This article approaches the question of “lived cosmopolitanism” through the eyes of transnational mixed-race adoptees. In recent years, adoption has been understood as a paradox evolving in the tension of humanitarian benevolence on the one hand and as a biopolitical scheme of Western imperialism on the other. Mixed-race adoptees are at once viewed as cosmopolitan figures that transcend race and nation and as abject, displaced figures that are produced and orphaned at the borders of kinship, nation, and culture. This article looks at the adoptees’ stories to pry into the underside of cosmopolitanism and to consider how America’s imperial outreach is tied up with Asia’s modernity in the creation of adoptees. This approach promises to recast cosmopolitanism as a “reflexive project” by foregrounding our own embeddedness in the intimacies of nation and empire. The adoptees’ life stories embody the modern/colonial beginnings and becomings of Asia.
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