The Imprint of Another Life by Homans Margaret;
Author:Homans, Margaret;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
These memoirs reflect searches and returns that are framed and staged, generally on behalf of children, by parents or social workers. I now turn to memoirs by adult adoptees who, prior to traveling âhome,â may have fictionally constructed ideal versions of their birth parents and of their place of origin and who find their expectations challenged by the experience of return. As we have seen, the relation of a transnational adoptee to her nation of origin may be a vexed one. Although the children in the memoirs just discussed (Lulu Prager, Jin Yu Gammage, Sophie McCabe, and others unnamed) express a generalized enthusiasm and curiosity about China that is not particularly connected to political realities, Blondie's point in The Love Wife that China means Tiananmen Square as well as tasty food, Jennifer Marcus's disregard for the difference between South and North Korea and her sending in effect a missile to China, as well as Prager's conflict over the Chinese response to the embassy bombing in 1999, are all reminders that returns require adults to replace a nostalgic fantasy of the country of origin with a more complex recognition of, among other things, international political tensions and mutually exclusive national loyalties.75
What does it mean for an adult adoptee to return to the country from which she departed as a baby, of whose language and customs she has no memory? To the unknown mother who has for decades been âan act of imaginationâ?76 For those adopted as older children, taught in an assimilationist era to deny their memories, will a âroots tripâ be a welcome return to the comfort of a once-loved home, or, especially if there is a language barrier, will it only activate a painful sense of loss? What do adoptees seek when they go âhome,â and what is gained and what is lost in replacing a dream of reunion and belonging with the experience of return? In some cases, the returning adoptee seeks refuge from a lifelong sense of dislocation, or worse, arising from the contradictory imperatives in the United States to assimilate and to retain and embody racial and national difference. Korean adoptees Jane Jeong Trenka, Katy Robinson, and Deann Borshay Liem all describe experiences of sexist racism suffered in the 1970s and 1980s in homogeneous white communities where their efforts to blend in could never succeed. In their works and other return memoirs, Korea is imagined as a place of nondifference and acceptance where such injustices could not occur. Fostering such hopes, the South Korean government, recognizing in the children sent abroad a potential economic resource, encouraged return visits starting in the 1990s. In 1997 the Overseas Koreans Foundation (OKF) was created, as part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, to promote âblood ties that cannot be severed.â77 Government-sponsored homeland tours flourished; popular TV shows staged reunions;78 individual families as well as the state sought forgiveness and financial help from their restored children. Yet the place of origin seldom matches adoptees' hopes or provides the
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