"I could be you, you could be him, he could be her"

Kim tells us how to read Adopted Territory in her introduction; “I encourage,” she writes, “readers to approach this book as an ethnography that attempts to understand an emergent social formation and not as a portrait of ‘Korean adoptee identity.’”(18) In other words, she is interested in exploring “how a shared sense of personhood was established among spatially dispersed, highly diverse individuals.” (14) While the study of adoptees is fascinating in and of itself, the description of their social movement that has emerged in the last thirty years out of nowhere, of its growth and internal struggles, is a fascinating case study in the formation of a social justice movement. I wonder what lessons we who are fighting for justice can take from this example. Obviously, if we are talking about feminism, or environmentalism, or whatever social movement it may be, there is not necessarily the degree of common experience that exists within the Korean adoptee community, in that they all share specific, important characteristics. Kim explains that “adoptee organizations emerged at the conjuncture of new media technologies, normative models of self-making and self-knowledge, and new kinds of social organization.” (104) Through this emphasis on the emergence of and organization of the social movement, Kim suggests a methodology for trans/forming transnational social movements. I’m not entirely sure what the message is yet, having read the first part of the book, but I’m hoping that later in the book she will elucidate her ideas.

I was interested in reading this book, which is not explicitly (in its title, its categorization, or its author’s mission) feminist, with a particularly transnational feminist lens. Kim’s assertion that the narratives about adoption in Korea show that  “neoliberal rationalities and global imaginaries are increasingly influencing the value placed on women’s reproductive choices and capacities,” (38) and her emphasis on exploring the ways in which neoliberal economic policies manufactured the crisis of Korean “orphan”hood, helped shape how I read the rest of the book. Another way that I see the work as being a feminist one is because it is fundamentally about justice. Kim, thankfully, does not offer a binary answer to the complex and textured question of transnational adoption, but simply by creating a space where critical voices can be heard is enough to challenge the status quo.

I related this work to the book from last week in that both Kim and Parreñas contextualize transnational phenomena that are simultaneously highly visible and so commonplace as to be rendered invisible. I have had several Korean adoptee friends over the years, and somehow I never complicated the existence of international adoption. Sure, one of my college friends would get very angry when another friend would call her a Twinkie, but this frustration never morphed into a discussion of adoption and racial politics in a more general sense.

I was interested in the ways in which the importance of culture/ethnicity are emphasized in the Korean adoptee experience and in the work itself. Kim quotes a common sentiment among adoptees as “‘I could be you, you could be him, he could be her,’” (97) or the idea that an adoptee’s entire future and existence were determined by chance. But isn’t that so for the rest of us as well? I think there is a tendency to credit/blame biology/god for our fates, but for adoptees, whether Korean or otherwise, there is an additional, more human element to the shuffling of the cards. Part of me was uncomfortable with the tradition Korean emphasis on race and nation, but I simultaneously feel that there is something inherently tragic about a child being removed from the culture and ethnicity into which they are born. But this is very complicated. Because what about a child in the “multicultural” U.S.? Take, for instance, the example about Native Americans. Kim mentions Native American adoption several times, which reminds me of this article that I read in the New York Times this year. When I was growing up in Utah, there were a lot of fundraisers at which you could “adopt” a native child or elder. When I was a kid, my family “adopted” a Navajo boy named Kenny who was the same age as me. We kept a Polaroid photo of him on our refrigerator. So, what made Kenny “adoptable”? The promotional materials for these adoptions certainly never highlighted the history that had necessitated the “adoption.” They didn’t discuss the lack of institutionalization of health and educational programs, whose existence would disintegrate the need for paternalistic “adoption” programs. And, for the transnational campaigns, such as Save the Children, they certainly never expose the neoliberal economic policies, including Strucutral Adjustment Programs and free trade/export processing zones, among others, which have created the need for “adoption.”

It is perhaps these materials, that, as Kim paraphrases Lisa Cartwright, that spur “the collapse of physical, cultural, and personal distance between spectator and sufferer,” (70) that created my desire to adopt internationally. I don’t know. What I do know is that I have always known that I want kids, and that, as a gay white male, I will adopt. I have assumed that I will adopt internationally, and while I have always had a clear understanding that my “children will fit into the nation differently than [I] do” (117), I had also never really problematized transnational adoption for myself. As Kim writes, there is no clear answer about whether or not children should be adopted transnationally, especially when they are primarily children of color born in the global South traveling to privileged white parents in the global North. But although the more recent waves of adoption have been marked by a more heightened cultural awareness among white adoptive parents, the fundamental questions of power imbalance and definitions of kin/home persist.