The Red Thread: Adoptee Formations of Kinship and Queer Diasporic Traditions in Chinese America

Chinese American adoptees exist in relationships that transcend racial, gendered, and physical borders as part of a tradition of non-normative kinship. Given the diasporic history of transnational adoption, Chinese adoptees seek meaningful relationships with one another to reconcile family and process diasporic trauma. Close relationships between adoptees provide foundational support through shared experiences. In-depth interviews were conducted with 19 adult adoptees (18 women, 1 man; ages 18-26), all of whom were born in China and adopted to the United States. Instead of generalizable results, research shows kinships are deeply complex and personal, which allows adoption discourse to settle into nuance. Adoptees are simultaneously generous and critical of parents when it comes to upbringing, conversations about race, and feelings of home and belonging, which accentuates the contradictory nature of adoptee experiences. Queer relationships with other adoptees (adoptee-adoptee) are particularly important for humanizing adoptee experiences, providing space for fluid identities, and coalition-building. Adoptee relationships form a constellation of kinships and restructure Asian American identity as political