Reading Eng’s discussion of transnational adoption in chapter three, I was struck by how strongly Eng’s ideas seem tied to his background as a scholar of Asian American Studies. Eng’s discussion of transnational adoption practices notes that a significant percentage of adoptees are Chinese girls, and he asserts that transnational adoption practices represent another manifestation of our contemporary “colorblind age” and “collective refusal to see difference in the face of it” (95). But it seems to me that, at least in Eng’s work, the presumption of colorblindness and ability to “pass” is almost a unique property of Asian transnational adoptees (particularly those from China and South Korea). These children are seen as capable of passing for “white” and completing the white family unit, in striking contrast to African American children. Eng notes, “white parents who are reluctant or unwilling to adopt black children domestically (or fearful of child custody battles with birth mothers), have turned increasingly to transnational adoption as an alternative source for the (re)consolidation of family and kinship. From this angle, the Asian transnational adoptee serves to triangulate the domestic landscape of black-white race relations” (108).
Once again, we see the Asian subject placed in a “triangular” relationship with America’s history of racism, and this conception of America’s history stages domestic racism as a “black-white” struggle (rather than, for example, a “white-yellow” struggle). I think that the “colorblindness” Eng attributes to our contemporary moment could also be considered a more particular manifestation of the “invisibility” or erasure of Asian American communities from America’s racial history (rather than a more general racial colorblindness). These Chinese and Korean children are viewed as more able to enter and “pass” within the white family because they are perceived as unconnected to problematic domestic histories and entanglements (like “child custody battles with birth mothers”). But this logic erases the domestic Asian presence and renders all “Asian-ness” essentially alien to the American nation, or perhaps this logic only acknowledges domestic Asian-ness to the extent that the desire for children from China and South Korea might draw on the stereotypical perception of Asian Americans as “model minorities” who conform to the status quo. Ironically, a perception of the child as definitively "alien" seems necessary before the child can be imagined as finally assimilable within the white family unit.
I’m also fascinated by the way in which these ideas of potentially “passing” children—children viewed as uniquely able to be incorporated within the white American family—seem tied to a specific gender; the emblematic transnational adoptee (within the insurance commercial and within Eng’s book) is always female. This seems to be an interesting reversal from the adopted Asian children we’ve encountered thus far in our class. In Madame Buttefly and The Japanese Nightingale, the mixed-race child who travels to the Unites States (Trouble, Taro) is imagined as male (a detail Hwang preserves in M. Butterfly). Now, the adopted Asian child is imagined as female; perhaps the mixed-race child needed to be male in order to emphasize that he was a legitimate continuation of his white father—that he could potentially enter a white patriarchal lineage. In contrast, the current adoptee may be more valued for her—as Eng suggests—ability to perform emotional or “affective” labor within the family, a quality more often associated with women than men.
At the same time, the commercial also images the white American couple as female, and Eng’s critique of the Oedipal paradigm of family seems to involve a movement away from a focus on the father to a focus (almost exclusively in Eng) on the mother-daughter relationship. A gender analysis—and a potential feminist critique of psychoanalysis?—is an interesting thread of Eng’s work that I would be interested in discussing further in class.
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