Adoption Fantasies: The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood is a love letter to Asian adopted women and girls. It''s designed to call attention to the ways we find ourselves situated at a nexus of objectification--as adoptees and as Asian American women--and how we negotiate competing notions of what adopted women and girls should be like based on sensationalist and fictional portrayals of adoption found in US popular culture from 1992 to 2015. This period is significant because adoption from mainland China reached its zenith, following the opening of China to international adoption in 1992, and the largest wave of adoptees from Korea (late 1970s and early 1980s) and Vietnam entered adulthood at the turn of the twenty-first century. The 1990s also marked a shift in the formation of Asian adoptee communities due to internet technologies. Listservs and Yahoo! Groups paved the way for connections made on Facebook and other social media platforms. These digital, deterritorialized communities should be seen as an outgrowth of the connections forged within local adult adoptee organizations that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One of the longest-running Korean adoptee organizations was established in New York City in 1996, and the First International Gathering of Adult Korean Adoptees occurred in Washington, DC, in 1999. Such efforts represent some of the earliest iterations of Asian adoptees building intentional adult adoptee communities within the US.

Pan-Asian adoptee-led coalitions often feature Asian adoptees from South Korea, Hong Kong, and Vietnam who came of age during this period. And since 1999, children adopted from South Korea, Vietnam, and China represent 80 percent of all adoptions from Asian countries. As someone who came of age during this period, I intersperse personal anecdotes alongside my scholarly prose to demonstrate the value and significance of recognizing how the personal is political. To pretend I have never borne witness to racialized sexual harassment, racism, or other forms of violence would be erroneous and disingenuous. In tracing the life cycle of the adopted Asian woman, from the rendering of our infant bodies in the white American imaginary to Asian American fantasies of adoption to what it means when adopted Asian girls and women find themselves hypersexualized in popular culture, Adoption Fantasies reveals the intricacies of the mundane. Focusing on the experiences of cisgender, Asian adopted women and girls assists my ability to situate the attachments of racialized and gendered Orientalism that reduces them as vulnerable to a mythic "Asian patriarchy." This vein of Orientalism is intimately connected to white American sensibilities of adoption--whereby the Asian adoptee is worthy of rescue both as a voiceless, innocent child and as a potential sexual threat in adulthood. Asian adoptee womanhood and girlhood is anchored in existing normative understandings of racialized and gendered heteronormative stereotypes of women of Asian descent.

This is not to elide the experiences of Asian adopted men and boys nor of gender nonbinary or transgender adoptees. I am aware of the different ways that Asian American men and LGBTQ Asian Americans encounter racialized and gendered stereotypes and have interrogated Asian American masculinity as it relates to adopted Asian, cisgender men elsewhere. While some of the experiences of queer Asian Americans may overlap with the pernicious ways feminized tropes are written onto their bodies, that analysis falls outside the scope of this monograph. Adoption Fantasies makes visible the nuances that shape the nexus of objectification experienced by Asian women and girls as a lens through which to consider the ethics of representation and the ramifications of how racialized and heteronormative gendered tropes become operationalized on a particular subset of adoptee experiences.