Meeting Once More: The Korean Side of Transnational Adoption by Elise Prébin (review)

An anticampaign by his own daughter turned the tide of the election of Seoul’s superintendent of education held June 4, 2014. A 27-year-old daughter from a previous marriage wrote an open letter on Facebook urging Seoul’s electorate not to vote for her father, saying that her father had no right to the post since he had never partaken in her and her sibling’s education and had completely forsaken his children. He was, therefore, masquerading as an education expert. Sure enough, a huge commotion was made in the press about the ethics of parenthood, and the once-leading candidate ended up losing the election. Interestingly enough, however, many people, including his opposing candidates, did not openly support his daughter, despite the decisive impact her disclosure had on the election, viewing the public denunciation by the daughter as violating moral laws of family relationships. The fact that the daughter was an American citizen, born and reared mostly in the United States, seemed to excuse her plucky but “unfilial” act. This event and the public response to it, I think, are a good representation of the complexities of family formation and kin relationships in contemporary South Korea; Kinship and family bonds are imagined as unbreakable ties of “blood” entailing various moral and ethical dictates, such as unconditional love, commitment, and obligation. And building strong, trust relationships among families is one of the fundamental qualifications for a moral and capable social member.

Elise Prébin’s Meeting Once More: The Korean Side of Transnational Adoption makes a welcome contribution to South Korean family and kinship studies by providing a rich ethnography of the meetings and post-meeting relationships between transnational adoptees and their Korean birth parents. By taking a closer look at family reunions that have been deliberately engineered by South Korean society since the 1990s, Prébin argues that “South Korean society actually organizes returns and meetings to make departures and ruptures acceptable, as negotiable and conscious choices and no longer as forced or ineluctable events” (p. 2). The ethnography also demonstrates that biological relatedness is not sufficient to (re)build family ties by illustrating the cultural investment to make adoptees, their birth families, and even ordinary Koreans form a particular set of languages and emotions toward the return of transnational adoptees.

Methodologically, Prébin looks closely at a popular television show mediating first meetings between adoptees and their birth families with a specific theoretical interest in kinship and media. Informed by her own experience as an adult adoptee—the author was adopted by a French family at age four and unexpectedly met her birth family at the age of twenty-one while participating in a summer school for transnational adoptees in Seoul in 1999—and two years of research in Seoul in 2003 and 2004, she conveys vivid ethnographic sketches of the field. Even though the author introduces the diverse life experiences of adoptees, including her own experience, throughout the book, the analytical focus of the ethnography is directed at the South Korean side of transnational adoption.

The book is divided into two parts composed of five chapters respectively, including an introduction and a conclusion. The first part of the book depicts highly staged and ritualized meetings between adoptees and their birth families. The latter part illustrates how their relationships evolve in the aftermath. Chapters 1 and 2 provide a historical overview of South Korea’s transnational adoption and the changing discourses on transnational adoptees. Prébin argues that the South Korean state began to rearticulate transnational adoptees as valuable members of the community of diasporic overseas Koreans as the country joined the advanced nations in a rapidly globalizing world. Contrary to the official positive discourses on transnational adoptees, however, Prébin advances, foreign adoptees are viewed as “ambiguous beings [. . .] with scorn and pity or with envy” (p. 47) in the real interactions between adoptees and South Koreans...