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This chapter explores how white adoptive parents construct Chinese identities for their adopted children in relation to their own understandings of Chineseness. It first considers the notion of preemptive parenting in relation to culture and race before discussing the birth cultures and the cultural difference of Chinese adoptees. It then examines the ways that white adoptive parents form conceptions about Chinese culture and its relationship to other elements of American life. It suggests that adoptive parents who strategically employ resources about China and Chinese culture for their adopted children are engaged in a type of reflexive, preemptive parenting and that in many cases, parents attempt to proactively pick and choose aspects of Chinese cultural identity to integrate into their children's lives to address salient issues of identity, while their understanding of and ability to change the broader racial and historical structures that continue to shape Chinese identities remain limited.

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 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.

In this chapter, the author reflects on her May 2002 trip to China with a group of adoptive parents as they received their adopted children and processed the adoption paperwork. She describes the trip as a liminal experience for parents and a reflection of the dichotomy between Asian and white, foreign and domestic, that permeates the Orientalist worldviews with which most white adoptive parents have been raised. Thus, the China trip provides an important context for the shaping of parents' understandings of the relationship between race, culture, and adoption. The author also considers the subjective processes by which Chineseness is experienced, mediated, and produced in an interactive, dialogic fashion and how the adoptive parents' trip to China allowed them to continue to experience and shape their versions of Chinese culture from afar after they returned home.

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.