How Chinese are you? : adopted Chinese youth and their families negotiate identity and culture /

Anthropologist Louie (Michigan State Univ.) addresses the concerns of white transracial adoptive parents in the US who adopt Chinese females and wish to offer them a sense of their birth cultures and help them navigate more effectively in the multicultural US. The author employs participant observation methods, studying transracially adoptive parents in St. Louis and the San Francisco Bay areas. She also collected uniquely valuable data by accompanying a group of prospective adoptive parents from the US traveling to China to obtain their children. Louie's book shows her commanding grasp of the transracial adoptions literature. Any transracial adoptive parent with a Chinese child will find immense value in this book, which provides strategic information on the adoption process of Chinese children and the issues that inevitably arise as children grow older, confront racism, and wish to connect to their birth cultures. Louie's many contrast groups--Chinese American parents, white American adoptive parents of Caucasian children, and Chinese transracial adoptive parents with children of differing ages--help greatly to pinpoint cultural differences and developmental changes that adoptive parents will inevitably confront. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --William Feigelman, emeritus, Nassau Community College