• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1035-1056
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• 2009

Korean adoptee narratives have proliferated over the last ten years as adopted Koreans have begun to represent their own experiences of violent dislocation, displacement and loss in various forms of literary and artistic works, including poems, autobiographical works, novels, documentaries and films. These narratives by Korean adoptees have intervened in the current diaspora discourse to question further the traditional categories of race, ethnicity, culture and nation by representing the unique experiences of the forced and involuntary migration of adopted Koreans. For a long time, the adoption discourse has been mostly constructed from the perspectives of adoptive parents. Therefore the voice of adoptees as well as that of the birth mothers have not been properly heard or represented in adoption discourse. According to Hosu Kim, the U. S. adoption discourse, feeling pressured to deal with the stigma of the commodification of children, changed from viewing the adoptees as children who had been rescued from poverty and abandonment to considering them as a gift from the birth mothers. With the emergence of the gift rhetoric in transnational adoption, the birth mothers erased from adoption discourse have begun to be acknowledged as one of the central characters in the adoption triad. If Korean adoptees are the "the ghostly children of Korean history," the birth mothers are their "ghostly doubles" who "bear the mark of a repressed national trauma." Somebody's Daughter represents the female experiences of becoming an adopted child and of being a birth mother. In particular, the novel makes a birth mother, the forgotten presence in adoptee narratives, into a central figure in the triangular relationship created by international adoption. The novel historicizes the experiences of a Korean adoptee growing up in America as well as those of a mother who had suffered silently from feelings of unbearable loss, guilt, grief and from unforgettable memories. In addition, narrating the birth mother's story is a way to give humanity back to these forgotten women in Korean adoption history. Revisiting the site of loss both for a mother and a daughter through the novel is an act of collective mourning. The narratives about and by Korean adoptees force Korean intellectuals to reflect seriously upon Korean society and its underlying ideology which prevents a woman from mothering her own baby, and to take an ethical and political stand on this current social and political issue.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.65 no.1
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• pp.83-107
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to understand the life experiences of an adult adoptee. For this purpose, the data were collected through in-depth interviews with an adult adoptee, observation, and documents and analyzed using life history approach. Results of analysis were composed of summarized life history, thick description of life history, theme analysis, and issues for intervention. The themes generated from analysis are 'a slub', 'a larva that want to be a butterfly', 'I am okay. No, I am not okay', 'because it is not my fault', 'love, the critical determinant leading my life'. Researchers, also, examined intervention issues of adoption, post-adoption service, closed adoption or open adoption, searching root, intervention for adult adoptee. Based on the results of this study, the policies and practical guidelines for adult adoptees were suggested.

• American Studies
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.25-56
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• 2020

The essay examines two contemporary American plays that portray adult Korean American adoptees' return to South Korea: How to Be a Korean Woman (2012) by Sunmee Chomet and Middle Brother (2014) by Eric Sharp. While the existing scholarship on transnational adoption has discussed homecoming as a predominantly female experience of birth mothers and daughters, Chomet and Sharp suggest the differing ways in which the adoptee subjectivity is re-imagined in particularly gendered ways after homecoming. In these plays, adult adoptees' repeated, mundane bodily performances of Korean cultural norms illustrate how notions of femininity and masculinity are inscribed onto the body of adoptee individuals under the patriarchal system. Such performative construction of Korean-ness departs from the earlier theatrical representations of young, adolescent adoptees' homecoming that served as a symbolic rite of passage, a necessary process through which they would gain cultural hybridity and mature into cosmopolitan American-ness.

• Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics
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• v.52 no.4
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• pp.410-416
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• 2009

In Korea, overseas adoption has been practiced for more than 50 years. Initially, overseas adoption began with the objective to provide permanent homes for Korean war orphans, including mixed-blood children. From 1953 to 2007, about 160,000 Korean children were placed worldwide through overseas adoption and approximately 70,000 children were adopted in Korea. During that period, Korea developed into one of leading industrial countries in the world and the family norms changed dramatically. Since 1989, the Korean government has made diverse efforts to increase domestic adoptions and to support adopted families through the revisions to Korea's Child Welfare Law. However, it is not enough to reduce overseas adoptions rapidly because the Korean government's economic support for adopted families is not adequate and Korean sentiments regarding adoption have not changed. Being an international adoptee is a unique experience, involving dissimilarities of race, ethnicity, and culture. Clearly, it is very important for us to focus on placing Korean children in the best possible environment. Therefore, Korea must make diverse efforts to reduce overseas adoptions and to encourage domestic adoption. First, Korean society has to try to reduce the number of children who need out-of-home care. Second, the Korean government and people should make an effort to increase domestic adoptions, including adoptions of disabled and older children. Finally, the Korean government and adoption agencies have to provide professional pre-adoption and post-adoption services for international adoptees and adoptive parents.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.3
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• pp.329-345
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• 2018

Sun Yung Shin's poetry collection Skirt Full of Black (2007) brings the author's personal history as a Korean female adoptee to bear upon poetic language in daring formal experiments, instantiating the liminal state of being shuttled across borders to land in an in-between state of marginalization. Other Korean American poets have also drawn on the experience of transnational adoption and racialization explore the literary potential of English to materialize haunting memories or the untranslatable yet persistent echoes of a lost home that gestures across linguistic boundaries, as seen in the case of Lee Herrick or Jennifer Kwon Dobbs. Shin however dismantles the referential foundation of English as a language she was transplanted into through formal transgressions such as frazzled syntax, atypical typography, decontextualized punctuation marks, and phonetic and visual play. The power to signify and thereby differentiate one entity or meaning from another dissipates in the cacophonic feast of signs in Skirt Full of Black; the word fragments of identificatory markers that turn racialized, gendered, and culturally contained subjects into exotic things lose the power to define them as such, and instead become alterities by departing from the conventional meaning-making dynamics of language. Expanding on the avant-garde legacy of Korean American poets Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim to delve further into the liminal space between Korean and American, referential and representational, or spoken and written words, Shin carves out a space for discreteness that does not subscribe to the hierarchical ontology of differential value assignment.

• Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association
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• v.49 no.2
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• pp.85-95
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• 2011

The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate an attachment improvement program for families adopting an older child. The objectives and contents of this program reflected on the experiences of adopted parents and the characteristics of older-age adoptee children with attachment disruption. The program consisted of three components: parent-child relationship building, parenting skills enhancement for adopted parents, and negative emotions mediation for the older-age adoptees. The subjects of program were eight parent-child dyads. Differences between pre- and post-test data showed statistically significant improvements in the quality of parent-child relationships, communication levels with parents, and the parents' autonomic levels. There was also a reduction in the children's social problems. The implications of this study were discussed in terms of improving parent-child attachments in families adopting an older child.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare Studies
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• v.40 no.3
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• pp.69-98
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• 2009

The purpose of this study is to examine the psychosocial adjustment level of adopted children in non-traditional adoption of Korea and to verify the variables which influence their psychosocial adjustment. Moreover, this study concentrates on the parenting style of an adoptive mother and the openness of communication between the adoptive mother and her adopted child. And, six control variables which are individual characteristics of the adopted child and his(her) adoptive mother were utilized. The participants of the this research consisted of 61 adopted children in non-traditional adoption of Korea aged six and above and their adoptive mothers of 61. Door-to-door surveys for data collection were conducted nationally from December of 2007 to February of 2008. As the results of this study, out of 6 behavior problem variables, the adopted child showed the highest points in immaturely dependence, and their social competence was verified to be good. The psychosocial adjustment of the adopted children in non-traditional adoption of Korea showed meaningful differences according to the warmhearted parenting style of the adoptive mother, the openness of adoptive mother-adoptee's communication on both general and adoption related issues, and control variables. It was also verified that the warm-heartedness and the respect for autonomy of adoptive mother's parenting style, openness of adoptive mother-adoptee's general communication, and five control variables were the important variables influencing the psychosocial adjustment of the adopted child in non-traditional adoption of Korea. Accordingly, the adoptive parents' education of parenting for adopted child should be required more professional and individual approach at the adoption practice of Korea.

• 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.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.21
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• pp.139-164
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• 2010

Sung Yung Shin was adopted as a Korean infant to an American family. She is now one of the most important writers in Asian American literary field. This paper analyzes the characteristics of her literature, focusing on Skirt full of Black (poetry)and Cooper's Lesson(children's book). Sun Yung Shin uses collage in Skirt full of Black as an effective rhetorical device because it can express her experience as an adopted other in the multicultural American society. She rewrites the fairy tale of Swan Prince in the viewpoint of silence. For a yellow Asian adopted woman, speaking is suppressed. In the end, the attempt to escape from silence is the writer's resisting activity, and the rewriting of the tale is her questioning in place of the princess. I analyses Cooper's Lesson in the viewpoint of transcultural assimilation. Cooper's lesson is accomplished not by his white father but by a Korean settler, Mr. Lee. Cooper's family is a hybrid composed of white American father, Korean mother, and their half son. So this family has many complicated difficulties, though it's small. Mr. Lee who accepted a new language to establish a new identity teaches Cooper the importance of cultural assimilation, which is not a one-sided integration to dominant culture but an intercultural communion while sustaining each culture's singularity. Cooper learns that he should live in an harmonious and balanced life in a multi-cultural society while keeping his own subjective point of view.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare Studies
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.369-393
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• 2010

This study examines the factors influencing Korean international adoptee's search for their birthparents. Considering that the search for birthparents is general needs for adoptees, Korean government should support their searching activities and, first of all, understand their characteristics. The research model was constructed based on the results of previous studies, and the data set of conducted by ministry of health and welfare was reanalyzed for this study. The subjects of the survey were Korean-born adoptees (who are more than 16 years old) in North America, Europe, and Australia. The research questionnaire was translated to English and French, and the survey was conducted on line. A total of 290 questionnaires were included in the analysis. Since survey was conducted on line, the missing rate of the data was relatively high. So, multiply imputed five data sets were used for analysis. Among the variables included in research model, the age group of adoptees, experience of identity crisis in their life, the first time when they became actively interested in Korean roots, the age at the time of adoption, and the attitudes of adoptive parents toward their search were significantly related to their search for birthparents. Adoptees in the age group of 30~34 had more actively participated in search compared to their reference group (which is the age group of more than 35 years old). The earlier they became actively interested in Korean roots, they tended to be more active in searching activities. Also, the experience of identity crisis in life and the age at the time of adoption were positively related to their search. Although most of adoptive parents have supported their search, the adoptees who reported that they didn't know their adoptive parents' attitude toward search, or their parents deceased had more actively participated in search for their birthparents. Some implications for adoption policy and practice were discussed based on the results of the study.