- Author: Hwang, Eundeog
- Title: A Diasporic Adoptee and a Birth Mother’s Narrative: Focusing on Somebody’s Daughter
- Language: Korean
- Journal: The New Korean Journal of English Language & Literature (NKJE) 54, 3: 123-146
- Publication Year: 2012
- Publisher: The New Korean Association of English Language and Literature
■ Abstract The diasporic nature of transnational adoption, a form of forced and involuntary child diaspora, was explored and discussed throughout the paper. Although diasporic adoptees are similar to immigrants, exiles, and refugees in terms of shared experiences of dislocation and loss, their experiences are distinct because they are forced to emigrate as infants or children. Diasporic adoptees are the most violent form of ‘victim diasporas’ who were outcasted in their own lands. Since 1953, South Korea has ‘exported’ more than 200,000 children to foreign countries. During those years, Korean government has tried to clear off the children of subordinated women such as single mothers, low-income women, and sex workers in order to solidify the national identity and patriarchic ideologies. The fact that the direction of these adoptions is from south to north and from east to west, along with the existing unbalanced power relations between the ‘receiving’ and ‘giving’ countries, clearly signifies that these unilateral flows of transnational adoptions need to be discussed and analyzed through postcolonial and diasporic discourse perspectives.
Somebody’s Daughter, a fictional story of nineteen-year-old Sarah Thorson and her birth mother Kyung-sook, exemplifies the diasporic nature of transnational adoption. One of the novel’s assumption is that transnational adoption is a market oriented economic transaction, and therefore, adoptees are exported as a way of ‘fattening the government coffers’ with adoption fees. As a returning diasporic adoptee, Sarah is intrigued by Korean culture and decides to search for her ‘true’ mother, or the meaning of origin and homeland. In the novel, Sarah’s story is juxtaposed with that of Kyung-sook’s, who was forced to let her baby be taken away. Kyung-sook has suffered all those years by the traumatic memories. As the novel unravels both Sarah’s and Kyung-sook’s hidden and forgotten stories, the readers eventually encounter the entrenched patriarchic ideologies as well as the prejudices and discriminations against single mothers in Korean society.
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