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.