In her study on adoption narratives, Margaret Homans argues that “adoptive origins and origin stories are not discovered in the past so much as they are created in the present and for the present” (5). Likewise, Thomas King also says that “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (2). The truth about “exactly who I am” is a constant question hovering over adoptees’ mind. Hence, as knowing the origin or heredity is often linked to one’s identity, root trips become necessary to adoptees. On one hand, the presence of the adoptees and their trips unsettle the amnesia of Korea.
On the other, however, as Hosu Kim suggests, in the dominant narratives surrounding returning adoptees in Korea, birth mothers are often generalized as they are all the same. Through the representation of media, adoption becomes the affect economy.
Birth mothers are made into “the affective figure, encapsulated in a dominant narrative of adoptees as successful citizens and of foreign adoption as being unfortunate, but inevitably necessary” (143).22
22 Kim argues that “the affect economy connects the traumatic losses of birth mothers with the adoptive parent’s desire for a child (often thwarted due to infertility). Increasingly, the figure of the birth mother is deployed as an affective pull, producing the adoptee’s desire to return to the motherland...” (145).
Women were exploited in the patriarchic society during the World War II and when Korea became industrialized.
With this dominant narrative in Korea, they are exploited again as “‘affectively
necessary labor’ that ensures a successful adoption” when their children become political tools bridging Korea to the United States and global economy.23
In transnational adoption, both birth mothers and adoptees become objects of pity. According to Eleana Kim, Korean adoptees feel “discrimination from Americans and rejection both from South Koreans and Korean Americans” (70); therefore, they do not have the sense of belonging. Koreanness becomes a national, political, and cultural discourse interpellating adult adoptees into a productive role in global economy, and the adoptees become “reminders and remainders of South Korea’s Third World past, the ‘illicit’ sexual practices of Korean Women, and American cultural and economic imperialism” (72). Both the adoptee and the adoptive mothers are the specters of a repressed history. They are conveniently erased from Korea’s official documents, easily forgotten.
Jane Jeong Trenka was born in early 1970s, when South Korea emphasized economic growth rather than the development of social welfare after the Korea War.
Sending children to another country for adoption is also one of the Korean government’s strategies in dealing with social problems of poverty. As discussed earlier, in both Korea and the United States, the international adoption narrative has appealed to an affective relation between both birth and adoptive parents. While in Korea’s adoption discourse, birth parents were socially, legally, or psychologically forced to give up their children with an expectation of a better life for both the children and parents; in U.S. adoption discourse, adoptees are viewed as gifts from birth mothers. To Trenka, she does not see her experience resembling what was told in master transnational adoption narrative. She writes The Language of Blood because she feels the need to tell her story in her own voice. In her essay “Why Write,” she
23 “Affectively necessary labor” was a term that Hosu Kim quotes from Michael Hardt’s “Affective Labor.” Affectively necessary labor is the labor that is essential to produce affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion.
said,
People always ask me why I write. Here's why: I write because the story I have to tell about my life is not the same story that I have been told. I write because I want to create a small mark on the historical record. I write because the master narrative is a master. I write because I refuse to be deployed to support someone else's agenda. I write to find the truth. I write so you will believe me. I write to remember who I am. I write to remember who my mother was. If my childhood memory is a site of amnesia, then I will make my adult memory a site of resistance. I will remember, I will remember, I will remember. I write, I resist, and I refuse to be erased.24
In transnational adoption discourses, adoption becomes affect economy. However, divergent voices come out from adoptees when the adoptees find their experiences diverge from dominant narratives and from the rhetoric of “the best interests for children.” For Trenka, to write is to resist being generalized and erased.
A Gesture Life represents another dimension of post-adoption narrative. The context of the transnational adoption narrative in A Gesture Life is located in the first wave of Korea’s foreign adoption, in which biracial children are the majority of the children given up for adoption. Korea had been occupied and annexed by Japan since 1910. The adoptive father, Kurohata, or Doc Hata, is also an adoptee who was
brought from Korea to Japan before the World War II. It was a period of time when Korea was under Japan’s occupation. In fact, it is very unusual for a Japanese family to adopt a Korean child; therefore, as Chang-rae Lee says, Hata is “a part of a family that he could never belong to and be a part of.”25
24 Trenka puts this paragraph on a conducive blog. See <
Wherever he is, Hata always makes
http://www.wrestlingtheangel.com/archives /000556. html>.
25 In answering the question “How common is it, or was it, for a Japanese family to adopt a Korean child,” Chang-rae Lee draws on his own study and make a comment which includes the information about Doc Hata. For Lee’s answer, which I will discuss in the third chapter, see <
great efforts to try to belong. The desire to be part of his environment drives him to join the army during the World War II. In his service, he meets a comfort woman from Korea, K. Hata, who develops a romantic love for K. However, in the end, K was murdered by other Japanese soldiers. As Chang-rae Lee said in an interview, Hata’s relationship with the comfort woman is one of the defining events in Doc Hata’s life. After the War, he moved to the United States and adopted a daughter, Sunny. Being a Korean orphan and mix-raced, as Lee says, Sunny is “taken in by a family or an adult who is not really thinking of her as a person, but as someone to fill out the house.”26
Without emphasizing humanitarianism, love, generosity, rescue narrative, the social benefit for children, and morality in the practice of transnational adoption, The Language of Blood and A Gesture Life present counter narratives to dominant
transnational adoption narratives. The practice is no longer a blessing for both parents and adoptees. My thesis therefore intends to explore the nature of transnational adoption discourses, and study the representations of transnational adoption in these two texts.
With the narrator’s retrospect to the conflicts between the adoptive father and the adoptee, the novel prompts an inspection of the “best interest for children.”
In the next chapter, I attempt to investigate Trenka’s representation of her experiences as a transnational adoptee. Her memoir challenges the master
transnational adoption narrative constructed by agencies and adoptive parents. First, I will discuss the dominant discourse in transnational adoption. Discourses about the binary opposition between the sending country and the receiving country have normalized the practice of transnational adoption. While social workers and
http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/poems/a.gesture.life.html>.
26 For the comment, see <http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/poems/a.gesture.life.html>.
facilitators become experts and knowledge producers of transnational adoption, the continuation of the practice is in fact supported by the reiteration of these discourses.
Following this, I proceed to study the representation of transnational adoption in Trenka’s memoir. As Marianne Novy observes, adoption plots have been made into films, plays and novels. Adoption plots also appear in TV series like The Simpsons, Grey’s Anatomy, and Sex and the City. As transnational adoption becomes normalized, in Trenka’s memoir, with the inclusion of playwriting, crossword puzzles, myths and dream sequences, it reveals an adoptee’s desire to combine these different genres to construct an adoption plot in her own perspective. The presentation challenges the representation of master narrative and enables us to rethink the practice of
transnational practice. I will also examine the migration of the female body under the practice of transnational adoption in the memoir. Gender dynamics in both sending and receiving countries is deeply involved within the process of transnational adoption, and gender ideologies in different societies have defined what women are.
Being stripped of her own culture and being displaced far away from her own race, Trenka, as a Korean female adoptee, has witnessed what has happened to both her adoptive and birth mothers. And she refuses to repeat their life stories.
In the third chapter, I will analyze the presentation of the transnational adoption narrative in A Gesture Life. I intend to study Doc Hata as an adoptee.
Belongingness has always been an important issue for him. For Hata, there is always a great yearning to belong: in Japan, in the military, and in his home in Bedley Run, America. The way that his language of successful assimilation in his narration and his gesture of being the number one citizen in the little town in America both reveal the fact that he can never possibly really be part of the American society. The
representation of Hata enables us to consider the experience of an adoptee after the practice of transnational adoption leaves him with little or no respect for where he was
from. Following this, I will delve into the relation between Hata and his adoptive daughter, Sunny. Oscillating between the past and the present, Hata’s narration discloses how his yearning for belongingness has driven him to adopt a daughter. As the relation between an adoptive parent and the adoptee deteriorates since the adoptive father refuses to regard his daughter as a person, the narrative suggests a reconsideration of the nature of transnational adoption. Finally, through the
examination of the novel, in the end of the third chapter I will focus on analyzing the relation between gender politics and transnational adoption. Hata’s expectation for women’s chastity, first in K, then in Sunny, reveals the gender ideology he has ascribed to. The way that Hata tries to have a family by adopting a Korean girl mirrors the exploitation of female bodies in the case of the comfort women. The gender ideology drives Hata to subjugate and control the female adoptee, and turns the female adoptee into a victim of patriarchy.
Experiences of transnational adoption can never be generalized. Likewise, the practice is never the only solution to social problems and family issues. Through the study of the representation in the two transnational adoption narratives, I argue that to accept the rhetoric of rescue, humanitarianism, love and generosity in transnational adoption without considering the loss of family, culture, and language for an adoptee is in fact a reproduction of the “banality of evil” because it is the reiteration of the discourses that support the continuation of the practice.27
27 Banality of evil is a phrase coined by
The language of “rescue” is hierarchical and dangerous because it assumes that there is a culture that is inferior or under-developed and thus must be rescued. Korean American adoption is a tale of racial and gender woe. We can not ignore the gender politics
Hannah Arendt. The phrase is incorporated in the title of her work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil and describes the thesis that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, are not executed by fanatics or sociopaths but rather by ordinary people who accept the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions are normal.
within the practice of transnational adoption. Nor can we neglect the lucrative profit accumulated through the migration of the children in the world of global capitalism.
The representations of transnational adoption in the two books debunk the myth of
“happily ever after” in the master transnational adoption narrative. Therefore, in the end of the thesis, I would also argue that to support transnational adoption without reducing the need of transnational adoption, eliminating monetary incentives, and effecting real social changes is to support the extension of the exploitation created by patriarchy, racism, and imperialism.
Chapter Two
Debunking the Master Narrative of Transnational Adoption in The Language of Blood
There are so many books written by adoptive parents in first person, the narrator being the adoptee. My book is actually from the adoptee’s perspective, which may not seem all that big of a deal to someone who isn’t completely obsessed with adoption, but it is true that white adoptive parents and social workers have dominated the literature of adoption for fifty years. We desperately need more adoptees, of any opinion, to write and publish just to begin to correct this imbalance. It’s imperative that we speak for ourselves in our adult voices.28
~Jane Jeong Trenka In this chapter, I intend to explore how Trenka, as a transnational adoptee, challenges the master narrative of transnational adoption with her own lived experience. I will also analyze Trenka’s criticism of the idealized version of transnational adoption as represented in the master narrative, which, according to Trenka, is not reality but most possibly a fantasy constructed based on class, patriarchy, racial ideology. I attempt to study Trenka’s critique from three aspects.
First, I will explore the nature of the master narrative of transnational adoption. The master narrative has been relying on the description of the polarities between sending and receiving countries for more than fifty years. And according to Trenka’s memoir, there is a discrepancy between what is told by transnational adoption agencies and adopters and the reality that transnational adoptees face in their real life. Hence, there is a need to rethink the nature of the practice. I will also study Trenka’s ambivalence toward her identity and then examine her choice to represent her experience in
28 See <http://www.waterstonereview.com/pdf/7/JaneJeongTrenkainterview.pdf >
divergent genres in the memoir. The employment of multiple genres embodies her struggle of identification. To Trenka, the memoir is a record of her experience of transformation, in which she has transformed from an adoptee who suffers from a fragmented identity into a person who has freed herself from the trauma and is reborn through her own writing. Furthermore, Trenka’s use of bodily symbols will also be analyzed.
To investigate how Trenka represents her own experience, I will begin with Trenka’s wish to speak as an adoptee. In The Language of Blood, Trenka writes herself into different characters: such as a doll which can be “returned” back to the store; a replacement of the “pink-skinned boy” with blue eyes and funny smile yet who has never been conceived; the rabbit “sitting right at the hunter’s feet” that has to remain perfectly still, or her stalker would find her; “a gook, a chink” in a white man’s society; a puppy that is eager to please her white parents but finds herself never good enough; the dragon which has never been accepted.29
Paradoxically, Trenka is also overly present to the adoptive parents as a reminder of their inability to bear their own children. As religious Lutherans, Trenka’s
This way of representation reflects her fragmented self and her sense of bewilderedness as an adoptee. Also, one of the focuses in The Language of Blood is the relationship between the adoptee and the adopter. To question the language in the master narrative of transnational adoption, Trenka dwells on the tension between people’s imagination of transnational adoption and the reality faced by the adoptees. To Trenka, her adoptive parents do not see her as who she is, so in the sense that Trenka is a replacement of the white baby desired by her parents yet who has never been conceived, she is invisible/ absent in the adoptive family.
29 For the reference of “pink-skinned boy,” see page 28. For the reference of “sitting right at the hunter’s feet,” see page 81. For the reference of “a gook, a chink,” see page 83.
adoptive parents follow Pastor Mattson’s advice — “God does not see the color of our skin,” and “He made us all the same in His image” — and adopt Trenka and her sister (25). The Brauers raise the sisters as if they were their own children. However, the adopters deliberately ignore the difference between them and their adoptive daughters.
Furthermore, they also ignore Trenka’s need for family support. When Trenka’s adoptive mother tries to sanitize the emotions out of Trenka, what follows after the sanitization is the adoptee’s “han” (恨/한)—an emotion consists of resentment, grudges, regret, angst, and grief (Lo 169). Trenka undergoes the experience of being unrecognized as who she is and suffers the emotional turbulence of “han.” Moreover, what frustrates her the most is that none of her experience resembles what is told in the master narrative of transnational adoption. In this regard, the disparity between the ideal version of transnational adoption as represented in the master narrative and the everyday reality for the adoptees is a recurring motif in The Language of Blood.
Hence in what follows, I will first start with a study on the master narrative in order to further explore the contrast between the perfect image of a nuclear family as
presented in the master narrative and the adoptee’s “real” life as represented in Trenka’s memoir.