She’s Just so American: Crafting Racial, Ethnic, and National Boundaries on Chinese Adoption Homeland Tours

• In Event: 192 - Regular Session. Culture and Identity

Abstract

Touristic spaces and the experiences of tourists offer a window on society’s structure—it’s emerging concepts, foundational mythologies, and future visions. This article focuses on diaspora tourism—structured group tours to natal, symbolic, and ancestral homelands. Based on interviews, observations, and a content analysis of written material, this study examines the experiences of adopted Chinese daughters and their American families as they hire tour guides and travel back to China. Encouraged to examine primordial roots, Chinese adoption homeland tourists work toward self-understanding by negotiating and exploring the boundaries of race, ethnicity, and nation. Building on recent constructivist scholarship, this article demonstrates how adoption homeland tourists articulate and negotiate the boundaries of belonging. The subtle stereotypes and unconscious contradictions they use to make sense of both the awkward moments of dissonance and the comfortable moments of connection expose both the fluidity and fixity of nation, race, and ethnicity, and reveal the paradoxes inherent in going abroad to find home.

Author

• Jillian Powers, Brandeis University