Unbearable Splendor by Sun Yung Shin

Author:Sun Yung Shin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781566894524
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2016-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

“No Record”

Orphan (hojuk). In her article “Our Adoptee, Our Alien: Transnational Adoptees as Specters of Family and Foreignness in Korea,” Eleana Kim explains how the “orphan hojuk” and the legal “orphanization” process reconstitutes the adoptee socially in Korea. Within “the context of Korean law, she becomes a person with the barest of social identities, and in the context of Korean cultural norms, she lacks the basic requirements of social personhood—namely, family lineage and genealogical history.”

The “orphan hojuk,” or the family registry created so that we could be separated legally from our Korean family and made available for intercountry adoption. The first is an English translation of the second. What we have is a hasty and terrible photocopy, dark and illegible, the Korean original. Yet, an original of what?

Deformation, a defamation in a home country. An ill report, rumor, scandal. A secret.

We are a copy and an original.

We will make a record.

In these copies, light escapes at the corners.

Sudden

We are a colony of one.

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