Global Families

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.

While Hollywood has made it famous, people have been adopting children from other countries since the end of World War II . . . In this book Catherine Choy brings to life the history of this unique way to create a family . . . This book will help students get a sense of where we have come from., Global Families is a rare find: a scholarly work that reads like a novel. The framing story, the little-known but influential work of International Social Service, is fascinating in its own right. What felt even more important was how, without compromising on research or analysis, Global Families makes this history matter on a deeply human level. It includes personal stories of the people who were involved in shaping Asian international adoption in the U.S., as well as those affected by it. It raises hard questions about the current practice and culture of international adoption. And it confronts us with the emerging voices of people adopted through this system, who are now old enough to speak for themselves. Im hoping Catherine Ceniza Choy will continue to look at adoption through this lens, so we can all see more clearly., Global Familiesis transformative in the strongest sense: it challenges the histories that we conventionally tell about Asian international adoption. Whether by uncovering the crucial role of mixed-race babies in the origins of Asian international adoption or recovering the story of baseball pitcher-adoptive father Jim Bouton, Catherine CenizaChoycrafts a unique history focusing on organizational practices and non-state actors. Using International Social Services records as a point of departure, this book provides crucial historical frameworks for any reader interested in adoption, race, migration, and 20thcentury international relations., Concise, provocative, and utilizing expert resources, Choy's work greatly assists in the larger discussion of, and questions concerning, global family making and the points of view of the adoptees often left out of this discussion., Her book's strength is in the stories themselves, which Choy narrates with skill and sympathy. . . . A useful corrective to one-dimensional, romantic portraits of adoption that saturate popular culture today. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.

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.