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This thesis aims to depict the different faces of the lives of two adopted women and their multiple predicaments by listening to their life stories. Meanwhile, the words of the informants, which shuttled back and forth during the interviews and writings also reminded the researcher of her own experiences. The retrospective reflection and empathy toward the experiences of adoption or adopted-like childhood inspired the use of polyphonic writing afterward. With the identities of female/adopted woman/aboriginal and female/adopted woman, the two informants developed their own coping mechanisms to confront the difficulties of lives. This thesis employs and analyzes interviews and two ethnographic works, Nisa: the Life and Words of a !Kung Woman and Return to Nisa, as the approaches of the study. The research questions the thesis attempts to answer are as follows: First, what were the aspects of adopted lives that the two female informants experienced? Second, how did they cope with or face their own predicaments?
In response to the first question, “A sense of uncertainty” and “A sense of wandering” are the main features of belonging-nowhere kind of lives for the two adopted women. As for the second question, “Falling back”, “Drifting”, and “Self- reinforcing the duties of being a female or woman” are the strategies they used to come up against the difficulties or dilemmas encountered in their lives. |