Adopting a Genre.

• Author: Bow, Leslie
• Position: Books - Children's books dealing with transnational adoption - Essay

As an Asian American and a parent of young children, I could not help but notice a recent literary trend: the flood of children's books dealing with transnational adoption from Asia. They go by any number of cute titles: Made in China; We Adopted You, Benjamin Koo; Kimchi & Calamari; Just Add One Chinese Sister; I Don't Have Your Eyes . They seem to be among the few books in which Asian Americans appear as central characters. And along with them, their loving, white parents.

It's an interesting phenomenon, I think, for Asian Americans to be so politically and culturally invisible as a group, while at the same time so overrepresented in this genre, the literature of adoption.

That's understandable. In 2000, the U.S. Census reported that nearly half of all foreign-born adoptees were born in Asia. Of these, the largest proportion were from South Korea (48 percent), China (21 percent), India (8 percent), the Philippines (6 percent), and Vietnam (4 percent). As sociologist Sara K. Dorow has noted, this trend was due not only to the legal apparatus of international adoption, but to the cultural perceptions that prospective parents held about Asians. "The rescuability of Chinese children," she writes, "is intertwined with several dimensions of imagined racial flexibility"--for one, the belief in Asian resilience.

Many of these picture books recount a journey of arrival, an alternative where-babies-come-from story that grants the gift of origins. Books such as Waiting far May (2007), Our Baby from China: An Adoption Story (1997), Bringing Asha Home (2006), and Rebecca's Journey Home (2006) are as much for the parent as for the child. They are tender, triumphant, and--how to say it?--a tad precious ("This was your forever family").

T here's another narrative that emerges across these texts: They offer coping strategies for Asian children encountering racism in the United States. The stories end in relatively the same way: The family offers reassurance against the stigma of physical difference. Who could fault these books for their uplifting messages: that love overcomes ignorance and that belonging is about more than how you look?

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"When they think I'm not looking, some people stare at my mom and dad and me," states Ada, a.k.a. Wang Bin, the protagonist of Three Names of Me , by Mary Cummings and Lin Wang (2006). "They stare because our skin and hair and eyes don't match, and they wonder why that is. I do not like to be stared...