Home and Belonging among Female Chinese adoptees in the Netherlands

Abstract

"This research examined how female Chinese adoptees in the Netherlands negotiate and construct belonging and the understanding of home from an anthropological stance. The motivation to conduct this research is a very personal. I am a Chinese adoptee and I have struggled with the question to whom I belong and what exactly home is. This research will contribute to the anthropological knowledge about the meaning and implications of aspects of culture and social order in relation to adoption. Furthermore, by analyzing international adoption debates within the theoretical framework this research would like to contribute to international adoption debates. The theoretical framework will delve into the emergences of international adoption, the international adoption debates and belonging. Belongingness will be used to analyze the data which I have gathered in the field. I have conducted fieldwork to obtain data. I used the methods of participant observation, semi-structured interviews, informal interviews (conversations) and small talk to obtain data. To analyze the data, I have used Nvivo in which I have coded all the data in three steps; open-coding, axial-coding, and selective coding. I also kept a diary to wright my own feelings and thoughts down during the fieldwork, which I have reflected on in the personal reflection. The results illustrated interesting ways how female Chinese adoptees negotiate and construct belonging and the understanding of home. I argue, that it is able to feel at home in the Netherlands for female Chinese adoptees. The adoptees do not make harsh boundaries between the culture, country, and family of birth and the culture, country and family where they are adopted into. By making this explicit, I would argue that the bad side of international debates is too simplistic, because it treats those above boundaries as fixed. It also states that removing children from their own culture would be culture genocide. To conclude I would argue that the bad side of international adoption debates must listen to the feelings and thoughts of international adoptees about belonging and the understand of home when they utter harsh statements like that."