Meeting Once More: The Korean Side of Transnational Adoption

4. Stratification and Homogeneity at the Korean Broadcasting System, 2003

68 > 69 be recognized by relatives who, either during or after the show, can call the number that appears on the screen during the broadcast. Every broadcast ends with the hosts telling the viewers that the participants receive presents and gift certificates from the companies that sponsor the show. Then the scenario writer tells the lucky participants to come again the following Wednesday to meet their relatives. If for some reason the participants cannot meet their relatives during the show, their meeting is organized by the scenario writer another day, somewhere near the studio, and is filmed by a cameraman. The following Wednesday, these meetings are broadcast as flashbacks. After the meeting has been broadcast live or by flashback, KBS offers the members of the reunited family a DNA test at Seoul National University Hospital, but the results of the tests are never mentioned in subsequent broadcasts. The host Sang-byŏk Lee and the hostess Kŭm-hŭi Lee are celebrities in South Korea, whereas the old man featured in the animated film, Dong-kyu Park, is known as the son of a famous poet, Mokwol Park.1 Ach’im madang met with success as soon as it first aired in 1997. This owed partly to the popularity of the two hosts at the time.2 The same year, the host of a KBS news program announced that viewers had selected Ach’im madang as the best program on KBS.3 According to the scenario writer, since 1997, no year had gone by without the four-person team in charge of the talk show winning an award. Despite an early time slot that restricts the audience to housewives and older people (Tsuya and Bumpass 2004), Ach’im madang was one of the top twenty most popular television shows in South Korea for more than a decade.4 The outreach of the Wednesday broadcast is enlarged by the KBS website, on which people can watch the show for weeks after the television broadcast.5 In this program, transnational adoptees effectively enter a system of representations that clearly classifies people in terms of degrees of marginality (as opposed to full Koreanness), while stressing resemblances among all people of Korean descent. The program aims at creating a community whose disparities and diverse fates should be redeemed by the collective memory produced on the spot. The objectives of the Korean program and the reactions of participants are obviously not always in tune, but there is little room during the broadcast for spontaneous and personal voicing of opinions, and, if anything, the show’s longevity attests to its appeal to the Korean viewers. Therefore, the program’s narrative on family separation—and by extension on transnational adoption—is indicative of representations that are widely accepted by the South Korean population. 70 > 71 process, due to their limited stay in South Korea. They were treated first, always cordially, avoiding long waiting hours, whereas the older Korean candidates were treated last, often with anger or contempt, as they were seldom articulate and behaved submissively. Several Korean candidates who did have information were eliminated on the grounds that they could not speak clearly in front of the camera, while some transnational adoptees were accepted despite scarce information. During this preliminary session with the prospective participants, I was struck by the differences in attitude on the part of the scenario writer and her young assistant toward foreigners versus Koreans. During the broadcast, the discrimination continued. Several Korean viewers I questioned about the program in the course of my fieldwork pointed out that foreign and domestic adoptees clearly appeared wealthier than orphans, but domestic adoptees were never valorized in the hosts’ discourse , whereas foreign adoptees were. The status of Korean participants can be determined through indirect indicators that fall into three categories: dress, attitude, and speech. First, observations of dress indicate varied status as some participants were dressed neatly and simply, and others dressed up to perform on television. By dressing up, several participants seemed to compensate for their lower-to-moderate economic standing. The few participants who had a neglected appearance also qualified as belonging to the lower economic class.9 Second, attitudes often indicated the lower economic class of the orphans in contrast to the foreign and domestic adoptees. Many orphans responded to questions by mumbling, stuttering, or keeping their eyes downcast.10 They answered the hosts’ questions in a childlike, demure manner, even...