This piece began as a response to the transnational adoption of thousands of ethnically Chinese girls during China’s One-Child Policy. Shaped by state control, racial preference, and global inequality, these adoptions raise critical questions about who is allowed to parent, and who is not.

Drawing on Judith Butler’s reflections on kinship, I explore motherhood as an ongoing process, a becoming, grounded in care, recognition, and responsibility rather than biology or legality. The work resists the cold language of adoption paperwork through the soft, handmade paper that frays, folds and embeds the journey of becoming. Its wheeled glass shelter speaks to the movement involved in forming a family across borders.

Respons(e)ibility invites reflection on alternative forms of kinship beyond bloodlines.