China's Lost Girls Analysis

a. Experimental group/pg. 132: the group of subjects in an experiment who are exposed to the independent variable. When watching China’s Lost Girls, it can be said that the whole documentary was focused around the study of American parents traveling across national borders in order to adopt Chinese baby girls. The causation for this ‘experiment’ could be traced to many different reasons; sterile parents who are unable to rear a biological child themselves, lonely married couples who have raised their own children already and want to do so again, or simply those families who want to add diversity and culture into their lives by way of a new Chinese female family member. Regardless of the causation, the soon-to-be parents are reaching out to …show more content…
Body language/pg. 108: the ways in which people use their bodies to give messages to one another. I found it quite intriguing to watch the mothers and fathers of the adopted Chinese girls interact with their new daughters for the very first time. For some odd reason, they were speaking English to them, as if the girls could understand the words which their new parents were uttering. Children barely understand language, nevertheless, they would indeed struggle to understand the language of a new culture at such a young age. Looking past this though, I noticed that the parents were using a good deal of body language to communicate with their daughters. They were waving, smiling, hugging, and crying tears of joy when they were presented with their new child. This showed the raw emotion that the parents were feeling at that moment in time and conveyed this strongly to the audience both in the room and us in the classroom, watching the documentary years later. The parents made no real attempt to hide their impression management, as they were very open about how they felt; being finally able to claim their baby girl as their own. In a different portion of the film, the one foster mother of a recently adopted Chinese girl also made no attempt to control her impression management. She was shown crying and speaking very loudly with her body language as she found out she would not be seeing the daughter she had reared since being entered into the orphanage. In fact, the new mother who had just adopted the girl expressed body language too, attempting to comfort the woman with her hands and patting her on the back. Interestingly enough, she turned her back on the woman when she could no longer bear watching her tears. The body language presented in the documentary was quite intense.