Performing Race and Place in Asian America: Korean American Adoptees, Musical Theatre, and the Land of 10,000 Lakes

During the spring of 2005, two Minneapolis-based theatre companies staged musical productions regarding transracial and transnational adoptees coming of age in the American Midwest.² The Asian American theatre company, Theater Mu, produced The Walleye Kid: The Musical, the story of a young Korean American adoptee in her rural White Minnesotan home. Similarly, Mixed Blood Theatre (a multiracial company dedicated to cultural pluralism) produced Found!, the story of a young woman born in Colombia and adopted by a White Minnesotan family.³ Both musicals follow the young women along their personal journeys of self-discovery as Latina and Asian Americans in their Minnesotan homes. Written by local artists and produced by local theatre companies, the musicals serve as attempts to illuminate stories of transracial and transnational adoptees and their search for identity within the snow-covered backdrop of the American Midwest. The themes of the musicals generally fall in line with the regular repertoire of the two theatre companies since they both position themselves as advocates for multicultural education and awareness within the larger community. However, that both companies chose the vehicle of the musical to express the complex issues surrounding transracial and transnational adoption is quite curious to me.⁴ Why the musical? Does the particular form somehow facilitate in expressing the transracial and transnational adoptive experience? If so, how and why?

My exploration focuses on the Minneapolis-based Asian American theatre company, Theater Mu, and their 2005 production of The Walleye Kid: The Musical; I examine the musical as an Asian American cultural production of the American Midwest. As a selected work of Theater Mu’s parent organization, Mu Performing Arts, I utilize The Walleye Kid: The Musical as a case study to examine the creative processes employed in contemporary Asian American artistic expression. Moreover, through the specific investigation of Mu Performing Arts and the Korean American adoption experience in Minnesota, I seek to contribute to more general discourses that examine the growing diversity of community, performance, expression, and experience within Asian America.

I begin with an introduction to The Walleye Kid: The Musical followed by conversations with artistic directors, playwrights, actors, and audience members regarding the development, context, and reception of the project. Through these multiple perspectives, my goal is to share the particular details of one specific group within the Twin Cities Asian American community and how they construct and perform their unique identity in the theatre.

The Story: Introduction to The Walleye Kid: The Musical

The program notes for The Walleye Kid: The Musical sets the piece in early 1990s Minnesota with the following introduction:

Since the Korean War, over 10,000 Korean children have been adopted into Caucasian families in Minnesota. This is the largest population of adopted Koreans in a single state in America. This play is dedicated to these children, many of whom are now adults, and their families.⁵

(Program notes, The Walleye Kid: The Musical)

Figure 1.

Shaman (Sara Ochs) and Annie (Isabella Dawis) (photo by Charissa Uemura, courtesy of Mu Performing Arts).

The Walleye Kid: The Musical (see Figure 1) tells the story of a young Korean American adoptee and her exploration of the complex intersections of identity, race, and place. A childless White couple eagerly accepts young Annie from a mystical Shaman (disguised as a walleye) while ice-fishing one cold winter’s day. Over the years Annie is showered with love by her family though her rural Minnesotan community struggles with how to accept a Korean American into the exclusively White neighborhood. The local grocer offers to special order rice, tofu, and chopsticks and Annie’s peers tell her that she will “never be American” (The Walleye Kid: The Musical 2004, 33). Meanwhile, the Shaman appears periodically to call attention to the racist and ignorant remarks of the community through asides to the audience. Annie is confused by the comments she over-hears from her elders and the ridicule of her peers; she begins to question where she came...