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>> 131 5 To Make Historical Their Own Stories Adoptee Narratives as Asian American History Some sociologists have characterized international adoption as a “quiet migration.”1 And some Asian adoptees have referred to themselves as “seeds from a silent tree.”2 By the late twentieth century, however, those seeds had taken root and had produced a collective critique of Asian international and transracial adoption through memoirs and creative nonfiction.3 In order to fully comprehend the history of Asian international and transracial adoption, we must engage with this body of work because it shows that adoptees are not solely the “precious objects” of rescue and affection that they have often been imagined to be in media news reports. Rather, like international social service workers, independent adoption agencies, and adoptive parents, they, too, are historical actors in the making of international adoption history. And, as adult adoptees, they narrate this history differently. The documentation of Asian adoptee experience through film is a major part of this emergent collective expression.4 Perhaps the most well known of these documentary films is Deann Borshay Liem’s First Person Plural (1999). Its distribution through the Center for Asian American Media has made it accessible to many university and college classes, and its PBS broadcast through the P.O.V. program (which airs documentaries with a point of view) has garnered a broader general audience.5 Eleven years later, Borshay Liem wrote and directed In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, a film that further investigated one of the story lines documented in First Person Plural.6 In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee was also broadcast on PBS’s P.O.V. program in September 2010. While Borshay Liem’s films are part of a larger body of cultural production by and about Korean adult adoptees, this chapter focuses on her two films because the ISS-USA arranged for Borshay Liem’s adoption and because Borshay Liem’s films analyze the prominent role that 132 > 133 shared by other Korean adoptees, indigenous Filipinos, and Japanese American internees and their descendants. Finally, these films illuminate that loss goes beyond the specific spatial and temporal experience of the death, disappearance, or relocation of persons. It also signifies the loss of knowledge of this collective experience. The films are a poignant meditation on how the histories of Korean international and transracial adoption, of the display of Bontoc Igorots at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, and of Japanese American internment during World War II are suppressed by the dominant narratives of U.S. humanitarianism and benevolent assimilation in Asia and America. Viewers learn through these filmmakers’ attempts to recover history that the past cannot be completely recuperated through the traditional historical method of archival research because archival documents, photographs, and film footage privilege some perspectives and exclude others. In these films, the narrators’ memories present viewers with a different lens to imagine and to examine the Asian American experience. Re-Envisioning the Global Family in First Person Plural While many of us juggle multiple roles and identities, the unique premise of First Person Plural is that, by the time of her adoption at age nine, Deann Borshay Liem had three distinct identities and histories. She is Kang Ok Jin, born on June 14, 1957, and placed in a South Korean orphanage by her birth mother for international adoption. But she is also Cha Jung Hee, born on November 5, 1956, because the orphanage gave her Jung Hee’s identification papers before being sent abroad. Finally, she is also Deann Borshay, born upon her arrival at the San Francisco International Airport on March 3, 1966, and her subsequent adoption by the Borshay family. Arnold and Alveen Borshay’s Christian ethic as well as economic success in real estate motivated them to help others. Like other potential American adoptive parents of Asian children during that time, the Borshays became knowledgeable of international adoption through news reports. An NBC television announcement about helping children abroad through the Foster Parents Plan for only $15 a month influenced Alveen to sponsor a Korean child, Cha Jung Hee, at the Sun Duk 134 > 135 view of a Korean international and transracial adoptee. The Borshays believed that they were adopting Cha Jung Hee in 1966. Deann did not tell the Borshays the truth about her identity at first because the director of the Sun Duk Orphanage warned her not to tell them who she really was until she was old enough to take care...

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