, Chinese ‘revolutionary motherhood’ and American ‘fortressed motherhood’ intertwined through the adoption of Chinese children into American families. Such enmeshment challenged the conventional narratives on international adoption as either a site of exploitation or paternalistic salvation towards transnational and transracial adoptees. By centring the lived experiences of mothers in both countries, this article employs mothers’ first-person accounts to interrogate the gendered politics of Chinese adoption, complicating the simplistic narrative of passive female victimhood in family settings.