I will start with the ideological discourses underlying the dominant narrative of transnational adoption, which includes gift rhetoric, rescue narratives, and
humanitarianism. According to studies on Korean American adoption, the practice links the expectation for building the loving middle-class nuclear family in Western society to the value of pure lineage and the ideal of feminine chastity in the
patriarchal society of Korea. It is also conceived as a repercussion of American imperialism/colonialism and Korea’s aspiration for economic growth and modernity
after the Korea War.30 Whereas in the United States adopting a foreign baby is an exercise of American assimilation in the name of rescue, sending children away from Korea is often read as a maternal sacrifice for a better life for both the child and the birth family in Korea. Moreover, when the “gift rhetoric” of adoption in the United States meets the notion of the American dream in Korea,31 the practice is also a means to fulfill Christian ideal of civilization and a reflection of Korea’s ingrained
misogyny.32
Transnational adoption discourse and narrative articulated by adoption agencies and adoptive parents has dominated the literature of transnational adoption for more than fifty years. It is until very recent years that we hear the voices of birth parents and adoptees. For the past five decades, while birth parents were mostly absent in government documents and the articulation of adult adoptees remained largely unheard, both adoption agencies and adopters have assumed the responsibility to speak for the practice of transnational adoption.
The binary oppositions between the sending and receiving countries such as supply and need, repression in patriarchal society and freedom in liberal democracy, traditional and modern, started Korean-American adoption. However, it is the
reiteration of the binary oppositions that sustains the practice.
On the one hand, adoption agencies have been the “knowledge producers” on the subject of Korean-American adoption. According to Kristi Brian, three themes in the discourse of transnational agency characterize the language of these knowledge producers: “adopter-centered,” “culture-consuming,” and the tendency of treating the sending country, Korea, as “nonpolitical, cultural other’” (62). In her essay “Choosing
30 For the relation between transnational adoption and the imperialism of the United States, see Tobias Hübinette. For the relation between transnational adoption and the aspirations for modernity in Korea, see Hosu Kim, and Eleana Kim.
31 The gift rhetoric views the child as a gift of birth mothers. In intercountry adoption sites where the U.S. has been the dominant receiving country, the American dream refers to a promise of a better life for the adopted child. See Hosu Kim, 145-47.
32 For a detailed discussion on each notion mentioned above, see Kristi Brian, David Eng, Dong Soo Kim, Hosu Kim, Tobias Hübinette, Eleana Kim, Catherine Cerniza Choy.
Korea: Marketing ‘Multiculturalism’ to Choosy Adopters,” Brian argues that in order to meet “the consumer needs of the target market,” which are the needs of adopters in the enterprise of transnational adoption, Korean-American adoption social workers often take the stance as experienced adopters and understanding, sensitive facilitators to guarantee a successful adoption (65). In the discourse of the agencies, U.S.
domestic adoptions are more often than not overlooked in the information provided to potential adopters. In addition, the efficiency of Korean-American adoption is often a focus in the discourse of agency facilitators when they intend to promote transnational adoption. Thus, the practice overshadows other options for potential parents. E. J.
Graff’s essay, “The Lie We Love,” corresponds to Kristi Brian’s points as she indicates that transnational adoption is promoted by adoption agencies because, in addition to religious belief and changes of demography,33
According to Brian, the agency facilitators of Korean American adoption also tend to link multiculturalism with the race awareness of adopters. In fact, the notion of multiculturalism is hailed in the United States and thus the race consciousness of the adopters is viewed as the embodiment of virtuosity and open-mindedness (Brian 70).
In Brian’s words, with the offhand uses of culture and multiculturalism, culture is mostly reduced to race or traditions, and adoptees are viewed as carriers of culture or cultural commodities. Thus, race, or culture, becomes a guide to the adopters’
preference in their decision-making process.
the practice is also considered as a “safer,” “more predictable and more likely to success” plan than domestic adoptions for those who are eager to adopt.
34
33 In Graff’s essay, the changes of demography here refer to the declination of the number of the unplanned births, which is a result of contraception, abortion, delayed marriages. Reasons for transnational adoption that are related to the changes of demography can also be found on page 6 and 12 of this thesis.
However, as the United States embraces its ethnic plurality and uses the image of a melting pot as the national
34 For a detailed discussion on the assumption of race consciousness in culture-consuming parents in the discourse of adoption agencies, see Kristi Brian, 69-74.
emblem, the notion of unity through diversity and the acclaim of multiculturalism not only highlight abiding ethnic differences, neglect socially shared interests but also lead to a dichotomy between sending and receiving countries, between western and eastern cultures, and between white people and peoples of color.
Finally, agencies intend to create a fixed image of Korea as “unanimously and culturally intolerant of adoption” (Brian 69). Brian suggests that in the discourse of transnational adoption agencies, Korea is a country with a bound tradition. The assumed tradition is often associated with patriarchy and gender hierarchies. And it is also a tradition that supposedly hampers the development of modernity and
democracy in Korea. In this perspective, Brian points out, without giving “careful reconsideration to how tradition is differently constructed at particular historical moments,” without portraying the relations among Korean-American adoption, its profitable program, Korea’s rapid industrialization and urbanization, and Americans’
reasons for adopting Korean children, and without contextualizing the diverse opinions for adoption in Korea, the practice often becomes “the best solution for a society crippled by its own traditions” in the dominant discourse of transnational adoption (68). Instead of “relying on the lazy language of tradition,” or on the polarities between sending and receiving countries, the practice of Korean-American adoption does indeed entail a rethinking on its nature (69). And an expectation for a real social change that focalizes on social welfare is, therefore, of imperative significance.
Besides adoption agencies, whose discourses dominate adoption narratives, adoptive parents and many western researchers are also speaking on behalf of the prevailing narratives that have illustrated and affected the practice of transnational adoption for a long time. Among them, international adoption guides written by adopters often provide information of the adoption process to adopters. In her essay,
“Shopping for Children in the International Marketplace,” Kim Park Nelson points out that a hierarchy of parents and children is omnipresent in these works of “how-to”
literature. Aside from the hierarchy of white parents and colored children, in the adopters’ preference, there are also a racial hierarchy of the adoptees of different colors with white children on top and colored children on the bottom and a national hierarchy with adoptive parents’ nations on top and the Third World countries on the bottom. Moreover, class hierarchy between adopters and low-class birth parents of color also exists in their language. In other words, language of hierarchy and racism lurks in many adoption narratives as represented by these international adoption guides. Nelson also indicates that the “power differentials between parents and children, institutions and individuals, white people and people of color, and rich and poor nations are great enough that potential for abuse is enormous” (90). The language of the international adoption guides not only allow adopters to view themselves as superior and more qualified in the experience of parenting than birth parents, but also consent the act of reproducing white privileges through transnational adoption.
Furthermore, some of the adoptive parents and adoption agency workers take a step further to assume the role of adoption “experts” or “authorities.” Sunny Jo points out that there has been an imbalance in terms of the consideration of
transnational adoption. On one hand, according to Jo, the “adoption professionals,”
“supposed authorities” or “experts” assume that “the affluent white couples in the
‘First World’” provide loving homes, opportunities for education and a “good” life for poor, starving, and needy children (286). Over the past fifty years, social workers, psychiatrists, white adoptive parents, and academics have dominated the literature on transnational adoption and therefore have been the ones who describe and define
“what it’s like” and “how the adoptees turn out” to be like (Oparah et al. 1). On the
other, based on the fact that the voices of adult adoptees remain largely unheard, when adult adoptees question the assumption in the master narrative, their articulation is often considered as individual or personal and therefore not as “credible” as that of the “experts.” In this regard, Jo defines the situation when “someone becomes the expert on other people’s experiences and is deemed more knowledgeable about who they are than the people themselves” as an act of “appropriation” (286). In the appeals of transnational adoption agencies to potential parents, there is often an emphasis on providing children a home to “rescue” them from miserable situations. In the words of the “experts,” children are “saved” and the practice of transnational adoption is
beneficial for children, parents, and society as a whole (286). However, if we think about how “the need to adopt” is created by western social expectations for building a middle class nuclear family, about the stark gender role which continues to reaffirm the importance of motherhood for women and thus forms the incentive to adopt from sending countries, about the financial accumulation that supports the practice of transnational adoption agencies, and about how government shirks its responsibility of maintaining social welfare and thus gives private agencies opportunities to develop without regulations, what the rhetoric of “the best interests for children” really means in the dominant narrative of transnational adoption becomes essentially problematic.
In addition to the discourses and narratives of transnational adoption, Shihning Chou, Kevin Browne, and Melanie Kirkaldy also point out in their essay,
“Intercountry Adoption on the Internet,” that 37 percent of registered American intercountry adoption websites clearly affirm that their programs allow adopters to select a child they wish to adopt. Kristi Brian holds the same conclusion in her study.
According to Brian, while many adopters are looking forward to a predictable and controlled process of family-building, adoption agencies often attempt to cater to the
“choosiness” of potential adoptive parents (66). Therefore, the agencies turn
transnational adoption into a practice that is “congruent with other processes of globalization that favor ‘private sector solutions over the public sector’” (66). Chou, Browne, and Kirkaldy also indicate that the majority of intercountry adoption
agencies displayed photographs of children on websites, and 18.1 percent of agencies used terminology that views children no longer as individuals in need but as
commodity items (22). In this regard, the discourse and terminologies used by
transnational adoption agencies create an illusion that transnational adoption has been all about freedom and choice of adopters; and the rhetoric of “rescue” and “save”
creates another illusion that turns the practice of transnational adoption into an inevitable result of war and poverty in the dominant narrative of transnational adoption.
Critics on the practice of transnational adoption have different ideas about the nature of transnational adoption. The act of taking the children away from their birth country are defined as either altruism or exploitation, either humanitarianism or consumption. Some argue that adoptive parents and adoptees are mutually produced for each other in transnational adoption, and that adoption is seen as a personal and social good; others disapprove the commodification of children and of kinship.
However, all critics condemn South Korea’s act of exporting children for adoption after the Korean War. North Korea, which took a different measure in dealing with the same crisis after the Korean War, criticized South Korea for sending children away permanently.35
35 Based on Dr Mi-jeong Lee’s study, “Domestic and Overseas Adoption and Unwed Mothers’
Welfare,” Jane Jeong Trenka points out in “Transnational Adoption and the ‘Financialization of Everything,’” that instead of exporting children out to other countries for adoption permanently, North Korea sent children to other countries with North Korean nurses, and the children were brought back later. Facing North Korea’s critique, South Korea “had nothing to rebut against North Korea.” See
<http://www.conducivemag.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=82:transnational-a doption-and-the-financialization-of-everything4569&catid=38:innovative-thinking&Itemid=61>
International community also attacked South Korea for exporting its most precious treasure—its children—for transnational adoption.
However, while all condemn South Korea for solving its social problems after the Korean War by sending children away, the practice still persists. In other words, few interrogate the continued practice of sending children abroad. Moreover, it is often described/justified as an act of humanitarianism. In the master narrative of
transnational adoption, this humanitarian justification defines the difference between exporting children and transnational adoption. However, according to Tobias
Hübinette, the experience of transnational adoptees is in fact very similar to that of the Atlantic slave trade between the 16th-century and 19th- centuries, the dispatching of Indians and Chinese indentured labor from 1864 to 1941, and the “massive trafficking of women and children for international marriage and sexual exploitation” at the present time (143). Moreover, the experience also parallels the “domestic transracial adoptions of children from indigenous and minority groups to white families,” which have been “highly charged and contested and sometimes even branded ethnocide or cultural genocide” (141).36
Laura Briggs also suggests in her essay, “Sex, Reproduction, and Foreign Policy” that “the language of sentiment, rescue” and the language of “doing good” in the world are never innocent, and are ultimately as dangerous as “virile” discourses for militarism (23). As Briggs states, before the photos and reports of the ferocity and prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraibin are released, most people do not have sufficient grounds to question the benevolence and morality of the United States military invasion in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many believe the American government’s claims in the name of intervention: the act is to liberate local victims from dictatorship to
According to Hübinette, the similarity comes from the analogy that both the enslaved and the adoptees are forced to migrate for the
insatiable demand from the “consumers,” for market interests, and for profit making.
36 In their essay, “A sociological Approach to Race, Identity, and Asian Adopton,” Jiannbin Shiao and Mia Tuan hold similar opinions, see especially 157-59.
stabilize civil unrest and terrorism, and to help develop democracy. As the report of the brutality in the prison confronts the American’s knowledge about the war, the military act turns out to be an affront to the believer of the government’s claim. In this regard, most adoptive parents, policy makers, and those who support the practice engage themselves in transnational adoption because of the rhetoric of
humanitarianism embedded in the master narrative. E. J. Graff demystifies the
“orphan crisis” by exposing the fact that the story of abandoned or orphaned infants who need loving homes and adoring parents abroad is largely fictional.37
In order to avoid consumer-oriented transnational adoption and to give sufficient attention to matters of race and international hierarchies of privilege, Kristi Brian argues that it is reasonable to demand adoption agencies to start reducing the need of the practice. Transnational adoption scholar Peter Selman points out that the practice of transnational adoption has continued by adopting children from Romania, then China and Russia, and finally African countries even as Korea and South
American countries decrease the number of foreign adoption. In Selman’s words, the
“market” remains as long as the demand from the West continues and as long as money is involved in the process.
It becomes fictional because, for those with vested interests in the practice, they need to justify themselves to make people believe in the decency of their act because they need people’s support. As Briggs suggests, there are people who use human rights, support, and the belief in decency to champion victims and there are also people who use these very terms to victimize people.
38
37 See E. J. Graff’s essay, “The Lie We Love.”
E. J. Graff also points out that once a country stops sending children abroad, adoption agencies can always find another country to
38 This is from an interview that Peter Selman has with Newsweek. The title of the interview is “Baby Backlash.” It is an interview on the topic of baby trafficking and intercountry adoptions. For more detailed information regarding to the interview, see < http://www.newsweek.com/id/104698>.
make up for the supply. As the practice continues, the language of humanitarian benevolence will remains necessary for the operation of adoption agencies. Jane Jeong Trenka also maintains that the reform of intercountry adoption relies on eliminating the monetary incentive that drives it. Otherwise, being taken in by the language of humanity and the rhetoric of “rescue” while ignoring the lucrative side of the practice will be more likely to create an orphan instead of saving a child.39
In the dominant narrative, ideologies in Korea society and those in the United States partly help construct the practice of transnational adoption. While the dominant narrative of transnational adoption endeavors to highlight humanitarianism in the practice, the enterprise of transnational adoption actually demands a rethinking and reevaluation of the practice itself. Languages produced by the clash of these
ideologies not only fortify, facilitate, and validate transnational adoption but they also assume an unwavering nature in each sending and receiving society. The following analysis of Trenka’s memoir intends to explore the textual articulation of an adult adoptee, whose experience not only is different from what the master narrative of transnational adoption has been communicating but whose narrative also helps us understand what transnational adoption appears to be for an adoptee.
2.2 Challenging the Master Narrative of Transnational Adoption in The