jesus christ! (no, literally!)

god bless you all! (no, really!)

linguistic quandary

was adopted vs. is adopted.

"Hi, I'm adopted."

"The woman was adopted."

Some literature talks about the "as if" thing, how birth parents are supposed to be symbolically dead (Lifton 1979). It's like "I am adopted" is an irreversible, "untreatable" condition. Whereas "was adopted" is just like a casual phase, an event, something that does not define the person. The adopted can be a person, but the person may be adopted. The label controls the core of the person; the adopted have no authority to challenge the label they were given.

Specifically, there was a woman who suddenly discovered that she actually was adopted. I'm sure the article (can't for the love of god find it anywhere) phrased it like this - she was adopted...but not anymore? - however, she is a person.

The opposite is true with adoptees. We are adopted. The present indicative tense is used to display facts, things that are true, things that are; it does not necessarily refute the fact that adoption was a temporal, liminal event, nor does it refute that adopted-ness is an eternal, non-temporal (duration is irrelevant!) condition. These are merely implications that have as much validity as they do inauthenticity. But it is not the adoptee who has jurisdiction over such arbitrary measures.

news: Most 'orphans' have a living parent, says charity

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/8375579.stm

craziest spur of the moment...

ok...filling out the birth family search application at G.O.A'L's website. Wish me luck!

shit...I don't remember what my blood type is...

...nor do I have my first baby photo on this computer....

I've had a very fortunate growing-up

When I see a Vietnam vet, he doesn't do anything to me.

When I see a Korean War vet, he tells me how dedicated "my people" were with a big smile.

I had Asian friends (friends of all colors) throughout school.

Oddly, most of the typical "Chinese eyes!" remarks came from other minorities.

I don't ever remember being discriminated against by whites.

When people ask, "where are you from?", DC is an answer that receives no further probing.

Only once has a Korean addressed me in Korean, then he immediately switched to English when I gave him a blank stare, and made nothing of it.

Adult Asians I've had contact with do not fuss over my adoptedness.

Friends in school never said anything about my adoptedness - it was as if it didn't even exist.

There are only a handful of race/identity things I remember from before college days, which I'll probably share sooner or later.

I think the depressing thing about this is when I read memoirs and stuff, I feel disconnected from them. It's a very selfish thing to say, that in a way I'm ashamed of my privilege. I can connect to adoptees in the most general sense...but I really haven't endured a lot of the hardships I read about. This is hugely biased though - I don't read much about the adoptees whose experiences match mine....ah, the publishing industry...

bigger bibliography (smaller world?) [and more stuff]

Expanding on the literature base. I've had a bank account since 3rd grade, so it's large enough to withstand an onslaught of ebaying and amazoning. But...I wonder if grant money would cover books? But I'm too busy with other stuff for that.......

The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child, 1993

Seeds from a Silent Tree: An Anthology By Korean Adoptees, 1997
The Unforgotten War: Dust of the Streets, 1998
Voices from Another Place: A Collection of Works from a Generation Born in Korea and Adopted to Other Countries, 1999

After the Morning Calm, 2002
Single Square Picture, 2003
Twins Found in a Box, 2003
Language of Blood, 2006
Outsiders Within, 2006
Once They Hear My Name, 2008
Fugitive Visions, 2009

I'm buying "Primal Wound" to dig into the dominant discourse and yeah, you know. yadadadad.

I just remembered that Jae Ran posted some great info a while back:

There are a bunch of scholarly work out or soon to be published by Korean adoptees, Tobias Hubinette, Jini Roby, Kathleen Bergquist, Kim Park Nelson are a few that come to mind. ...I forgot some poetry that have Korean adoption as a central figure. Sun Yung Shin's Skirt Full of Black, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs Paper Pavillion and Lee Herrick's This Many Miles From Desire are three that come to mind.

I had recently found out about Hubinette too. Discovering all these people and associating names with their work was really cool. I'm going back to Outsiders Within and looking at it, and I'm like "damn, this is stacked". Mei-ling Hopgood, who wrote "Lucky Girl", mentions she has an adopted Korean brother, who I'm guessing wrote a piece in After The Morning Calm (p. 109-112). I find these connections to be very cool.

About Jeannine Vance's "Twins Found in a Box"...I read the first 200 pages but due to midterm week the last 80 didn't take top priority. So far, I have mixed feelings about this book. I like it, I think the religious aspect is interesting and refreshing (from what I recall none of the other adoptee stuff is even remotely religious, correct me on that though), but I can only help but think that the book itself is only indirectly related to adoption. She writes that the time accounted in the book took place during her adjustment period, a coming of age kind of thing, though not a lot deals specifically with adoption-related thoughts. I guess what I'm saying is that...can we really assign causality to everything she says? Is all her family problems directly due to her being adopted? Actually when I think about her mom, the argument is strong, since it turned out that Mike was actually adopted too, but this complex problem I can't really sort out. But yeah, I still have 80 pages to read.

I'll definitely buy those poetry books, those should be interesting. I've been into poetry, not because I didn't like it though.

hmmmm

Well I think I'm probably going to go along with that 'make-believe' dissertation, though it will be my undergrad thesis. I have to start getting a hold of the autobiographical literature soon - I'd say I have a good start on this already - then building contacts for interviews, then getting a hold of the historical and theoretical literature (this will be a pain, and quite expensive...), getting funding. There's a $2,500 grant my school gives that I'm pretty sure I can get, and then there's also funding from Korean organizations I've seen. Eleana Kim and Eun Kyung Min had it listed in articles, if I remember correctly. I was also thinking of asking Eleana Kim to be a thesis reader, that is, if my uni allows 'outsiders' to be on reading committees.

I'd have to formulate everything next semester, start reading, do most of the interviews this summer, and write it next year.

It sounds like this a book-length endeavor. It will be challenging - I don't know if I have to do "everything" per se, just for the thesis part, but I'd be looking towards publication. The larger issue is whether or not it's too early to write something like this. I'd basically be analyzing the history of a subfield of autobiographical literature, trying to make sense out of where it came from, why, how, and where it's going. I have no idea how long the editing process takes (for a book), so I guess a not so far-fetched speculative publishing date would be between winter 2011 and spring 2012. From what I've experienced though, I think the literature will start to shift from Koreans to Chinese girls. Some of the memoirs I've heard of are from adoptive parents, so we will hear from their children within 15 years perhaps...

Tobias Hübinette, 1999

-- that was the citation from Wiki that had some good historical information. After some digging, I came upon this site:

On Adoption and Korea 1996-

Unpublished manuscripts

1999
Irland och Korea – en komparativ historisk studie [Ireland and Korea – a comparative
historical study], B.A.-thesis, Department of Oriental Languages, Stockholm University,
58 p.

Hopefully it's translated?

1991!

from wiki:

One factor that helped making KADs visible in the South Korean discourse, was a 1991 film called Susanne Brink's Arirang, based upon the life and experiences of Susanne Brink, an adult KAD from Sweden who stated to have suffered abuse and racism in her adoptive home and country. After the movie she became a celebrity in South Korea, and many South Koreans started to feel shame and guilt for the children their country had sent out (Hübinette, 1999). Since then, South Korean media rather frequently reports on the issues regarding international adoption. Most KADs have taken on the citizenship of their adoptive country and no longer have Korean passports. Earlier they had to get a visa like any other foreigner if they wanted to visit or live in South Korea. This only added to the feeling that they were 'not really South Korean'. In May 1999, a group of KADs living in Korea started a signature-collection in order to achieve legal recognition and acceptance (Schuhmacher, 1999). At present (2009) the number of KADs long term residents in South Korea (mainly Seoul) is estimated at approximately 500. It is not unlikely that this number will increase in the following decade (International adoption from South Korea peaked in the mid 1980s). A report from Global Overseas Adoptees' Link (G.O.A.'L) indicates that the long term returnees (more than one year) are predominantly in their early twenties or early thirties.

This is the perils of looking at the issue through an American lens. Hmm.

right around now...

...my ulra-pragmatic, real world, conservative republican semi-childhood says: who gives a shit about adoption? It's just intense navel gazing.

Perhaps that side of me needs suppression...

well speak of the devil...

I was randomly selected for a general college life type survey.

Two consecutive questions were "was your mother born in the USA?" and "was your father born in the USA?" Oh why oh why did I just know that the next question would not be "and were you born in the USA as well?"

The things even surveys take for granted...

make-believe dissertation

One of my key interests is organic intellectuals. Overall, I would call my "field" (only a junior undergrad) the sociology of knowledge. In relation to adoptees, here's what I'm thinking.

Track the historical development of "autoethnographic" (Pratt 1991) media and draw links between the real, material conditions of the cultural politics of adoption and the subjective feelings of adoptees and those that partake in the cultural politics of adoption. Broadly speaking, to investigate the historical socioeconomic factors and conditions - especially print media - which catalyzed the Korean imagined community (Anderson 1984), and how the development of the imagined community lead to the organic formation of a knowledge-producing intelligentsia.

Key Theories

1. What is an "autoethnographic" text? Pratt describes it as

"a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations of others have made of them. Thus if ethnographic texts are those in which European metropolitan subjects represent to themselves their others (usually their conquered others), autoethnographic texts are representations that the so-defined others construct in response to or in dialogue with those texts. ...[Autoethnography involves] a selective collaboration with and appropriation of idioms of the metropolis or the conqueror."

There are more important theoretical nuances to this definition, but this is the main point. Ethnography is the description of people, a key methodology of anthropology. The -auto prefix denotes that such ethnography is done by the very people of study; people studying themselves, but in relation to and in conversation with others.

2. What is an "imagined community"? Wiki says: "The imagined community is a concept coined by Benedict Anderson which states that a nation is a community socially constructed, which is to say imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group." The concept of the imagined community is a crucial part in understanding how autoethnography is more than just "self-representation" (as Pratt puts it). The idea is that autoethnography is predicated upon and situated within an imagined community. One of those smaller nuances of Pratt's theory that I mentioned is that autoethnography requires collaboration between people. She gives the example of literate ex-slaves and abolitionist intellectuals, and this resonates wonderfully with intellectuals focused on adoption politics and birth mothers. Anyway, the message behind collaboration as a necessary part of autoethnography is two-fold: (1) that the imagined community is a group, and a group requires more than one person; and (2) that the physical relationships of people within groups is dependent upon an abstract understanding of one another's position, that is, the formation of a group is predicated upon meaning structures and modes of understanding that transcend a physical reality. Groups stabilize not just because people "are there", but because there is a greater meaning to why people are there.

3. What is a superstructure? From my understanding, Marx made a turn in the 19th century from Hegelian phenomenology by stating that physical reality is the basis for all of society. He said that the economy drove everything, it was the base of everything. Sociologists now just call it "the base" (the economy, the material conditions of society). While idealists like Hegel said that ideas were the driving force of society, Marx said that, in reverse, ideas were generated by material conditions, ie. to gain knowledge from a book you have to have the money to buy the book in the first place. Academics call this the "superstructure", and it encompasses things like political structures and ideology. In relation to imagined communities, groups need a material basis. For whatever reasons, people have to come together physically. But, for these reasons, whatever they are, they may give the situation an abstract dimension, that additional meaning. Thus the "superstructure" (imagined community) is generated by the material conditions of the group. The first general goal of this research would be to understand the "how" of imagined community formation.

4. What is an organic intellectual? - an organic intelligentsia? From what I've read, Gramsci was the first (or one of the first) to theorize upon the concept of the organic intellectual. Wiki:

An organic intellectual, unlike a traditional intellectual, is a bourgeoisie scholar who cultivates strong roots in his/her community, working to maintain links with local issues and struggles that connect to the people and their experiences. While traditional intellectuals imagine themselves as an autonomous group with an historical presence above and separate from political class struggle, they are in fact strongly allied with the dominant ideology and the ruling class. On the other hand, organic intellectuals openly recognize their location within the dominant ideology and their function in perpetuating it, and use their positionality to cultivate strategies for helping their communities to develop a self-inspired, organic consciousness.

Hence, organic adoptee intellectuals help to perpetuate the organic consciousness (imagined community) of adoptees through print and digital media. Thus the second general goal of this research is to understand the "how" of imagined community propagation.

Overall, these are the larger, sociological theories that play a key role in informing the research.

Research Goals (defined more explicitly)

One part of this project would be to track the dominant structures in which the adoption community had to form. While traditional intellectuals wrote about adoption, they formed myths about adoptees and adoption, forming resilient representations against which organic intellectual adoptees have had to contest with their main weapon, autoethnography. These "dominant structures" include the publishing industry, adoption industry, church, state, and dominant discourse and representations on adoption and adoptees. Of course, as the adoption community has had time to coalesce, they have created points of entry into these very structures. These "points of entry" are also of high interest because they are structures which may be technically labeled the same as dominant structures, but they explicitly try to subvert the latent functions of dominant institutions. [By "latent functions", sociologists mean functions which institutions do not directly instigate - they are nasty side effects. One simplified example is universities: they are intended to educate people, but their latent function is to maintain the division of labor and class stratification by guaranteeing education only to the wealthy.] I think South End Press would be a good starting point into this line of research.

Perhaps more importantly, however, would be to get into the real nitty gritty; to document how imagined communities are manifested within the individual.This requires a lot of interviews. I'd have to interview people like editors of books, founders of nonprofits, executive directors of adoption organizations, writers of all stripes, readers, adoptees that don't care about their adoptedness, blog authors, educators, social workers, etc. The point of these interviews would be to understand how they all navigate the terrain of the imagined community, shaping it as they generate their own knowledge and share it with others. What exactly was an author thinking when they decided to write that memoir, or that essay? What exactly was that editor thinking when they wanted to put together a collection of essays written by adoptees? What was that entrepreneur thinking when they wanted to start an organization that strove to educate mothers about adoption? What were their goals, their visions about abstract purposes or ideals? How did they perceive themselves in relation to their goals? Did they feel the presence of an opposition? Can they describe their perception of the opposition - the Other? To those "key players" in charge of money and enterprises, how did they feel about this? Who was the editor and agent of the author of the first adoption memoir? Did they have any premonition of what was to come, of the historical significance of A First in a subfield of literature? And to these pioneers, the very first of the organic intellectuals, how did they feel? Were they aware of their positions, of their historical significance?

So, why Korean adoptees?

I take it from what I've read that Korean adoptees are "the first". Koreans after the armistice make up the first major diaspora intercountry adoptees. It's due to simple historical primacy that adoptee literature first arose out of Korean adoptees. [or so I'd think. If this hypothesis proves wrong it's either that Korean adoptees weren't really the first, or some other crazy reason I can't fathom.] However, once Koreans spoke up, all the other adoptees followed. Chinese, Vietnamese, African, European, American, etc. I'm not really at all fluent in autoethnographic writing by nationalities other than Korea and China though. The Korean adoptee community provides the optimal research setting because of their firstness and because the development of autoethnographic literature is a recent addition as well. Jae Ran provides some crucial information here, with the first Korean memoir being self-published (an important fact in itself) in 1998.

However, the relationship between Korean adoptee autoethnography and mainstream media on adoption runs much deeper. It's 3am and I'm tired and this part I haven't devoted much thought to so I'll have to write a part two later...

oh yeah, also, this would make for a cool undergrad thesis (I have to make a proposal for mine in March), but this really isn't what I want to culminate my undergrad years with. It seems too big for merely a side project though...I'm pretty sure I'd have to get a good amount of funding for travel expenses and interviews, books too maybe. No idea what a budget would look like. Do I have to go to Korea? I'm sure interviewing Trenka is an absolute must. She is, after all, my gateway author.

taekwondo

Took it (maybe in kindergarden?) 'cause I wanted to be a power ranger. haha

actually, the Power Rangers was originally a Japanese show...

safety valve

I don't why I never realized it, but for a while I was in the mindset of "oh well, if you're saving a child from certain death by adopting them, what's the problem?" Well, it's not a problem entirely, but focusing on the adoption part diverts attention from the conditions that spur adoption in the first place. This comment I thought was insightful, I don't think I'd ever read something that showed so much humility:

I am infinitely grateful that my two amazing daughters (from China) are in my life. I also think, that as an adoptive parent, it's my responsibility to fight to repair that web of injustice that allowed me to have them.

In the same sense, I've seen some documentaries on race where white families are talking about how, since they didn't directly do anything to blacks, they shouldn't be obliged to "repay" them. Of course, it's not a very historical approach...what would America be without slaves (I'm conflating white privilege and America but hey)? The reverse doesn't hold as much merit...what would "blacks" be without slavery? Uhhhhhhh... ...well the point is that the present must be grateful for the present that the past gave to them.

"critical mass"

A term you might come upon in academentia with some frequency is "critical mass". It's a term that describes a necessary amount of something which prevents the collapse of that entity. Wiki defines it as "a threshold value of the number of people needed to trigger a phenomenon by exchange of ideas," which is a very apt definition in a sociological perspective, though the word sounds like it's borrowed from physics describing supernovae or something...

One really fascinating thing about the adoptee community is that it's accessible. Or that's kind of my take on it. Trenka has a blog, so does Sun Yun Shin. Julia Chadyere Oparah is the only editor of Outsiders Within that doesn't seem as much present on the internet. Harlow's Monkey was also a gateway blog for me, then I stalked blogrolls and within a few hours got a list of 170-something, it's that .xml I keep for people to download if they want.

Anyway this critical mass of adoptees needed 50-some years since the armistice to develop into a knowledge-producing community. Some dates...

Trenka, 1972, 39 years old
Sun Yung Shin, 1974, 37 years old
Jae Ran Kim (Harlow's Monkey), 1971, 40 years old
me, 1989, 20 years old [if you're wondering!]

When You Were Born in Korea: A Memory Book for Children Adopted from Korea, 1993*
A Single Square Picture, 2002
After the Morning Calm, 2002
Language of Blood, 2003
Somebody's Daughter, 2005
Cultures of Transnational Adoption, 2005
Outsider's Within, 2006
Once They Hear My Name, 2008
Slant, 2008
Fugitive Visions, 2009

Slant and When You Were Born are the two from this list I haven't read; the list is only to give a brief chronological view of the development of adoption literature written by adoptees. The exception, noted with the asterisk, is that When You Were Born in Korea was written by adoptive fathers. However, their words are revealing:

This book will be read and enjoyed by 7-to-12 year-old children and their parents, and it can be shared with younger children to help them learn more about their life before coming to you. ...

When You Were Born in Korea was developed as a fund-raising effort by two adoptive dads who began this project to give their own children a better understanding of their lives as babies, and of those people who were important to them then.

I'm sure more observant people could pick apart the myths in their statement, but it's not an ill-intended book (ie. $$$$$), I don't think. But, a book for 12 year-olds written in 1993 would include adoptees born in 1981, 10 years after Jae Ran Kim.

I hope that there are more books written by Korean adoptees than those I have listed. There is truly a dearth of "traditional" knowledge production if a handful of memoirs and one scholarly anthology (Cultures of Transnational Adoption isn't written entirely by Korean adoptees) account for the entirety of this critical mass of intellectuals. Of course, scholarly work like Outsiders Within is founded on decades of research carried out by non-adoptees, but my point is that it takes a certain condition and amount of time for a community to develop and insert their voices into mainstream discourse. If 2002 really is the first "organic" piece of literature - surely motherland trips must have existed in the 90's, right? - I find that really shocking. Not in a bad or good way, it's just kind of...wow.

oh! - statistics

Trenka posts some stuff here.


source: TRACK http://justicespeaking.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/domestic-vs-overseas-korean-adoption/

I did the percentages for the domestic column:

domestic adoptions (% of total adoptions)
1999: 1726 (41.74%)
2000: 1686 (41.67%)
2001: 1770 (42.08%)
2002: 1964 (45.36%)
2003: 1564 (40.61%)
2004: 1641 (42.08%)
2005: 1461 (41.01%)
2006: 1332 (41.22%)
2007: 1388 (52.33%)
2008: 1306 (51.09%)

I can't really draw causality between lots of publicity on part of TRACK and others in Korea this year and the 1.3% decrease in domestic adoption out of total adoptions. It doesn't necessarily conclude that the activism isn't working per se...there are just other factors which are out of the political reach of such activism. What I'm interested in now is the huge 10% jump in 2007. What was that?! A widely read book? Movie? Interesting condition probably.

clans, lineage, extrapolation, etc.

My Korean birth name is Shin 신. My record doesn't give the Chinese character though, so I can't be sure which clan I come from (申,辛,愼). Apparently I was born in Kyonggi-do, though, which may be of geographical significance. Wiki implies that Shin is an fairly common family name with nearly a million people identifying as such in 2000. Only a few family names reach the million mark; Kang, Kim, Park, Lee, Chung, Cho, Choi. Yoon and Shin are the only 900k ones. I'm actually surprised that there's no Hanji in my record. Shouldn't you use Hanji for official stuff? I don't know if I mentioned it here already, but they tried to white-out my parents names, though I can easily see my mother's name is Jeong Sook. Dunno about the father's name though. The white-out is thicker over his name.

The record also states my mother has two sisters and one brother, so I'd have aunts and an uncle to complicate things, though that's interesting in itself. Cousins? It says my mother's parents had a "commercial business". My mother was 18 when she had me. If my grandmother was 20 when she had my mother, she would be 58 now. My mother is 38. I'll say my grandmother is +- 5 years, so 63 still isn't that old. I'd say there's an 80% she's alive, since she had a "commercial business", which might imply middle class and access to medical service. I'd say this "commercial business" would be an invaluable clue if I were to search. If I get better at reading Korean I could easily access some kind of business documents from the 80's: how many businesses run by Shins in Kyonggi-do do you think there are - Shin is 1.0% of the family name population? [however, the problem, I said, was that I don't know which specific Shin clan I belong to...but I wonder if that even matters?]



[luckily the consonant S in Korean is the same kanji for "people" in Japanese (hito/jin, 人) so it's easy to remember]

The record says my mother was admitted to Esther's temporary home for unmarried pregnant women in the Eastern Child welfare center, which I also assume must have cost a lot - I'm guessing this only since abandoned children probably had mothers who didn't have enough money to live in a care center before birth.

My first legal guardian was Dr. Kim Do-Young - he also gave me my given name. Was he your legal guardian?

I'm pretty sure I'll go to Korea. Maybe when I graduate around May 2011, only on the condition that I obtain some level of confidence in the language. But damn is Korean hard...

huh?

I'm finally getting around to part wasting time part absorbing Korean via dramas. Some googling brought me to this one, Shining Inheritance. A few minutes in this line came up:



lol, what?

name change

I'll probably do it later on, that is, change my last name back to my Korean birth name. My western name isn't common, no one knows how to pronounce it, and in general it's just annoying. But I wouldn't do it while my parents are alive, probably. I guess I'd feel insulting to them or something...I dunno.

unghhhhhhhh

why do I watch these things [yeah, this clip is pretty old...I know]? It's even scarier since I sided with Bill on this one. It's not necessarily that Bill is "correct", it's just that the other dude's argument was not that logical based on speculation.

State boundaries are fictive, constructed. Humans are real. Social institutions have always imbued upon people constructed values, identities which make people easy to manage. Classification is a method of social control. The church created heretics. The state creates criminals. Medical institutions create mental illnesses. The nation state creates citizens.

The thing is that in a modern, global political economy the construction of the citizen cannot be ignored. Perhaps it seems like an inevitable, necessary tool, just as the nation state itself is a necessary tool for capitalism to function. Therefore, humans are citizens before they are humans. That is a political economic perspective which doesn't really yield to human rights definitions, unfortunately.

The state as a territory defines humans in a political perspective before a biological perspective, and thus all beings within the fictive borders of a state must abide by such definitions. That is a prerequisite for legitimately existing within the borders of the state. To exist within a state, you must be classified by the state accordingly. You could, however, proclaim that you exist not in a nation state but simply on a land on earth. This is more of a biological definition, and as such it requires to arbitrary abstractions. You simply exist as a biological creature. But if you in any way associate with the state, you are an object of the state. That is unfortunate. Political economic paradigms usurp any other and make it impossible to exist in the world free of political classifications. You can't not be a citizen of some state; you must have a passport for international travel. You must have a political identity to legitimately exist in the global political world. I find these unfortunate truths, not that I actively support them, only because hegemony is the lesser of the two (anarchy) evils.

So, yes, an "illegal immigrant" must abide by the rules of the state in order to live within its boundaries. It seems perfectly reasonable to say that if an immigrant that doesn't abide by state identity classifications kills a citizen of the state, they can remove that person from their boundaries, since they didn't have the "right" to be there in the first place.

In analogy: I steal a cookie from the jar. I get caught, and receive punishment on two accounts - (1) for stealing; and (2) for stealing a cookie before dinner. This distinction is important because a crime is committed when it is predicated upon another; I stole, but I stole at a certain time. The first is an act, the second is a condition in which the act takes place. Both require volition, the will to act, and the will to act in a certain condition. Thus, a person can kill, and they can kill when they are in a certain condition (illegal residence).

The problem, as Rivera points out, is that migrants come not to wreak havoc but because of economic promises. It complicates the 2nd account of cookie analogy but does not entirely refute it; migrants come out of their "volition" but it's pretty fatalistic. And of course shifting attention away from the individual to structural issues is something people with little critical insight never do. Deviance has long shown how problems are individualized. The state should assume economic responsibility for globalization, not individuals.

Anyway, it's not like I directly support state hegemony, but I find it the lesser of two evils. Isn't that reform is all about?

appearances

I only recently found out what the hell a double eye-lid was. It was from some adoption book, may have been Trenka's, or this novel, called "Somebody's Daughter" by Marie Myung-Ok Lee. It was a significant discovery because I vividly remember in high school some people were sitting around, discussing Asian eyes and whatnot, and this Latino guy with distinctly European features comes up to me and was like "well, yours aren't bad." Like Trenka, double eyelids are my mothers genetic gift to me...if it's a "gift" you'll call it. If single eyelids would have resulted in more teasing, then I'm glad I have doubles.

OK, but on to what I just discovered now. There's these things called circle contact lenses:



......ok that's just creepy.

Lucky Girl

Mei-Ling's book. Doesn't she have a blog? That's pretty cool, to be able to come into contact with authors in such an open way.

I liked this book way more than Wuhu Diaries. Mei-Ling was spot on when she said around half-way in the book that every adoptee's experiences are different. She knew that from her brothers too.

There's was also an author's picture on the back flap. I think she'd look better without bangs than with =p.

Also, I grew up in the DC suburbs, so I totally knew about Hard Times! I don't go to the one in Alexandria a lot, but there's one in Arlington that I go to a lot. Best chili ever. If you're ever in the area, make sure to go...but the one in Arlington is undergoing renovation now.

LaTex

I recently just heard about this...marvelous ancient technology...from another blog run by someone crazier than me. Well, I'm still an undergrad, so that's not saying a lot.

LaTex seems great. The syntax probably isn't hard to grasp and seems much simpler than Word...I hate Word, especially for Macs. My foray into open source goodness came from a resentment towards Windows and Lilypond, which I still use sort of frequently for various music projects. Lilypond gets rather confusing though and has a lot of annoying "limitations" that can only be overridden with the most ingratiating of syntax.

Wuhu Diaries

Just read this book by Emily Prager. I enjoyed it for the most part. It was kind of boring in some places where nothing seems to happen, but I liked the overall "message" I guess. I thought it was an interesting trip through a perspective of an adoptive parent. The only thing that made me go "WTF" was when Prager's daughter asks about her birth parents, Prager says that if she looks in the mirror she will see them, that they're in your legs, in your body. Wtf? If all adoptees were comforted by that logic do you think the majority would still go back to their place of birth in search for their parents? I don't really hold it against her though. I have no idea what I'd say if I were an adoptive parent. That bit didn't stop me from enjoying the book though.

Then again, scathing Amazon reviews do confirm that I know nothing about China nor travel writing.

When was it...

...that I started to find Asian women attractive? [Feminists, put down your pitchforks and torches...] Ever since I can remember - through my K-12 education - I was never attracted to Asian women. Maybe I was even scared of them...although I had many male Asian friends. Perhaps my memory has blotted out any attractiveness I did see?

But then this past winter I began to read more about adoption. I think Jane Trenka's first memoir was my gateway book into the entire discourse on adoption. Not coincidentally Asian women became attractive. Well, my school does have a very large (11% or so) international student population, many from Japan, South Korea and China. And, again, not coincidentally, this was around the time where the fact actually "dawned" on me that I had a birth mother. I guess I "knew" it all along, but I never really engaged with the reality of the statement.

Attractiveness, adoptedness, birth mothers...in other words...I've never seen a more Freudian thing in my life.

news: Massachusetts woman found with baby cut from womb held on $500,000 bail in kidnap case

via

an insensitive pun

If you're an adoptee, well, you may be able to meet your birth parents, but you cannot return to the past. Adoption is, well, there's no use crying over adoption just as there's no use crying over spilled milk.

news: Elton John wants to adopt a boy

via

always get two cats

Do you have a pet? I've had several cats through my youth. The one I have now my family got right when it was born. It was a large cat family...maybe 7+ kittens. But we adopted only one. She was de-clawed and went through all standard house-cat-ification processes. But, ten years later, the cat is really fucked up. She is terrified of outside, terrified of other cats (we never socialized her), and has very strange habits. She'll start sucking on my t-shirts, maybe since it never had a real mother. My parents say (I'm at college, cat-less ;_;) she howls at night looking for me.

I guess the point is...does this sound remotely familiar?

edit - I found this paragraph after searching "socializing cats" in google:

Getting a new kitten or cat is exciting. Whether you have one already and are getting an addition to the family, or whether you getting one for the first time, socializing your new furry friend should be right at the top of your agenda. You know, next to the litter box training? It's too bad that a lot of people don't think of socialization as being an important part of owning a pet. In fact, socialization makes all the difference between a timid, aggressive, shy, scared, and/or irritable cat and a sweet, cuddly, loving, trusting, bundle of joy. Socialization also teaches your cat the rules of the house, what kind of behavior is allowed and what isn't. This is especially important if you have children in the house that might possibly be chasing your kitty around, picking him up in odd ways, and petting him a little too roughly for his liking. A well socialized cat will put up with all these things without lashing out, and that is what you want in a cat.

re: sigh

via

Comments are closed on that post...the author wasn't "looking for a discussion".

However, disregarding the futility of this post, I wanted to point out one thing in the aforementioned post. She states:

Because we are your parents, who labored for you in ways you can never begin to understand.

[...]

Above all, let's find ways to help the current generation of adopted children, so they don't waste so much time in the emotional limbo of wanting something they cannot have.

I presume the author thinks "they" know what is best for adoptees, yet adoptees cannot, allegedly, "begin to understand" the plight of adoptive parents. Whadda they call that?...a double standard? And from a mother too...

***

On the other hand, I had been learning more about all the trouble my a-parents went through, stuff I have absolutely no memory of; how much of a pain it was to find a daycare, negotiating hours and pay at work, maternity leave, etc. But wouldn't any empathetic individual eventually think of those kinds of things?

Most of the time, I see little point in demonizing the individual when it's a larger structural problem. I also thought that was common wisdom in the community from what I've read.

almost at that time

Apparently my b-father was 21 when I was born.

I'm almost 21.

That's kind of a very...strange, sort of scary feeling, that I'm of the age that my father conceived me. He also apparently joined the army when he was 21.

I don't think we're very similar.

Also, b-mother has always had a more special place than b-father. I don't really...hmm...care about b-father, even if he primarily exists in my imagination. Maybe I'd try to beat him up if I ever met him (I don't think it's very nice to impregnate an 18 year old girl and then join the army without a notice). I don't think I'd win...haha. If I go searching in Korea, it'd be to see b-mother and her family.

more on existentialism

I'm not a philosopher, I don't really claim to be one. Fancy labels/jargon are useful because the establish language structures that other people can enter. However...jargon alienates people for that very reason. Sometimes it's hard to enter the structure. [notice I use the tag 'academentia'...a funny meme I heard from a professor]

At any rate, what I understand from briefly reading the wiki article is that existentialism seeks to understand stuff from the perspective of the individual and their experiences. That is to say, the world can only be understood internally and that there is no "objective", external world.

In the case of adoption, as I said before, it can be divided roughly into two perspectives. The existentialist one, and...another one for which I know no fancy philosophical term. Adoption as an economic mechanism of capitalism surely exists external to the individual, yet all that which people experience due to adoption must surely be, well, experiential, or internal to the individual.

The classification "adoptee" itself is derived from adoption as an external mechanism. A classification seeks to group people together for conceptual convenience, and the only way we are able to avoid logical fallacies is to group people together based on objective criteria, criteria that are external to individuals. Thus we could define "adoptee" as one that, as others have noted, is separated from her biological family and raised in another.

This "logical fallacy" we wanted to avoid would occur if we group together "adoptees" based on adoption as an internal mechanism. It would entail our grouping together people based on subjective, widely variant experiences. If we did this, then our category of "adoptee" would not be consistent with itself; one person could base their classification on their feeling of loathing towards his adoptive parents, while another could base it on her desire to meet her birth parents.

Moreover, a nasty case of circular reasoning emerges if we examine the classification of adoption as an internal experience:

"I don't like being adopted because it makes me feel disconnected."

If you replace "being adopted" for an internal experience, you get

"I don't like feeling disconnected because it makes me feel disconnected."

Therefore, adoption as a classification based on experience holds no explanatory power. When we speak of "being adopted", it must be in reference to an objective, external condition.

Despite all that, the condition of adoption is what binds people together. Imagined community, or what have you, powerful feelings swell up when you realize there are other people that have been through the same situations, and may hold the same or similar feelings as yourself.

news: Mother of abandoned baby sought

via BBC

Keep your eyes open for a follow-up story later.

re: Down with Metaphors!

via

Well this becomes considerably more confusing the more you delve into it.

Metaphors can be damaging if they get out of hand. If a certain language usurps the prevailing discourse of an issue, that language will define the issue. This language, however, is external to its issue and is observable for everyone (already with complicated phenomenology...). Thus if a whole bunch of dumb metaphors start to dominate the discourse on adoption, there is a probability that the general public will be saturated with these metaphors, and the concept which the metaphor seeks to describe will basically become those metaphors. Lakoff and others get into this, what the metonymy and everything. I think this is the main problem with metaphors, to which I should be more careful to heed.

Here was another part of my comment on that post:

Do I know what it is for you? No. Adoption is a process, a condition, a mentality, not just some political and economic function external to individuals. So you can’t really reduce it to a one liner and say “what it is”. That’s speaking for everyone. I don’t think about my biological family. It wasn’t really a family anyway. Just a mother. Or will you say you know what my definition of a family is too? It’s all too complicated to grasp with one line.

At first you'd think I was instantly contradicting myself, saying that adoption is different for everyone, then saying that "adoption is". But there is a key epistemological difference. We can say what adoption is when it is a process external to the individual. You might say it's "objective" that way. But when we're speaking of the internal, psychological process and condition of adoption, you can never really say what it "is", because it will always differ between individuals. We are able to say what adoption is only as a social, political and economic function because these criteria are what bind us together in the category "adoptee", a category that is external to the individual. To say otherwise would be a horrid essentialist argument. However, when we arrive at the psychological realm, I think there will always be different experiences.

Before, I had said that this blog had an unfortunate academic flavor. I maintain that opinion. People usually scoff at things overly-academic. It's kind of a shame on both sides of the table, but I think this is important enough to discuss, hopefully without getting to rallied up as to cloud our visions.

\a box of cookies if you can detect all thirty-six instances of hypocrisy in this post

semantics, i.e. "trafficking"

Trafficking in Persons Report from 2005 (21) (via Allen, Kevin Minh, "THE PRICE WE ALL PAY Human Trafficking in International Adoption", Conducive, July/August 2009.)

Though baby selling is illegal, it would not necessarily constitute human trafficking where it occurs for adoption, based on the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the UN Protocols on Trafficking in Persons and the Sale of Children, the 1993 Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in respect of Intercountry Adoption, and definitions of adoption established by U.S. jurisdictions.

The purposes of baby selling and human trafficking are not necessarily the same. Some individuals assume that baby selling for adoption is a form of human trafficking because trafficking and baby selling both involve making a profit by selling another person.

However, illegally selling a child for adoption would not constitute trafficking where the child itself is not to be exploited. Baby selling generally results in a situation that is nonexploitative with respect to the child. Trafficking, on the other hand, implies exploitation of the victims. If an adopted child is subjected to coerced labor or sexual exploitation, then it constitutes a case of human trafficking.

In some respects, the victims are indeed exploited. Recently, some have spoken about love, so you'd think that the purchasing of a child for emotional satisfaction of the adoptive parent would constitute exploitation, especially if the child grows up to be emotionally detached from the adoptive parents.

The problem is that such a definition of exploitation resists prevention because it's predicated on how the child's mentality evolves over time. The only partially viable prevention method would be to do rigorous background checks on adoptive parents to make sure that children aren't adopted for the sole purpose of pleasing the parents. But didn't we come to that conclusion already? Semantics...

archival

A place for storing various articles and research materials. In chronological order.

2007

Robinson, Katy, Relative Choices blog,The New York Times, November 2007.

2008

Norimitsu, Onishi, "For English Studies, Koreans Say Goodbye to Dad," The Boston Globe, June 8, 2008.: Hints at third culture kids, a change in Confucian culture and foreign exchange Korean students learning English in order to get ahead in Korean society.

2009

Hopgood, Mei-Ling, "Another Country, not my own", The Boston Globe, August 23, 2009.: Briefly chronicles shifts in adoption discourse from assimilation to "birth culture" and back again.

Joyce, Kathrine, "Shotgun Adoption", The Nation, August 26, 2009.: Good information on CPC's (Christian pregnancy centers), how child-birth is medicalized and individualized. CPC's coerce women into having babies for the sole purpose of adoption.

George, Justin, "Adoption experts worry economy is driving more birth mothers, or fakers, to scam," St. Petersburg Times, September 12, 2009.: A very money-oriented perspective on domestic adoption...

re: Are we all connected?

via

Well, humans are connected genetically. Isn't all life genetically related, going back to a common ancestor? Not like I know when the first eukaryote evolved out of a prokaryote though.

But the notion that all humans are connected by a real bond - biology - just serves to indicate how disconnected humans are, how barriers are constructed, and the material of these barriers isn't anything real, nothing concrete. That's what race is, as one of my professors put it: it's everything, and it's nothing.

But of course race is more complicated than that. It can't easily be reduced to a single aphorism. What does it mean to be "white"? "Asian"? Merely the color of your skin? Is it what's on the outside? The inside? Race is as much external as it is internal. Why else would memes like "oreo" or "coconut" exist?

Race also exists as a function of class. btstormb2006 writes:

I am white because my aparents are white and my afather makes more money than your father, so that makes me white. It’s about the color of my aparent’s skin and amount of money my afather makes, but nothing to do with me.

Why is it that being rich can, to an extent, count as being white, regardless of ethnicity and heritage? I've seen this growing up too.

Eventually...idealism can be nice, but it's just a means to an end. \end marxism