num_pages: 244
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.How has the sight of a little Asian girl with a white American family become so commonplace? In Catherine Ceniza Choys 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 Americas relationships with the world has touched and shaped us.-Naoko Shibusawa Brown University
language: English
title: Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America
publisher: NYU Press