Michele Carlson

Michele Carlson
Home Is Where We Stand: Transnational Adoptees and Racial Melancholia
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All of my life I have been haunted by phantom memories I cannot remember clearly. Sometimes if I try hard enough they begin to come back to me, but not in my photo albums or in the faces of the families that surround me. Not in the deep beats of the music always pumping into my ears or in the classes I take to help me find them. I do feel bad for losing them, but I know they are there, drifting and floating, following their own trails painted by forgotten children. People have tried to tell me where I could find those memories. I thought about following them to lands spanning war-torn countries and the fantasies of Western heroes. Still I could never really see those memories the way I felt I should. The negotiation of fixed cultural memory and grand narratives is common to the Asian transnational adoption experience. Framed within this narrative of loss, mourning, and compensation, the adoptee is repeatedly positioned as a foreigner who must maneuver multiple histories, families, and nations.

The growing public interest in the practice of transnational adoption has risen largely in response to the media hype around the recent wave of celebrity adoptions. This essay attempts to provide a critical examination of what is at stake for the Asian American adoptee when he or she is immersed in a sea of images that reinforce Western constructed ideals of normativeness and family building. These cultural forces create a melancholic relationship between the adoptee, his or her mythic motherland, and the adoptive home that works to position the adoptee as different, foreign, and perpetually searching for “true” home.