De Facto Adoption and Transnational Kinship Formation: Rearticulating Paper Children Immigration during the Chinese Exclusion Era and After

Abstract

Abstract This article situates Chinese paper children immigration during the Exclusion Era and the pre–1965 period in the combined framework of ancient Chinese adoption and transnational kinship formation. It examines, by reading paper children's oral histories and related sources, how the paper children system was rooted in, borrowed from, and modified ancient Chinese adoption practices, through which Chinese immigrants formed transnational, fictive kinship in the United States that were mixed with both blood and non-blood relationships. Since the Exclusion Era, a discourse about Chinese immigrants, especially paper children being illegal, was so powerful that immigration historians seldom question this assumption, even as they critique the institutionalized exclusion that created such illegality. This article, however, challenges this assumption by arguing that paper children immigration generated de facto adoptive relationships between paper children and their paper families, and that these adoptive relationships further sustained paper children's legal status as American citizens. Treating paper children as de facto adoptive members of their paper families, this article brings to the surface a fact that by emphasizing their illegality, the dominant discourse only acknowledged their hidden, original identities and deemed parent-child relationships based on blood ties as the only legitimate ones.