Choice matters

Abstract

In transracial adoption research, the practice of using books to help international adoptees connect to their birth cultures was interpreted by adult adoptees as their parents’ reluctance to engage in practices that demand more integration of the parents and the families into adoptees’ birth cultures (McGinnis, Smith, Ryan, & Howard, 2009). Yet, reading books about the adoptees’ birth cultures was the most frequent activity adoptive parents performed to establish birth culture ties for their adoptees (Vonk, Lee, & Crolley-Simic, 2010). Thus, this study aimed to understand why reading books received distinct evaluations from adoptive parents and adoptees.

Drawing on Bakhtin’s dialogical theory (1981; 1984; 1986), this qualitative case study investigated European American parents’ rationales for selecting picturebooks about China and Chinese culture to read with their adoptees, given the fact that one third of the international adoptees in the U.S. are from China (U.S. Department of State, 2012). Through using picturebooks with four European American families, I examined parent’s book selection process, their book selection rationales, and issues surrounding that selection. Primary data sources included initial and final interviews with parents and open-ended book selection interviews with parents. The data sources were analyzed using inductive and deductive thematic analysis.

These parents’ book selection rationales demonstrated that they tended to choose books that have a positive representation of China with universal themes that they could relate to and that aligned with their interests and personal lives. Moreover, parents’ inclination to emphasize connections, family bonding, and universal themes all indicated that parents were more willing to reside in their comfort zones than visibly establish Chineseness in their families. The implications of the study are that European American parents with Chinese adoptees need to engage more with Chinese culture in books and be willing to challenge their own cultural identities in order to allow those books to play a larger and more effective role in their efforts to foster birth culture connections for their adoptees.