Aporetic origins: Narratives of transnational, transracial Asian adoption in a North American context

This dissertation examines literary representations of transnational, transracial Asian adoption in contemporary American and Canadian literature. This study illustrates the ways that recent Asian adoption literature revises the adoptee archetype established in earlier literary and cultural narratives. The narratives discussed in this thesis utilize literary and stylistic devices to elaborate upon some of the important themes and motifs related to Asian adoption. By highlighting elements of style, structure, and form, this thesis considers the turn in transnational, transracial Asian adoption literature away from direct, factual narration toward more literary experimentations and creative uses of stylistic devices. Further, Aporetic Origins illustrates the ways that transnational, transracial Asian adoptee identities (and the discourses about those identities) share central, constitutive tropes with literary scholarship: emphases on fiction, narrative, and characterization.;Chapter One addresses the various narratives that make up transnational, transracial Asian adoptees' identities. Adopted figures are frequently asked to negotiate and make sense of the multiple origins narratives offered to them. Given the contradictory nature that these narratives often take, notions of "origins" are rendered aporetic, irresolvable, and unknowable. Chapter Two explores some of the trends and patterns connected to transnational, transracial Asian adoption. Early "pi(e)ty" stories, those which conflate adoptive parents' and societies' sympathies for orphaned children with personal needs to self-narrate their own philanthropic exceptionalism, are challenged by adoptee-centred "quest" stories that confront the pi(e)ty narratives' assumptions about and characterizations of adoptee figures. Chapter Three examines two memoirs authored by Korean adoptees as evidence of the ways that narratives complicate and fragment adoptee figures' understandings of origins and self. The adoptee authors of The Language of Blood and Trail of Crumbs use hybridized forms and fictionalization in their memoirs as a way of negotiating their aporetic origins.;Chapter Four compares two novels that locate transnational, transracial Asian adoptee characters within the Chinese diaspora—positions that are not always automatically assumed. The adoptee figures in When Fox is a Thousand and The Love Wife parallel other characters that represent the Chinese diaspora and who symbolize strong connections to those ancestral and cultural pasts. Chapter Five investigates Asian adoptive parents in A Gesture Life and Digging to America and their goals of assimilating their adoptive children in ways that, perhaps, are unavailable to them. The adoptive parent characters in these novels arguably adopt from Asia as a way to "Claim America" for themselves. Chapter Six returns to the idea of narrative and form by addressing the significances of formula fiction in Leave it to Me and Country of Origin. The authors of these novels represent transnational, transracial Asian adoption via the tropes and conventions of crime fiction, but refrain from positing adoption literature as formulaic or archetypal. This dissertation concludes with a consideration of the cultural narrative of colour-blindness as it continues to prevail (despite undermining evidence) in the twenty-first century. "Selective colour-blindness" exemplifies the direction transnational, transracial Asian adoption narratives are headed, and again reiterates the paradoxical and highly narrated discourses surrounding adoptee subjectivity.