Constructing and negotiating identity in "birth culture": an intercultural communication approach.

Chang, Changfu ; Chen, Zhuojun Joyce ; Chatham-Carpenter, April 等

   We departed the hotel promptly at 8am this
   morning, and headed straight to the jade
   factory. It was a beautiful facility, and we got
   to see real jade being carved by professionals.
   The jade we saw being carved was in an
   intricate sphere design with many layers inside.
   It reminded me of an adopted Chinese girl; a
   rough block of hidden potential to begin with,
   but after time, love, and attention, we become
   a beautiful piece of art with various layers
   (including Chinese and American) within us. Kate
   Crotty, during her birth parents search in
   China.

Introduction

The first wave of international or intercountry adoption started after the Korean War (1950-1953). The war resulted in many abandoned children, among whom a large number of orphans were the offspring of Western soldiers and Korean women. With the birth of the adoption agency Holt International in 1956, American adoptive families were able to start adopting orphans from Korea. Although those adoptees were fully socialized to American culture and identified with their American parents, many in the larger society denied them as "Us" and pushed them away as "Others" (Kim, 2010). Identity became the key issue in those adoptees' lives, and issues surrounding international and transracial adoption came to the forefront of the public's attention (Lee, Lammert, & Hess, 2008).

With that additional attention, other more recent adoptees from another country, China, have experienced a much different experience. Since the early 1990s, because of China's One-Child Policy, over 120,000 Chinese children have been adopted into families in the West (Selman, 2015), among which about 73,662 were adopted by American families from 1999-2014 (Bureau of Consular Affairs, Department of State, 2015). Most of these adoptees were girls, due to a cultural tradition that valued boys over girls. As many of these adoptees come of age, they have started to grapple with key issues concerning their identities.

This study examines the cross-cultural adaptation and identity formation process of Chinese adoptees through the interweaving of relationships between adoptees and their two sets of families (adoptive family and birth family), based on the production materials of three documentary films in a birth parents search series (Chang, 2015).

Identity in the Context of Transracial Adoption Identity of International Adoptees

The question of identity is about who we are. There are two dimensions to it: one is who we are as we believe or "avowed identity"; the other is who we are as others perceive, or "ascribed identity" (Collier, 1997). "Conflicts" and "confusions" arise when there are discrepancies between the two dimensions (Erikson, 1968). And an identity crisis develops when such conflicts and confusions cannot be resolved. Transracial and interracial adoptees, caught in the tension between their "true self' and their "public self," are more prone to experiencing identity crises (Kirk, 1964; McRoy, Grotevant, Ayers-Lopez, & Furuta, 1990). A Korean adoptee shared this experience with Shiao and Tuan (2008):

   Raised by white parents in a predominantly
   white town, I considered myself to be white.
   Others saw me differently, though. People
   stared at me as if I were an alien, and children
   asked if I could see through my "Chinese, slant
   eyes." The worst episodes were when teenage
   boys surrounded me on the school bus and
   yelled obscenities and racial slurs at me. My
   race shouldn't have mattered, I thought,
   because it didn't matter to my friends and
   family. (p. 1023)

The experience of early Korean adoptees highlights the urgency of investigating identity issues arising from transracial adoption "because their ethnic explorations indicate how much the status of being nonwhite remains a barrier even when nonwhites are highly acculturated to majority-group culture" (Shiao & Tuan, 2008, p. 1025). As a remedy, the older generation of Korean adoptees made efforts to connect with their birth culture and reclaim their lost Korean identity.

Within this milieu, parents of adopted Chinese children have taken a more intrusive approach to helping their children embrace their Chinese heritage (Chen, 2015). For Chinese adoptees, this journey towards ethnic identification starts almost as soon as the child is adopted, with attempts made by adoptive families to connect the child to the culture of their birthplace (Rojewski, 2005; Traver, 2007). Parents of adopted Chinese children have a greater plethora of resources, including children's books, cultural artifacts, language classes, and international adoption stories, than did parents of those earlier Korean adoptees (Fitzpatrick & Kostina-Ritchey, 2013; Rojewski, 2005; Traver, 2007). Attempts to achieve Chinese cultural competence can range from having "minimal exposure to Chinese culture" (Thomas & Tessler, 2007) to total immersion in Chinese culture (Heimsoth & Laser, 2008). Parents often choose to travel back to China with their adopted child, when their child is quite young, in order to help their child gain an appreciation of birth culture and to determine if there are connections to the child's birth family which can be traced (Chatham-Carpenter, 2015; Liedtke, 2010; Ponte, Wang, & Fan, 2010). The inclusion of birth culture in the adoptee's upbringing provides resources and a deep structure crucial to the identity formation of the adoptive child, because ethnically inspired, positive experiences can translate into strong building blocks in all phases of identity development (Hamilton, Samek, Keyes, Mgue, & Iacono, 2015; Upshur & Demick, 2006).

Identity and Birth Parents

Scholars in developmental psychology argue that the need to be connected with one's biological and historical past is "an integral part of one's identity formation" (Sarosky, Baran, & Panor, 1989, p. 219). As children grow and change into adolescents, their struggles to form a cohesive identity are often accompanied by a strong desire to identify with their birth parents. When adoptions were practiced in secrecy, the adopted children were able to relate to their adoptive parents in the process of identity formation, thus mitigating the contradictions and confusions that could lead to identity crises. Unfortunately, in the case of ethnically mixed (interracial) adoptions, the racial line between adoptive parents and birth parents would be apparent, which raises questions regarding birth parents. If the information about the birth parents is unknown, "adopted children have no biological examples" with which they can identify (Rosenberg & Horner, 1991, p. 75).

For Chinese adoptees, due to cultural and political reasons, almost without exception, they do not know much, if any, information about their birth parents. While clinical studies on how the lack of birth parents information has impacted Chinese adoptees are not available at the moment, it is reasonable to suggest that those adoptees are struggling in varying degrees of intensity by the lack of information on their biological parents. Further, there have been increasing cases of these adoptees finding their birth parents (Liedtke, 2010), but little is known how the differing cultural norms are negotiated between the two very different cultures (American and Chinese cultures), when interacting with birth parents.

Intercultural Communication and Cross-Cultural Adaptation Process

Transracial adoptees need to go through a cross-cultural adaptation and transformation process. First, they have to accept the reality that they are international adoptees who have a different cultural heritage from their adoptive parents. Second, as they encounter societal prejudice against their physical appearance and birth cultural background, they continue to go through identity formation. Third, they may have a life-long concern with what to expect from their birth parents, if they meet them, and how to communicate within their birth culture, which impacts their identity (Chen, 2012).

Studies on reunion remain extremely rare. In "Korean Adoptees ' Birth Family Reunions," Docan-Morgan (2015) identified "cultural differences" between the adoptees and their birth families in several contexts: family roles, expectations of beauty and femininity, interpersonal interactions, and so on. The deeper differences made it challenging for participants to negotiate their identities vis-a-vis their birth families. According to the study, how to understand, interpret, and accept cultural discrepancy can be a difference-maker in the reunion experience: those who accepted cultural differences had a sense of "belonging" while those who did not felt they were "outsiders" (p. 615).

Docan-Morgan's observation poses a very important suggestion. An adequate intercultural understanding or intercultural literacy in the first place could help the adoptees negotiate the meanings of various transactions. This is particularly important for the Chinese adoptees who in increasing numbers are ready to search for and reunite with their birth parents. It helps the adoptee not only emotionally and culturally prepare before the trip, but also intellectually be able to deal with cultural issues during the trip.

For adoptees, the lack of birth parent information can be a source of anxiety and uncertainty in the formation of their identity. Adoptees conceivably experience anguish over their inability to relate to their parents and to predict their traits such as temperament, interests, physical characteristics, as well as health. In light of the emotional investments (e.g., anticipations and expectations) and financial investments (e.g., costly expenses involved), a search that does not lead to locating the birth family would likely cause a great concern.

Using a creative documentary method, this is a case study on cross-cultural negotiation and adaptation processes used to re-create new relationships and identities across the cultural divide. In particular, this paper explores how those adopted Chinese children negotiate their identities based on new narratives of their past.

Films/Methods

As a filmmaker dedicated to human-interest stories, Changfu Chang was drawn to the intercultural issues associated with transracial adoption, adoptive families, and adoptees. During the first phase, Chang focused his lens on the adoptive families, particularly parents, who shared their stories and thoughts on adopted children's culture and roots. During the second phase, Chang shifted his attention to Chinese families, which for the first time gave the voice to many "invisible" birth parents.

As Chang continued his production and research, it was clear that the most pressing and vexing issue--identity--concerning the Chinese adoptees started to take shape. Granted, identity is a "work-in-progress" throughout a person's life, but the transition from childhood to adolescence undoubtedly marks the most intense exploration (Erikson, 1968). It is during this period that teenagers formulate their own questions, reflect on their past and present, and construct their identities. Forming a coherent self-identity remains a challenge for a minority person, and more so for a transracial adoptee (Willing & Fronek, 2014).

In recent years, adoptive families and adoptees in growing numbers have journeyed to China to search for birth parents. Thus, in the third phase, Chang followed, or had frequent contacts with, several dozen families and adoptees in their "birth parents search," completing what he calls the "birth parents search" series (Chang, 2015, http://www.connection-media.com/): Sofia's Journey, Daughters 'Return, and Ricki's Promise.

From 2008 to 2014, Chang and his team spent 6 years recording a total of over 180 hours of video footage, including interviews with adoptees, their adoptive parents and siblings, and their birth parents, siblings and relatives. Additionally, an adoptee, Kate Crotty from Cincinnati, Ohio, was invited to write a daily blog on her birth parents searching experience.

Using this data from an ethnographic approach, we attempted to study adoptees' cross-cultural adaptation and identity formation process by analyzing the three films in the "birth parents search" series, which were produced collaboratively with those adoptees and their families in both cultural contexts-U.S. and China.

Birth Parents Search and/or Reunion and Chinese Adoptees' Identity Formation

Identity Formation

Consistent with existing studies on birth parents, Chinese adoptees' desire to find information on their birth families has promoted the process of constructing their identities. All of the data collected for producing the films demonstrates that those adoptees' construction of their identities resides in the journey for the search of birth families.

Sofia. In Sofia's Journey, a documentary film about a 14-year-old in her search for birth parents in China, the title character Sofia from early on yearned for information on her birth parents. Her adoptive father recalls, "Early on, she expressed interest in finding her biological parents. There were times when, during family gatherings, she seemed a little withdrawn, or contemplative, or pensive, thinking about that family she was separated from so far away."

The desire to connect with her roots and to relate is well expressed by Sofia during her birth parents' search when she got older. In one of the emotional moments when she thought she was very close to getting the information about her birth parents, she sang her favorite song, "Reflection" from the Disney movie Mulan. She recalled that special moment:

   The words to the chorus part have a lot of
   meaning to them--"who is that girl I am seeing
   staring straight back at me, why is my
   reflection someone I don't know." So,
   basically, I think for me the words of that song
   mean ... who are you, you know, because ... kids
   back home, they have their birth parents and I
   don't. I mean you look at yourself in the mirror,
   you are not able to ... to relate, because you
   don't know whom you came from, really.

Although Sofia did not ultimately find her birth mother, when she met her Chinese adoptive parents, she felt an instant connection with them. Sofia said:

   ... it's really obvious when I walked into the
   house, they loved me a lot and I love them a lot
   too. It's kind of strange when you love
   someone you first see, you know, but you
   could feel the love in the room ... they are kind
   of, are another adoptive family in China, so I
   don't really have two moms or dads or families,
   I have three ... I know they took really really
   good care of me, because of the way I am
   today, you know. I do well in school.

In a vivid account, the Chinese adoptive family told Sophia what they knew about her birth parents. With tears streaming down her face, one of Sofia's first questions was: "Did my mom love to sing?" As a lead singer and dancer in her school, she wanted to be able to identify with her birth parents in their characteristics.

Eline. Eline, adopted by a family in the Netherlands and profiled in Daughters' Return, expressed a similar desire. Her adoptive mother Wilma Leemakers talked about Eline's anxiety and frustration:

   At the age of 4, she started asking the questions.
   "Mom, do you know who they are? Do you
   have a picture of them? Do you know where
   they live?" ... By the age of 6, she could be so
   upset, crying, shouting, you couldn't reach her,
   then for two hours, I put her on my bed, and I
   said: "You can yell, you can shout, you can
   kick me, it doesn't matter, but you stay here."
   After two hours, she was at rest, she said:
   "Mommy, I missed them so much."

However, after being united with her birth parents several years later, Eline became stable and confident. Her adoptive father Jim Kuijper said:

   Now she is a normal teenager without missing
   pieces of her life ... Eline is rather small,
   especially in comparison with her classmates.
   That was always a problem, now she is more at
   ease with that because when we went to China
   this year, she said: "Mom, I am always as tall
   as my mother." Her mother is 1.42m, so she is
   more at ease with that. Actually they don't
   tease her, they treat her as normal in her class.

Ricki. Another adoptee profiled in Daughters' Return was Ricki. In the film, Ricki's adoptive parents helped Ricki find and unite with her birth parents. Even though she was at the center of all the attention when she first met her birth parents at age 12, Ricki was not quite emotionally attached to the intense moments and events. But a promise was made: Ricki would come back when she was 18. Partially a sequel to Daughters' Return, the film Ricki's Promise follows the 18-year-old adoptee as she returns to China to live with her birth family in a summer, to face her past and fears, and to reflect upon her identity and choices.

It was Ricki's adoptive parents who started the search. As she grew, Ricki became more and more interested in the connections and in her cultural identity. At the outset, Ricki started her journey by posing the question of "Who am I":

   My name is Ricki Mudd, but I go by two
   different names. I have two different birthdays
   and two different families in two different
   countries. I happened to be one of over
   100,000 Chinese kids who are adopted and
   now live in the West. In a way, we have a
   similar fate; we don't know our roots.

Reflecting on her first trip to China, Ricki revealed her motivation: "There's a lot that I want to know. It's my family, so I definitely want to get to know the members of my family. I want to know exactly what happened when I was a baby or a small child." Ricki was also very interested in finding her family's medical history. When she heard that her birth mother just had cervical cancer, one big concern was whether it was genetic.

After meeting her birth parents, Ricki reflected upon her own identity from the perspective of her new family:

   I reflect on my life mainly when I was around
   my family saying "when I'm older this is how
   I'd be." I noticed temperaments in my mother's
   family tend to be pretty high, they get angry
   pretty easily. I had a feeling that if I had
   grown up with my mother, I'd also have a
   temperament like that. Just those kinds of
   things, it's just like the way my personality
   could have differed if I had lived in China.
   More than my actual physical being, more just
   the inner traits.

Kate. Kate Crotty is a Chinese adoptee living with her adoptive mother in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was born in Wuxi, China, and adopted in 1997 when she was one year old. She also went on a return trip to China to try to find her birth parents. However, similar to Sofia, Kate was not able to find her birth parents. After initial disappointment, though, she reported being transformed emotionally and intellectually by her search, feeling much more assertive and confident:

   I used to think I would be so upset if I didn't
   find them this time, that I would go back and
   search again. The weird thing is, those feelings
   have settled so suddenly. I would love to find
   them, but I don't feel the need to rush back and
   look again. We were so productive and literally
   did everything that we could, that I would most
   definitely say that I found my necessary peace
   and closure. I am more than proud of all that
   we accomplished.

The "peace" and "closure" may shed light on some neglected issues that lead to new research questions and paradigms. An adoptee's trip to search and, in some cases, to reunite with the birth parents may, without their knowledge, answer unconscious and unformulated questions that are camouflaged in the concept of the "birth parents." In other words, when a transracial adoptee raises the question about the birth parents, can that be motivated by the inability to relate as a minority member living with white parents in a dominant white society? On her second day in China, Kate wrote:

   As cheesy as it sounds, I find a pleasant
   comfort being in China, surrounded by people
   who look like me. Used to being the minority, I
   took a big leap into the majority. When I see
   someone with similar features as my own, I
   cannot help but think: I wonder if that's my
   mom, or my dad, or my brother, even though I
   know deep inside it is not possible. I've already
   fallen in love with China, and I cannot wait to
   continue this once in a lifetime journey.

This is consistent with other research on return trips where the adopted children and their adoptive families have not found the birth parents or any additional information about why they were not being raised by their birth parents (Chatham-Carpenter, 2015; Ponte, Wang, & Fan, 2010).

Ethnic culture or "birth culture" is theorized as a key component in the constitution of the positive identity. Reclaiming birth culture and incorporating it into an adoptee's life has been seen as an effective way to reconstruct their identity (Badeen, Treweeke, & Ahluwalia, 2012). Therefore, a large body of literature focuses on the function of an adoptee's birth culture, the dynamics and dialectics between birth culture and dominant culture, and the strategies for parents to use when incorporating birth culture into the child's cultural narrative (Ballard, 2015; Ballard & Ballard, 2011; Bolvin & Hassan, 2015; Chatham-Carpenter, 2012). Indeed, an adoptee's trip to China in search of birth parents and cultural roots is a multifaceted intercultural experience, which can transform the individual emotionally, intellectually, and psychologically.

Cross-Cultural Adaptation

The three Chinese adoptees who united with their birth parents or Chinese adoptive parents all encountered problems with Chinese language and cultural norms, when communicating with their birth family members through telephone or internet, and trying to better understand what happened in their early lives. Moreover, they had to face their uncertainties because of cultural differences, which go beyond language differences.

Uncertainty reduction. Uncertainty management has received considerable attention in recent adoption literature (e.g., Colaner & Kranstuber, 2010; Powell & Afifi, 2005). In general, existing literature first focuses on descriptive understandings of the impact of uncertainty (e.g., the lack of birth parent information and birth culture connections) on the adoptees as they experience anxiety, frustration, and, in extreme cases, mental breakdown; then it provides normative suggestions on how to find a coherent narrative to reduce and manage uncertainty-induced psychological and emotional problems.

An intercultural communication perspective on uncertainty can be incorporated and increase the efficacy of uncertainty management. According to Hofstede (1997 & 2001), the ability to tolerate uncertainty is a primary cultural trait. In some cultures such as Chinese culture, people have more tolerance for uncertainty. They may do things without strict adherence to time, pre-arrangements, or pre-arranged events. In other cultures such as American culture, the tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity is relatively low. It is quintessentially in the Western psyche to find a closure, through scientific investigation, or logical reasoning, or internal and external resources, to mysteries concerning people and past events. Therefore, the missing pieces (knowledge of birth parents, birth date, etc.) can present more challenging situations for an adoptee growing up in the West, when constructing identity.

As the Chinese adoptees and their adoptive families search for information about those adoptees' past, they are frustrated by missing pieces due to the Chinese cultural and political traditions. Typically, the Chinese side provides adoptive parents with a medical report and a sketchy description of the life of their adopted child in orphanages or in foster families. For some "lucky" adoptive families, they might be presented with a birth parent note, or a finding advertisement, or an account of how their child was found. Such artifacts initially help reduce the uncertainty in the narrative that is created by the adoptive parents for their adopted children (Chatham-Carpenter, 2012); however, sometimes information they receive on return trips do not match the narrative they have believed.

For example, before the search trip, Sofia was told that in the orphanage, there was a note left by her birth parents, and based on the information from the note, she knew her birthday was December 27, 1993. She was eager to visit the orphanage to retrieve the note and search for additional information. The Chinese orphanage officials, however, told her that the birth note did not exist at all and that they created the story to make her adoptive parents feel better. Sofia sadly recounted: "I was really, really sad to find out that December 27 was not my real birthday after 13 years of thinking that my birthday was on December 27."

In her search for birth parents, Sofia only met her Chinese adoptive parents, but not her birth mother whose name was unknown to Sofia. However, Sofia was told that she looked like her birth mother. While she is still waiting for the final answer, Sofia was satisfied with the biological resembling between her birth mom and her. Sofia wrote:

   I asked them if they had a picture of my birth
   mom, and they said no, but they said that I
   looked so much like her. And I was just really
   glad to hear that, so because when I was in
   China, even now, when I am getting ready for
   bed, when I look into the mirror, you know
   trying look at myself older, so I kind of see her
   in the mirror. It is really cool trying to imagine
   that.

In Ricki's case, it was not about the "missing pieces," since she reconnected with her birth family; it was about "how to fit all the pieces together." However, when Ricki met her birth parents the first time, she was afraid of the new culture, because of the uncertainties involved in what this meeting would mean.

   I wondered if my [American] mom and dad
   were going to leave me in China. That thought
   really scared me. I think I was like terrified. I
   can't really explain the feeling in words,
   because I was happy to be with them [Chinese
   mom and dad], but that was a whole new
   culture with a whole bunch of traditions that I
   didn't know. I couldn't communicate with
   anyone.

Yet, in her second trip, the uncertainty turned to the various stories she was hearing. Before long, she realized that she had more questions than answers: she got conflicting accounts of her names; she was confused about the relationship between her "victimized" birth parents and the "evil" foster grandma Madam Fan. Was it just a clear-cut case of black and white where Fan was a master manipulator who wanted to take advantage of everyone else, or were her birth parents hiding something, not being forthcoming? Ricki concluded: "I may never know what exactly happened in the past."

Reducing uncertainty might not be able to effectively assuage anxieties and pains of adoptees like Ricki and Sofia who must navigate through a maze of conflicting and confusing information. Yet, the biological connection with birth parents and the support and love of adoptive parents help them develop tolerance to uncertainty. Their experience may reveal that a positive identity could still be possible when individuals have no access to critical information in their lives. More importantly, as they actively participate in the search for a coherent narrative, the Chinese adoptees acquire and internalize information, gain socialization experience, and negotiate their identities in a different cultural setting.

Collectivism vs. individualism. In an individualistic culture and society like the United States, people tend to develop a strong self-centered consciousness and identity. For most people, any snippet of information (e.g., the identity of their birth parents, the time they are born, and the growing-up memories as captured in scrapbooks) can all contribute to the "uniqueness" that serves as integral building blocks for their identities. For the Chinese adoptees who are raised in the West and who carry an individualistic identity, the missing pieces in their lives leave a big hole in their hearts and a big question mark in their identity construction.

In contrast, people in a collectivistic culture often see a virtue in suppressing self-interest, placing more value on relationships and "conformity." After her second visit to see her birth parents, Ricki (Mudd, 2015) talks about her experience of thinking from a Chinese cultural perspective, while still valuing individualistic values. She writes in an essay for The Washington Post:

   ... when I learned about the preference for
   boys, I bristled at the idea of being a victim of
   blatant sexism. But talking to my birth family,
   I began to see how, from a Chinese perspective,
   there's a certain logic to it. China has a lot of
   farmland, and many families' survival depends
   on the success of their farms, so boys are
   valued for their utility when it comes to
   physical labor. Boys also provide insurance
   that aging parents will be looked after, since a
   wife is understood to marry into her husband's
   family, obligating her to care for her in-laws
   ahead of her own parents. And boys are better
   positioned to carry on their family's honor,
   since only a man can pass his surname on to
   the next generation. Of course, these traditions
   are themselves rooted in a sort of sexism. But
   it's not as simple as liking boys better than
   girls. (p. 4)

Further, according to Chinese traditional culture, family relationship is valued more importantly than an individual's loss or interest. The Chinese idiom, "[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" (Blood concentration is greater than water), means biological bonding is the most important thing in one's life. Although her younger brother Wu Chao was the preferred child who involuntarily "took over" her citizenship in China, Ricki became really attached to her brother when she united with her birth family. She promised to take care of Wu Chao. For example, when Ricki was anxiously waiting for Wu Chao's arrival to the U.S., she asserted:

   Sometimes it's odd to think that between us,
   Wu Chao is supposedly the privileged child--the
   boy preferred by Chinese society, the son
   my family held out for while I was hidden and
   ultimately put up for adoption ... Our parents'
   divorce seems to have been especially tough on
   him. When I saw him in China, he was
   withdrawn, often looking at the ground. He
   didn't like going outside or having friends
   over ... Almost every day I was with them, my
   mom yelled at him about something. One time
   she slapped him, and he ran off into the
   night ... She says she knows it hurts him, but it
   makes her feel better--and less sorry for what
   happened to me.

After she picked up her brother, she said, "My brother's flight arrived on time, and I was there to meet him." The connotative meaning is apparent. Ricki would be there for her brother because they are biological siblings.

However, at times, Ricki's individualistic identity was at odds with the expectations of her birth mother in the Chinese collectivist cultural context. In a collectivistic society, parents exercise unchallenged power and control over their children. When Ricki visited her birth parents in China at age 18, she felt controlled by her birth mother. Understandably, Ricki's mother was overly protective of her daughter, to a point of obsession. And she felt her daughter was coming home to build and mend the relationships and family life. The different expectations from different cultural orientations (collectivism and individualism) became clear as Ricki challenged her mother:

   I would tell my mom that, um, this is, basically,
   I came to China to figure out my own identity
   and my own history, and I want to know the
   things that I couldn't find out in America while
   I have the chance to and that's this whole
   vacation. And so, this vacation is, is dictated by
   what I want to do, it's my trip, it's my vacation.
   I mean I don't want to sound selfish, but that's
   really how it is.

Collectivism and individualism are pitted against each other in another of the movie's storylines. Because of the loss of Ricki, her birth parents were divorced. When Ricki came back, her parents got back together and they all became a complete family. Her mother's boyfriend, as much as he loved Ricki's mother, believed that his own happiness and pursuit should yield way to their family getting together. To Ricki's surprise, he appealed to her that she come back to China often to bring the family together.

The impact of the different value orientations such as collectivism and individualism on the notion and formation of identity can be explored and explicated to help Chinese adoptees in the West cope with various cultural issues.

Integration and Beyond: A New Cultural Space

Searching for birth parents is a fairly recent endeavor for Chinese and other adoptees. To date, there has been very little study on international adoptees' birth parents search and reunion. Without any doubt, the unique encounters between adoptees who are raised in the West and their biological families who live in their land of origin are sources of excitement for researchers from a broad range of fields and disciplines (e.g., Ballard, 2015). New concepts, frameworks, and theories will surely emerge. Based on the experiences of the adoptees discussed in this paper, we posit the following new lines of investigation.

Cultural Awareness and Reaffirmation

For international adoptees, traveling in a foreign country is not all about knowing a different culture or society. Simultaneously, it is an opportunity for one to understand, appreciate, and claim his/her own identity and the culture to which he/she belongs. A different culture and society serves as a mirror which, through self-reflection, literally and figuratively reveals to us who we are and what we are made of.

Whereas Ricki's search for the missing pieces in her past relates to the deeper structure of the Western sense of identity, Ricki's daily activities and interactions during her sojourn in her native land constantly makes her aware of her American identity, which is centered on a cultured set of habits and attitudes. The moment she arrived in China, she took notice of the heat, noise, pollution, dust visibly floating in the air, and cigarette butts scattered everywhere, just to mention a few.

There are several scenes in which Ricki asserted her American identity. She felt extremely uncomfortable seeing a chicken being slaughtered in her presence in broad daylight. She felt that her mom's boyfriend had made a wrong request for her to come back to China to help their divorced parents get together, because more as an American than as a daughter, she refused to get involved in her parents' relationship. Even in a very bucolic scene where she got lost in the moment swimming with her brother and relatives in the canal near her grandma's house, she made an effort to detach herself from the culture:

   I was very strongly keeping my mouth closed
   the entire time that I was in water. Why?
   Even though the water was so clear, you could
   see down to the bottom pretty much, I can't
   trust the water. ... I'm accustomed to really
   cleaned filtered water here. I mean I've lived
   in a very fortunate place. And so in Seattle in
   my house, I haven't had to worry about that
   kind of water.

In a certain sense, the film is Ricki's journey to reaffirm her American identity:

   What I've learned about myself from my trip to
   China, I don't know it just really emphasizes
   the fact that I was very fortunate to grow up in
   America. I feel like my whole person would
   have been different if I had grown up in
   China ... but now I come back and I really try
   my best not to take anything for granted here
   because I realize seeing everyone else's lives
   there, not just my family's, just the random
   stranger, the random passerby, just seeing how
   hard their lives are and how much they're not
   getting ... That kind of thing just makes me
   realize, like, how lucky I am to be here.

That an adoptee can find re-affirmation and subsequent confidence in her American identity when immersing in a "birth culture" poses potentially a very interesting question. As more and more Chinese adoptees take a return trip back to China--not necessarily a trip to reunite with their birth parents--can the affirmation of their American identity be part of a process of constructing a positive self-identity? If these children's experiences in the "conflicts and confusions" between two cultural identities are analyzed, how would their process of re-evaluating and re-claiming American identity be conceptualized? Could this conceptualization lead to new mechanisms and alternative resources to address identity issues? In order to understand how the new identity adjustment and alignment mitigate tensions and ambiguities experienced by the transracial adoptees, scholars would need to gain entry into these new experiences and re-evaluate the efficacies of birth parent reunions.

Identity in a New Cultural Space

There have been various models of minority development (e.g., Atkinson, 2003) illustrating the journey through psychological and behavioral terrains, including (a) identifying with the dominant culture (conformity stage), (b) realizing racial differences while experiencing forms of rejection and discrimination (dissonance stage), (c) consciously and defiantly separating themselves from the majority and seeking connections with their own ethnic culture and society (resistance and immersion stage), and (d) through reflections, forming a positive identity that embraces both minority and majority cultures (awareness and integration stage).

However, any integration model exploring how a minority person straddles between both cultures to form a positive identity, while possessing the best attributes of the two worlds, might miss a key point. Perhaps the increasing and evolving cultural space of transracial adoptees can be problematized and theorized in the construction of those adoptees' identity formation, without resorting to the binary treatment of two cultures.

The world for transracial adoptees is quite different today. The sheer number of transracial adoptees, the increasingly diverse population, the heightened awareness of race and ethnicity, and more importantly, the profoundly rich experiences lived and being lived by transracial adoptees, give rise to a world of complexity and authenticity. Clearly, the existing integration model may overlook this complexity and authenticity, reducing the dynamic identity process to the stagnant combination of minority and majority cultures.

In a recent study of the role of the heritage camps in identity development among Korean adoptees, Randolph and Holtzman (2010) note a disjuncture between parental purposes for utilizing heritage camps and the actual experiences of adoptees participating in these camps, suggesting that "complexity of transnational adoption goes beyond issues of integrating racial and ethnic heritage into one's identity" (p. 92). In this new era, charting the identity development of the transracial adoptees may require a new field of view, a new vocabulary, and a new set of questions.

In an investigation of cultural embodiment of the adoptive community in North America, Volkman (2005) poses this question: "Is the child [Chinese adoptee] an 'open cultural space,' or is he or she inextricably 'rooted in national soil'" (p. 34)? While the question was raised along a different mode of inquiry, the concept of "cultural space" can be appropriated for studies on the re-conceptualization, re-theorization, and reconstruction of transracial adoptees' identities. Narratives on identity formation no longer need to rely on binary categories that reflect tension and contradiction, but can be situated in a cultural space where adoptees can "speak, articulate their collective voice, and foster a new, postmodern culture where their collective differences are not marginalized" (Ballard, 2013, p. 248). This holistic view sees the adoptive experience as a totality that generates meaning and provides both sources and contexts for the new identity beyond the integration of two cultures.

Conclusion

While these documentary films tell riveting stories of Chinese adoptees searching for and/or reuniting with their birth families, at the heart, however, are complex cultural and intercultural issues centering on identity (Fong, 2014; Fuchs, 2014; Gammage, 2011; Waldmeir, 2014). As The Philadelphia Inquirer describes Ricki and her cohort of the Chinese adoptees, they are "Chinese by blood, American by upbringing," and their lives are "constant negotiations of ethnic identity" (Gammage, 2014).

Finding the overarching theme of identity was not the original goal of this 15 year film-making project. Each phase of the project led to the realization that there were more stories to be told, which had not yet been told. Through the process and experiences of this creative work, the meanings of transracial adoption and the perceptions and experiences of those people (birth families, adoptees, and adoptive families) involved were uncovered. By using the means of documentary films, previously muted groups were empowered to tell their true stories, increasing the public's understanding of the complexities of adoption through the eyes of both birth and adoptive societies.

Over time, as adoption policy experts, researchers, practitioners, and families listen to internationally adopted children, we will hopefully gain a fuller understanding of what it means to Chinese adoptees to embrace being Chinese and the importance for them to explore their birth heritage during their lifetimes. Only then will we really know the effect of birth parent searches on their identity as persons.

Correspondence to:

Changfu Chang, Ph.D.

Department of Communication and Theatre

Millersville University of Pennsylvania

Millersville, PA 17551

Email: [email protected]

Zhuojun Joyce Chen, Ph.D.

Department of Communication Studies

University of Northern Iowa

Cedar Falls, IA 50614

Email: [email protected]

April Chatham-Carpenter, Ph.D.

Speech Communication Department

University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Little Rock, AR 72204

501-569-3158

Email: [email protected]

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01/02/2016

Changfu Chang, Millersville University of Pennsylvania, USA

Zhuojun Joyce Chen, University of Northern Iowa, USA

April Chatham-Carpenter, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, USA