Growing up as Hybrid Plants A Multiple-Case Study on How Adoptive Parents Cope with the Chinese Origins of Their Adopted Children from China

Abstract: Transnational adoption is a type of adoption where the couple (or an individual) voluntarily become the permanent and legal parents of an adoptee from a different nation. Sweden has been actively participating the transnational adoption since the early 1970s, and from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, China had been one of the major donor countries for Sweden. The children and the parents have different origins, which challenge the way parents raise the children up. Transnational adoptees are likely to have identity crisis if they could not properly perceive their origins. The aim of the thesis is to discuss how the adoptive parents in Sweden cope with issues on their adopted children’s Chinese origins while incorporating the children into the kinship of the parents. In doing so, I collected data from semi-structured interviews with adoptive parents, and used the interview results to build three cases. Motivated by the characteristics of the cases, I developed a theoretical framework which contains concepts from Kinning theory and Symbolic Interactionism Theory as well as ideas from Pierre Bourdieu. There are three subquestions which explore how the parents help their children make sense of the Asian phenotypical features, and of the fact that the children were born by unknown bodies. The study also examines how the parents help the children construct the time the children spent in orphanages or equivalent institutions in China. The research findings show that the adoptive parents are open to talk about birth parents to their children despite having little information on them. In comparison, the adoptees’ pre-adoption experience is what the adoptive parents make more use of. The parents help the children build meaningful social relations with people from the orphanages or the equivalent institutions to make the children’s pre-adoption memory alive. Furthermore, parents themselves also have ties with people from the institutions. In terms of the phenotypical features, the adoptees do not see it as a issue until they go to school where the features tend to be activated through social interactions. In preventing the children being disturbed by the features, the adoptive parents intentionally put their children to play with those with similar backgrounds since the first period after the children came to Sweden. The adoptive parents also construct the image of China for the children with the hope that their adoptees can acknowledge the Chinese ethnicity as they grow up.