Adopting a child can be one of life's most rewarding experiences. Unfortunately, complex policies, legal risks, and fewer available children can make a domestic adoption difficult. International adoption offers a solution to parents yearning for a child of their own. American parents are now adopting over 6,000 children a year from China and Korea. John Maclean's The Chinese Adoption Handbook is a comprehensive guide to adopting a child from China and Korea. From pitfalls to practical advice, the rewards to the risks, The Chinese Adoption Handbook leads parents through the international maze, including: How the international adoption process works. How to start the process. What you need to know before traveling to China or Korea. Making the most out of your trip-the inside scoop on customs, hotels, and shopping. The children's homes, the U.S. Consulate visit, and the questions that need to be asked. Medical issues, special adoption doctors, and travel requirements. Post-adoption procedures and much, much more. Practical, accurate, and written with a father's sense of humor, The Chinese Adoption Handbook is the most comprehensive and up-to-date guide to adoption from China and Korea.

'Handbook of Adoption' addresses topics in adoption that reflect the many dimensions of theory, research, development, race adjustment and clinical practice which can affect adoption triad members.

In the thirty-five years since China instituted its One-Child Policy, 120,000 children—mostly girls—have left China through international adoption, including 85,000 to the United States. It’s generally assumed that this diaspora is the result of China’s approach to population control, but there is also the underlying belief that the majority of adoptees are daughters because the One-Child Policy often collides with the traditional preference for a son. While there is some truth to this, it does not tell the full story—a story with deep personal resonance to Kay Ann Johnson, a China scholar and mother to an adopted Chinese daughter. Johnson spent years talking with the Chinese parents driven to relinquish their daughters during the brutal birth-planning campaigns of the 1990s and early 2000s, and, with China’s Hidden Children, she paints a startlingly different picture. The decision to give up a daughter, she shows, is not a facile one, but one almost always fraught with grief and dictated by fear. Were it not for the constant threat of punishment for breaching the country’s stringent birth-planning policies, most Chinese parents would have raised their daughters despite the cultural preference for sons. With clear understanding and compassion for the families, Johnson describes their desperate efforts to conceal the birth of second or third daughters from the authorities. As the Chinese government cracked down on those caught concealing an out-of-plan child, strategies for surrendering children changed—from arranging adoptions or sending them to live with rural family to secret placement at carefully chosen doorsteps and, finally, abandonment in public places. In the twenty-first century, China’s so-called abandoned children have increasingly become “stolen” children, as declining fertility rates have left the dwindling number of children available for adoption more vulnerable to child trafficking. In addition, government seizures of locally—but illegally—adopted children and children hidden within their birth families mean that even legal adopters have unknowingly adopted children taken from parents and sent to orphanages. The image of the “unwanted daughter” remains commonplace in Western conceptions of China. With China’s Hidden Children, Johnson reveals the complex web of love, secrecy, and pain woven in the coerced decision to give one’s child up for adoption and the profound negative impact China’s birth-planning campaigns have on Chinese families.

A nine-year-old girl describes what she knows of her adoption from China.

Chinese adoption is often viewed as creating new possibilities for the formation of multicultural, cosmopolitan families. For white adoptive families, it is an opportunity to learn more about China and Chinese culture, as many adoptive families today try to honor what they view as their children’s “birth culture.” However, transnational, transracial adoption also presents challenges to families who are trying to impart in their children cultural and racial identities that they themselves do not possess, while at the same time incorporating their own racial, ethnic, and religious identities. Many of their ideas are based on assumptions about how authentic Chinese and Chinese Americans practice Chinese culture. Based on a comparative ethnographic study of white and Asian American adoptive parents over an eight year period, How Chinese Are You? explores how white adoptive parents, adoption professionals, Chinese American adoptive parents, and teens adopted from China as children negotiate meanings of Chinese identity in the context of race, culture, and family. Viewing Chineseness as something produced, rather than inherited, Andrea Louie examines how the idea of “ethnic options” differs for Asian American versus white adoptive parents as they produce Chinese adoptee identities, while re-working their own ethnic, racial, and parental identities. Considering the broader context of Asian American cultural production, Louie analyzes how both white and Asian American adoptive parents engage in changing understandings of and relationships with “Chineseness” as a form of ethnic identity, racial identity, or cultural capital over the life course. Louie also demonstrates how constructions of Chinese culture and racial identity dynamically play out between parents and their children, and for Chinese adoptee teenagers themselves as they “come of age.” How Chinese Are You? is an engaging and original study of the fluidity of race, ethnicity, and cultural identity in modern America.

With essays by well-known adoption practitioners and researchers who source empirical research and practical knowledge, this volume addresses key developmental, cultural, health, and behavioral issues in the transracial and international adoption process and provides recommendations for avoiding fraud and techniques for navigating domestic and foreign adoption laws. The text details the history, policy, and service requirements relating to white, African American, Asian American, Latino and Mexican American, and Native American children and adoptive families. It addresses specific problems faced by adoptive families with children and youth from China, Russia, Ethiopia, India, Korea, and Guatemala, and offers targeted guidance on ethnic identity formation, trauma, mental health treatment, and the challenges of gay or lesbian adoptions

This book is an ethnographic study of China/U.S. adoption, the largest contemporary intercountry adoption program.