Politics of Belonging

One part of Eleane Kim’s Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging that really resonated with me was the name selection that occurs when Korean adoptees are placed with an American/European family. These kids are essentially renamed, placing them in a more “typical” category of names. This practice does not serve its purpose of cultural assimilation, but instead it only causes a more noticeable dichotomy of self/other.

I went to a boarding school for high school. While I could drive home for holidays, many of the students were from other countries—mostly North and South Korea. These Korean students often were encouraged (now I wonder by whom and WHY) to pick an “American” name, a name that would be easier for their teachers and new friends to pronounce and distinguish. What usually resulted is the students choosing a name unheard of to most of their peers… or a name that would be more suited to our grandmothers. In hindsight, I realize that this caused marginalization in two ways: the Korean students likely felt disassociated from the backgrounds they bring to America and the U.S. students had a solid example of differences between the two “cultures”.

While these students weren’t adopted, I think it’s very likely that they could relate to the divide in “an internal white identity and an external Asian body” that Kim mentions throughout Adopted Territory (92). Kim also talks about the communal isolation that Korean adoptees go through; this, again, brought me back to high school—this time, in the dining hall. The dining hall had unofficial language tables, where a language other than English was spoken. These tables were initially provided as a place for students to practice their French, German, Chinese, etc., but it became a safe-haven for the Korean students to speak the language they knew best without being condemned for being rude or exclusionary.

Another part of Adopted Territory I found interesting was the idea of the politics of belonging. Nira Yuval-Davis talks about this concept, and she breaks down the construction of “belonging” into three facets: “The first facet concerns social locations; the second relates to people’s identifications and emotional attachments to various collectivities and grouping and the third relates to ethical and political value systems with which people judge their own and others’ belonging/s” (Power, Intersectionality and the Politics of Belonging 5). I would be curious to see these three facets applied to the stories of Korean adoptees in the United States.