Absent Fathers, Adoption from China, and Kathryn Ma's The Year She Left Us

abstract: This essay tags along with Kathryn Ma's 2014 novel about Chinese adoption, The Year She Left Us , to chase after absent fathers in adoption fiction. Ironically omnipresent in the novel, which maps the life of a San Francisco adoptee, absent fathers relentlessly colonize the emptied place of biological origin. Sanctioned by long cultural traditions in the West, absence in Ma's account garbs vacated selves as systemically paternal rather than maternal or otherwise familial. In a remarkably attenuated form of adoption dynamics, absent fathers throughout steal the shadow stage of absent biological origin, occupying that vacated space, painfully, in the apophatic form of a withheld gift that never stops not giving. The essay tracks these fraught fictional patterns in a series of episodes, where even surrogate fathers, markers of primary absence, perform disappearing acts, following a venerable script.