WORKING TITLE: The Chinese Adoptee Experience: a Digital Ethnography
ELEVATOR PITCH: Learn about Chinese adoptee’s experience with family, culture, appearance, and identity through an interactive, storybook style, digital ethnography.
CONCEPT: Growing up as a Chinese adoptee in America, forming and expressing my identity, whether it be concerning my appearance, the language that I speak, how I present myself, and my feelings regarding topics like culture, heritage, and family, has always been a struggle. Questions such as, “What do I do when no one in my family looks like me?” and “Do I call myself Chinese or American? Neither? Both?” and “How do I define the word ‘family’ in a way that actually reflects my own feelings and experiences?” and “What is so important about staying connected with my culture? What is ‘my culture’, anyway?” constantly present themselves in all aspects of my daily life. From the moment I was old enough to understand what adoption is, I’ve embarked on the journey towards reconciling with these struggles and finding the answers to these questions.
In fact, this is a journey that nearly every Chinese adoptee is bound to come across; it is a journey that is ongoing, without a clear end. I specify the term “Chinese” adoptee, for our struggles with racial, cultural, and linguistic identities are heightened by the fact that we are products of transnational adoption, living in transnational families, as well as products of China’s One Child Policy of the 80’s and 90’s. The experience of the transnational adoptee, or the Chinese adoptee, is distinct and unique from other cases of adoption. Moreover, as transnational adoptees, our opportunities to interact with other Chinese adoptees and other Chinese people, as well as the resources we have to learn about our culture and history, is very limited, if not non-existent. Hence, this project focuses on telling the story of the Chinese adoptee community, creating a safe space for members of our community to learn about and connect with each other’s experiences, and to foster their journey towards becoming their authentic selves. This project also acts as a site for individuals outside the community to learn about the nuances and complexities within the community, and for users to step outside their own positionality, immersing themselves in the perspective of the adoptee. In this way, I call this project an ethnography, which is a type of anthropology that deals with society and how its peoples/cultures operate within, taking the subjects personal experiences, feelings, and memories, interviews, and participant observation as the main method of research. Further, it is a form of digital ethnography because I will be using an interactive website, forums, and p5.js sketches to visualize my research and emulate the “adoptee experience”.
SOURCES & INSPIRATIONS:
- Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8x9hjGBY7c
Dys4ia is a video game/simulation that documents the experience of trans woman Anna Anthropy. The game has multiple levels, each level deals with a different challenge of being a trans woman, such as buying new clothes, being misgendered, starting testosterone, etc. Her game is an example of how video games can be used as a method of digital storytelling, telling the story of marginalized identities. She also shows us the capabilities of media art being self-reflective, allowing the user to enter into a new perspective that is not their own and to learn about the struggles and experiences of others in a way that is vulnerable, intimate, and creative. Although I will not be creating a game, I want my website to be a mode for digital storytelling, gathering real stories and real memories from Chinese adoptees in my community. I also want my sketches to have a self-reflective, simulative aspect so that they can be understood and have impact on any type of user, not just other adoptees.
- China’s Children International: http://chinaschildreninternational.org/
China’s Children International (CCI) is a non-profit organization that organizes events and programs for Chinese adoptees around the world through their website and social media platforms. They also have a collection of resources of podcasts, essays, videos, and scholarships created by members of CCI that are centered on adoption, identity, and community. I was especially inspired by the website’s multitude of resources, and I want one of my pages of my website to be a list of similar resources that users can access, review, and discuss in a type of forum. But unlike this website, which is more of an organization that sets up online and in person events, I hope for my site to be an intimate community of users. Further, as much as this is a site I want to share to the public, its purpose is more for me to document physically something that is important to me, an artifact of growth that I can look back on in the future.
METHODOLOGY:
As aforementioned, this website is a digital ethnography; hence, I will conduct my own “fieldwork” for the project, which will include gathering conducting interviews and collecting small writing pieces from other adoptees. Based on the information I’ve gathered, I will organize it into separate web pages, along with p5.js sketches. The general layout is as follows:
- A main page with all menu options
- A page of each interviewed adoptee’s “finding story” (will be explained in detail on website)
- A page that explores how the adoptee identifies with the topic physical appearance. Along with personal entries, a p5 sketch that uses facial distortion will emulate the phenomenon in which adoptees, not looking like their parents and family members, struggle to contextualize their own physical appearance in relation to those around them.
- A page that explores how the adoptee identifies with concepts of family, lineage, heritage. In other words, how does the adoptee define the word “family”. The sketch to accompany this page will be an interface in which a collection of photos is given of people, objects, and places — all taken out of One Child Policy Propaganda–, and the user can drag and move images onto a blank canvas, ultimately creating their “ideal family portrait”.
- A page that explores how the adoptee situates their identity within their bifurcated culture–the one of where they were born and the one of where they grew up in. This sketch will be a simple game in the style of 90’s computer games. An alien character will be placed in space; on either side of the screen are two imaginary plants, each to represent the two cultures they know of. The user can move the aliens position with arrow keys, but as soon as the alien moves into the territory of either of the planets, comets will shoot in the aliens direction. The character is an alien because the adoptee is a perpetual foreigner in their home country and their birth country, and the two planets represent the two cultures that they struggle to truly “belong” to.
- The final page (if I have time) will be a collection of resources (memoirs, documentaries, essays, etc) that all have to do with the adoptee experience. This page is important because every adoptee is different, and my website will inevitably not have the same impact on every adoptee; hence, I want to provide other resources for people to explore if they are curious and want to learn more.