- LGBTQ+
AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities
This is an interdisciplinary essay collection which examines the shaping of local queer cultures in the Asian Pacific region in order to move beyond definitonis and understandings of sexuality and gender that rely on Western assumptions.
- Literature
God Painted Me
This book imagines the way we came to be and how we are loved through adoption. Mason tells his mommy how God painted him and all that is in the world. With divine creativity and color, we are all God’s masterpiece.
- Literature
Free to Be… A Family: A Book About All Kinds of Belonging
This is a collection of stories, poems, and songs about different types of families and family relationships. The theme of this anthology is that the concept of “family” includes adoptive and foster families, step-families, relatives, friends, community, culture, and global humanity.
- Literature
Delly Duck: Why A Little Chick Couldn’t Stay With His Birth Mother
When Delly Duck lays an egg, she is excited for it to hatch. But she doesn’t really know how to keep an egg safe, or how to look after her chick when he hatches. See how a concerned goose tries to help Delly to learn how to care for her chick, in this touching adoption story.
- Literature
Ten Days and Nine Nights: An Adoption Story
Follow a little girl as she and her family prepare for the new baby that will soon be joining them. And simultaneously, watch the girl’s mother fly off to Korea, meet the new baby, and bring her home. Here is an utterly simple, sweet, and child-centric look at the adoption process through the eyes of a soon-to-be older sibling. From cutting a red paper heart and taping it above the new baby’s crib to telling her best friend about the adoption, the young narrator counts down every day and night with growing anticipation, marking them with a big X on her calendar. This is also perfect for older children who are about to become big sisters and brothers.
- Literature
A Family Is a Family Is a Family
This is a book that talks about the many different types of families. Ones of every shape, size and relation.
- Literature
A Mother for Choco
Choco wishes he had a mother, but who could she be? He sets off to find her, asking all kinds of animals, but he doesn’t meet anyone who looks just like him. He doesn’t even think of asking Mrs. Bear if she’s his mother. Then Mrs. Bear starts to do just the things a mommy might do. And when she brings him home, he meets her other children, a piglet; a hippo; and an alligator, and learns that families can come in all shapes and sizes and still fit together.
- Literature
Adoption Stories: Excerpts from Adoption Books for Adults
This book shows that adoptees are an assorted population with varying backgrounds. It argues that adoptees should be given the right to ask questions about our background and even gain access to our adoption documents when we inquire. They have the right to ask questions—even if it makes adoption agencies uncomfortable. This book, containing excerpts from Janine’s “Adoption Books for Adults” collection, is “completely biased on the rights of adopted people and void of influence from adoption authorities”.
- Literature
Last Airlift: A Vietnamese Orphan’s Rescue from War
This is a true story about life in a Saigon orphanage, a dramatic rescue flight from Vietnam to Canada, adoption by a Canadian family, and growing up in Canada. It tells the story of the last Canadian airlift operation that left Saigon and arrived in Toronto on April 13, 1975. Son Thi Anh Tuyet was one of 57 babies and children on that flight. Based on personal interviews and enhanced with archive photos, Tuyet’s story of the Saigon orphanage and her flight to Canada is an emotional and suspenseful journey that is brought to life in this book.
- Literature
I Love You Like Crazy Cakes
This tells the story of a woman who travels to China to adopt a baby girl. It is based on the author’s own experiences and is a celebration of the love and joy a baby brings into the home.
- Literature
The Family Book
In this picture book, Parr celebrates many different types of families through color. He assures readers that no matter what kind of family you have, every family is special in its own unique way. His central message is about the importance of embracing our differences.
- Literature
The White Swan Express: A Story About Adoption
This is a picture book that talks about the process of adoption from China. It shows the steps from the adoption-agency paperwork to interviews to approval and finally being able to travel to China.
- Literature
The Red Thread: An Adoption Fairy Tale
This book is based on the ancient Chinese belief that an invisible, unbreakable red thread connects all those who are destined to be together. In this story, a king and queen rule a beautiful and peaceful land. They should be full of joy and contentment, but they both feel a strange pain that worsens every day. Then a peddler’s magic spectacles reveal a red thread pulling at each of their hearts. The king and queen know they must follow the thread–wherever it may lead.
- Literature
What Is a Family?
In this Waldorf-style illustrated book, with depictions of families of all shapes, sizes and colors, we get kids talking about their own families while opening their eyes to the fact that even though families don’t always look the same, they all share one special thing—love.
- Literature
The Red Blanket
Eliza Thomas went to China in 1994 to adopt her daughter PanPan, who was then 5 months old. This is their story. It is a touching and beautiful adoption story that reveals the challenges as well as the joys of forming a new family. It is a story about a little girl who needed a mommy and a forgotten blanket that needed a little girl and a woman who needed them both. This is a journey about the forming of a family.
- Literature
All You Can Ever Know
Cheung is a Korean transracial adoptee from Oregon and was born severely premature. She grew up knowing her adoption story as a “comforting, prepackaged myth”. As she grew up, she began to face prejudice, find her Asian American identity and became more curious about her origins. In this memoir, Cheung tells of the “search for the people who gave her up, which coincided with the birth of her own child”. It is a “profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections and the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets—vital reading for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong”.
- Literature
Palimpsest: Documents From a Korean Adoption
Sjöblom was adopted from Korea at two years old into a Swedish home. Throughout her childhood, she struggled to fit in and was constantly told to suppress her feelings of wanting to know more about her origins. Thus, she learned to bury the feelings of abandonment, like many other adoptees. In this illustrated memoir, “Sjöblom’s unaddressed feelings about her adoption come to a head when she is pregnant with her first child [and] she discovers a document containing the names of her biological parents”. She realizes “her own history may not match up with the story she’s been told her whole life: that she was an orphan without a background”. She ends up digging more into her background by traveling to Korea and the orphanage and finds out that the truth is “more complicated than the story she was told and struggled to believe”.
- Literature
Adoption Literature for Children and Young Adults: An Annotated Bibliography (Bibliographies and Indexes in Sociology)
This is an annotated bibliography that covers literature published from 1990 to 1991 suitable for children and young adults “dealing in some fashion with adoption”. There are 503 titles in this volume and are divided into fiction and nonfiction by reading level. “Most of the books included feature adoption as a main theme, others use adoption as a secondary theme, while others have characters who just happen to be adopted”. The bibliography encompasses topics such as “the age of arrival, sibling adoption, single-parent adoption, foster parent adoption, step-parent and relative adoption, transracial and intercountry adoption, Amerasian children, racial identity, minority families, special needs, large families, birthparents, search and reunion, surrogacy and open adoption, and some of the less pleasant aspects of adoption”. It is compiled by a reference librarian who is also an adoptive parent. There is also a featured selective resource list and directory of adoption-related organizations.
- Literature
The Lost Daughters of China: Abandoned Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past
This book presents a cultural history of the events that led to the controversial one-child policy in China and the generation-long abandonment of Chinese daughters to American families.
- Literature
In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories
This is a collection of interviews conducted with Black and biracial young adults adopted by white parents. It entails personal stories of two dozen individuals “who hail from a wide range of religious, economic, political, and professional backgrounds”. Some things this book explores is “How does the experience affect their racial and social identities, their choice of friends and marital partners, and their lifestyles?” The book includes overviews of both the history and current legal status of transracial adoption as of 2000.
- Literature
Lucky Girl: A Memoir
In this true story, journalist Mei-Ling Hopgood, one of the first wave of Asian adoptees to arrive in America, “comes face to face with her past when her Chinese birth family suddenly requests a reunion after more than two decades. | In 1974, a baby girl from Taiwan arrived in America, the newly adopted child of a loving couple in Michigan”. Hopgood had an “all-American upbringing, never really identifying with her Asian roots or harboring a desire to uncover her ancestry”. | When Hopgood was in her twenties, her birth family showed up. They end up being “a boisterous, loving, bossy, complicated middle-class family who hound her daily life by phone, fax, and letter, in a language she doesn’t understand until she returns to Taiwan to meet them. As her sisters and parents pull her into their lives, claiming her as one of their own, the devastating secrets that still haunt this family begin to emerge. Spanning cultures and continents, Lucky Girl brings home a tale of joy and regret, hilarity, deep sadness, and great discovery as the author untangles the unlikely strands that formed her destiny”.
- Literature
A Single Square Picture: A Korean Adoptee’s Search for Her Roots
Kim Ji-yun, who grew up in Seoul, Korea soon became Catherine Jeanne Robinson, who had an American family and lived in Salt Lake City, Utah. Twenty years later, she returned to Seoul in search of her birth mother and found herself “an American outsider in her native land”. Katy was left “conflicted, shattered, exhilarated, and moved in ways she never imagined”. This book is “a personal odyssey that ascends to the universal”, and is “a story that will resonate with anyone who has ever questioned their place in the world — and had the courage to find the answers”.
