• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 Geographical Society
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.400-412
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• 2003

It is now widely recognized that new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been changing the way tv which firms conduct their businesses. Examples are the application of enterprise resources planning (ERP) and business process reengineering (BPR) to increase the efficiency of internal resources management, adoption of Business-to-Business e-commerce (B2B e-com) to integrate supply chain, and invention of new marketing channels such as Business-to-Customer (B2C) e-com. These new ways of conducting businesses are believed to help firms to reduce transaction costs and increase productivity. As a result, new ICTs have played an important role in recent growth of many small firms into multi-functional and multi-product corporations and in their spatial expansion towards internationalization as well. This paper takes Haier in China as a case to study the role of new ICTs in the growth of firms and reveal how the new technologies have facilitated the expansion of Haier into a transnational corporation (TNC) by examining the internationalization process of the firm in relation to its adoption of new ICTs in the period from 1990 to 2002. The study reveals that the adoption of new Ins has helped Haier to integrate its functional units located in dozens of places across the world, which is essential to the internationalization of a firm, and to link closely together its worldwide suppliers and customers to achieve just-in-time (JIT) production and delivery. As such, the authors of the paper argue that, without the facilitation of new ICTS, Haier could not have developed into a TNC in less than ten years.It is now widely recognized that new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been changing the way tv which firms conduct their businesses. Examples are the application of enterprise resources planning (ERP) and business process reengineering (BPR) to increase the efficiency of internal resources management, adoption of Business-to-Business e-commerce (B2B e-com) to integrate supply chain, and invention of new marketing channels such as Business-to-Customer (B2C) e-com. These new ways of conducting businesses are believed to help firms to reduce transaction costs and increase productivity. As a result, new ICTs have played an important role in recent growth of many small firms into multi-functional and multi-product corporations and in their spatial expansion towards internationalization as well. This paper takes Haier in China as a case to study the role of new ICTs in the growth of firms and reveal how the new technologies have facilitated the expansion of Haier into a transnational corporation (TNC) by examining the internationalization process of the firm in relation to its adoption of new ICTs in the period from 1990 to 2002. The study reveals that the adoption of new Ins has helped Haier to integrate its functional units located in dozens of places across the world, which is essential to the internationalization of a firm, and to link closely together its worldwide suppliers and customers to achieve just-in-time (JIT) production and delivery. As such, the authors of the paper argue that, without the facilitation of new ICTS, Haier could not have developed into a TNC in less than ten years.

• THE INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE & LAW REVIEW
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• v.13
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• pp.657-677
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• 2000

Since January 1, 1999, traders, bankers and their counsels worldwide have available for their use the first set of rules exclusively dealing with standby letters of credit:the International Standby Practices(ISP98). Numerous standbys have alreadby been issued in the United States and worldwide subject to the new ISP. The international banking community is anticipating an increasing demand from their customers to issue ISP-governed undertakings. Before the adoption of ISP, traders and bankers had only the choice of issuing their standby subject to the International Chamber of Commerce's(ICC) Uniform Customs and Practices for Documentary Credits(UCP) and, to a much lesser extent, to the ICC's Uniform Rules for Demand Guarantees(URDG). However, practice showed that UCP rules are not easily adapted to regulate transnational standbys. Indeed, UCP was conceived to govern documentary credits, which are intended to serve as a means of payment. By contrast, standbys are means of guaranty. The core of UCP cannot therefore be appropriate for standby practices and, as a consequence, a number of UCP's provisions have to be excluded in the standby's text. UCP's shortcomings indicated above fulfil the requirements of a key factor for the success of uniform rules. Indeed, to achieve success in the sense of meeting the market's acceptance, any such rules should fill a widely recognized need expressed by merchant community to which such rules are addressed. The ISP cleary has such a vocation. Nonetheless, the already largely encumbered regulatory environment of guarantee devices can hardly go unnoticed. The question therefore arises as to the proper place of ISP in such a context.

• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.246-257
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• 2009

Regarding climate change, the most significant challenge the world faces is achieving the goal of stabilizing the global concentration of greenhouse gases. However, this cannot be accomplished by greenhouse gas reduction efforts of developed countries alone. In this context, a "sectoral approach" has been brought up as a way to overcome the limit of the Kyoto Protocol and induce the participation of developing countries. This paper focuses on the different types of sectoral approaches that have been suggested so far, and their criteria, scope and effectiveness. It therefore explores the potential each approach has as a policy alternative under the post-2012 scheme. On top of that, with the possibility of these sectoral approaches becoming strong future policy alternatives in mind, this paper also analyzes their applicability to the Korean industry. For the steel, petrochemical and oil industries - in which energy efficiency exceeds the world average- a technology-based approach is proposed as an alternative. For the cement, paper and power generation industries - in which energy efficiency is about the same as the global average - a sectoral crediting mechanism or an index-based approach or a sector-wide transnational approach are proposed as alternatives. Lastly, this paper suggests a future research direction for their adoption and implementation.