“I\u27m not really sure, but I think”: Entrance stories from Chinese-Americans adopted between 1995-2005

Within families, shared narratives may be used to create and strengthen a family\u27s experiences, as well as develop their identity as a group. For families that are traditionally biological, any social and cultural assumptions about their families and about biological births as a child’s entrance into their family only affirm their validity. However, for families that do not share these master narratives, they may feel edged out of the cultural and social bounds of acceptable. In place of the common birth stories and to fulfill the gaping history of a birth story, families who have adopted will share entrance stories, narratives which adopted children are told to teach them what adoption is, what it means for them to be adopted, how they came to their family and how they fit into their families. In my research, I sought to collect entrance narratives from female Chinese American adoptees who were adopted between 1995-2005 in order to derive a grounded theory of the reoccurring themes of these narratives