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Hata and Sunny are both adoptees, which means that they carry a history related to another country. Hata is a Korean adoptee turns Japanese immigrant in America. Before he immigrates into the United States, he is a Korean who “spoke and lived as Japanese” (72). Hata’s experience is interwoven with the history of Korea under Japanese occupation before World War II. Sunny is “the product” of “a GI and a local bar girl” in Korea during the Korean War, brought to the United States through international adoption (204). In this respect, the juxtaposition of two types of adoptees and immigrants in a family helps to complicate our study of the practice of

international adoption. The novel presents the adoptees’ lives as the convergence of three worlds: Korea, Japan, and America. Sunny’s bodily appearance becomes a space of the entangled history of the three countries. On one hand, Sunny’s “dark-hued skin” disillusions the adopter’s imagined “ready, natural affinity” between the adoptive parent and child (204). As Mark C. Jerng points out, the “dark-hued skin”

turns Sunny into “a site for the overlapping and intertwining of multiple histories” and the adoption becomes an overlapping of “the history of Japanese colonization of Korea; the presence of the US army in Korea during the Korean War; the history of black-white relations and Japanese-white relations in the US” (59). On the other, for Hata, rescuing a little girl by bringing her from the “squalor of the orphanage……to

54 See <http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/poems/a.gesture.life.html >.

55 As Lee points out in an interview on the book, Hata’s last words “come almost home” is “as home and homey as he could ever find.” See < http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/poems/a.gesture.life.html >.

an orderly, welcoming suburban home in America” demonstrates his competence as an American citizen (73). Sunny’s migration results from a binary opposition between Korea and the United States. The imagination of the squalor of orphanage in Hata’s mind and the orderly, welcoming home that he provides makes Korea an antithesis of America.

Thus, the recognition of the pre-existent, multiple layers of histories in Sunny implies how categorization and racialization are projected onto the adoptee because of her skin color. Along with Hata’s description of Sunny’s appearance, he not only reveals how racial images are projected onto the adoptee but also how the society forms the projection. The adoption begins with Hata’s expectation of natural bonding between two people of the same race. Hata expects to build such a bonding by having a daughter of “like-enough race;” that way his “colleagues and associates and

neighbors, though knowing her to be adopted, would have little trouble quickly accepting our being of a single kind and blood”(204). To Hata, the bond is supposed to be recognized not by their affective interaction but by external looks.

For Hata, his common ancestry and expected resemblance with Sunny is what he relies on to build a new family and blend in with the community. In this regard, Sunny is not thought of as a person but as something to fill a void in his life.

As Hata says, he hopes that Sunny’s arrival would “serve to mark the

recommencement of my days” (74). For Hata, to provide financial security for Sunny becomes a moral justification for the transnational adoption. In Hata’s mind, Sunny is a needy object from “the squalor of the orphanage” and waiting to be transformed into a subject provided not only with economic protection but also social recognition.

According to David Eng, being a parent is “a measure of value, self-worth, and

‘completion’” (7). Having a child creates a sense of belongingness for Hata in the community. In a sense, Hata becomes a fully realized political, economic, and social

subject through the adoption. In this respect, transnational adoption is socially

effected from child to parent to form a full and robust citizenship. Just like joining the Japanese army is his gesture to become a real Japanese, having a family with a

bonding based on “like-enough race” between parent and child is a passport for him to become a real American citizen (204).

In “Transnational Adoptees: Global Biopolictical Orphans or An Activist Community,” Natalie Cherot contends that international adoption is a practice of biopolitics because it is a control over life. According to Cherot, as Foucault defines biopolitics as “a state’s concern with the biological wellbeing of the population,”

transnational adoption can be a unifying social force that “transform[s] Third World children into human subjects instilled with Western culture and values.”56

In A Gesture Life, Hata’s hope to form a family with racial resemblance is based on an intention to produce an adoptive family that mimics a natural one. Before

The power within the biopolitics of international adoption works in a domain that manages crisis and trauma such as war and poverty to promote humanitarianism. Cherot argues that

“through disciplining, categorizing, and socializing, both adoptees and adoptive families, international adoption institutions are collective actors that invoke real power and governance.” According to Cherot, during the Korean War, the U.S.

military intervention framed and produced adoptees’ birth. However, under the discourses of biopolitics of transnational adoption, the children were constructed as

“beneficiaries of US humanitarianism, US military, Western churches, and later adoption agencies” after the war. International adoption agencies are the site of biopolitical power because humans are managed, and being an adoptee is a racialized experience because Asian orphans’ bodies became governable through placement in white family.

56 See <http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j008/Articles/cherot.htm >

Sunny’s arrival, to Hata the adoption is like a display in order to show how his family

“would soon be well reputed and happily known” (204). However, Sunny’s biological genealogy reveals through her skin forces him to face the uneasy “conceit” (204).

Hata is disappointed upon the first seeing Sunny because her hair and “her skin, were there to see, self-evident, and it was obvious how some other color (or colors) ran deep within her” (204). His attempt to have a “natural” bonding in his family through the practice of transnational adoption is undermined because the adoptee is racially mixed. To Sunny, being an adoptee is also a racialized experience because to her adoptive father, her skin color defines who she is. As Barbara Yngvesson argues,

“Alienation from this source of likeness produces ‘genealogical bewilderment’” (8).

The idea of having a family and a new beginning in life by transnational adoption is complicated since Sunny is a product of wars that reminds the adopter of his past.

The biopolitics of international adoption is made especially clear when Hata mentioned the control of comfort woman and the manipulation of the female body during the war. In “Political Economics of Passion: Transnational Adoption and Global Woman: Roundtable on Global Woman,” David Eng argues that transnational adoptees play the role similar to that of “Global Woman.”57

57 The examples that Eng gives are nannies, maids, sex workers, nurses, migrant laborers, and mail-order brides.

“Global woman” refers to workers who are exploited for both their wage labor and their affective work. The term is related to the commodification of affects, emotions, and passions, all of which are the emotional labor that often accompanies the importation of physical labor from the global South to the global North within the logic of globalization, gender

exploitation, and wage labor. According to Eng, scholarship in postcolonial and transnational feminism links the emergence of global woman to military prostitution.

In this perspective, Eng also points out that military prostitution is one of the sources

of transnational adoptee and is therefore directly linked to transnational adoption. As what is revealed in A Gesture Life, during World War II, daughters in Korea were given away or taken away to serve as comfort women in the army, as what happened to K and her sister.58

In the novel, it is obvious that the relationship between Hata and Sunny is partly colored by Hata’s experience with K. When talking about his relationship with Sunny, Mary Burns tells him that “you’re the one who wanted her. You adopt her. But

After the war, another generation of daughters in Korea is given away out of racial congeniality, stigma, and poverty. As the narrative seamlessly transits from present to past and back again, the novel explores the exploitation of women in terms of the experience of comfort woman and that of transnational adoptee.

The control of life over the body of comfort woman and that over the female adoptees mirrors each other. The power of biopolitics oppressed woman and turned them into comfort woman by controlling the female body and forcing it into nothing but a tool for men to have sexual pleasure. Nowadays the brutality of oppressing woman and forcing them to be comfort woman is no longer exist; however, under the practice of transnational adoption, the power of biopolitics still exists. The female body from the third world has not yet been freed from the control. The “function” of the female body of the third world woman transforms from providing physical pleasure to offering emotional demand.

58 Comfort women were kidnapped and forced to become military sex slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army during the World War II years 1932-1946. “Many were young teenagers snatched from

schoolyards. Others were lured with promises of lucrative jobs to feed hungry families. Some saw their families murdered before they were raped. Once in custody, they were taken to Japanese army bases ranging from the Siberian border to the South Pacific. Some endured rape up to 40 times a day.

The rate of suicide was high. Women unable to work because of physical or emotional breakdown were quite literally destroyed, as a beast of burden would be. Only a quarter survived their ordeal.” For more detailed information regarding comfort women, see <http://wibfrederick.org/pdfs/Comfort%20Women

%20brochure.pdf>.

you act almost guilty, as if she’s someone you hurt once, or betrayed, and now you’re obliged to do whatever she wishes” (60). When Sunny decides to leave Hata’s house, she also tells Hata herself that “I never needed you. I don’t know why, but you needed me. But it was never the other way” (96). These observations remind Hata of his experience with K. Hamilton Carroll argues that “Sunny is clearly meant to recuperate Hata by replacing his failure with Kkutaeh with a story of success” (609). Young-Oak Lee also points out that Hata is subject to his adopted nation and the gender ideology of the traditional patriarchal society; hence his possessive male ego has much to do with the idea the woman’s chastity. To Hata, K’s sex can be something like what K describes, “a pelt or favorite stone” to him (300). And Hata also thinks that “if he cannot have K all to himself, he would rather have her dead” (151). The language of ownership turns K into an object for him to possess. Hamilton Carroll also points out that Hata describes K as an object such as a sculpture, a statue, and a house (603).

From Hata’s own experience, he has learnt to deny his past and origin and learnt to live as someone who he is not, a Japanese. He has never been recognized for who he is, a Korean, until he met K. Even though Hata denies his origin as a Korean, he feels drawn to her (240). Therefore, on one hand, he wants to be found or recognized by K;

and on the other, he wants K for sex. Hence the help that Hata wants to offer is not only unwanted but also with an intention to possess her.

The language of ownership also sheds light on the similarity between the biopolictics of comfort woman and that of transnational adoption when Hata mentions his expectation for Sunny: “My Sunny, I thought, would do much the same. Not be so thankful or beholden to me, necessarily, but at least she’d be somewhat appreciative of the providence of institutions that brought her from the squalor of the orphanage”

(73). Hata’s stance and the language of ownership discloses how demanding he is of Sunny’s gratitude. The idea that adoption would benefit Sunny is overturned by both

Mary Burns’ and Sunny’s observation regarding Hata’s attitude to Sunny. As Dorow argues, “the simplistic assumption that a poor child in a developing country will have a preferred life with a family in a ‘rich’ country is misguided, imperialistic and over-looks the sacrifice and loss, not only to the sending country, but to the child”

(17). Either way, Sunny’s loss, as presented in Hata’s narration, is overlooked, and unrecognized by Hata. Hata fails to recognize what Sunny needs and leaves Sunny to recuperate from her loss by herself. The protection offered to Sunny is limited; while she is instilled with economic stability and political rights in the western world, the practice of transnational adoption is devoid of emotional interaction. She is silenced not only because the adoptive father is the narrator, but also because she is not present to Hata. Young-Oak Lee argues that it is his obsession with K that drives him to adopt Sunny and that Sunny is K’s substitute because the way Hata sets the rules and

expects Sunny to obey is similar to the way that Hata acts as an agent of patriarchy to oppress K. Although the experience of the transnational adoptee is incomparable to the life of misery that is consigned to girls in sexual bondage, the control over the comfort women’s bodies in the army can be compared to the movement of the female body in transnational adoption. The control is not only related to what Foucault refers to as a practice of biopolitics, people who are engaged in the control also becomes what Foucault calls “a vehicle of power” because they apply to “the mechanism of gender” to make their situation politically advantageous and useful.59

59 See Young-Oak Lee’s “Gender, Race, and the Nation in A Gesture Life,” 147.

The

objectification of the comfort woman is similar to the objectification of the adoptee.

After witnessing Sunny’s “indecent move and behavior” in the Gizzi house which obviously violates the concept of chastity, Hata also renounces his care for Sunny by saying “I wish she were just another girl or woman to me, no longer my kin or my daughter or even my charge, and I made no sound as I grimly descended, my blood

already trying to forget, growing cold” (116). To Hata, both the comfort woman and the female adoptee are sexual objects. Hence, out of the fear for being marked as failure, and also because he is not willing to see the “imminent disgrace and

embarrassment that would hang about the house like banners of our mutual failure,”

Hata facilitates the abortion of Sunny’s baby (340). It is obvious that the help that Hata tries to offer for the adoptee is again selfish and unwanted.

Either in the case of global woman or that of transnational adoptees, as Eng points out, “money is exchanged for a body that is commodified” (54). The fact behind Hata’s adoption of Sunny involves him bribing the adoption agency worker.

When Hata thinks of the process of the adoption, what he regrets is not the fact that he bribes the adoption agent but that he loses his good judgment for the desire for a child.

When Hata says that “ I brought a large donation to the agency, this beyond the regular expenses, as well as a like sum for the woman, which I explained as a most proper gift in my former homeland, and which would be followed by another,” it is clearly shown that the adoption is clouded with monetary exchange (73). The

exchange of capital not only brings about Hata’s robust citizenship but also transforms Sunny into a commodity. She is bought into the family with an expectation to “serve to mark the recommencement” of his day (74). The commodification is reinforced because the agency allows Hata to choose the child before adoption when he rejects the agency’s arrangement of locating a boy for him and insists on having a daughter.

The description of the merchandise in transnational adoption is shocking in the sense that it is revealed in a very plain way as if the capitalist exchange is necessary and normal. In fact, the illicit relationship between money and transnational adoption is one that has becomes an issue in the “reform” of transnational adoption. But when Hata discloses the bribery behind the adoption, the description reveals the lack of reflection on the adopters’ intention in transnational adoption.

In A Gesture Life, the family made of two generations of adoptees offers the reader a crucial insight into the adoption agencies as sites of bio-politics. Both as Asian Americans, Doc Hata stands for the generation of the model minorities who make efforts in sustaining life conditions and who are willing to be assimilated into US. Different from Hata, Sunny, is brought to the country as a privileged immigrant.

According to Trenka’s study, “Aside from the cultural and economic elite, adopted children have become the only people in the world who can so easily flow over the boundaries of nation-states because they have been rendered into commodities instead of people.”60

Also, in most adoption narratives, the origin has always played an important The exchange that is offered to Sunny is a trade off between a new life and a departure from her homeland. Hence the practice of transnational adoption transfers the focus on Sunny’s sadness when she first arrives into a focus on the adoptive parent’s joy in starting a new life. Chang-rae Lee makes it clear in the adoption story that Sunny is both an object of desire and protection, and adoption is a practice of both commodification and care, both market and rescue. As Sara Dorow points out, the transnational adoptees “are not bought and sold, but neither are they given and received freely and altruistically” (17). The idea of adoption plays a role that both saves and consumes the children. The double-sidedness can never be ignored when we considered the practice of transnational adoption. Moreover, in order to achieve “the best interests for children,” the practice should work more on the side of saving children than on consuming children. As the studies of Jane Jeong Trenka, E. J. Graff, Peter Selman, Shihning Chou, Kevin Borwne, and Melanie Kirkaldy suggest, eliminating the monetary incentive is the first step to avoid consuming children.

60 See <http://www.conducivemag.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=82 :transnational-adoption-and-the-financialization-of-everything4569&catid=38:innovative-thinking&Ite mid=61>

part in adoptees’ search for identity. In A Gesture Life, the past of the two adoptees is

part in adoptees’ search for identity. In A Gesture Life, the past of the two adoptees is