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This chapter explores the complexities of Asian American identity production in the context of adoption by focusing on the experiences of Chinese American adoptive parents. Drawing on Asian American scholar Lisa Lowe's model of Asian American cultural change, it considers conceptions of China and Chinese culture that inform Asian American adoptive parents' effectiveness in addressing racial and cultural identity issues for adoptees, and how these meanings of Chineseness are renegotiated over time as they are practiced within daily lives. It shows that Chinese American adoptive parents are flexible when it comes to creating and practicing (or not practicing) Chinese or Chinese American culture. It also examines how issues of cultural authenticity are intertwined with questions of cultural change, how the uneven power relations and histories that define the relationships between whites and Asian Americans factor into cultural productions, and how attempts at self-fashioning and building cultural capital present possibilities for the construction of alternative identities.

This chapter reviews the book’s main themes and findings through the broader lens of the mixed-method approach, noting the ways in which the survey data and the family ethnographies provided surprises and novel insights into the workings of immigrant Korean American parents and their adolescent children. The chapter ends with the conclusion that, contrary to previous common portraits of immigrant Asian American parents as “tiger parents” focused on intense cultivation of academic and occupational attainment for their children, immigrant parents care deeply about how to cultivate their children’s healthy sense of self, with awareness of their gendered and racialized positions within the U.S. society. In turn, their children respond to their immigrant parents’ aspirations and care in resilient—and often surprising—ways.

This book explores the ways that Chinese American and white adoptive parents, and their children as they become teens, approach issues of Chinese identity, and how they imagine the Chineseness of their children in relation to blacks, whites, Asians, and other groups. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and extensive participant observation and focus group discussions with more than seventy-five individuals conducted intermittently between 2001 and 2009, the book considers the processes by which adoptive parents negotiate Chineseness and Chinese culture within the politics of race, class, and culture of the Midwest and in the San Francisco Bay Area. It discusses the ways that new family identities—incorporating forms of whiteness and Chineseness as well as ideas about multiculturalism and race—are being created out of the practices surrounding Chinese adoption. It also examines how productions of Chinese culture become salient for Chinese adoptees who are living them.

This chapter presents interviews with American parents and the differences uncovered in these interviews—between fathers and mothers, between liberal and conservative parents, between past behavior and current approaches, and between cultural languages. However, if the differences and contradictions that characterize the American parents' conceptions of teenage sexuality and romance are easy to identify, a less apparent shared narrative of sequence unites them. Adolescent sexuality starts early with impulses, leads to battles, but becomes only fully legitimate once young people have successfully navigated these trials by fire and established autonomous households, an accomplishment both deeply desired and dreaded. Three frames structure that narrative: the first is hormone-based adolescent sexuality; the second is the battle between the sexes; and finally, until youth establish their autonomy through financial self-sufficiency or marriage, the principle of parent-regulated adolescent sexuality applies, leading a majority of parents to respond to the sleepover question with a resounding “No way, Jose.”

Chapter 4, “Nuanced and Dissenting Voices,” examines the nuances diverse parents brought to their understandings of childrearing and self-esteem. Framed within Bakhtinian theory, this chapter gives voice to African American parents, working-class parents, conservative Christian parents, and mothers, particularly women who had experienced low self-esteem. These parents endorsed self-esteem, but refracted the language of the self-esteem imaginary in ways that made sense, given their diverse values and ideological commitments, social positioning, and idiosyncratic experiences. This chapter also describes the perspectives of two groups from the larger study who challenged key elements of the dominant discourse: grandmothers of Centerville children who raised their children in an earlier era, and Taiwanese parents who grew up in a different cultural context but were temporarily residing and raising their children in Centerville. These two groups of dissenters underscore again the book’s theme that self-esteem is rooted in time and place.

This chapter discusses the methods and positionality used in this ethnographic study on the processes by which Chinese American and white adoptive parents negotiate Chineseness and Chinese culture within the context of racial and class politics. Drawing primarily on interviews combined with participant observation and focus group discussions involving more than seventy-five individuals, the chapter explores the views of adoptive parents in St. Louis, Missouri, and in the San Francisco Bay Area, regarding adoption as well as issues of Chinese and Chinese American culture. The chapter provides an overview of the adoptive families in the Midwest and in the San Francisco Bay Area, along with transnational and transracial adoption.

This chapter looks at the cultural assumptions that childbearing requires specialised medical knowledge in the United States, where expectant parents usually receive advice on all aspects of pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care from multiple medical experts. This guidance divides the care of mothers and infants under the supervision of separate medical experts, and further fragments various aspects of infant care, including feeding and sleep. The chapter uses historical and ethnographic research to explore the origins of these assumptions and their consequences for American parents who embark on breastfeeding. It suggests that severing the links between these evolutionarily and physiologically connected domains has had a significant detrimental impact on night-time infant care. Parents have been left without adequate community cultural knowledge about the interaction of breastfeeding and sleep, and assume that these processes are separate. As a result, they are frequently surprised by infants' night-time behaviour and have difficulties navigating night-time breastfeeding and sleep. These challenges constitute an important element of an already formidable set of barriers to breastfeeding in the United States, where structural support is extremely limited and breastfeeding remains a controversial practice.

This concluding chapter reviews how the book has explored how Chinese American and white adoptive parents learn about issues of culture and racism and gain insight into how their children are being racialized. It has shown how meanings surrounding Chineseness are negotiated within the daily lives of adoptive families as well as the ways that Chinese adoptees, including teens, use and reinterpret Chineseness. It has also highlighted the dynamic and ongoing process of Chinese identity construction among Chinese American adoptive parents that often involves the interpretation of practices and values as “Chinese,” along with white adoptive parents' conceptions of the relationship between Chinese and Chinese American culture. As a conclusion, the book considers the importance of looking at Chinese culture being produced in relation to shifting and multilayered discourses on race, culture, and adoption that circulate around adoptees.

This concluding chapter argues that the study of Pagan parenting and childhood illuminates important features of American parenting and childhood as well as religious communities and imaginations in the twenty-first century. French sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger suggests that religion can be understood not only as a chain of memory, but also as a process of undoing certain kinds of religious, historical, and personal memory. As American parents reformulate conceptions of idealized childhood, they pave the way for experiences that recall Romantic ideals of childhood innocence and wonder. At the same time, they emphasize the mature wisdom and spiritual gravity of these expectations of children. Pagans are not representative of all Americans, but both their specificity and their similarity can illuminate aspects of the American religious imagination.

This chapter explores the bicultural upbringing of mixed-race children produced via intermarriages between Creek Indians and southern colonists. On a daily basis, white and Native American parents struggled to find compromises and common ground in the socialization of their children, resulting in a bicultural upbringing. This process of middle-ground parenting defied and adhered to many of the norms that structured southeastern Indian society, but it almost always reflected the interests of Native society. Most fathers had the ability to influence the upbringing of their Creek children only when it suited their Indian mothers and families. Creek women and their matrilineal kin maintained the upper hand in this process, carefully regulating the actions of intermarried white men.