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In her award-winning and celebrated memoir The Language of Blood (2003), Korean adoptee writer Jane Jeong Trenka theorizes Korean adoptee identity by way of a recipe. She writes: Home chef, the modern alchemist, starts not with base metals but old chicken hearts and livers, broken backs and flightless wings. . . . Extract the undesirable parts; accent the desirable flavors. Serve up consommé, chicken liver pâté with toast and apple rings, aspic in half-globes with carrot flowers suspended in amber. Consider another recipe: Start with a girl whose blood has been steeped in Korea for generations, imprinted with Confucianism and shamanism and war. Extract her from the mountains. Plant her in wheat fields between the Red River and the Mississippi. Baptize her. Indoctrinate her. Tell her who she is. Tell her what is real. See what happens. Witness a love affair with freaks, a fascination with hermaphrodites and conjoined twins, a fixation on Pisces and pairs of opposites. Trace a dream that won’t die: a vision of an old woman slumped on a bench, her spirit sitting straight out of the body, joined to the corpse at the waist.1 Framing the formation of Korean adoptee identity within the confines of the kitchen laboratory, Trenka exposes the experimental qualities of Korean adoption. She implies that Korean adoption is an experimentation with identity, whose base ingredient is Korean children. Like most scientific experiments, highly controlled variables are set in place (“Indoctrinate her. Tell her who she is. Tell her what is real.”) in order to achieve the desired results: to make the adoptee normal. However, it turns out that the recipe did not quite produce the intended effect: the Korean adoptee, who is now fascinated with freaks, is not normal. You can almost hear the whispers of 127 5 “I WANTED MY HEAD TO BE REMOVED” The Limits of Normativity orphanage personnel, social workers, adoptive agents, and adoptive parents in the observation suite: How did this happen? What went wrong? Rather than assuming that things went wrong with the experiment, I am more interested in teasing out why the architects and endorsers of Korean adoption are so invested in constructing it as a project of normativity. Why are the practitioners of Korean adoption constantly laboring to normalize the adopted child? The answer, I suggest, resides in a core anxiety concerning the racial, cultural, national, and biological difference between the adopted child and her adoptive parents. In this chapter, I am devoted to investigating the nonnormative components that have been actively disavowed and/or shunned in Korean adoption and how this denial has shaped Korean adoptee subjectivity and identity. In the previous chapter, I examined the processes of normalization and Americanization that orphans underwent in order to become categorized as adoptable. I used the case study of the Holt Adoption Program’s Il San orphanage to examine this transformation, wherein the orphanage became a site of Foucauldian discipline that normalized abnormal and handicapped bodies in order to make them adoptable by Westerners. In this chapter, I follow the adoptee to the United States, where we observe that the strategies used to normalize the child become more varied and prolific (rather than ceasing altogether) inside her new American home. Even though the adoptee is disciplined in the orphanage to seamlessly assimilate into her new adoptive family, the very presence of the adoptee’s body within the adoptive family disrupts the semblance of the all-American (read white) heterobiological nuclear family. It is this disruption that is the focal point of this chapter, and it is this disruption—the failure of being indoctrinated and told who she is (that is, white American), along with the excesses that “won’t die”—that signals the queer dimensions of Korean adoption. David Eng indexes Asian transnational adoption as a part of the queer diaspora because it challenges conventional organizations of kinship where families are chosen rather than units into which they are born.2 For Eng, this form of adoption becomes a site to envision what he calls a “new global family,” with space for two mothers—and perhaps even more.3 Although I agree that Asian transnational adoption has the potential to create radical new forms of kinship that eschews the biological imperative of family making, it is important to point out that historically this has not been the case. Indeed, as this chapter will show, the goal for adoptive families during much of the fifty-year history of Korean adoption has been to be...

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