The (T)race of Trojan Horses: Transracial Adoption and Adoptive Being in Phan’s We Should Never Meet and Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth

Abstract

Transracial adoptees disrupt cultural imaginaries. They trigger powerful rethinking of what families are, of how we as individuals are constituted within them. Adopted children render visible the struggle of two major competing paradigms that John McLeod pithily summarizes, in his recent Life Lines (2015), as the “biogenetic and adoptive models of kinship.” Following Nancy’s theorization of Being as ever “singular and plural,” McLeod argues that, for this new model of identity formation to emerge, transcultural adoptees need to move from the fact of “being adopted” to the achievement of attaining “adoptive being.” In this chapter, Simal-González interrogates two recent transracial adoption narratives, Aimee Phan’s We Should Never Meet (2004) and Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth (2010), in order to elucidate whether they ultimately embrace the new horizon of adoptive being. After a thorough analysis, structured along McLeod’s four axes—secrets, histories, traces, and bearings—the study concludes that, despite some ambivalent features, most notably their narrative structure, both Phan’s and Truong’s books yield unexpected treasures for the purposes of adoptive being. In We Should Never Meet, careful attention is paid to the “referential specifics” of transracial adoption, and the conscious proliferation of perspectives and identity anchorings. Bitter in the Mouth, on the other hand, demythologizes the discourse of race by playing with the “racial trace.” It offers an alternative mother-child reunion, and suggests an alternative pattern to explain the construction of selfhood, the spider web, an image that, with its multiple anchorages and interconnectivity, conjures up the promising model of adoptive being.

All families were an invention . Some families were machines. Some were gardens. […] Others were Trojan horses.

(Truong, Bitter in the Mouth) ¹

This publication is the result of the research project “Literature and Globalization” (Ref. FFI2015-66767-P), funded by the MINECO/FEDER, UE.