Adoptee Trouble

Week 9 Blog Post – Adopted Territory (Part II)

            The second half of Eleana J. Kim’s Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging highlights the, globally conventionalized, contradictory states in which Korean adoptees construct their identities and realities.  Korean adoptees are at a constant psychological flux, investigating and navigating the lines between race, heritage, culture, and ethnicity.  Kim notes, “…the notion of the identity in difference of adoptees presented a profound contradiction between the ideologies of hanminjok (one race) or han p’itchul (one blood) and the acceptance of adoptees as Koreans who are also foreigners” (Kim, 238).  These innate contradictions of identity and being within adoptees’ psyches relate back to Laura Briggs’ attention to contradictions in relation to society.  Briggs states, “The contradictions that a community, culture, or text can contain elucidate its myths, its ideologies, its worldview” (Briggs, 201).  Thus, the Korean worldviews that permeate from their contradictory acceptance and distaste for transnational adoptions are their adherence to strict, nationalistic familial units and, on the broader, sociopolitical level, a capitalistic mandate to consolidate peoples and identities into generic, overarching categorizations.  Kim elaborates on these consolidations in which, in the South Korean drive to modernize and globalize (in the West’s terms), the diasporic nature of adoptees is being homogenized into forms of expansive, global Korean networks that remain consistent in the state’s cultural nationalism.  Kim writes, “…diasporic politics are being actively mobilized and merged with transnational processes in the production of new forms of long-distance nationalism” (Kim, 174). 

To me, Korea’s transnational adoptions ring eerily similar to (post)colonial relations of power between the “modern West” and the “developing East,” in which assimilation to the hegemonic, empowered forms of economic and political control were mandated and eventually conventionalized, thus limiting true diversities.  Chandra Mohanty’s notion of colonization relates to Kim’s illustration of Korean transnational adoptees; “…colonization almost invariably implies a relation of structural domination, and a discursive or political suppression of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question” (Mohanty, 61).  Upon adoptees’ return to their “motherland” of South Korea, their “heterogeneity” is diminished or silenced in seemingly subconscious efforts to limit their identities to the place of birth and biological bloodlines.  Analytical attentions to adoptees’ unique, especially multifarious identities highlight the contradictions and incongruities within globalization, modernization, and capitalism as; “…adoptees denaturalize both kinship and citizenship, but…they more often reveal the limitations of…a world order that is profoundly organized around exclusionary boundaries of nation-based citizenship and blood-based kinship” (Kim, 267).