Gloria Jean Gong and Dr. Matthew Christensen, Asian and Near Eastern Languages
Due to systematic gender discrimination and the “one-child” policy, the overwhelming majority of Chinese orphans adopted by American families are female. Families choose different ways of familiarizing their adopted daughters with “Chinese culture” and making them aware of their “Chinese heritage.” As a third-generation Chinese-American, I was interested in using participatory filmmaking as a method to examine the issues of identity and cultural heritage that arose as families with adopted Chinese daughters took them back to visit China for the first time.
Descriptions of the film topic were disseminated through local and national organizations for adoptive parents. A Salt Lake City family with a five-year old daughter volunteered to act as the focus family and allow me to film their return trip to China in the fall of 2005. In preparation, I filmed them at home and worshipping at a local Buddhist temple. By spending time with the family and asking them to participate in the filming process, I clarified some of the aspects of cultural heritage I wanted to address in the film. I hoped I would be able to depict that the girls lived in a split world—a real American life overlaid by a semi-fictional Chinese life perpetuated through family myth by their parents. One of the most interesting aspects of this stage was learning how adoptive families make the abandonment of their daughter part of their personal narratives. I began focusing on how selectively chosen stories were formed into optimistic narratives.
As a supplement to filming the Townsend family, I filmed an interview with First Lady Hunstman and her adopted Chinese daughter Gracie. The Governor’s wife articulated many of the issues facing adopted Chinese girls, and also demonstrated what might be safely assumed to be a “model” adoptive family. At the same time, interactions between First Lady Huntsman and her daughter illustrated many of the challenges facing adopted Chinese girls. It became apparent when mother and daughter posed for the camera and participated in candid and formal interview settings that questions of identity imposed and accepted were still present. Gracie’s parents are determined that she be proud of her Chinese heritage yet also feel completely natural in her adoptive setting. They want her to feel accepted, but also recognize that she is different. Gracie has learned to tell the story of her abandonment on a flight of stairs as part of her personal narrative, and has not yet had to grapple with the fact that her proudly-held cultural heritage contains a gender discrimination so serious that it necessitated her adoption by American parents. This interplay between the past and present in our definition of self became my main theme.
Upon arriving in Nanjing, China, I began to do preparatory research and filming. I interviewed Chinese women from a variety of backgrounds about their daily lives. I should note here that while my studies at the University of Nanjing were critical at this time, the very nature of conducting interviews in Chinese meant that I was having to struggle not only with my personal language barrier but with cultural barriers as well. All information I collected is filtered through my faulty understanding of Chinese language and culture. In addition to doing my personal research, I collaborated with a Masters student at Nanjing University on producing a forum comparing Chinese and American feminism. One facet of the forum was a short film we shot of interviews with Chinese and American students about women’s opportunities for fulfilling experiences in education, work and family in their respective countries. I anticipated that this research about the lives of contemporary Chinese women would add to my understanding of adopted Chinese girls.
The Townsends had made plans to meet me in late October, but wrote late in September to say that Mrs. Townsend had gotten a new job and they wouldn’t be able to come. At the same time, it became apparent that the Nanjing Orphanage’s restrictive policy was going to prohibit filming and interviews. But when I learned that my parents had made plans to pick me up from Nanjing and do a trip through southern China, I found that I could simply shift the focus of the film from the Townsends to my own family, keeping intact my background research and theme conceptualization. I was also a Chinese-American woman returning to China for her first time, struggling with her concept of cultural identity and constructed family narratives. My father wanted to return to Guangzhou to visit the ancestral village my great-grandfather left in the late 1800’s, and I decided to make the search for our village my central story.
The search for our village was more arduous than I had expected. Guangzhou is riding the wave of development sweeping China, and we thought at first that our tiny village might have been covered by a new airport. When we finally found the village, I was amazed to discover how closely connected I felt and yet how little I knew about my own family’s past. When we returned to the United States I spent time researching my own family history and editing a film that tells the story of our search for the village and for my own identity as a Chinese-American woman.
The film I produced is titled 找 老 家:Looking for the Old Home. It will potentially be aired on KBYU-TV, at the discretion of my advisor. It is a half-hour piece done in an informal narrative documentary style, chronicling my family’s search for our ancestral village. It addresses the experience of Chinese immigrants, but also what it means to be American. It directs the viewer to genealogy, and to the roots of family narrative and myth.