“Outcasts to Princesses”: U.S. White Adoptive Parents’ Fairy-tale Narratives of Adoption from China

Abstract

“Outcasts to Princesses”: U.S. White Adoptive Parents’ Fairy-tale Narratives of Adoption from China Yanli Luo (bio) In June 2016, the adoption hearing of Danielle, a five-year-old girl from Michigan, drew wide attention in a number of media outlets, including NBC News, Today.com, and huffpost.com. As the court judge Patricia Garner dressed as Snow White to finalize her adoption and eight case workers showed up as Disney prince and princesses to celebrate it, most media articles use terms related to Disney fairy tales, such as “magical” or “happily ever after.” Commenting on these reports, Liz Latty, a writer and adoptee, laments that the “all-too-familiar storyline linking adoption and fairy tales” causes much “anxiety and exhaustion” in her own body, since it was in the same celebratory fairy-tale tone that her adoptive parents used to tell her adoption story “time and time again,” even in her thirties. To her, narratives like these brush off the complex reality behind adoption and “den[y] adoptees the acknowledgement and support necessary to process their experiences across a lifetime” (“What We Lost”). Much earlier, a Korean adoptee Nikki raised another issue about adoption narratives in the United States. On August 29, 2012, she posted a blog article criticizing that the U.S. adoption narrative “is so completely dominated by adoptive parents as a group—THEIR experiences, THEIR emotions, what THEY believe to be ‘the truth’ about their children’s adoptions.” “It’s not that an adoptive parent cannot have plenty of good, worthwhile things to say about adoption,” she asserts, “[b]ut there is SO MUCH of THIS out there . . . And that is especially problematic when you have white people clearly looking to take the easy way out and not think about race too hard” (“Why White Adoptive Parents,” emphasis in the original). The issues Latty and Nikki have raised find a unique combination in narratives about adoption from China. Starting from the early 1990s, tens [End Page 103] of thousands of Chinese, predominantly female, children have been adopted into American, primarily white middle-class, families. Since then, China has remained the major sending country of adoptees, and the United States has been the largest receiving country. Till 2019, about 92,202 Chinese children have been adopted into the United States.1 As white parents embracing Chinese babies became an prominent phenomenon in the United States, adoption from China has also become a focal point in U.S. adoption narratives, most of which are constructed by white adoptive parents.2 Among the 75 narratives of adoption from China listed on amazon.com in April 2017, 56 are written by white American adoptive parents, including 49 by mothers.3 U.S. white adoptive parents have thus become powerful producers of adoption narratives. In these narratives, the fairy-tale genre plays out prominently: a long list of picture books about adoption from China—including Buffi A. Young’s Miracle in the Land of Wu, Mick Verga’s The Lonely Little Horse: A Chinese Adoption Story, Catherine Conley’s Coming Home: The Journey from Heaven to Your Adopted Home, and Grace Lin’s The Red Thread: An Adoption Fairy Tale—are written in the genre of fairy tales. This article analyzes two picture books created by white adoptive parents, Rose Lewis’s I Love You Like Crazy Cakes (2000, illustrated by Jane Dyer) and Stephan Molnar-Fenton’s An Mei’s Strange and Wondrous Journey (1998, illustrated by Vivienne Flesher), both written in the fairy-tale genre. Lewis’s book portrays a single, white, middle-class woman who adopts a girl from China and provides an abundant life for her in the United States. Molnar-Fenton’s narrative features a white, middle-class adoptive father who adopts another Chinese girl and brings her back to join his wife in the United States. Compared with fairy-tale narratives mentioned above, the two books are more influential ones written by white adoptive parents. The author of The Red Thread, Grace Lin, is not an adoptive parent, and the other narratives are self-published, thus having limited circulation. The two books, however, are illustrated by established professional illustrators, published by well-known commercial...