Both The Language of Blood and A Gesture Life present counternarratives to dominant transnational adoption narratives which mostly emphasize the point that transnational adoption is equal to social benefit for children and a practice of humanitarianism, love, generosity, and morality. In The Language of Blood, the adoptee is bitter about being taken away from her birth family. Trenka directly questions the practice of transnational adoption by giving her life experience as an example. In A Gesture Life, there is a tension between the narrator’s nonchalance to the practice of transnational adoption and the impact of the experience on the adoptee.
In other words, Chang-rae Lee does not question transnational adoption by
confronting the practice directly. By describing how the practice is taken for granted and normalized as a strategy to deal with one’s own situation, A Gesture Life
questions what makes transnational adoption necessary.
In this thesis, I intend to provide an examination of the representations of transnational adoption in order to argue that there is an urgent need to educate people about what is involved and at stake in the practice of transnational adoption. Without counternarratives such as the two texts we have studied here, people would not know what transnational adoption is about. The master narrative of transnational adoption has been the main source of information about what is comes to the issue of
transnational adoption, which is often misleading, overly general and fails to provide a well-rounded understanding of the life of adoptees and their adoptive and birth parents. In this respect, I have attempted to carry out a study of the social, cultural, and political background of the practice and examine The Language of Blood and A Gesture Life in order to suggest a rethinking of the practice. In the first chapter, the historical and cultural review of transnational adoption shows that Christianity, American optimism, the demand for children in the receiving countries, the
patriarchal ideology and the lack of social welfare in the sending countries are the main factors in transnational adoption. The review also points out that practice of transnational adoption is closely connected to politics, social issues, and cultural context. However, experiences of transnational adoption can never be generalized.
Moreover, the examination of the representations in the texts in Chapter Two and Three reveals the necessity of reforming the practice of transnational adoptoion.
Jane Jeong Trenka points out in “Transnational Adoption and the ‘Finacialization of Everything’” that the reform of intercountry adoption often relies on eliminating the monetary incentive that has driven the practice. Once the monetary factor is
eliminated, the mass transnational adoption would dwindle and the flow of
“financialization” would be directed to real social welfare and family preservation. As Trenka says, “Transnational adoption as it is practiced today is a business that exists in a world of global capitalism where anything—including brides, sex slaves, and the children of vulnerable mothers—can be purchased for the right amount of money.”61
In the dominant narrative, while the truth is never said, and is unlikely for And the link between money and transnational adoption is largely ignored in the public thinking of sending countries. Shihning Chou, Kevin Borwne, and Melanie Kirkaldy’s study shows that “only four percent of the children in insititutions are
‘true’ biological orphans with both parents deceased” (22). Peter Selman also argues that there is always an adoption market because the pressures on poor parents will continue as long as money is allowed to play a part. In this regard, E. J. Graff’s study on orphan crisis indicates that international adoption has become an industry driven by cash and the fact is that if money is removed from adoption chain, the number of healthy babies needing Western homes would vey possibly drop and even disappear.
61 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>
us to hear, what we can rely on is not what is said but what is done. This is also the measure that Chang-rae Lee takes in representing transnational adoption through his novel. A Gesture Life is different from The Language of Blood because it is not a first-hand autobiographical novel written by adopters or adoptees. However, like The Language of Blood, A Gesture Life reveals the deficiency of the master narrative of transnational adoption because it deals with the dark secrets which have long been sugar-coated with the rhetoric of “gift,” “save,” and “rescue.” While I do not want to deny the benevolence of people who want to help children and give them what they deserve in their life, neither do I intend to view the practice of transnational adoption solely as an act of selfishness, ignorance, gullibility, and pretentiousness of human beings. Instead, I aim to question the practice in terms of the counternarratives such as The Language of Blood and A Gesture Life to demand the needed concern for the issues of monetary circulation, commodification and exploitation of adoptees, and a reform of transnational adoption. Not only do we have to avoid “consuming” children by eliminating capitalist exchange, we also have to consider whether the practice is really needed. Sending children to another country is not necessarily the only way to deal with the problem of domestic violence or poverty. Considering the issues such as racism and the sense of un-belongingness that transnational adoptees might encounter after being replaced in another country, enhancing domestic social welfare in order to help the children to stay in their own country and culture can be actually a better option to save children. This can be done through education for people to have well-rounded knowledge of transnational adoption and thus enable a rethinking in society. Through the study of these two texts, what we have to always bear in mind is that The Language of Blood is not just a memoir of an unfortunate adoptee, neither should we take the representation of transnational adoption in A Gesture Life as just a fictional account of the actual practice. Through The Language of Blood, we see the
adoptee writes to fight against the language of master narrative of transnational adoption. Also, while most critics focus on the representation of the experience of comfort women in A Gesture Life, my examination of the text here focuses on the experience of transnational adoption and the power of biopolitics within it. The counternarratives of the texts not only reflect the fact that the practice of transnational adoption needs to be reformed, but they also remind us that, most important of all, the ultimate goal of transnational adoption should always be done with the consideration of the best interests for children and of reducing the manipulation over female bodies.
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