• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.183-217
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• 2012

This study explores the identity-formation of adult Korean-American intentional adoptees who studied Korean in a Korean language center in New York from 2005 to 2007. Based on participant observation in the classroom, observations of student conversations in their gatherings, and discourse analysis of conversations related to why they were studying Korean, I found that adoptees felt that their lack of knowledge of Korean had caused them to fall short of expectations of ethnic Koreans. Stereotyped as Korean (or Asian) based on their looks, they were often assumed to possess knowledge of and skills associated with Korean culture, which they of course lacked. They were motivated to study Korean (and acquaint themselves with Korean culture) in order to meet these expectations.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.1
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• pp.147-170
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• 2011

This paper elucidates the characteristics of transnational adoption, estimates the possibility of beyond-borders identity of transnational adoptees, and tries to analyze Jane Jeong Trenka's The Language of Blood in its context. Though it has been regarded as one of the most humanitarian ways of helping orphans and poor children of the world, transnational adoption, a one-way flow of children from poor Asian countries to rich white countries, has been operated under the market logic between countries. Transnational adoptees, who had been abandoned and forced to be taken away from their birth mother, and later, to fulfill the desire of white parents for a perfect family, perform an ideological labor, serving to make the heterogeneous nuclear family complete. Korean transnational adoptees, forced to transcend the borders of nation, culture, and ethnicity, experience racial conflict and alienation in white adoptive family and society. Their diaspora experience of violent dislocation creates frustration and confusion in establishing their identity as a whole being. When they return to Korea to find their birth mother and their true identity, Korean adoptees, however, are faced with other obstructing issues, such as language problem, culture conflict, and maternal nationalism. Finally, Korean transnational adoptees reject Korean nationalism discourse based on blood, and try to redefine themselves as beyond-borders subjectivities with new and fluid identities. Jane Jeong Trenka's The Language of Blood, an autobiographical novel based on her experiences as a transnational adoptee, represents a Korean adopted girl's personal, cultural, and racial conflict within her white adoptive family, and questions the image of benevolent white mother and the myth of multiculturalism. The novel further represents Jane's return to Korea to find out her true identity, and shows Jane's disappointment and alienation in her birth country due to her ignorance of language and culture. Returning to USA again, and trying to be reconciled with her American mother, Jane shows the promise of accepting her new identity capable of transcending the borders, and thus, the possibility of enlarging the category of belonging.

• Korea journal of population studies
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.71-95
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• 2007

This paper attempts to identify the principle of family succession and family patterns of yangban in the late Chosun period through an analysis of male adaptation cases found in family registration records. The primary source of analysis is the family registration documents of Uiseong Kim's from the late 17th century to the early 20th century. As a result, it is found that there is a substantial change in the patterns of family from the early and mid Chosun period to the late Chosun period. The change is the strengthening of the principle of patriarchy succession through male adoption. Looking at the data as a whole, the average number of household members is increased and the membership of kinship also expanded. In contrast to the family patterns of the early Chosun period, not only the patterns of Uiseong Kim's family are predominately immediate family or collateral family but also the majority is extended family in the 18th and 19th centuries. The male adoption cases recorded in Uiseong Kim's family registration documents take up 33.8% of the male adoption cases in the entire family registration documents. This goes to show that the strengthening of the principle of primogeniture succession at a time when child mortality rate is very high resulted in the increase of male adoption. In conclusion, the late Chosun society was a society where the seat of primogeniture was much more important than immediate hereditary members in the family succession.