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>> 163 10 Meeting the Lost and the Dead When I returned to South Korea and found my birth relatives in 1999, I learned that my father had passed away in 1996 at the age of forty-five. Weeping , my paternal grandmother explained that this premature death of her second-oldest son had been followed shortly by the death of her third son in 1998. After these two deaths, my return was a real consolation; my relatives interpreted my renewed presence in their lives as a sign that bode well for the fate of my entire paternal family, as my paternal aunt expressed in a letter she sent to me in France after my departure: “When you came back last summer, your grandmother’s han was half relieved. It was as wonderful as meeting again with her first son who was left behind in North Korea before the war. But she will find peace only when your younger sister comes back as well.” In 2003, as related earlier, I spent considerable time with my paternal aunt, who welcomed me in her house for several months. Once, she reported my father’s words on his deathbed: He said many times to your grandmother and to myself that he had no regret: he had done all he had wanted, loved the person he wanted . . . but his only torment was that he had left you and your sister at the orphanage . So, he thought that he was dying early as a punishment from God. . . . (Silence. She wipes her eyes) He had become very religious toward the end. These words from my paternal grandmother, my paternal aunt, and my father reveal a representation of the lost or abandoned child that lies close to the representation of the malevolent dead. The abnormal deaths of her two sons left my grandmother disconsolate and worried for the rest of the family. She has gone to a Catholic church to pray to Jesus and the Virgin Mary every morning since her conversion in the 1980s. My aunt told me that before, my grandmother frequented shamans’ houses with the same assiduity (yŏlsimhi katta). My return as a transnational adoptee has occasioned a great deal of relief. The correlation between the two deaths and the two lost children left 164 > 165 never reached the drastically high level as those in China following the implementation of its “one child” or “one boy” policy, family planning policies in South Korea were implemented and the ideal of the nuclear family promoted in the 1960s. If the promotion of the nuclear family succeeded, it did so in an unexpected fashion: abortion became the most efficient method of contraception.3 Most abortions were selective, as parents were willing to limit the number of their children while at the same time ensuring the patriline by giving birth to a son. As a result, the South Korean government grew concerned at the imminent demographic imbalance and began passing laws limiting the conditions under which abortions could be performed and punishing doctors who provided the illegal service.4 The case of abortion sheds light on the evolving structures of feelings between parents and children in South Korea. Catholic and Protestant churches were the first institutions to call for a better handling of abortion issues by the government, and for an awakening of consciousness of the value of fetal life in the 1970s. Following the changes in abortion law passed by the government, South Korean Buddhist monks5 addressed the subsequent guilt related to abortion by creating rituals for aborted fetuses in the mid-1980s, after the Japanese cult for the mizuko-kuyo (LaFleur 1992): An awakening of concern for aborted fetuses occurred among Buddhists in Korea in early 1985 with the work of Venerable Sok Myogak . . . [who] incited great interest among a group of posallim (female supporters) in Seoul when he introduced them to a first draft of his Korean translation of some selections from a Japanese book regarding mizuko kuyo. The book’s depiction of the fears and suffering of the spirits of helpless, aborted children and their attempts to seize the attention of their parents through dreams and misfortunes (interference) in their daily lives resonated deeply among these pious Buddhist women. It obviously brought to the surface feelings of uneasiness and guilt they had experienced for years but could or would not identify and provided a justification for certain life problems. “We grieve over the death of our pet animals and even bury them. How much more...

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