The New York Review of Books (2022-01-13)

January 13, 2022 19

Return Flights

E. Tammy Kim

Palimpsest:

Documents from a Korean Adoption

by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom,

translated from the Swedish by Hanna

Strömberg, Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom,

and Richey Wyver.

Drawn and Quarterly,

151 pp., $24.95 (paper)

Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.

by Jenny Heijun Wills.

McClelland and Stewart,

248 pp., $22.95; $15.50 (paper)

All You Can Ever Know

by Nicole Chung.

Catapult, 228 pp., $16.95 (paper)

Amy Mee- Ran Dorin Kobus was ad-

opted from South Korea in 1974, at the

age of six. In an essay for the anthology

Voices from Another Place: A Collec-

tion of Works from a Generation Born

in Korea and Adopted to Other Coun-

tries (1999), she recalls “kicking and

screaming” as she was taken to her new

home in North Branch, Minnesota,

by white adoptive parents. “I worked

diligently to become the model Amer-

ican,” she writes. “I dressed in Ameri-

can clothes, took speech tutoring to rid

myself of my Korean accent, and, most

important, I acted American.” Still,

she felt unsettled by her past:

Most adopted children have ques-

tions about their biological par-

ents such as, “Why was I given up

for adoption?” “Didn’t my family

want me? ” and “Who were my real

mother and father?” Those were

my questions too.

Dorin Kobus’s adoptive mother, en-

couraging her to explore her heritage,

took her to a Korean cultural program

in Minneapolis. After high school, her

adoptive parents sponsored her trip to

Korea with twenty other adoptees, a

“motherland tour.” She visited an or-

phanage like the one in which she spent

her infancy, but did not manage to find

her birth parents. On the way back, she

was asked to escort a thirteen- month-

old baby boy to his adoptive family in

the United States. “During the long

flight I cared for the baby as if it were

my own, knowing I would have to give

him up,” she writes. “I thought of my

biological mother and her possible feel-

ings when giving me up. I am certain

she cried many tears.”

Over the past seven decades, some

200,000 South Korean children have

been adopted abroad, mostly to the US

but also to Canada, Europe, and Aus-

tralia. For many years, South Korea

was the top exporting nation for in-

ternational adoptions; more recently,

that distinction has belonged to China,

which has sent more than 126,

children abroad since 2000. Korean

adoptions began in the 1950s, with the

well- intentioned rescue of “war or-

phans” during and after the Korean

War. Many of these children indeed

had no living family; others were “so-

cial orphans” who’d been separated

from their parents in the fighting or

were considered unassimilable owing

to racial and social stigmas. In Voices

from Another Place, Kat Turner, the

adoptive daughter of a pastor in Iowa,

describes herself at a telling distance:

she is, she writes, the mixed- race “prod-

uct of an American soldier in Korea as

a result of the war.”^1

It didn’t take long for transnational

adoption to go from emergency re-

sponse to permanent bureaucracy.

For the South Korean government,

out- adoption became a substitute for

costly antipoverty programs: in 1960

the country’s per capita GDP was just

$158, compared with $475 in Japan.^2

Churches and social services agencies

in the West, meanwhile, aggressively

marketed Korean children to pro-

spective adoptive parents. One couple

described their adoptive daughters as

targets of their evangelicalism: “Our

girls are our mission field, this brings us

great pride. We never see a nationality

difference.” As Arissa H. Oh writes in

To S a ve t h e C hildren of Korea (2015),

South Korea designed a template for

interracial family- making that plan-

ners in Vietnam, Central and Latin

America, India, Russia, Romania, and

China later used to send children to

the West. International adoption be-

came a long- term form of child welfare

and, despite many people’s best inten-

tions, “a public market in which chil-

dren were commodified, sourced, and

shipped overseas like packages.”

South Korean adoptions peaked in

1985, more than three decades after the

Korean War and well into the nation’s

economic rise. By then, thousands of

transnational adoptees were reaching

adulthood. In the US, they were em-

boldened by growing racial awareness

and increased scrutiny of the child wel-

fare system. In 1972 the National Asso-

ciation of Black Social Workers issued

a statement against transracial adop-

tion, asserting that “only a black family

can transmit the emotional and sensitive

subtleties of perception and reaction

essential for a black child’s survival in

a racist society.” Several years later, Na-

tive activists won passage of the Indian

Child Welfare Act, which recognizes the

“essential tribal relations of Indian peo-

ple” and requires that Native children

be placed with kin whenever possible.

Beginning in the 1990s, Korean

adoptees met through organizing net-

works and at international conferences

as well as on the early Internet. They

shared their experiences of estrange-

ment and uncannily similar accounts

of why they had been abandoned (des-

perate teenage parents) or why their

vital records were incomplete (fires

and floods). They returned to Korea on

motherland tours, visiting orphanages

and trying to locate their birth parents.

In time, they began to tell their own

stories. The first anglophone adop-

tee memoirs appeared in Voices from

Another Place and another collection,

Seeds from a Silent Tree: An Anthol-

ogy by Korean Adoptees (1997). Then

came The Language of Blood (2003),

a lyrical recollection by Jane Jeong

Trenka, who later became a leading

adoptee activist. Trenka describes a

sort of double birth:

My name is Jeong Kyong- Ah....

Halfway around the world, I am

someone else.

I am Jane Marie Brauer, created

September 26, 1972, when I was

carried off an airplane onto Amer-

ican soil.

As a young child in the Midwest,

Trenka is taught to feel grateful but

cannot shake a sense of dread:

“We chose you,” my mommy al-

ways says. To me that means from

a store.... A thought comes to me

now, a frightening thought that

makes sense as I sit alone: I could

also be returned to the store. I

could be exchanged for a better

girl.

Korean adoptees, especially in

North America and Europe, have since

produced numerous works of mem-

oir, poetry, film, and visual art. The

American poet and English professor

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs has written auto-

fictionally of found family: “An hour

into reunion, Appa and I match /pace

1- 2- 3 drink! and I want to sing /the

only Korean song I know.” Another US

adoptee, Deann Borshay Liem, made

two documentaries about being ad-

opted under the identity of another girl

from her orphanage. Jane Jin Kaisen,

an adoptee raised in Denmark, repre-

sented Korea at the 2019 Venice Bien-

nale, with an installation based on the

folktale of Princess Bari, an abandoned

daughter who becomes a powerful sha-

man. And Malene Choi, also Danish,

took a refreshingly experimental ap-

proach in her feature film The Return

(2018). In one scene, an adoptee named

Thomas posts xeroxed signs all over the

tiny Korean island where he was cared

for by a foster mother before being sent

to Denmark: “ ” (Look-

ing for my family).

While the first wave of memoirs had

an unvarnished, diaristic quality, there

is now a greater diversity in content

and style. Today’s authors are Korean

adoptees from all over the world; their

stories still involve searching for their

birth families, but much more be-

sides. Three recent books show how

the genre has evolved alongside the

Li

sa Wool-R

im Sjöblom /Drawn and Quarterly

A panel from Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom’s Palimpsest: Documents from a Korean Adoption

(^1) Kori Graves’s book, A War Born Fam-
ily: African American Adoption in the
Wake of the Korean War (NYU Press,
2020), documents how Black Korean
children were advertised for adoption
to Black couples in the United States,
especially those with military ties.
(^2) Japan’s own economic recovery after
World War II was due to a war boom: it
served as an industrial and military ally
to the United States during the Korean
Wa r.
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