Among the many books and films about adoption, Jane Jeong Trenka’s memoir The Language of Blood stands out as a voice challenging the dominant master narrative of transnational adoption. In an interview with Shannon Fimbel, Jane Jeong Trenka exresses not only her expectation of creating multiple voices in the narrative
39 Here I intend to focus on the relation between the language of adoption and the practice. The relation between transnational adoption and money will be discussed in the next chapter.
of transnational adoption but also her wish to speak as an adoptee in her memoir. In terms of The Language of Blood, we can find that there is a discrepancy between the mainstream narrative of transnational adoption and what the adoptee actually faces in real life. The rhetoric of gifts and “being saved” is accepted and taken for granted by most people whether they are involved in transnational adoption. However, in her memoir, Trenka dwells on the tension between “seeming and being” by mulling over the glittering appearance, which is what people are usually told about transnational adoption, and the reality of the adoptee’s life (226). Her attempts to write her experiences in different genres create a narrative tension that not only reflects her doubled self—the Korean daughter Kyong-Ah and the adoptee American Jane—but also question the language in master narrative of transnational adoption.
The doubleness in Trenka’s experience is unavoidable because there is a racial difference between her and the adoptive family. Being an Asian child raised by white parents, Trenka constantly came across people who came up and talked to her and her family with curiosity when she was little. The questions that the people brought up were often impolite and even rude, which also reinforces her feeling as an outsider who is not accepted in the white dominant society because of her Asian looks.
She could not help think about what her life could be if she were not brought to the new family and she imagines how she is brought to her new parents’ home when she was a six-month-old. Trenka becomes a playwright writing herself into a character in the play. By describing how her sister Carol is looking for Korean faces in the new environment and by depicting Carol’s past life in Korea at the same time, Trenka directs and controls the focus of the scene and what should be presented. Unlike what most adoption agencies have “promised,” the plot here is no longer about how happy the new family is and how radiant the smiles of the parents and the adoptees are, but about how Carol the adoptee misses her life with the birth family. Moreover, in the
end of the play, when Trenka says that “at the end of the movie sequence, the Korean memories are completely erased, and the reel-to-reel projector shows blank frames and white noise, as seen at a beginning or ending take-up length of tape,” this
presumed closure to the past is disturbed by the sense of grief and repression since the adoptee “has willed herself to become a girl with no history and is now ready to start her new life” (18). It is a closure imposed on the adoptee not only because she is taken away from her birth family and country but also because a “clear break” or “clear cut”
from the past is deemed necessary for the construction of a new family.
In order to make a clear cut, in Trenka’s adoptive family the a-word,
adoption and the k-word, Korea, are forbidden. Trenka’s mother also tells her that it is not possible for Trenka to correspond with her birth mother (38). When Trenka asks why she is given away, the question irritates the adoptive mother. It is made clear in the adoptive mother’s reaction that the past should be erased and never talk about. As Eun Kyung Min argues, “for the transnational adoptee raised in a white adoptive family, and thus cut off from an Asian community, the pressure to assimilate by disavowing and repressing her racial identity can be all the more extreme” (121).
Being afraid that she would be given away again, Trenka is so regretful that she blames herself for asking the question which irritates her adoptive mother: “Who could love such a stupid child who says such stupid things? There must be something wrong with me. I must be rotten, truly bad” (24). The anger, sadness and loss of the adoptee sneaks in under the cover of self-blaming. The experience that Trenka has is never, as she says, “the convenient and fateful equation for me: my parents didn’t have children and I needed a home” (226). The “unquantifiables” of the freedom in America and her loss of language and culture of her birth country are never calculable (229). In her experience, appearance and reality have never been the same to Trenka.
The difference is most obvious in the colorblindness of the adoptive parents.
Trenka’s adoptive parents are devout Lutherans, and they adopt Trenka and Carol out of religious piety and community pressure. As Trenka writes, in her adopted hometown Harlow everyone is prescribed with their responsibility: “men must be husbands and fathers. If they are not, they are eccentric old bachelor cousins or junior high English teachers. Likewise, Women are wives and mothers. They must be mothers, not just wives, and if the children are not born soon, people talk” (19).
Trenka’s teacher, Miss Larson, who remains single without any intention of getting married, is the object of compassion in Harlow. People talk about her marital status
“with a knowing nod,” and they “pray” for her when they learn the fact that she does not intend to get married and have a family (35). The pressure from the community in fact turns women without husbands and women without children into victims rather than objects of compassion. Within this cultural context, the community technically compels women to be mothers. Thus, as transnational adoption becomes “a plausible choice” for adoptive parents, it also shores up an idealized notion of kinship, making good of the white heterosexual nuclear family (Eng 26).
Back in the early 1970s when Trenka was adopted, in order to adopt children, Trenka’s adoptive parents needed to “prove to the social worker from Moorhead that they were good enough, earnd enough, were Christian enough” (26). As Pastor Mattson says to Trenka’s adoptive parents, “God does not see the color of our skin,”
and “He made us all the same in His image” (25). The way that the Brauers raised Trenka and her sister as their own indeed mirrors their religious belief. However, while in-race adoptive parents can weigh the advantages and disadvantages of telling the truth to their adoptees, there is no bypath left for transracial adopters. As the memoir shows, memories can be erased by taking the children away from birth countries, just like the way that Carol does not remember any Korean at all. But the visible difference between parents and children is not easily overlooked, and yet
Trenka’s parents chose to ignore the difference. Writing a scene in a restaurant into a musical, for example, Trenka vividly portrays the colorblindness of the parents:
“Some of the DINERS touch the girls as if they are dolls and push CAROL and JANE roughly in their chairs. MARGARET and FRED continue reading their menus,
holding them over their faces, oblivious to the crowd of DINERS at their table” (34).
And then the musical continues mocking the adoptees, revealing the racism and stereotypes about Asians in the adoptive country.
The colorblindness of the adoptive parents creates the “absent presence” of the adoptee. It is the coexistence of absence and presence in the double bind of colorblindness. The adopters see the adoptees because the adoptees are there to complete the adopters’ role as parents, but the adoptee also reminds the parents their inability to have a child of their own. Hence Trenka claims that in her adoptive family, the adoptee is in fact a replacement of the white boy who has never been born to her parents. Being a replacement means being invisible because she is not recognized by the parents for who she is. For Trenka, as she says, she is like nothing more than a doll which can be returned to the shop (24), a “people-pleaser” (206), and a “pathetic little dogs” (207). David Howe points out in Patterns of Adoption that
the quality of parenting and family relationship do affect adopted children’s social and emotional adjustment. Adoption studies of children placed as babies consistently report that the outcome is heavily influenced by the skills, attitudes and relationship style of the adopters. Parents who are able to relate to and communicate with partners and children in an open, accurate, sensitive, stable and empathic way are most likely to produce well-adjusted children (68).
Howe also suggests that adopted children show marginally higher rates of “anxiety to be accepted by adults. Low self-esteem and feelings of insecurity are also more likely
to be present” (24). In the memoir, the anxiety to be accepted is always present. For instance, one time Ternka confesses “How I wanted parents like that, parents who wanted me for me, not to act and look like their white child who had never existed”
(110). As a child, she expresses her anxiety by stating “I must be very, very good so my mommy will keep me. I won’t ask any more stupid questions. I won’t do anything to make her mad. I will be so good for her. I will be perfect” (25). After she grows up, she feels frustrated because she attempts to do well and struggles to gain recognition from their parents, only to find that, as her friend Mary says, no matter how good she is, what the parents want from you is “for you to be someone you’re not” (207). Her parents see her without seeing her. The invisibility is to the level that her adoptive father mocks her Asian boyfriend in front of her. To Trenka, the anxiety to be accepted and the sense of insecurity is equal to “self-loathing, the kind you get when you discover that you must be one of two things to your dad, either invisible or ridiculous; the kind you get when you hate your own face, so much like your
boyfriend’s and so easily mocked; the kind you get when you want to love your father but hate him instead” (67).
While Trenka’s parents show their ignorance of the racial difference, many studies have shown the importance of race, ethnicity, and parents’ support for positive self-identity formation of adoptees.40
40 For more studies on the relation between an adoptee’s identity formation and parents’ support, see Nam Soon Huh, M. Elizabeth Bonk et al., Tai Soon Bai, Dong Pil Yoon, Daniel B. Lee, and David Howe.
In “Utilization of Structual Equation Modeling to Predict Psychological Well-Being Among Adopted Korean Children,” Dong Pil Yoon states that adoptees’ psychological health is related to their relationship with parents. According to Yoon, family warmth and communication patterns are the primary source of psychological well-being for adoptees. Family support that provides a feeling of love and a sense of belongingness is positive for the
development of adoptee’s sense of self. These adoptees also have less emotional distress than those who do not have support and warmth from family. However, Trenka’s adoptive parents refuse to talk about Korea. They refuse to travel to Korea with Trenka to meet her Korean family. They also refuse to attend the memorial service for Trenka’s birth mother. To Trenka, the refusals are signs of denial to see Trenka for who she is and a denial to provide the family support that she needs.
Facing the denial and colorblindness of her adoptive parents and out of despair, Trenka comes to assume that an understanding between her mother and she could be possible only if they are really blind: “Would we know each other by touch? Touch me here, Mom, in this place where I am sorry, where I love you, where I need to be healed” (231).
Moreover, in Trenka’s adoptive family, emotions are sanitized. When Trenka’s paternal grandma is dead, Trenka’s adoptive father is also asked by her adoptive mother to control his sadness and sorrow in front of the family (59). And as Trenka says, “in a family that doesn’t talk much,” there is no communication about feelings between the adoptive parents and children, either (201). Trenka also experiences discrimination from the society and assumes that being different is a negative thing. At school, other children leer at her and some children are not allowed to play with her. Adults do not feel compelled to defend her when some people call her a “chink” or a “rice-picker.” Her college application form is returned as she automatically checks “white” for ethnicity (129). She seeks out other Asians in America after her reunion with her birth family, only to find that she is not accepted by them either because she is “still not Asian enough, suspected of being a
subcutaneous white supremacist” (215). Trenka is like the dragon in the story she has created, “The Happy Village” (53). As the dragon tries hard to behave in order to earn trust from the villagers, it is still not allowed to become one of the members in the
Happy Village. Being an Asian in Harlow, Minnesota is like being the dragon who wants to enter the village but never will be accepted. In the memoir, the rejection from her society disturbs our understanding of the rhetoric of love and demands us to question the practice of transracial and transnational adoption.
In an interview with Bryan Thao Worra, Trenka states that the reason that she writes a lot about language and the body is because she is “bothered by them and they won’t leave me alone.”41
41 For a detailed information about the interview, see <http://voices.cla.umn.edu/readings/trenka_jane.
html >
When she studies in college, Trenka is stalked by a fellow student who has a .38 caliber pistol in his possession and breaks into her house with
“the basic intentions of kidnapping Jane, raping her, and then killing her” (87). After
“her stalker” is arrested, according to the psychological evaluation of the guy, he admits that he bought video camera equipment “so that he could record his exploits of raping and killing the intended victim so that he could further enjoy the experience again and again later on…” (87). Moreover, one winter day in Minnesota, Trenka is approached by a guy in a supermarket who thinks of her as a foreigner because of her oriental face. He talks to her in order to “offer her a job” to “cane” or “punish” him (99). She is irritated to find that, other than “her stalker,” there is “one more white guy who couldn’t keep his Asians straight” (99). In the memoir, the copies of a white guy’s personal ad and an ad of an adult website reflect the stereotype/fantasy about the sexuality of Asian women. Trenka creates a theater piece of monologue named
“Don Worry. I Will Make You Feel Comfortable” to represent racial and gendered stereotypes about Asian women. The monologue reflects the fact that to the
Caucasians in her imagined audience, who represent the majority of Americans in her real life, she is, as “her stalker” says, “a gook, a chink,” and “nothing but a Korean in a white man’s society” (83).
According to Eun Kyung Min, Trenka’s intention in writing The Language of Blood is “not to condemn transnational adoption outright or to be ‘geneticist,’ but to say that there are losses entailed in transnational adoption that cannot, and should not, be rationalized or imagined away” (124). An author’s vision always reflects her social status in relation to gender, ethnicity, nationality, political perspective, and
involvement in the adoption triad. To Trenka, “blood” in the title is not “a signifier of biology, nature, the given” but “the memory without language,” the “silenced memory, what is not allowed to be remembered, and that which nonetheless survives this
silencing” (Min 125). Hence, if transnational adoption is one of the solutions for the women who are oppressed in the patriarchal society of Korea and also for women who suffer the social stigma placed on women without children in the United States, the practice would also be a mechanism that not only supports the gendered ideology within patriarchal society but also reinforces the ideology that prioritizes white middle-class nuclear family building over “the best interests for children.” In this respect, the migration of the female body only serves to enhance patriarchy because it is marked with the violence and repression imposed on women and mothers.
Moreover, we should not imagine away the losses of the adoptee, nor should we ignore the experience that the female body encounters after she is adopted. Without taking Trenka’s losses into consideration, the process of her adoption is not only a commodification, her experiences with the stalker and the harasser are also a sign of a prolonged objectification of female body in the experience of transnational adoption.
As mentioned, Trenka designates her emotion as “han” (恨/한) after she has the experience of multiple alienation: being unrecognized for who she is by her adoptive parents, being unaccepted by an Asian-only community because she is not Asian enough, being told “Go back to where you came from” in a white society, being a human ball pitched around different adoption agency workers while requesting for
information about her adoption, and being rejected for the right of opening her own adoption file (238). According to Beth Kyong Lo, “han” “contains grudges, lamenting, regret, resentment, grief, and angst. It is conceived of as an ailment of the mind and heart, and inconsolable state of mind” (169). The result of “han” is “Hwa-byung,” (火 病/화병) or pent-up anger.42
Trenka’s “han” comes from the interpersonal conflicts that she encounters when facing her family and society. The “han” is there when she is incapable of fulfilling the longing for “wholeness” and being “normal” (237). Trenka is frustrated because she does not see her experience resembles what she has been told, because she is not “a better daughter,” because she is not being grateful for receiving “the best interests” for her, because no one sees her as who she is, and because her loss is not recognized either by the people around her or in the master narrative of transnational adoption (227). The yearning to be a real white and northern Minnesotan is so
Trenka’s “han” comes from the interpersonal conflicts that she encounters when facing her family and society. The “han” is there when she is incapable of fulfilling the longing for “wholeness” and being “normal” (237). Trenka is frustrated because she does not see her experience resembles what she has been told, because she is not “a better daughter,” because she is not being grateful for receiving “the best interests” for her, because no one sees her as who she is, and because her loss is not recognized either by the people around her or in the master narrative of transnational adoption (227). The yearning to be a real white and northern Minnesotan is so