January 13, 2022 21To my older sister, unni... I em-
bodied years of deception and our
father’s betrayal. I represented her
mother’s sadness. For Halmoni
[grandmother], I’d caused years of
blackmail, a secret that kept a poor
family of grape farmers ground
down into the earth.... Even
for Bora, the one to whom I was
closest, I had caused pain. Bora’s
father’s rage used to burst open
without apparent cause. My sister
didn’t understand the source of her
father’s hatred for Ummah [mom].Things get weirder still. Wills’s Ko-
rean parents, having lost touch over the
intervening decades, reunite to meet
their daughter in Seoul. They fall in
love with her—then with each other.
To the shock of their extended fami-
lies, the couple moves in together and
travels to Canada for Wills’s wedding,
as does Bora. It’s the kind of improba-
ble, transpacific reunion that an adop-
tee might dream about, but no fantasy
can last.Like Wills’s book, Nicole Chung’s
All You Can Ever Know is a story of
sisters. Chung, a Korean adoptee and
a contributing writer at The Atlantic,
dedicates her memoir to a newfound
sister—one she meets in the course
of looking for her birth mother. But
Chung’s search has the rare distinction
of unfolding outside Korea: she was
adopted not overseas but across the
Washington–Oregon border. Chung’s
adoptive parents are white Christians
in the rural east of Oregon. Her life
with them is placid, but she wants tobe normal, meaning not Asian. She
knows only that she was born prema-
ture in Seattle and in need of a decent
home. Her adoptive mother tells her re-
peatedly, “Your birth parents had just
moved here from Korea. They thought
they wouldn’t be able to give you the
life you deserved.”
In high school, Chung tries to contact
the attorney who handled her adoption.
It’s only then that her mother confides
that the lawyer had called them years
ago: “Your birth mother asked her to
get in touch with us.” But Chung’s par-
ents refused contact. “I understood that
they didn’t want me to want to search. I
was enough for them, and they wanted
to be enough for me,” Chung writes of
their crisscrossed desires. Much like
Sjöblom, Chung swallows her curiosity
until she’s pregnant with her first child.
She suddenly thinks of “those mysteri-
ous months my birth mother had spent
carrying me” and wonders, “What had
pregnancy been like for her? Why
had she gone into labor so early? What
if the same thing happened to me?”
Chung hires a “search angel,” a sort
of adoption private eye, who fills in her
past, bit by bit. “Two sisters, a half sister
and a full one, had been living at home
at the time I was born,” Chung is told.
Her birth parents divorced six years
later and now live in different states—
neither more than a few hours’ drive
from where Chung grew up. Chung
drafts and redrafts a simple letter, to be
forwarded to her birth mother. “I am
your biological daughter,” she writes.
“I want you to know that I am well, and
happy, and have lived a good life.”
She receives e- mails from both of
her sisters in reply. “Nicole, I was veryshocked to find out I had another sis-
ter,” Cindy, her full sister, writes. “I
don’t know how much you want to
know. Our parents told us that you had
died.” Chung learns that her birth par-
ents had been unhappily married and
short of money, running a small store
while trying to raise two girls. Their
mother could be cruel, their father un-
available. When Chung was born two
and a half months premature, they gave
her up at the hospital.
After the divorce Cindy went to live
with their mother. (The older half-
sister was already away at school.) But
after six months, “she grabbed her be-
longings—everything she had packed
fit into a couple of plastic grocery
sacks—and nervously bid her mother
goodbye.” Their relationship never re-
covered, and Cindy moved in with her
father, who remarried a year later.
“There are many different kinds of
luck,” Chung realizes, “many different
ways to be blessed or cursed.” Her fam-
ily search does not lead her to a Korean
motherland or original maternal em-
brace. But it does bring her Cindy, who
also suffered rejection and pictured what
life might have been like in a different
family. “I don’t know how you would
have been treated if you’d stayed with
us, Nikki, but I know your sisters would
have loved you and tried to protect you,”
Cindy tells Chung. The reunited sisters,
though living on different coasts, visit
each other regularly with their husbands
and children—a kind of rebirth.
A few years ago Korean American
friends of mine, a married couple in
New Jersey, adopted a boy from Korea
through Holt International. The pro-
cess was long and complicated, withrepeated visits and court hearings
to safeguard the rights of the birth
family—the reforms that returning
adoptees had pushed for. I overlapped
with them in Seoul on one of their
pre- adoptive trips to meet their new
son. “Back in the day, you could start
your adoption process and a kid would
be delivered to you at JFK, and they’d
be five months old,” the wife told me.
“Now it’s impossible to get a kid home
earlier than two.” She and her husband
understood the critiques of transna-
tional adoption. But they felt that they
were well situated, as Korean Amer-
icans, to adopt a Korean child. When
they brought their son to the US from
a nurturing foster home in Busan, they
reminded him where he’d come from.
They created an album of his pre-
adoptive life and tried to read him chil-
dren’s books about adoption. None of
this interested him; he wanted only to
be an American kid and use his Amer-
ican name. “I do wonder how he’ll feel
later,” the wife said.
A lesson of adoptee memoirs, includ-
ing those by Chung, Wills, and Sjöblom,
is that adoption, search, and reunion
are not discrete events but unruly pro-
cesses that continue throughout an
adoptee’s life. At each step, new bonds
are haltingly formed. Existing bonds
can grow stronger or threaten to break
apart. For Chung, the presence of her
Korean parents and Korean American
sisters forced a revision of the “family
lore given to us as children.” It was no
longer gospel truth, she writes, “that
my birth family had loved me from the
start; that my parents, in turn, were
meant to adopt me; and that the story
unfolded as it should have.” QGeorge J.E. Sakkal
WHOSE
TRUTH,
WHOSE
CREATIVITY?
A 21 ST CENTURY
ART MANIFESTOWhy Postmodern Art Theory
Is A Culturally Damaging Mistake
And How Neuroscience
Can Prove ThisPUBLICATION DATE: DECEMBER 1, 2021
HARDCOVER • 230 PAGES • $ 24.00 / £ 16.99
ISBN 978-1-913606-55-8 • AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON
AND BOOKSTORES ACROSS THE USA, UK AND IRELANDCAN ART THEORY BE SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN?
WWW.BLACKSPRINGPRESSGROUP.COM
BLACK SPRING PRESS — INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING AND THINKING SINCE 1985
BASED IN WEST LONDON, A MINUTE FROM WHERE WILDE’S PUBLISHER LIVEDVISIT THE AUTHOR / ARTIST AT WWW.SAKKALCUVISM.COMWhose Truth, Whose Creativity? is an
expert analysis of neuro-science and art
theory — this new book delves into the
source of all art and creativity, from ancient
cave paintings to contemporary art. It
explores why postmodern art theory has
had a damaging impact on the art world and
explains how neuroscience can prove this.
Does talent spring from the unconscious
mind as Paul Cézanne believed? Or does
it, as Marcel Duchamp theorized, come from
conceptual thinking at the conscious level?&RJQLWLYHQHXURVFLHQWL¿FSV\FKRORJ\DIDLUO\
QHZ¿HOGRISV\FKRORJ\H[SODLQVDQDWXUDO
mental basis for human creativity. This book
exposes the many falsehoods and distortions
of postmodern reasoning to demonstrate
how, by following this disturbing, unnatural
direction for decades, the art establishment
has been responsible for initiating an era of
damaging cultural chaos.George J. E. Sakkal: For
RYHU¿IW\\HDUVKLVDYRFDWLRQ
has been the practice of
Fine Art. In addition to
winning several national andregional competitions and exhibiting his work
throughout the Baltimore / Washington D.C.
region, he has lectured and taught collage
and his discovery, CUVISM, at the University
of Maryland’s Community College in
Columbia, Maryland. Sakkal has served as a
Peace Corps Volunteer architect from 1966 to
1968 and an Associate Peace Corps Director
from 1968 to 1971, both in Iran. He has a
Bachelor’s in Architecture from the School
of Architecture at Texas A&M University and
a Master’s in City Planning from Harvard’s
Graduate School of Design.+LV¿UVWDUWLFOHThe Problem with Postmodern
Art Theory, was published by the American
Arts Quarterly Journal in the summer of- Examining the validity of the theories
of contemporary art’s Postmodern era
UHVXOWHGLQKLV¿UVWERRNCUVISM (Cognitive
Unconscious Visual Creativity): The Human
Creative Response, published in 2015.
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