CHILDREN & SOCIETY VOLUME 29, (2015) pp.

626–636
DOI:10.1111/chso.12102

Not Ethnic Enough: The Cultural Identity

Imperative in International Adoptions from
China to Canada
Xiaobei Chen
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Ottawa ON, Canada

Based on a qualitative research of adoptions from China to Canada, this article analyses changing atti-
tudes and approaches to racial and ethnic differences in adoptive kinship in the last few decades.
I argue that culture celebration labour over children adopted from China is shaped by the contemporary
Canadian culturalist ethos, the Orientalist imagination, and the Asian model minority stereotype. The
cultural identity imperative, a core component of multicultural governmentality, perceives culture as an
object, demands non-white Canadian subjects with rooted belongings, and operates in ways that sanc-
tions and incorporates, as it depoliticises and subordinates. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and
National Children’s Bureau

Keywords: adoption, childhood, children’s culture, racism, multicultural governmentality.

Introduction
‘I must admit, they [late-teen adoptees from China] do not have a strong Chinese identity’.
Shaking her head gently, an adoptive mother told me this not long ago, with resignation
and some regrets. Currently strong and healthy ethnic and racial1 identities have been
stressed as essential to successful interracial adoptions. Concerns with racial and ethnic iden-
tities in (non-white) adoptees have become the norm in government guidelines, training
manuals, home study by social workers, parents’ promises to the Chinese government, the
mainstay of post-adoption programmes and studies of adoption outcomes. Does the weak
identification observed above indicate parents’ failure? Does it suggest that the adoptees are
not doing well? My answer in each instance would be a ‘no’, as I believe a strong ethnic and
racial identity, on its own, should neither be the challenge nor the answer for interracial
adoptive families in Canada, and North America in general. The pre-occupation with strong
ethnic and racial identities misses and masks the contradictions engendered by the racialised
structuring of adoptions, a characteristic of international and interracial adoption that has
been the focus of analysis for an increasing number of scholars.2 The heightened attention
to cultural identity ought to be understood in the context of the hegemonic, depoliticised
concern with essentialised cultural identities for the racialised non-white populations, some-
thing that I have termed the cultural identity imperative.
In this article, I locate the cultural identity imperative within multicultural governmentali-
ty.3 Multicultural governmentality refers to considered, rational activities that discursively
shape mental, emotional, social and political conduct of racialised multicultural others, as
well as the conduct of unmarked, apparently culture-less dominant groups. As a governmen-
tality, official multiculturalism is analysed for its mobilisation of a range of knowledges, axi-
oms, categories, strategies and techniques to achieve particular nation-building ends. In this
article, I question the cultural identity imperative on the site of adoption, for its historical
particularity, its knowledge/power nexus, and effects on subject formation.4

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 Not Ethnic Enough 627

The analyses presented are based on an interpretivist, qualitative study of adoptions of

children born in China by Canadians who are typically white, upper-middle class profession-
als. Data were mainly collected through 73 semi-structured interviews with adoption practi-
tioners (9), adoptive parents (12), government officials in Canada (8) and China (3), Chinese-
Canadians (10) and Chinese nationals in China (31). Participants were recruited through
direct contact and snowball sampling. Additional primary sources include participant obser-
vations of information sessions and culture celebration events, publications on adoptions
from China, both in print and online (websites for governments, adoption agencies, Families
with Children from China support groups and Chinese-language websites) and numerous
chance conversations. In 1995, I came from China to Canada as an international student and
decided to make Canada my home shortly after my arrival. As a relatively new immigrant
struggling to make sense of my positionings and belongings while doing the field work
(2001–2011), I sometimes found myself in situations where I was bluntly reminded that, to a
Canadian interviewee, I was ‘the Chinese woman’;5 or that, as implied by a Chinese official, I
was no longer a real Chinese because I lost the locals’ fluency in Mandarin. These experi-
ences and similar ones in daily life have sensitised me to the landscape of ambivalent, non-
autonomous belongings that adopted children must confront.
The aim of this article is to identify widely accepted truths that have made adoptive
parents’ and children’s perceptions of and practices with ‘cultural things’ a central
normative concern in Canada. In what follows, I will start with situating changes in cul-
ture-related adoption practice norms in discourses external to the field of adoption. The
subsequent section examines how culture and identity are understood and acted upon in
international adoption circles. Two arguments are drawn: first, I argue that the intense cul-
tural heritage celebration labour over children adopted from China is shaped by the con-
temporary culturalist ethos, the Orientalist imagination of Chinese culture, and the Asian
model minority mythologising of Asian cultural traits. It may produce some affirmative
West-centric recognition of ‘Chinese culture’, but it also retrenches stereotypes. Rather than
worrying about whether adopted children have strong or weak ethnic and racial identities,
whether they have kept enough culture, it would be far more helpful, but also harder, for
adoptive parents and the children to learn about the public histories of Asian immigration,
the existence of racism, including the insistence on defining Chinese Canadians as the rac-
ialised cultural Other. Second, I argue that the cultural identity imperative, as a core com-
ponent of multicultural governmentality, perceives culture as an object, demands rooted
belongings and operates in ways that sanctions and incorporates, as it depoliticises and
subordinates.
Cultures of recognition and multicultural governmentality
In North America, attitudes and approaches to racial and ethnic differences in adoptive kin-
ship have been shaped by shifts in broader politics of difference and cultures of recognition.
In the 1970s, practice norm in adoption started to change to favouring keeping adoptees’
heritage culture (Volkman, 2005). A number of factors have been examined for their influ-
ence on the change: the rise of interracial adoptions since the 1970s and the ensuing contro-
versies, from the late 1980s on Korean adult adoptees’ critique of colourblind interracial
adoptions, and the less often noted international legal norm of recognising a child’s rights to
culture in the 1980s and 1990s.
The premise of this article is that we need to historicize these factors themselves in the
context of emerging concerns with identity and difference on the left in the 1960s and
1970s and the rise of co-opting state multiculturalism since. Such an exercise is necessary if
we are to have a reflective understanding of the apparently axiomatic status of cultural

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628 Xiaobei Chen

identity, to clarify what social and political concerns motivated the interest in identity and
difference, and to avoid falling in the trap of seeing a healthy and robust racial and ethnic
identity as the true criterion for success and justice in international adoptions.
North American notions of racial and ethnic identity have their particular histories. For
much of the first half of the 20th century, from the perspective of non-whites, the problem
was the whites’ insistence on the distinction between the ‘universal we’ and ‘racial/ethnic
others’ and making such a distinction matter politically, economically and socially. Thus,
many members of ethnic minority groups fought to be accepted ‘just like everyone else’
(Nicholson, 1996, p. 4). Partly influenced by the anti-colonial movements around the world,
the politics of differences began to shift with ‘new cultural understandings of oppression’ in
the late 1960s and 1970s (Nicholson, 1996, p. 7), with ‘norms of integration and assimilation
[giving] way to concerns with identity and difference on the left’ (Brown, 2006, p. 2). Nichol-
son outlined two sets of analyses underpinning this shift. The first grappled with the disillu-
sioning elusiveness of attaining equality by simply insisting sameness. The second was the
emergence of an understanding of the social and psychological dimensions of oppression.
Identity politics emerged as a central issue, foregrounding exploration of minority identities
and fostering of pride in minority cultures in order to promote the psychological well being
of the oppressed people, to escape the self contempt (Chin, 1974).
While the language of culture, identity and pride found its way to Canadian state multi-
culturalism in the 1970s and 1980s, what minority cultures constitute and for what purposes
they should be fostered, are contested questions. Li (2007) has described how activists who
politically identified as Asian Canadians in the 1970s created community-based, avant-garde
cultural productions for the interconnected purposes of reclaiming suppressed ethnicity,
exploring an Asian Canadian identity, and intervening in the marginalising nation building
process. Canadian state multiculturalism, on the other hand, favours traditional and non-
political art forms, and has been criticised by Asian Canadian cultural activists as ‘limiting
people’s identity’ (Yung, cited in Li, 2007, p. 246).
In my research on adoptions from China and culture celebration, I approach Canadian
multiculturalism as a particular mode of governmentality, focusing on its cultural identity
imperative. Multicultural governmentality foregrounds ethnicity as the primary identification
(Mahtani, 2002; Shome, 2012). That minority individuals’ strong ethnic identity is essential
for their emotional well-being has been a topic galvanising voluminous social scientific
research and shaping policy since the 1970s. Multiculturalism as state policy can be said to
presume and produce a normative non-white subject that yearns for culture maintenance
(but not social change) and participates in society as ethnicized, complementary citizens.
This, I argue, is an ideological context that shape adoption practice shift to emphasizing the
desire for culture maintenance and ethnicized citizenship.
The cultural identity imperative in international adoptions from China
Culture figures prominently in current Western conceptions about the difficulties that would
arise for adopted children, particularly non-white adopted children (Jacobson, 2008). Specifi-
cally, culture is considered an object of a child’s inevitable loss as a result of crossing famil-
ial bounds and national borders; it is also an object for the adoptive family to strive to
restore, if only partially. International and national laws concerning international adoption
holds the state of origin, not the state of destination, responsible for ‘giving due consider-
ation to the child’s upbringing and to his or her ethnic, religious and cultural background’
(Hague Convention, Article 16 (1) b). The Hague convention contains no specific articles on
post-adoption care. In other words, international adoption law does not supply a mandate
for culture maintenance.

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In the case of adoptions from China where ‘culture keeping’ labour is among the most
intense (Dorow, 2006; Jacobson, 2008), the state of origin does not supply a mandate for
culture maintenance, either. It is often simply assumed, in a West-centric way, that China
expects culture keeping practices that are typical of North-American celebration of multicul-
turalism. My research reveals that there is a remarkable downplaying on the part of the Chi-
nese about the adopted children’s development of a Chinese-oriented identity. When asked
how they explain their expectations regarding Chinese culture, Lao Ning, an official of the
then China Centre of Adoption Affairs, replied:
We do not especially mention these. These are often raised by adoptive parents and we respond
positively. When they visited, or when we visited, looking at the specific circumstances, listening
to what they said, we would say: ‘This is good,’ to give affirmation and support. Of course we
do not put forward requests that you must have children learning Chinese, you must celebrate
Chinese New Year, you must learn about some Chinese traditions. . . That concerns their freedom
and rights.6
However, there are expectations in China to see the children being loved and enjoying a
middle class life. The same attitude was echoed by the overwhelming majority of Chinese
and Chinese-Canadians interviewees. While they are positive about adoptive families’ interest
in Chinese culture, they do not prioritise it. Mei, a Chinese woman in her 30s explained:
It’s not that if the child came from China then she must know China. . . . if she thinks a lot and sees
a lot, her thought would be broadened, she might not know Chinese culture, maybe she would like
other countries better. This is not necessary; it’s not something to force and to demand. If she feels
that she is a Chinese person, that she must know Chinese culture then she may come back, then she
must learn. I think they all have happy lives, not knowing is just not knowing, what’s wrong with
that?
This perspective stands out when compared to non-Chinese adoption situations. I shall
briefly note here this needs to be understood in connection with China’s socio-economic and
cultural trajectory in recent history (Chen, 2008). For the purpose here, the point is that nev-
ertheless it was common for facilitators to advise adoption applicants to promise to honour
their children’s birth culture in their letters to China. This specific practice and the general
approach of culture celebration, in my view, need to be situated in the ideological context of
multicultural governmentality, among others. In what follows, I discuss three modes of nor-
mative conduct in adoptive parents as directed by the culture maintenance norm.
Anxiety about cultural differences
Among professional experts on international adoption, ‘to retain a link with their cultural
and racial origins’ (Westhues and Cohen, 1998, p. 51) is widely taken as essential for non-
white adopted children, even though some studies have reported that no significant relations
between self-confidence and ethnic, racial identification have been found (Bagley and
Young, 1980; Simon and Alstein, 1992; Westhues and Cohen, 1998). Parents are taught, and
teach each other, the importance of ethnic identity, positive reception of adopted children’s
cultural heritage and strategies of culture keeping (Jacobson, 2008). The professional dis-
course is focused on persuading parents about the need for culture maintenance in response
to: (i) real or imagined (in the case of China) demands for recognition from countries of ori-
gin and (ii) children’s perceived psychological needs. Parents are coached in how to attend
to their adopted children’s different cultures and racial backgrounds, how to feel about these
differences, what are the things to worry about, and what to do with them.
The parents interviewed all point to certain worries, which are widely understood,
accepted, if not always acted upon. One is the worry about discrimination against the

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adopted child and the understanding that a proud identification with one’s ethnic origin and
race is a key coping mechanism. Another is to worry about the adopted child’s potential
identity crisis and conflict with parents in teenage years and the need for open and frank
discussions that acknowledge the child’s ethnic and racial difference. Keith, an adoptive
father recalled
I thought they [training workshops] gave some good advice about . . . the kinds of things you’re
going to experience as a multiracial family. And the other part that I thought was pretty good was
just talking about . . . when you’ve adopted somebody especially from another country and another
culture, you know there’s going to be times in their life when they’re going to have identity issues
. . . they tried to explain . . . here’s what you can do to give them as much as you can. One of the
things they said is to keep their name or as much as you can because that’s one thing that they
brought with them. I don’t know if we had already decided but we thought . . . well that makes
sense.
A will to culture maintenance
A will to culture maintenance is perceived as a solution to the problems that parents have
been trained to focus on. All parents interviewed expressed their wish to educate children
about Chinese culture. Culture maintenance primarily involves learning the Chinese lan-
guage, consumption of food, artefacts, books and travels. Despite the expressed interest in
Chinese culture, all the parents I spoke to were keenly aware of their inability in giving chil-
dren ‘a more complete understanding of culture’. Frances, an adoptive mother, registered a
sense of pragmatic resignation: ‘you don’t get the essence of the festival because you were
not raised that way’.
An analysis of parents’ narratives reveals a spectrum of self-consciously qualified expecta-
tions ranging from ‘cultural competence’, ‘connection’, to mere ‘exposure’. One was ambi-
tious and wished that their child would acquire sufficient cultural competence so that she
could one day ‘speak and comprehend Chinese in a store’. Another described her goal in
terms of ‘connections’, aiming to bring her daughter closer to her ethnic background, to help
her realise ‘the cultural little things . . . have a particular connection to her’. Still some define
their objective at an even more modest level, as ‘exposing her to what I can of Chinese
culture’.
The research reveals that parents are generally reflective and open about the superficiality
of what they do with regard to culture keeping. They do it because the consistent, even uni-
fied message to them is that culture keeping is the way to mitigate, if not remove, possible
problems that their children likely will experience as they leave childhood behind, the same
as official multiculturalism presumes.
Affinity towards Chinese culture
The research shows that there is a strong sense that parents’ legitimate feelings towards the
Chinese culture are those of affinity, fascination, comfort and even love. Affective relations
with the Chinese culture were often cited as one of the reasons for choosing China, beside
practical considerations. Bess, an adoptive mom, explained:
I think we looked at China right away simply because it was a country that we both have an affinity
for and would feel very comfortable and were very excited at the thought of have a little Chinese
baby.
She added:
I’ve always had kind of a crush on China. I don’t know why . . . when we were younger and going
travelling and things like that we [the interviewee and a girlfriend] both wanted to go to China.

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A couple shared their romanticised view that Chinese women are beautiful — ‘we were
very excited at the thought of having a little Chinese baby . . . I just thought she would be
so beautiful and really it’s very simple’. Some noted approvingly that ‘the Chinese commu-
nity here is highly respected’, pointing to the Chinese’s ‘sense of responsibility to their own
people’, and their ‘aspiration for education and family and all of that’.
Parents are guided by professionals to cultivate and express normative emotions —
affinity, empathy, comfort — towards the culture in which their adopted children were
born. The passion of positive attachments to the birth culture is aimed at aligning
parents with their adopted children to address worries that good adoptive parents with
non-white children are educated to feel. The objects of such affinity are often fantasies
about China, and there are ‘a lot of fantasies . . . about [for example] how Chinese ladies
should be acting like and that type of thing’, as Deborah, a Chinese-Canadian experi-
enced with international adoption, observed. The Asian model minority stereotype
invented in the mid-1960s — ‘well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, politically nonthreaten-
ing and definitely not-black’ (Wu, 2014) also provides resources for expressing respect to
birth culture.
The limits of cultural identity imperative
In this section, I discuss the limits of culture maintenance norm, cultural identity imperative
and multicultural governmentality in general, in three interconnected aspects.
Depoliticisation
Power has been at the centre of recognition demands from marginalised groups since the late
1960s and 1970s. These demands move beyond the juxtaposition of recognition versus non-
recognition of difference and instead have emphasised power dynamics in actual practices of
recognition. In Tanaka’s words, it is the problem of cultural self-determination (cited in Li,
2007). This focus on questioning power relations in recognition practices, however, is absent
in multicultural governance deliberations on what to do with minority cultures. The typical
liberal multiculturalist argument for greater sensitivities to and accommodation of cultural
difference fails to question the dominance of socially privileged groups and how issues of
desire and power are involved in the process of recognition, the paradox of multiculturalism
depoliticising as it protecting (Brown, 2006, p. 10), which is manifested on the site of adop-
tion.
Multicultural governmentality and its norm of recognising cultural heritage conceal
the politics around who gets to do the recognition, what gets recognised and to what end.
Certain things get defined as actionable (complementary to the white centre) culture ele-
ments, as objects of normative feelings of affinity, but not others. The ‘traditional gowns’,
dim sum, festive celebrations, house decoration fall into the acceptable category, but not so
much politicised cultural expressions about Asian Canadian experiences as the racialised
Other in Canada (Li, 2007, for example). The point is there are power relations in recognition
practices outside and within the international adoption communities but there is little if any
critical reflection on such political dynamics. As part of the majoritarian group, adoptive
parents typically have a blind spot for power dynamics and white privilege (Little, 2011) in
this mode of culture celebration, which does not help parents and their children to a political
understanding of the uneven, hierarchical distribution of advantages and belongings.
Chinese Bites7
Various critics have analysed cultural racism (Balibar, 1991) and ethnic absolutism (Gilroy,
1993). Examining the international legal instruments that enshrine an individual’s right

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632 Xiaobei Chen

to culture, Cowan and others (2001, p. 8) argue that culture is understood as ‘a unified
arrangement of practices and meanings’, a thing that one is supposedly entitled to have and
enjoy. It is also ‘easily distinguishable and opposable to each other’, even though ‘after cen-
turies of imperialism, and in the current period of high-velocity cultural globalisation, this is
a fantasy’ (Ibid, p. 18). The Chinese ‘traditional gown’, known as ‘Qi Pao’ in China, is a case
in point. Though considered a symbol representing Chinese tradition both inside China and
outside, it is a fashion innovation in the 1930s with Western influence (Finnane, 1996). No
less importantly, what is taken as Chinese culture in Canada is a product of migration, adap-
tation and survival strategies in often adverse conditions. Rather than rooted in some myste-
rious land over there,8 the culture is ‘routed’ (Gilroy, 1993) across the Pacific, along the
railway and through the once (and sometimes still) necessitated ghetto of Chinatown. For
example, dim sum has its origin in a style of eating in Southern coastal China; it was
brought to North America and adapted by earlier waves of immigrants from Southern China.
And yet under the tutelage of multiculturalism governmentality, Chinese culture is seen as
something that is self-evident.
Everyday practices of acknowledging and celebrating cultural heritage tend to take forms
of consuming ‘Chinese bites’ (both figuratively and literally), collecting and displaying Chi-
nese objects, and performing ‘Chineseness’ on specific occasions, while missing the stories
they could tell about locality, migrancy, creativity, hybridity and survival. Chinese culture
becomes objectified as a constant package of practices and meanings transportable across
time, national borders, regional boundaries and class hierarchies, detached from histories. As
they are practiced now, heritage celebration activities maintain a romantic essentialism
about Chinese particularity. Such practices may produce some affirmative recognition of
Chinese culture as seen from the Western eye, but they also buttress Orientalist stereotypes
about China. It reproduces an affirmative essentialism that maintains Orientalist understand-
ings of ethnic particularity by denying the complex cultural reality (Gilroy, 2000; Handa,
2003).
Rooted subjects or routed subjects
The third direction of criticism concerns the impact of the cultural identity imperative on
subject formation. Here I draw on authors such as Appiah (1992), Cowan and others (2001),
and Warnke (2007), who, while sympathetic with political movements and solidarity on the
basis of racial or ethnic identities and seeing them as historically and strategically necessary
given the reality of racism in society, question the constraining impact of identity politics.
Others have also noted the ambivalent result of recognition politics that naturalises identity
while reducing stigma (Brown, 2006; Comaroff, 1997; Nicholson, 1996). Under the cultural
identity imperative, culture is perceived as a thing that an already-formed actor — the par-
ent — is duty-bound to ‘love’ and ‘respect’, and another already-formed actor — the child
— is entitled to ‘have’ and ‘enjoy’. What is left unexamined is the role of culture, rendered
as an instrument for conducting our conduct according to a culturalist logic, in constituting
varied and hierarchically positioned subjects and the nation itself (Ang and Stratton, 1994;
Cowan and others, 2001).
The culture affinity discourse positions the normative adoptive parent as a party of gen-
erosity in accepting and even loving other cultures and cultural others, and apparently
outside the reproduction and circulation of dominant perceptions of other cultures. Posses-
sion of diversity and affinity towards diversity emerge to denote a non-racist positioning.
Through pre-adoption training and post-adoption support undertaken by professionals
disseminating knowledge about racism and coping techniques, racism is rendered as oth-
ers’ problem, often in the form of in-your-face racist insults from the unworldly and

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 Not Ethnic Enough 633

unsophisticated individuals. The positioning of being outside and above racism is produced
through such processes.
In turn, parents are expected to cultivate strong ethnic and racial identities in their chil-
dren. These children are tutored to define themselves as fundamentally ethnicized. Such
ethnicization is typically couched in a reiteration of the ‘model minority’ attributes of hard-
work and respect, and the implied understanding of Asian-Canadians as not really having
any problems in Canadian society. It seems that professionals’ and parents’ efforts often do
not lead to hoped-for results. As noted earlier, studies seeking to measure the strength of
ethnic and racial identification, mostly among teenagers, repeatedly report ‘disappointing’
results and are at loss in reconciling relatively high self-esteem scores and low ethnic and
racial identification scores. The lack of ethnic and racial identification among adoptive chil-
dren perhaps could be understood in light of assimilation pressure and children’s resistance
against an imposed, normative rooted identity that constrains in a racist society rather than
empowers.
Instead of adhering to the cultural identity imperative or being colorblind as the earlier
generation of adoption parents, I would argue that adopted children from China need to
learn about the politics of being the routed, rather than rooted, Chinese-Canadian subject
(Gilroy, 1993; for a similar argument, see Patton, 2000). They are connected to the larger
Chinese immigration history (Eng, 2003) through shared routes. Instead of privileging con-
sumption and possession of cultural (root) ‘bites’, adoptive parents and their children would
benefit from exploring the predicament of being a Chinese-Canadian and the elusiveness of
racial and ethnic options to Chinese-Canadians (Stanley, 2011; see also Tuan, 1998 for the
American parallel). First of all, Chinese-Canadians do not have full autonomy in defining
who they are and that they will have to contend with pressures exerting on them because of
their non-white bodies. Second, they are both valued and denigrated for what is assumed to
be different about them, they have both suffered and benefited from assumptions about their
exoticness. Third, they also need to learn that being defined as non-white means a position
of subordination. They will always be tied to a land far away and have to explain their
belonging even though they have spent almost all their life in Canada. They, along with
other Asian Canadians, still have to struggle to assert themselves as part of the Canadian
social body (Yu, 2001).
Conclusion
Children are stakes in historical and contemporary contestations over definitions of cultural
identity, nation and transnationality (Stephens, 1995). This, when intersecting with the dis-
course of the child’s best interests, are precisely why international and interracial adoption
remains a controversial topic (Dubinsky, 2010). This paper argues that the heightened atten-
tion to cultural identity ought to be understood in connection with hegemonic, depoliticised
preoccupation with essentialised cultural identities for the racialised non-white populations
in Canada, and North America in general. As suggested by Asian Americans’ (Tuan, 1998)
and Asian Canadians’ experience (Stanley, 2011), it is neither feasible nor transparently
desirable to raise children from China in an ‘authentic’ Chinese way. A strong ethnic and
racial identity should not, by itself, be the focus of adoptive families. To be sure, adoptive
parents who take culture celebration seriously at least have taken a step forward in acknowl-
edging that their non-white children need support in a racist society. However, a depoliti-
cised version of cultural pride and ethnic identification, detached from a critical
understanding of Asian Canadians’ experiences in Canada, does not equip children to face
the predicament of belongings. As Shin (2007) counselled, culture celebration should not
be at the expense of overlooking racism. The recent Bank of Canada’s new banknotes

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634 Xiaobei Chen

controversy serves as a blunt reminder: news broke out in August 2012 that the Bank of
Canada decided to change the ‘too ethnic’ face of a female scientist with Asian features on a
new banknote to a ‘neutral’ and inevitably white one. The decision was forcefully criticised
by individuals and organisations such as the Chinese Canadian National Council but
remained in place (Canada Broadcasting Corporation, 2012). While professionals and parents
may worry that the adopted children are not ethnic enough for their own good, these chil-
dren, along with other non-white people, are also faced with exclusions for being ‘too eth-
nic’. It is crucial to understand and challenge this bind thrust to Asian-Canadian minorities,
the persisting stigma of foreignness, and their consequent constraints. Ethnic exploration
would help adopted children, if, for example, tasting a rice dish would sometimes be an
opening to learning about these issues.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the Killam Trust, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada for providing funds for the research that this article is based on. Different
parts of analyses in this article had been presented at the 2008 Berkshire conference, Minne-
apolis, U.S., the 2009 Canadian Law and Society Association Conference, Ottawa, the 2010
Joint World Conference on Social Work and Social Development, Hong Kong SAR, PRC, and
the 2011 Childhoods Conference, Lethbridge. My sincere thanks to Mariana Valverde, Daiva
Stasiulis and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions for strengthening the
article.

Notes
1 Race is understood not as a biological fact, but as an ideological construct with material
and non-material consequences.
2 These include: Patton, 2000; Fogg-Davis, 2002; Dorow, 2006; Trenka and others, 2006;
Jacobson, 2008; Marre and Briggs, 2009; Gailey, 2010; Yngvesson, 2010; Tuan and Shiao,
2011; Briggs, 2012 and Choy, 2013.
3 A number of authors have contributed analyses inspired by the Foucauldian notion of gov-
ernmentality (Foucault, 1991), see Ong, 1996; Ang, 2010; Beauregard, 2008; Brown, 2006;
Hage, 1998; and Shome, 2012.
4 These emphases are what differentiate my analysis from other adoption scholars’ work, for
example Jacobson’s (2008) culture keeping, Tuan’s ethnic expectation (1998), and Tuan and
Shiao’s (2011) ethnic exploration.
5 During one interview by telephone, the father answered the phone and asked for the
mother to come to speak to me. I could hear him saying: ‘The Chinese woman is on the
phone’. Hearing myself being identified as ‘the Chinese woman’, rather than ‘the researcher
from the University of Alberta’ for example, I felt frustrated and upset. It was an incident
that revealed the over-determination of who I am and what I do by my ethnicity, exactly the
kind of logic and practice that I am critical of in normative international adoptive parenting.
6 When I asked Canadian parents and facilitators what the practice of promising culture
maintenance was based on and how it started, I could not get a clear answer. It seemed that
it was assumed the Chinese government wished to see such a promise and over time, through
word of mouth, this has become a standard practice.
7 This echoes Anagnost’s (2000, p. 413) critique of ‘cultural bites’.
8 ‘Root’ is also a notion situationally employed by the Chinese state and some overseas Chi-
nese. For a critical understanding of the ideology of root, see Louie, 2004.

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 Not Ethnic Enough 635

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Correspondence to: Xiaobei Chen, PhD, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, 1125 Colo-
nel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1S 1P3, Tel: 613-520-2600 ext. 3990; Fax: 613-520-4062.
E-mail: xiaobei_chen@carleton.ca

Accepted for publication 16 September 2014

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and National Children’s Bureau CHILDREN & SOCIETY Vol. 29, 626–636 (2015)