Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea: Virtual Mothering by Hosu Kim (review)

294   ADOPTION & CULTURE 7.2 Rev. of Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea: Virtual Mothering HOSU KIM. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018 245 pp. $29.99 (Paperback) ISBN: 978-1349711512. By Jenny Heijun Wills Recently published in paperback, Hosu Kim’s thorough investigation of those she coins “virtual mothers,” offers remarkable insight through a balanced combination of scholarship and anecdote, rendering this book a simultaneously informative and intimate reflection on the most underrepresented people in the adoption constellation . From the outset, Kim rightly remarks on the ways birthmothers are rendered invisible in both public discourse and scholarly conversations, noting “the existence and experiences of birth mothers is seriously limited in South Korean discourse on transnational adoption” but also that they are “even less acknowledged in the adoption discourse in North America and Western Europe” (4). Not only does this observation provide context for the pages to come, as well as the urgency of Kim’s work on the subject, but it also reminds readers of the author’s perspective as a member of the Korean diaspora (2)—uniquely positioned to be cultural and literal translator for the book’s diverse audience. Five robust chapters are grouped into two sections, organizing Kim’s theorizations around “Unbecoming Mothers” and then “Virtual Mothers.” Chapters in the first section articulate the gendered (and classed) violences that create(d) birth mothers, such as mid-twentieth century “population removal polic[ies meant] to deal with an excess population of mixed-race children after the war” (66) that “frame[d] the birth mothers’ act of surrendering the child as an act carried out to fulfill the imperative of national/family security” (68) in moments when Cold War tensions were escalating. In this first section, Kim addresses the ways that adoptees, considered “excess ” by the postwar South Korean national imagination, consisted mainly of “the children of single mothers, poor mothers, and divorcées; the disabled; and twins” (55), and focuses on two groups of birth mothers who are registered through the lens of heteronormative relationships with men: women involved in relationships with married (and therefore, unaccountable) men—both Korean and American— and widows. Here, Kim draws on interviews with birth mothers to think through the invention of that category of personhood in South Korea, drawing important links between poverty and figurative as well as literal gendered violence. The interviews reveal the sorrow and grief that is always antecedent to adoption without veering into the territory of reductive or oversentimentalized tropes. In another chapter, Kim describes the history and ongoing practices of South Korean maternity homes, and especially those that are part of adoption agencies . Again, by way of extensive interviews, Kim recounts the experiences of birth mothers who, for different reasons, were persuaded by maternity home workers into relinquishing their children for overseas adoption. Although she is careful REVIEWS   295 not to denounce maternity homes outright, Kim unflinchingly paints an image of manipulative tactics, unfair circumstances, and nonconsensual actions by adoption workers connected to these places that purport to offer protection and sanctuary for pregnant Korean women. The two chapters that comprise this first section, summarized by the poignant and multivalent title of “Unbecoming Mothers,” outline how different Korean women become birth mothers—a subjectivity invented and perpetuated by national and social narratives and violences. The second section, on “Virtual Mothering,” begins with a compelling commentary on the most ubiquitous adoptee-centered narrative: the search and return. Focusing on the impacts of this narrative on Korean birth mothers, and with the particular example of television reunion shows that capitalize on and even orchestrate (for dramatic effect) the losses and gains of reunion, Kim offers fresh insight on this infamous plotline. Kim remarks on the irony of the Korean birth mother becoming a meaningful figure, all but erased and rendered invisible when her child(ren) are being taken/relinquished, now key to a new political manoeuvring . Says Kim, “the birth mother, who has been erased from the nation’s official history and adoption discourse, has become a central, newly significant figure appropriated as an allegory of South Korea” (119). The metaphor, Kim suggests, is one whereby the traumatic and ruptured loss of Korean cultural security (after decades of...