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

20 The New York Review

community. Lisa Wool- Rim Sjöblom’s

graphic novel Palimpsest: Documents

from a Korean Adoption, Jenny Hei-

jun Wills’s Older Sister. Not Necessar-

ily Related., and Nicole Chung’s All

You Can Ever Know present complex

narratives informed by the histories of

earlier adoptees. All three women find

and meet their families of origin—a

rare feat that’s understandably over-

represented in adoptee memoirs (what

better story line is there?). Along the

way, they discover unexpected bonds

whose tenderness surpasses even that

of the birth mother.

The adoptee memoir is a genre of re-

turn, so we should start at the beginning,

with the American couple who created

the prototype of transnational adop-

tion. In 1953 Harry Holt, an evangelical

lumberman from Oregon, and his wife,

Bertha, adopted eight Korean children

orphaned by the war. They went on

to establish Holt International, which

grew into one of the largest adoption

agencies in the world. The Holts were

motivated by charity, but they also rec-

ognized a business opportunity. The

ravaged South Korean state did, too: war

orphans were a photogenic conduit for

foreign aid, and Western parents were

willing to pay to adopt from overseas.

The Korean War had left millions

of people displaced. Families were scat-

tered and split, including by the division

of Korea into North and South. Among

those lost or abandoned were large num-

bers of “Amerasian” and Black children

born to Korean women and the Amer-

ican GIs who’d occupied the Korean

Peninsula since the end of World War

II. The South Korean government was

eager to send these mixed- race children

abroad, and the US obliged. In 1955

President Eisenhower signed into law

An Act for the Relief of Certain Ko-

rean War Orphans, selectively loosen-

ing restrictions on Asian immigration.

As Thomas Park Clement recalls in his

memoir The Unforgotten War (1998),

early adoptees like him depended on

individualized acts of Congress—some-

times named for the child in question—

to be let i n. (T he vagar ies of i m m igration

law have left thousands of transnational

adoptees in the US and Canada without

immigration status; some have been de-

ported to their countries of birth. In the

US, the Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2021

would provide relief for undocumented

adoptees, but it is stalled in Congress.)

Eleana Kim, an anthropologist at the

University of California at Irvine and

the author of Adopted Territory: Tra n s -

national Korean Adoptees and the Pol-

itics of Belonging (2010), found that,

between 1951 and 1964, the number of

abandoned children at orphanages in

South Korea grew from 715 to 11,319.

The number of children adopted over-

seas increased every year between 1953

and 1985, when nearly nine thousand

children left South Korea, primarily

for the US. Why weren’t more children

adopted internally, within Korea? A

common sociological explanation is

that East Asians, with their strict fa-

milial maps, were culturally indisposed

toward adoption. There’s truth to this,

but other factors mattered just as much:

poverty and stigma toward the off-

spr i ng of si ng le mothers, a lack of soc ia l

services, prejudice against mixed- race

families, and welfare workers who en-

couraged poor and unmarried parents

to give up their children.

Adoptees sent to the West often grew

up racially isolated but found them-

selves, and one another, in the multi-

cultural climate of higher education.

Then, beginning in the 1990s, some-

thing unlikely happened: many of them

settled permanently in South Korea.

Adoptees like Jane Jeong Trenka

worked across barriers of language

and culture to study the fundamen-

tal reasons for their adoptions. Were

it not for the mistreatment of unwed

mothers and discrimination against

mixed- race Koreans, they reasoned,

perhaps they would not have been sent

away.^3 Adoptees also raised questions

of material distribution: What if the re-

sources put toward adoption had gone

instead to the birth family? The point

is as relevant to Korean adoptees as to

indigenous children sent to Canadian

residential schools and the African

American and Latino kids dispropor-

tionately placed in foster care.

In subsequent years, returning Ko-

rean adoptees fought successfully for

welfare reforms and their right to due

process in South Korea. In 1999 a coa-

lition led by the group Global Overseas

Adoptees’ Link won a campaign to

expand the Korean F- 4 visa: adoptees

now had the right of other ethnic Ko-

reans to reside long- term in the coun-

try. In 2011 activist adoptees further

secured the right to dual citizenship

and helped enact dramatic changes to

the adoption laws: the government now

requires robust notice and consent pro-

cedures to protect birth parents’ rights.

(Partly as a result, only 259 children

were adopted out of South Korea in

2019.)

Last year, Kara Bos, who was ad-

opted by a Michigan couple in 1984

after being left in a parking lot at the

age of two, successfully sued in Ko-

rean court to be legally recognized as

the daughter of her birth father, even

though he refused to meet her. (Some

adoptees worry that her lawsuit will

discourage other birth parents from

coming forward.) As Kristin Pak, an

adoptee organizer in Korea, told me, the

right to know one’s family, one’s history,

and one’s birth nation is a basic human

right. Pak believes that transnational

adoption is intrinsically flawed. “It’s not

about having a good adoption or bad

adoption,” she said. “This whole system

is demand- driven. It’s very unequal.”

While the adoptee memoirs antholo-

gized in the 1990s were works of con-

fession and communion, the books

emerging now are full of confidence

and rage. They are wider in scope, crit-

ical of the choices made by the US and

Korean governments, and sharpened

by scholarship on global adoption.

Lisa Sjöblom’s graphic novel, Pa-

limpsest, is the tale of a Swedish adop-

tee who was removed from South

Korea at the age of two, in 1979. The

book unfolds in sepia- toned rectan-

gular panels whose lengthy text some-

times competes with the soft, spherical

characters and detailed backgrounds.

Many frames consist entirely of letters

and recreated documents: adoption

case files and e- mailed pleas for infor-

mation in a mix of Korean and English.

As a transnational, transracial adop-

tee, Sjöblom questions her origins at

a young age. Her adoptive father tells

her, simply, “I’m sure your mom loved

you, but she gave you away to give you

a better life.” Yet at school, she is bul-

lied for being Asian. Her classmates

tie her to a post. We watch her face

flush, her body shrink in on itself. As

an adolescent, “in an attempt to save

myself, I asked my parents to help me

find my Korean roots,” she writes. Her

parents agree, but a callous Swedish so-

cial worker discourages them partway

through the search: “We can only hope

that Lisa’s mother today has a family,

a husband, and children. A revelation

of Lisa’s existence would most likely

break up that family and cause even

more people pain.”

According to Jennifer Kwon Dobbs,

the Korean- adoptee experience in

Scandinavia is marked by “a kind of

colorblindness that’s much more in-

tense there than in the US.” For Sjö-

blom, it isn’t until she has married and

settled down in cosmopolitan Stock-

holm that she feels ready to reconsider

her origins. When she becomes preg-

nant—the book’s cover illustration is

of a fetus—and is unable to tell the ob-

stetrician about her family’s health his-

tory, she decides to look again for her

birth parents. Pregnancy is a common

turning point in the memoirs of female

adoptees.

Things are different this time. On-

line, Sjöblom finds “critical adoption

forums” full of peer advice. A Korean-

speaking friend helps her e- mail the

“countless middlemen involved in an

adoption.” After months of correspon-

dence, Sjöblom receives “the photo I’ve

been waiting for all my life”—a picture

of her birth mother, whom the authori-

ties in Busan, South Korea, have finally

located. The following summer, Sjö-

blom goes to Korea with her husband

and two children. They meet her birth

mother at a restaurant and hug and

weep and do their best to relate, de-

spite an intractable language barrier.

In two imagined panels, Sjöblom rests

her head in her mother’s lap and speaks

with ease. But in real life, they bumble

through with an interpreter, and her

birth mother turns away, begging Sjö-

blom not to ask about the past. Sjöblom

learns that she has siblings and that her

father is still alive, yet she meets no one

besides her mother.

At a popular beach in Busan, Sjö-

blom encounters a stranger who comes

to represent a substitute mother. The

woman gazes admiringly at Sjöblom

and her family and invites them to tea.

Upon hearing Sjöblom’s story, she says,

“If it turns out she’s not your real mom,

I can be instead.” The scene distills an

increasingly prevalent motif in adop-

tee memoirs and activist life: a focus

beyond the birth mother. These days,

according to Mike Mullen of Also-

Known- As, an adoptee advocacy group

in New York, the “search” extends not

only to other blood relatives but also to

the foster mothers who provided pre-

adoptive care in South Korea, often for

up to a year or two.

Jenny Heijun Wills’s memoir, Older

Sister. Not Necessarily Related., depicts

an extreme version of this dynamic.

Whereas Sjöblom struggles to connect

just with her birth mother, Wills, an

English professor at the University of

Winnipeg and the adopted daughter

of a white Canadian family, contends

with an overflow of attachments. She

goes to Korea hoping to find her birth

mother and perhaps her father. But it’s

a younger half- sister she hadn’t known

about who “would become the most im-

portant person in all of this,” she writes.

Wills begins her book with a warning:

This story, these stories are not all

mine. Some of them, in fact, be-

long to no one at all, but are the

fantasies that seem to flower so

naturally from the mouths of those

of us who’ve grown lives out of half

facts, wishful thinking, and out-

right lies.

The book entangles fiction and truth—

in vignettes, vaguely chronological

meditations, and letters to Unni, the

Korean word for a girl’s older sister. Its

form simulates the fragmentary, one-

step- forward, one- step- back journey of

many adoptees.

Wills’s trip to Korea becomes un-

wieldy. She meets not only her birth

mother and younger half- sister, Bora,

whom she’d spoken with by phone, but

also her father and his side of the fam-

ily, including an older half- sister. Wills

learns the reason for her adoption—

she was the product of an affair—and

watches herself become a “tripwire,”

blowing “shrapnel through at least

three generations”:

Orphaned Korean children gathering around a delivery of items sent by foreign children

through the United Nations during the Korean War, early 1950s

Nat

ional Arch

ives/Photo12/Un

iversal Images Group/Getty Images

(^3) Although the birthrate in South Korea
is the lowest it has ever been—so low
that the government provides all kinds
of financial incentives for procre-
ation—unwed and nonheterosexual
parents are still stigmatized, and immi-
gration is tightly restricted.
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