Korean Adoption Literature and the Politics of Representation

Introduction

The debate on transnational adoption has in recent years been nuanced and complicated by an emergent corpus of texts written by the adoptees themselves.¹ Among these, the Korean adoptees are by far the most organized group — for the simple reason that Korea has the largest, oldest, and longest-running transnational adoption program in post-war history — and therefore also the first group of adoptees to reach adulthood. Numerous associations for Korean adoptees exist in the U.S. and Europe, and there are even several activist organizations in Seoul run by adoptees who have returned to Korea on a permanent basis. Korean adoptees have participated in — as well as produced — a wealth of TV shows, films, documentaries, interviews, radio programs, blogs, and exhibitions (see Eleana Kim 2000 and 2003; Hübinette 2006, Nelson 2009b; and Palmer 2010). But perhaps the single-most characteristic form of expression that has taken a central role in the formation of the Korean adoptee movement is the genre of the memoir. The authorial first-person perspective of the memoir has become a popular way both to capture an elusive and complex subject-position and to reach a broad audience, even outside that of the community of adoptees and their families (cf. Hübinette 2007: 138). Among these memoirs we find a divergent body of texts, American as well as European — such as Astrid Trotzig’s Blood is Thicker Than Water (1996), Thomas Park Clement’s The Unforgotten War (1998), Elizabeth Kim’s Ten Thousand Sorrows (2000), Katy Robinson’s A Single Square Picture (2002), Jane Trenka’s The Language of Blood (2003), Joey Yoon’s I Came Back Home (2004), Sunny Jo’s From Morning Calm to Midnight Sun (2005), Anneli Schinkel’s Silk Daughter (2007), and Miriam Yung Stein’s Berlin Seoul Berlin (2008).

Diverse in style and content — especially regarding the controversial ethical issue of Korean transnational adoption — the texts embody a desire to speak, to be heard, and, in some cases, to claim a sense of identity as an adopted Korean. Some texts are overtly critical of Korean trans-national adoption as such; others outline a more neutral or even positive view of the phenomenon. Many of the memoirs document and thus testify to individual as well as collective experiences of abuse, suffering, racialization and racism, sexual harassment, stigmatization — either as a direct or indirect consequence of their adoption — but most often these experiences are integrated thematically as derivative aspects of a larger, more ambiguous, identity narrative (see Hübinette 2007; and Hübinette and Tigerwall 2009).

Although the Korean adoptee memoirs at present may not constitute a genre, in the proper sense of that term, they do seem to form “a collection of texts that appear to invite similar interpretive strategies” (Rabinowitz 1996: 137). Crucially, this definition necessarily compels us to focus on audience(s). One of the central questions I want to pursue in this article relates to the politics of representation — or, what one may see as the authoritative right to interpret or articulate the elusive experience of Korean transnational adoption. Rather than focusing on the Korean adoptee memoirs themselves, I want to look at their interpretations, responses to them, as well as their imitations and projections. One such interpretation is Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s novel Somebody’s Daughter (2005), a work that fictionalizes the experience of Korean transnational adoption.

The author of this book was not adopted, and the book is clearly labeled a novel, a fictional text; at the same time, given the fact that about half of the text is written in the first person — a Korean adoptee recounting her return to Korea — Somebody’s Daughter at times resembles an adoptee memoir. This resemblance is further enhanced by the fact that neither text nor paratext indicate whether the author is an adoptee or not. As such, one could say that the book is indirectly — that is, despite its clearly marked fictional and imaginative discourse — offering the illusion of an “authentic” albeit fictionalized testimony of adoptee experience.²

Here I want to recount my first-hand experience of a discussion of...