Periodic Reporting for period 1 - OriginStories (Chinese Heritage Tours and Adoptive Origin Stories: Towards a Transnational Adoptive Field)
Berichtszeitraum: 2016-09-01 bis 2018-08-31
The first objective is to distinguish impending complications of adoptive family life, specifically those related with the (dis)connections surrounding the ‘birth context’ and to advocate for better transnational family-making practices by taking on account all the parties involved.
The second objective is to work towards the construction of the new Transnational Adoptive Field model, intended to provide a comprehensive and cross-country comparative way to study transnational adoptive family-making processes.
Preliminary results show that it was usually the adoptive parents who proposed the “heritage tours” or even initiated birth parent searches to know the truth about their children’s past and help gather identity information. Most of them did so for fear of their children having been trafficked and to make up for a pressing sense of “loss” they feared their children might have in the future. Generally, adoptive parents felt an unease with Chinese culture and procedures and therefore sourced out the birth searchers in China to those who presented themselves as experts in the field."