Julayne Lee, poet
Rare Bird Books, A Barnacle Book
Publication date : March 13, 2018
Language : English
Print length : 128 pages
Julayne Lee was born in South Korea to a mother she never knew. When she was an infant, she was adopted by a white Christian family in Minnesota, where she was sent to grow up.
Not My White Savior is a memoir in poems, exploring what it is to be a transracial and inter-country adoptee, and what it means to grow up being constantly told how better your life is because you were rescued from your country of origin. Following Julayne Lee from Korea to Minnesota and finally to Los Angeles, Not My White Savior asks what does “better” mean? In which ways was the journey she went on better than what she would have otherwise experienced?
Palimpsest
Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom
Publisher : Drawn and Quarterly
Publication date : November 5, 2019
Language : English
Print length : 156 pages
Thousands of South Korean children were adopted around the world in the 1970s and 1980s. More than nine thousand found their new home in Sweden, including the cartoonist Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, who was adopted when she was two years old. Throughout her childhood she struggled to fit into the homogenous Swedish culture and was continually told to suppress the innate desire to know her origins. “Be thankful,” she was told; surely her life in Sweden was better than it would have been in Korea. Like many adoptees, Sjöblom learned to bury the feeling of abandonment.
In Palimpsest, an emotionally charged memoir, Sjöblom’s unaddressed feelings about her adoption come to a head when she is pregnant with her first child. When she discovers a document containing the names of her biological parents, she realizes her own history may not match up with the story she’s been told her whole life: that she was an orphan without a background.
More Voices
by Susan Soon-Keum Cox (Editor)
Publisher : Koryo Press
Publication date : April 14, 2011
Language : English
Print length : 232 pages
Prose, poetry, art, non-fiction and other creative contributions about the international adoption experience by adult Asian adoptees.
To Save the Children of Korea
To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption
by Arissa H Oh (Author)
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Publication date : June 17, 2015
Language : English
Print length : 395 pages
Arissa Oh argues that international adoption began in the aftermath of the Korean War. First established as an emergency measure through which to evacuate mixed-race “GI babies,” it became a mechanism through which the Korean government exported its unwanted children: the poor, the disabled, or those lacking Korean fathers. Focusing on the legal, social, and political systems at work, To Save the Children of Korea shows how the growth of Korean adoption from the 1950s to the 1980s occurred within the context of the neocolonial US-Korea relationship, and was facilitated by crucial congruencies in American and Korean racial thought, government policies, and nationalisms.
Korean adoption served as a kind of template as international adoption began, in the late 1960s, to expand to new sending and receiving countries. Ultimately, Oh demonstrates that although Korea was not the first place that Americans adopted from internationally, it was the place where organized, systematic international adoption was born.
The Language of Blood
by Jane Jeong Trenka (Author)
Publisher : Graywolf Press
Publication date : July 1, 2005
Edition : Reprint edition
Language : English
Print length : 244 pages
“My name is Jeong Kyong-Ah. My ancestry includes landowners, scholars, and government officials. I have six siblings. I am a citizen of the Republic of Korea. I come from a land of pear fields and streams, where people laugh loudly and honor their dead. Halfway around the world, I am someone else.”
Jane Jeong Trenka and her sister Carol were adopted by Frederick and Margaret Brauer and raised in the small, homogeneous town of Harlow, Minnesota―a place “where the sky touches the earth in uninterrupted horizon … where stoicism is stamped into the bones of each generation.” They were loved as American children without a past.
With inventive and radiant prose that includes real and imagined letters, a fairy tale, a one-act play, crossword puzzles, and child-welfare manuals, Trenka recounts a childhood of insecurity, a battle with a stalker that escalates to a plot for her murder, and an extraordinary trip to Seoul to meet her birth mother and siblings. Lost between two cultures for the majority of her life, it is in Korea that she begins to understand her past and the power of the unspoken language of blood.
Disrupting Kinship
Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States
by Kimberly D. McKee
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Publication date : March 2, 2019
Language : English
Print length : 250 pages
Since the Korean War began, Western families have adopted more than 200,000 Korean children. Two-thirds of these adoptees found homes in the United States. The majority joined white families and in the process forged a new kind of transnational and transracial kinship.
Kimberly D. McKee examines the growth of the neocolonial, multi-million-dollar global industry that shaped these families—a system she identifies as the transnational adoption industrial complex. As she shows, an alliance of the South Korean welfare state, orphanages, adoption agencies, and American immigration laws powered transnational adoption between the two countries. Adoption became a tool to supplement an inadequate social safety net for South Korea’s unwed mothers and low-income families. At the same time, it commodified children, building a market that allowed Americans to create families at the expense of loving, biological ties between Koreans. McKee also looks at how Christian Americanism, South Korean welfare policy, and other facets of adoption interact with and disrupt American perceptions of nation, citizenship, belonging, family, and ethnic identity.
