Response

According to Kim, South Korea sends children abroad for adoption in spite of its status as a developed country, and in fact, it seems that sending so many children abroad has begun causing or exacerbating more problems than it’s solving. Korea has an aging population, a shrinking workforce, and low fertility rates, yet it still sends children out of the country to be adopted elsewhere. Action is being/has been taken to curb this, including, adult adoptees who are speaking out about their experiences as Korean transnational adoptees. The story of Korean transnational adoption is one in which Korean children are “orphans” and “waifs” whether they actually have living family members or not, and the adoptive parents are acting out of a sense of Christian charity. They are rescuing needy children and bringing them to a better place to live, giving them opportunities that wouldn’t be available in Korea. According to Kim, many adult adoptees imagined Korea as a third-word country and were shocked to find that’s not the case. The rise of Korean adoption can only be understood in the context of the rise of adoption from Europe and Japan after WWII and the “patriotic pronatalism” of the 1950s. So, while couples in the U.S. were being told to have children because it was the patriotic thing to do, the Korean government was looking for a way to deal with the problem of mixed-race children—most of whom were fathered by U.S. soldiers. Those couples who couldn’t have children on their own discovered that not only would adopting in the U.S. be difficult, but there was also a shortage of white babies.

            The surge of concern for the welfare of Korean children wasn’t just about doing good deeds; it was also about containing the threat of Communism and spreading U.S. culture and values. Adoptive parents weren’t just rescuing these children from a parentless life of poverty; they were saving them from the horror of not living the way those in the U.S. do (did?). Highlighting acts of charity or kindness from U.S. soldiers stationed in Korea made them appear as surrogate fathers for these children, some of whom did actually have family. It’s a bit ironic given that many of them actually had or would have children in Korea whom they would pretty much abandon responsibility for. Of course, this wasn’t part of the Korean transnational adoption narrative that became popular.

            Kim highlights four aspects of Korean adoptee social practices: self-consciousness about not fitting into dominant categories of race, family, and nation, using the Internet to network and socialize, the significance of adoptee conferences and meetings, and the recognition of adoptees as part of the diaspora. Adoptees often don’t have access or can face difficulties getting access to information about their birth families, so basing their identity or relationships on biology or genetics is impossible. Adoptee kinship is not related to biology or genetics, but rather, to “social practices and cultural representation.” The names given to adoptees complicate their identities because when they are given anglicized names, it creates confusion; they do not “match” their names. That seems to complicate what it means to be “Korean” and what it means to be “American”, “white,” etc.  The “Korean body of the adoptee” destabilizes self-identity, with the outer Asian body and the internal “white identity” being split. Many adoptees experience “Asia-phobia” and an “anxiety about ethnic authenticity.” Either they reject being Asian, or they worry about not being Asian enough. Meeting and connecting with other adoptees is significant because they share similar questions and struggles. The adoptee counter public provides the space to explore these questions. Some adoptees never questioned their “ethnic socialization” and only do so after meeting other adoptees.

            Mohanty discusses the need to question the meaning of words like “home”, “nation”, and “community.” She urges that we begin “excavating subjugated knowledges to craft decolonized and oppositional racial and sexual identities and political struggles that [pose] direct challenges” to the race, class, sex, and gender regimes of the “capitalist U.S. nation-state” anchors the practice of antiracist, multicultural feminism. This complicates the meaning of the aforementioned terms because we are supposed to conceive of this work—and ourselves, presumably—as crossing borders. The task is to dismantle the myth of capitalism as a democracy and to dismantle the myths that feminists of various races, classes, nations, and sexualities have inherited about one another. We must become “fluent in each other’s histories” and establish dialogues. We must change the way we define genealogies because we need genealogies that not only show cultural and historical differences but also that envision common political and intellectual projects across those differences. Mohanty argues the question “What is home?” is a political question that complicates settled notions of territory, community, geography and history. These notions don’t work for immigrants and migrants, who cross and re-cross borders. They don’t work for the adoptees, who must try and negotiate self-identity and definition with little or no information about their lives before adoption. If they reject the definition of “home” as the place where they grew up—the place they were sent to for adoption—then where is home for them? Is it Korea, a place they have never been or may not fit into? If Korea isn’t home, then is the place they grew up home, even though they don’t “match” that place?