Throughout author Eleane Kim's Adopted Territory there is a question of how Korean adoptees can form an identity while assimilating into a new culture that ultimately alienates them and figuring out how one's inexperienced cultural difference plays into who they are. Kim discusses the ways in which the child is "normalized" into the idea of a nuclear family in their move to the United States, "The visibly different adopted child is at once normal... but also unnatural and out of place- the child's racial difference indexes her foreign origins and implicitly links her to groups that have long histories of being culturally and economically excluded and marginalized" (89). The adoptee is faced with the process of being normalized into their role as the member of a traditional nuclear, white, American, family while being forced to acknowledge not only their physical difference, but also the public perception of their country of origin. Kim continues on the topic by explaining "cognitive dissonance" in which adoptees are given traditional American names that do not "match" the stereotypical physical attributes one pictures when hearing a name such as Kelly, Tom, Lucy, and the like (89). In this method of normalizing the adoptee, the adopting parents have actually further marginalized the already marginalized child by "inadvertently disrupting culturalist and racialized expectations" (89). She then goes on to explain how it has become common for these adoptees to incorporate their Korean names into their American names in their adult years (89). However, psychologically, Kim depicts "the split between an internal white identity and an external Asian body is often expressed in Korean adoptees" (92). In reading this section of the text it was striking to me the similarities that the kind of double persona that the adoptee must take on is to W.E.B. Dubois' statement on an African American "double consciousness" in which African Americans face a psychological difficulty in equating their African heritage with their European upbringing and educational experiences. In this way, the African American poses a similar situation to the adoptee in that both are trying to accommodate the physical attributes traditionally associated with their nation of origin with that of an American environment and upbringing and forming their personal identities based on these two modes of "consciousness". Kim concludes that "for adoptees, cultural citizenship has proven to be eminently problematic, as their racial difference has marked their distant and different origins... an "inclusion in American citizenship and exclusion from American identity'" (130).
From this point Kim explains that the adoptee method of mitigating this confusion and alienation is through the formation of "adoptee kinship" which is usually hinged upon a shared experience of "profound isolation, liminality, and survival" as well as "a shared acknowledgment of the instability and uncertainty of origins and the involuntary forfeiture of historical and cultural connections" (96-97). Since the mid 1990's introducing home computing, the main way in which adoptees develop this kinship is through conferences such as the "Gathering" as well as through the internet (137). Kim explains that it is through, "the collapse of space and the acceleration of time associated with developments in communications and transportation technologies increasingly helped to bring the past of Korea into the present lives of adoptees" as well as the more economically affordable costs of air travel to Korea. In this way the adoptees are utilizing time-space compression, in a way that Doreen Massey's article, "A Global Sense of Place" explains as a group's priviledged ability to be "those who are both doing the moving and the communicating" across territorial borders, placing them "really in a sense in charge of time-space compression"(3). It is solely the way in which this adoptee population utilizes their control over time-space compression either by internet communities or through physical communities that they may seek kinship. However, this utilization of time-space compression has its pros and cons. The pros read as an increased population capable of traveling to Korea, increased internet access to Korean media outlets as well as agency for lower class and marginalized adoptees (Kim 105). The cons read as a "collective identification" that has "been effected through the construction and exclusion of adoptee others-namely, adoption agencies, adoptive parents, and other ethnic Koreans" (141). This subsequent hierarchy is also felt by other adoptees unable to afford the costs of travel and accommodation and thus do not experience this "rite of passage" as well as adoptees who have not had the traditional shared experiences that other adoptees have (interracial couples, incarcerated adoptees, homeless, and drug addicts), and who are limited to the use of the internet as a method of kinship (166, 125). As well as the divide that such conferences have created amongst the relations of adoptees with Korean based adoptees over political praxis (161).
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