Always an Outsider

Eleana Kim’s Adopted Territory studies how Korean children (and later as adults) have been affected by transnational adoptions.  This reverses the roles that were studied in Children of Global Migration.  In Adopted Territory, the children do not remain while birth parents leave.  Instead, the children are hand-picked to live a “better” life in a mostly white, western country like the United States or Australia.  While these are two differing situations, the economies of their home countries (whether the Philippines or South Korea) have led to limited choices for the birth mothers involved.
 
The adoptees undergo being stripped of their homeland and culture in many ways.  They are physically taken from South Korea.  Their names, clothing, and culture is changed in order to force assimilation in a new country that will continuously see them as an “other” regardless.  This in some ways leads to a stripping or even a fracturing of their identity.  In essence they have no place to belong to.  They are outsiders in their new adopted country, but they are also outsiders in South Korea because they have no connection to that culture either.  Kim mentions how the 1988 Olympics allowed many adoptees to see their birth country for the first time (Kim 108).  I wonder if this was the same for Chinese adoptees with the recent Beijing Olympics.  I would assume this might be a little different, because from 1988 to 2008 time and space have compressed at an even greater rate.
           
The situation the adoptees find themselves in as adults relates to Massey’s article about the time-space compression.  Because of the time-space compression these adults are now able to find more about where they came from, and even find a sense of community among others who are in similar situations.  At the same time, Massey’s idea about social groups and the geometry of the time-space compression comes into play.  Massey says different social groups have a different role, that “some people are more in charge of it than others” (Massey 3).  So where the Korean adoptees have been able to benefit from the internationalization of capital and commodities, which has compressed time and space, they still are not technically in charge of the process.