Challenging the Color-Blind American Dream: Transnational Adoption in <i>A Gesture Life, The Love Wife</i>, and <i>Digging to America</i>

Abstract

In historical terms the culture-specific notion of “the American Dream” has excluded racialized groups of people. However, the rise of postethnic and color-blind thinking in the past few decades implies that ethnic and racial equality has already been realized in the United States where people are free to choose their ethnic identities. Adoption as a literary trope is regarded as important because it allows authors to speak of broader questions about identity and belonging. This study focuses on transnational and transracial adoption in three novels: Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (1999), Gish Jen’s The Love Wife (2004), and Ann Tyler’s Digging to America (2006). These novels link adoption to the realization of one of the updated versions of the American Dream. I call it the Color-Blind American Dream, because it is pursued through denial of racial difference. As the adopting families in the three novels differ from one another, I examine the depth of their faithfulness to notions of race transcendence—and if the novels in question ultimately challenge the Color-Blind American Dream. In a white-dominated society, Asian immigrants and adoptees of Asian descent are socialized to identify with idealized whiteness, but experiences of racism inescapably draw attention to their visible difference. At the turn of the 21st century, there was a shift in Asian American studies to transnationalism and diasporic identity constructions as well as psychoanalytic criticism. In my essay, I apply the psychoanalytic concepts of “racial melancholia” and “racial reparation,” which have been developed by Asian American scholars. Since the three novels, which all tackle transnational and transracial adoption, invest in the Color Blind- American Dream, these theoretical concepts are helpful in questioning what is being repressed in adhering to a postethnic and color-blind refusal to engage history and how this affects identity and sense of national belonging.