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Paper pavilion and routes through transnational adoption

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Paper pavilion and routes through transnational adoption

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Content PAPER PAVILION AND ROUTES THROUGH TRANSNATIONAL ADOPTION by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING) May 2008 Copyright 2008 Jennifer Kwon Dobbs ii Acknowledgements Thank you to the University of Southern California, English Department, and the Ph.D. Program in Literature and Creative Writing for fellowships and grants that supported my doctoral studies and the writing of this dissertation. With gratitude and love to my dissertation committee – David St. John, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Roberto Ignacio Diaz, and Frank Ticheli – and to Susan McCabe, James Kincaid, and Carol Muske Dukes for earlier insights and generosities. Thank you to Robin Romans, Penny Von Helmolt, William G. Tierney, Victor Garcia, the Center for Higher Education and Policy Analysis, and Jefferson Adult School for opportunities to grow pedagogically in powerful ways. Some of these poems (or earlier versions) have appeared in 5 AM, Crazyhorse, Cimarron Review, Cream City Review, Poetry NZ, Tulane Review, MIPOesias, Echoes Upon Echoes (AAWW 2003), and Language for a New Century (W.W. Norton 2008) and on radio and in film. “The Puppet Maker” was published as a broadside by Center for Book Arts in limited edition. “The Hidden Aria” was a finalist for the 10 th Annual Inkwell Magazine Poetry Prize, and “The Boy Clown” was a finalist for the Rivendell Magazine Emerging Poets Prize. In 2007, USC awarded Paper Pavilion a Phi Kappa Phi Student Recognition Award. Paper Pavilion received the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and was published by White Pine Press in November 2007. The manuscript was also a finalist for the New Issues Press Prize in Poetry, and a semifinalist for the Crab Orchard Review First Book iii Prize. I am grateful to Dennis Maloney, Elaine LaMattina, Genie Zieger, Chris Kim, Katherine Deblassie, and the White Pine Family. Earlier drafts of poems in this manuscript were featured in song cycles or collaborations with the composers – Thomas Osbourne, Charles Ilwoo Lee, and Steven Gates. I am fortunate to belong to an extensive artistic and intellectual community, but I am particularly thankful to Larry Levis, Norman Dubie, Marilyn Chin, Laura Johnson, Eric Rawson, r.r., Amy Schroeder, William Memo Arce, James Penner, Unhae Langis, Nicky Schildkraut, Alice Bardan, L. Alvis Minor, Stacy Lettman, PB Rippey Ashley Currier, Colleen Gates, Bob Bryan, Nick Carbo, Fong Sam, Jin Soo Lim, Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Hollee McGuiness, Dana Leventhal, Elizabeth Raleigh, Elise Prébin, Jane Jin Kaisen, Gail Wronsky, Kimiko Hahn, Jan Beatty, Marianne Novy, Henry Oso Quintero, Susan Bernstein, Sun Yung Shin, Lee Herrick, Joseph O. Legaspi, Hélène Cardona, Jeff Solomon, Greg Bills, John Fitzgerald, Giovanni Di Simone, Dave Cochran, Lata Murti, Mary Beth Tegan, Alex Kolker, Phyllis E. Van Slyck, Thomas Fink, Hana Moon, Tina Chang, Danny Pukes, Also Known As – NYC and So Cal, Kundiman, and AAWW. Thank you to my families in Korea, Germany, and the United States, and to my Uncle Glen “Sweetgrass” Juste and Allen Juste. We are one heart with many names – known and unknown. This dissertation is dedicated to you. Thank you to Dr. Kim, Ms. Um, and Jae Yeong for helping me to find my routes in Seoul. And to Stefan “Iro” Liess, my husband, saranghaeyo. Dein Herz ist mein Heim. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Abstract vi 1. Creative Part: Paper Pavilion 1 A Small Gift 2 Section 1 3 Homage to the DMZ 4 Letter to Oklahoma (1) 7 Aria for Slag & Embers 8 Elegy for Daniel 10 Libretto 13 Section II 15 In Medias Res 16 Painted Fire 20 Letter to Oklahoma (2) 22 Red 24 Sijo 25 Kameoka 26 Section III 29 Prodigal 30 Paperclips 35 Authenticity 37 The Puppet Maker 38 Boy Clown 39 Doll in the Ermine Cap 40 Section IV 41 Face Sheet 42 The Hidden Aria 43 Shadow Theatre 45 Digital Archive 46 The Pavilion on Adams Avenue 47 Sijo 49 On the beach 50 Section V 53 Kisaeng 54 v Questions for “a flame of fire out of a bush” 55 Song Echoing Inside a Mountain Pavilion 57 Elysian Field 60 River 63 Variation on “Azaleas” 68 Notes on the Poems 69 2. Critical Part: Routes through Transnational Adoption 73 Chapter 1: Routes to Seoul 74 Chapter 2: Fragments of a Missing Person 83 Chapter 3: To Be Taped to Windows of Light 90 Chapter 4: Routes to a Field 94 Chapter 5: Sorrow’s Song: The Military Origins of Transnational Adoption 98 Militarizing Adoption 105 A Small Circle of Light 115 Sorrow’s Aria, or Gathering Routes 125 Chapter 6: A Million Dollars 131 Bibliography 143 vi Abstract This dissertation consists of two parts: a book of poetry, Paper Pavilion, and a collection of researched essays titled Routes through Transnational Adoption. Paper Pavilion fuses together fairy tales, opera, and traditional Korean and English forms to follow an epic impulse – beginning and ending as a quest across cultural and geographic distances – in order to create alternative histories from paradoxes, absences, and speculations arising from a post-Korean War Diaspora of which transnational adoptees are a part. The critical part, Routes through Transnational Adoption, seeks to build embodied and communal routes, rather than retrieve cultural roots, through transnational adoption by interweaving memoir and literary research. Based on the trajectory of search, specifically one that fails to uncover personal facts, this collection of essays considers the military’s role in originating and perpetuating transnational adoption in order to write through it. Oftentimes imagined as a child refugee who benefits from U.S. humanitarianism and economic opportunity, the transnational adoptee lacks agency because others must speak for her/him. Moreover, her/his cultural authenticity is questioned due to lacking memory. Seeking to give voice to failure in all its forms that are part of building routes, the critical part of my dissertation resists this grateful child narrative to discuss adult adoptee-authored transnational spaces that are currently being developed and that advocate on behalf of shared adoptee and birth mother interests, which recognize the economic, gendered, political, and social inequalities that give rise to transnational adoption. 1 Creative Part: Paper Pavilion “The moon shines on Cold Pine Pavilion . . . why is it that our beloved prince, once gone, is never to return?” -- Hongjang (undated) 2 A Small Gift Ku Sang, guide me as a tender brother scrupulous with pathways to the Han that flows above the sky. Below hanging baskets of ivy in the shadow of tenements, I spend my light counting sorrows the ants haul across railings. Let me listen to your chest’s easy crests, falling and rising to take your shirt’s hem. Let me collect the button and thread about to unravel. I’ll show you, when you awaken, how I shellacked them with ox blood for a pendant charm. And you will sternly correct me by touching my face as you would a mirror the river becomes in autumn morning. And you will say in Korean something I’ll feel without translation run through me a current of sadness mixed with some joy. 3 Section I “Our destination is fixed on the perpetual motion of search. Fixed in its perpetual exile.” -- Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 4 Homage to the DMZ Guards, please keep your triggers locked. My camera, maps, and pick are left behind. No spy, I do not come to break the code Nor tour the warning walls. No uncle waits To reunite across electric wire, To touch my face and call it true to his One memory: the burning trees and mud- Caked women running in the hazy night. No memories, but still my grief has skin And hands to comb the Han with nets cast deep And hands to comb the Han with nets cast wide And lips to speak my peace. I can’t recall The distant whistling growing louder when It flashed across the dark, careened, then boomed And echoed in the crash of pummeled walls Collapsing in the strobe-lit dark, while late Alarms began to wail of fighter jets Diving low in rows for gunner range. I wasn’t with the people trapped inside Mistaken targets; throngs of people fled, Ignored the old ones stumbling, children, parts Of bodies hurled with rubble, shrapnel pierced Debris, and smoke. A sister stopped to check Her brother slipping down her back and strapped To his, a kettle came untied and spilled. Its grain was lost to sludge, cold and chance, The midnight raids on fallout shelters smashed By aircraft, tanks forever on the move 5 To battle fronts while people streamed against Advancing troops to safety. Where was that? It’s hard to tell when lines deployed in all Directions, rivers soured by floating fish. Yet hunger had to eat, examined hair for lice, Dug roots and worms. The stench of shit and muck, The stains of vomit, rags bound tight to stop The spread of gangrene, sores mosquitoes sucked Or numbed by fever’s spell, exposed, each eye Ahead on sunset, nights of transit, hush. The people wound through hills till nitrous gas Lashed their faces peeled to bone. They shone Absurdly white in morning fields of charred Anemone awaiting help, return, Some sign. “I’ll find you” promised. No one could Identify their paths by what remained. Missing children hid inside ravines Or crept outside their hiding place to search The ruins, found a metal strip and bent It back-and-forth into a knife to fend Off men who tried to snatch the can of food That they had stolen as a barefoot gang, Or stayed beside her broken body spread Into a shape of loss I cannot trace To find her soldier-lover marching south Or husband killed in action. Nameless men Forced themselves upon her, cupped some snow To pack a ball inside her pleading mouth? I can’t go on, can’t imagine how She bore this child though I could be that child 6 Of mixed-up rivers, hard attempts to keep A secret. Why return to unknown names I feel are mine when snipers watch this ground? While they remain, how can I begin? 7 Letter to Oklahoma (1) I’ve got to go or I’ll suffocate in so much space. I fear your dead-end dirt roads. I chart a way out of this zodiac of backyard trash fires. Your water is undrinkable. Everyone spits dust that clots screened in porches. Inside, I read The World Book, contemplate volume A’s “anteater” for other than myself reflected in your sky like a stadium mirror for copper rusted posts, guarding trucks engines fell out of. I need skyscrapers to hem back your night’s fabric, some florescence other than moon, but you enfold me in Indian paintbrushes, shadow me with willows giving in to wind free from limits. I would give thanks to sod removed block by block for shelter, a passage of hands, exposed taproot breaking the tools. I came so close to calling this wound of ground a home, but it felt too familiar. 8 Aria for Slag & Embers “Vissi d’arte. Vissi d’amore.” – Giacomo Puccini, La Tosca I’m not supposed to know how my father does this every night. With a pocketknife, he slices his heel calluses to feel the new underneath, gathers the yellow peels into a pile, drops them into an ashtray, loads the pipe, then sucks the cherry to glow. It steals his breath. He is used to this tenderness, this post graveyard shift habit. He settles into smoke, does not imagine it’s like the furnace fumes that cloak the cauldron named “Our Lady” swinging above the workers below who ready the rock tundish. No secret offerings. They glove their hands out of necessity. They bring only wire to scrape the cast hole for the molten to pass. It pours into molds; glows like the tabernacles, like saving hatreds, like ledger columns. Like an idol, it demands loans of the spirit it will never pay back, wants children to believe books should be returned on time. I hang on to see my father in the center of an imploded star, 9 flipping on the T.V. & skipping past reruns. He pauses before a broadcast on Orion & stares at the bright belt hung in the sky, raised club to strike the invisible tracking the hunter. My father draws the remote from the recliner, makes no conclusions. Shirtless, pink, he leans toward the flickering form & is always, as I shall recall, painted by sparks, slag burning off, his shadow thrown everywhere in the desire to live for art & love. If I could suspend this moment, I could touch his raw steel, but he has worked all day on this to the usual. He is shirtless, pink. His tobacco embers cool. 10 Elegy for Daniel (1970-2001) After the bullet discharges through the tunnel of his mouth, after it shatters the Oklahoma evening, rips through ragweed & across many rivers, my apartment in Pittsburgh, the metal clips my arm, slams into a plaster wall, & the silence is his body slackening & the black fact of the gun underwater. I compress my wound, as his ghost kneels beside his body, the bathtub, & as his ghost draws the shower curtain back, I look away. No, I don’t want to know his secrets, why surer hands will tag, bag as evidence. He is a poet. He makes the difficult question of speaking a matter of remembering how he shouted about the poems he loved. His workshop outbursts were “pure country.” Yes, rumors circulated, how vets suffer medication, what he saw as a S.E.A.L., how weird, & no one could stand the belabored way he read aloud, & I said all the above & more, & to his face when no one was around, when he finally caught on, I asked him, ‘Why are you quieter? I’ve noticed, & it scares me.’ * Even now I’m busy with details, the dirty work of gathering. Here’s rosemary & some pansies, that’s for thoughts rambled to me one Fall afternoon, 5 th floor, Cathedral of Learning, how Komunyakaa showed him a way to anchor a moment 11 between stillness & approach turning tenderly toward tall grass or a woman’s wet hair to braid, or how it could lock arms with an enemy, lose to an overwhelming grasp or listen to the dying echo of paradise birds singing so much gibberish, as if a whole life could be reduced to one image dangling from a fist & engraved with a number, as if a poem wants only to be identified upon delivery, which was why Daniel read Blake, Calvino, & Crane for fire & crystal; why he shut himself up with Bishop; why Stern’s huge breath; why Oppen, Tu Fu & Paz. Lewis & Vollmer mattered for their generosities, lines layered like the earth in his face, the reds & browns of his voice deepening to what he pursued, half-formed in haze & burrowing underneath to avoid tripwire, & Daniel yelling as he plunged after its gray, disappearing shape. * I listen to his ghost pace the hallway as if barefoot across dirt, rustle, fronds like unfurled scrolls, root scent, & rainfall stains his cheeks with welcome, risk. He has walked far to finish this conversation between us. He brushes against the wood, taps the doorknob trying to explain the jagged web of cracks in my wall, hot metal at the center like a labyrinth chamber or the slick tip of a widow hunched over & spinning a bundle or the pure ore from a journey toward sublimation, a soul’s treasure, or the soul, itself, lodged in a network & inconsolable in disappointment because wings never guaranteed perfect pitch. 12 * Daniel, the scar on my arm fades as I read your poems again, & the maps you drew time spackles over for a move out west. The twenty that someone taped to my office desk for flowers remains unspent, a bookmarker for a Ramses biography. I tried. I couldn’t find your permanent address. Daniel, the news today proclaims disaster, code orange to survive for tomorrow’s headline that you were right could, at any moment, slip under a thicket, emerge skittish beside a pile of leaves, its long gray nose & black eyes focused on your movements. How you wrote it down, my friend, held it gently in the starless night & gave it pink fingers with which to scratch back. 13 Libretto “Non saperlo per te, pei tuoi puri occhi muore Butterfly…” – Giacomo Puccini, Madama Butterfly Again, my false mother of verbena is singing The aria that I’ll recite as if I’m a natural Child among night flowers opening their dark eyes to the moon Not a mother to the ocean that bears its resemblance Like a floating summer barge. Again, I am sinking into her Hazardous silks of caged birds and mute crickets, into her Televised longing for smoke stacks and flags, into her image Painted on to a soprano’s face, into her vermilion Folds in which are sealed the purposes, provisional Names for my hands dragging a brass opener through wax. The dream drips on to the table, makes new forms All scraped and discarded. Beginning is always a problem When toenail, strand of hair, some notes Scribbled by a social worker in a code familiar as skin: Where is my baby? Is my baby hungry? Does she mourn as I do? Is this loss or libretto? What is our contract, if there is blood between us? Have I the right To scabs picked off for pink underneath, little shutters opened to let in air, The pure music. It is raw in there. I am guessing 14 An alcove to grieve among robes embroidered with cherry blossoms, Gion festival wagons, cranes returning to a patch of silver at the breast, Leave-taking. Every sleeve, myth. Every hem, a crossing Guarded by dust, dry creek beds, buffalo grass, sky like a kiln. Not the blue heat, but the orange as in tiger lily, the yellow foxglove Seed ground into the heart’s medicine to quicken In want of a memory. I was 10, a watcher of things winged, PBS, Sunday Afternoon at the Met, Levine conducting. Plastic swatter in hand. My palms pressed against the hot glass to get through. Windows of my parents’ living room covered with damask. I imagined she called to me, non saperlo . . . per te, across a sea Of bad reception. I did not see myself but heard the scattered humming of flies. I studied the white parts squirming out of their black, mashed bellies In wonder of death. Still, a birth through the wound Willed by itself. Why else such a distance crossed from its mother Lying on the wood, her ash veil falling away? 15 Section II “Men can do nothing without the make- believe of a beginning.” -- Horace, Ars Poetica 16 In Medias Res 0 Muscles bear down, grip instead of push the suspended, midway 1 that will become 2 when forceps reach through to drag me, headfirst & unharmed, 3 into a clearing, the ticking, halogen light, the typical 4 slap to spit out fluid, suck in cold air 5 to survive as another image held above her slack form, lying on the metal table, 6 & cut so that the cord snaps back inside her body. Hands pass me 7 to others that carry me down an arterial hallway without considering that too an act of delivery. No chance of stopping each transaction from blurring, 8 how hands rub out with pine scent to start another task. The impulse to return & to want to see that instant, 9 her body in that instance 10 surrounded by assembly & to elbow my way through to find her 11 not like a fish or an unnamed beloved in a yellow dress, but to check whether she 12 exists as more than evidence 17 13 or a single brainstorm: 14 Did she blink her eyes or move side-to-side to catch a glimpse? Did she think to ask my sex? Was she awake? Did she curse or lie mute? How old was she? Could she afford this? 15 Did she know that I lived? 16 Did she consider me dead? Did she 17 already write my story, disassemble me bit by bit according to the days that I grew a foot, thumb, ear, & every bone & blood detail 18 until only a sheet like a page thrown over the metal table bore a trace of our relation? 19 It weighs nothing. Each conjecture. I put down the pen & pick it back up. It weighs nothing. I touch the page & then it’s true 20 every device wants a vertebrae & a staircase 19 to descend with applause for small accomplishments. I could be wrong because I need her on that metal table or 18 now surrounded by traffic noise in a two-bedroom flat. She hums & thinks nothing of me. Nothing at all. 17 She found a husband at a lunch café in Seoul & created a family. She never looked back 16 the way the living must to make a way. This is not right or wrong. 18 15 This is just a story, 14 or her rushing upstairs with a briefcase & sack of bread. Her sitting, signing letters & checks. 13 Her signature everywhere & everything bearing her trace. 12 Every trace wanting her more 11 talking with confidence 10 like an image turning to her across a distance & laughing 9 about a summer matinee & slipping 8 an arm through hers to guide across a busy street. No one caring. No one noticing at all, & why should they 7 when this image is hers, only younger & mine, 6 leaning in 5 to whisper against her gray hair, 4 against her 3 paper thin cheek, & my lips 2 & my lips against 19 1 the ineffable 0 hollow of her ear? 20 Painted Fire Ohwon copied “Party by the Lotus Pond” locked in his employer’s brass-hinged cabinet, which he polished everyday with root oil except once when someone forgot to latch it & Ohwon could not resist opening the doors a little more. So identical his version that the yangban accused him first of theft, then of genius not befitting an orphan drifter who didn’t know his age. Rumor summoned him to a springtime pavilion where the aristocrats gathered ignoring the new kisaengs’ raspberry wine. The challenge, a poem composed for the event: The vast earth and high mountains increase my will to fly. Withered maples and falling leaves heighten my spirit. He needed no outline, no bones for his eagle rapidly alighting from ink brush to paper, feather by bristling feather as with searching for the thicker part of a branch. The bird steadying its rippling weight above the vast empty field, clutching & unclenching the phantom twig, a wash of ink leaves trembling as Ohwon’s bristles streaked clear, his body like the eagle circling the maple to fasten roots to the rock face, then sitting on his knees as a twin appeared below 21 anchored & armed with a black-eye. The audience murmured among one another, how was this possible? He followed but broke Su Shih’s aphorisms. In Ohwon’s one brushstroke, a thousand transgressions & with each one, an increase in a will to fly! 22 Letter to Oklahoma (2) The rumor is a plain is a good place to discover how urban glare interrupts the speech of stars, yet no one listens to their cadence, Sousa’s “March of Venus,” or studies the planet’s positions to foretell the right time to kill witch grass by boiling water so that stars persist, large in their orbits, as riveted stations in an antique ornament strung & clasped around a mannequin’s neck. I don’t believe in creation as a priori, a wind sweeping over the face of the waters, or in a formless void that others say delivered me. Even the ineffable writes as it burns the edge where heaven meets earth dragging its foxtail over sage for smoke & ash, so that nothing is lost, only sent down, a basket retrieved among reeds & renamed “I drew him from the river,” & the silence embracing him loves thus it conceals every detail of his birth as a slave. & I’m thinking, we carry a trace worn casually as an impression like the lips’ bowed cleft where an angel’s finger rested to seal a promise not to recall the terms by which we’re cut loose vulnerable as the veins in a moth’s wings that defy the pinned shape of surrender or release, or it’s guesswork we must copy, disobey, then reinvent. 23 & though the plainness of a day strips each answer like paint from a barn torn down to a frame, there are vistas through the frame & someone young trespassing at twilight, rushing to stake a claim. 24 Red I remain in your leave-taking like the mandolin’s note. Long and lingering perfume of petals enfolds my body because you desired me in a red aura of candles, then clouded by your palms seeking my origins in cities you traveled in search of Lorca finding sandalwood uncurling like a ghost in a room darkened by blinds. Above the bright shouts of women bargaining for meat, we stole from one another silver and pearls, demanded retribution in bracelets. May the bruised jewels your lips left me last the length of your absence. Will you ask to see me again so adorned? Or will you bring saffron to stain our bed orange? 25 Sijo The necks of the chrysanthemums bow to a passing of days, Then release mauve petals that I’ll press between white leaves To slip into your lap, when you open this book. 26 Kameoka Because I dreamed it, I believed wholly in my power to alter its outline of fallen persimmons. The trees shadowing Kyorai’s house that Basho praised for “bedding and relishes brought over from Kyoto” spoke in a rustling of branches. “This is Korea,” I wrote in my journal underneath a sketch of oat grass. I found repair in every fissure in the scholar’s room; the shaped infinity felt like homecoming. It’s just that I was so happy that morning in Saga. Beside the bamboo trellis, I forgot myself completely. I knelt, gathered a cake of black dirt, and ate. * A Postcard: “The Golden Pavilion,” reflected in water and seven stories high. On top, a phoenix with outspread wings poised to take flight. Dear D— I read that a monk fell so madly in love with the rundown original that he set fire to it. What you see here is a reproduction. Which strikes you as more true, story or image? * Within a week, I learn to say, “Excuse me,” “yes,” and “good morning” with such a proper female inflection that bus drivers no longer greet me or call out my stop. * Japanese Plate— Fire glazed to preserve my misspelling my Korean name, some blue accident of the desire to say, “Here, I was here.” 27 * July 29 Kyoto Wisteria. White lotus in a moonlit pool of water. A split peach design of a maiko’s hair slipping as she rushes home from Kiyomizu Temple. Sun goes down as a monk goes down on his knees toward the west, evening sutra on his lips, a chord from the shakuhachi ends thin as screens to keep out the light, and inside is the place of myths and makings— * I do not trust stories. I resist them— as I would the small overblown for bric-a-brac— to unmake the thing into its origins of sand & heat, to put my hand in the mess then draw it out, & in my hand nothing, nothing but hot. * While Watanabesan folds the violet yukata across my chest, I notice a small freckle underneath her left eye like mine. “Please,” she says, “call me okasan.” * On pale yellow paper, I write: “thank you, okasan, for the o-cha and pickled cherries.” * Flying across the Pacific, I close the window shade. Beside me, a student sleeps. Wherever he descends after dreaming, his Lost Japan is turned over to hold a place. 28 I dislike that book’s fanciful ache, “looking for a castle” in a land “that seemed inhabited by gods.” Because Korea, my lost castle, land of my birth and longing— I would come to you as a tourist as I arrive in Japan a tourist of bunraku puppets, gardens in which to meditate justice, classes on history still uncertain, and like the ignorant or orphaned, I rush headlong into a red sun that rose over your peninsula, and now over my eyes seeking you in all I behold! 29 Section III “We all live in total ignorance in the city of Memory. Erased.” -- Enrique Lihn, Paris, Irregular Situation 30 Prodigal Even in Korea, I long for Korea. Some fidelity to the proper note: tongue fitting as join, as the letter reminds it to lift fire and wood. So King Sejong told the scholars, “It must kindle the people’s hearths.” So too my heart must strike metal. These letters: sticks, o’s I’ll glue for “d” as in “radio.” The way I say “radio,” so effortless. A water glass drops sediments. This pull to homeland, no different than gravity giving weight to the simplest task. The city shines through “Give me grapes” (my first sentence) 31 written 20 times in the frost-darkened pane like a recitation or many false starts. I erase with a circle of breath chrome traffic, billboards, subway crowds jostling in rush hour, every shot at home reached by “The Correct Sounds To Instruct the People” delivered on time. I can’t spell “home.” It’s all brushstrokes like a bough split in half by indecision, dew lit bud where my finger paused, and I thought now each one is the beginning to reach outside anonymous as in urban strut past storefronts, neon arrow for transfer. I could stop there, but streaks, handprint, 32 this glass like a trellis for love’s polemics. Overgrown or exact risk? I could give in, stand still in awe. It’s not enough. The king returned to the mountain pavilion restless with questions for holy woodblocks, ran his lips across the grain to impress the subtle textures he could not capture otherwise. His failure wrote, “the ignorant seek to express, but cannot…” here, a letter. This one, a splinter. This one char to stand in for red ornaments, charmed knots of white cotton. Each, a ghost babbling loss unknotted to release into ether. Even in Korea, I long for Korea to come undone as an embroidered robe 33 across headlights flicker then shadow leading to sources crumpled, ink-stained. Train out of Seoul. Train to the mist hung passageways the king climbed. Granite. Filament sun burning its last message to autumn, red cedar lined basin of the heart. That too, a letter smeared, some bracken. I never sought flare, tectonic shifts for new land forms jutting toward heaven, the king saying, “This is holy ground.” You remove shoes anyway when entering private halls, kneel to sit among kindred dragging hot noodles quickly by necessity between bowl and … “Why,” servers ask, 34 “this fork?” The king betrayed Chinese birds gathered by ink stone and graceful, those images of ages; those pictographs, perfect. “But,” says the king to worthy dissenters, pen-scepters upraised, “Our ignorant too must eat.” 35 Paperclips Obaji/father . . . other half of the equation. X + Y chromosomes add up to a foreign embassy. A blue suit greets me like a returnee from a long ago war for tea and sandwiches. I ask him whether Confucius had a daughter named “Will.” Another false start: “Hive scooped out of nesting an egg. The cardinal preens himself.” Dad. 52. Steelworker. Democrat. Union member. So Okie it’s Miam-ah, not Miam-ee. Schlitz if cheaper than Hurricane at the Qwik Stop. A. Abandoned by Father _X_ Mother _X_ My students read Hahn’s zuihitsu for her mother. I admire a hurt like that so whole as to taste salty, to smell metallic, and to pass through oneself to find how omoni might’ve leaned her head against the bookcase when obaji re-shelved the apiary guide. My lover is absurdly beautiful. He plucks his eyebrows into languid judgments and despises riding the bus. He is a visual artist. Those ugly people distress him. I send Dad a list of 30 questions. Mom promises to nag him to answer. Attempt #2: “Ovum. Inside, an embryo knocks against a shell when moved from one place to another. Who shall her? Progress?” My lover sleeps on his back with his mouth open and legs up. He is Korean. I am totally fascinated. One of my students submits a zuihitsu about his brother, confined to a wheelchair by a drunk driver. My student handles “a semblance of order” well by moving elliptically through --fragments. If I tell him, will pride overtake his exquisite rage? Attempt #3: “Yellow (adj.): jaundiced, tawny, lily-livered. See ‘fever.’ See ‘Dixie cup.’” Did he leave her when she grew large and unable to conceal irritation? Did he return only when she agreed to screw legs out like a wheelbarrow leaned into and pushed toward the shed? Maybe it’s that his body differs from mine, and I’m drawn to similarity. I pick at the blue birth- mark on my arm. How disappointing that my lover’s resembles a mud splatter on his inner thigh! B. Separated or lost from Father ____ Mother ____ 36 Will you respond? What of the color orange? I thought of you the other day snoring in your Lazy Boy. Your feet, two brown bears in summer. Remote stuffed in the catfish’s fin slung over the armrest, the television chattering about tires and granola. My lover and I can’t get enough of each other. At a café, I scribble on a napkin, “Shall we?” and rise for the bathroom. I lend my student my copy of Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book to study the form. He wants me to explain, but he ought to experience himself. Father precedes mother categorically in birth records. My lover asks permission to videotape our sex because, together, we create beauty. This is getting ridiculous. Did he throw money at her? Did he hold out for a son surrounded by sesame cakes? Did he not wait? Could he not recall her name? Or did he wake sour-mouthed and reach for water? Or did his eye take in the white cotton creek her form left in the mattress? Attempt #4: “The egg sizzles like an idea forcing shape. The bright orb is useless.” My student staples a thank you note to his paper. So many dangling modifiers! I guess at his intention. Against the broken down Ford, my father smokes cheap cherry tobacco. His telescope points toward the North Star as if to navigate a prairie sea. My lover hunts for shells to place in my windowsills. I wish he wouldn’t do that. How we use one another. Last attempt: Lambs in winter, and this need is. C. Death of father: _unknown_ Death of mother: _unknown_ Obaji/Father, I will pull back that alien skin sheathing your penis to find another like my tender… 37 Authenticity Brother, I needed your water poured into my cupped hands your cool slipping through efforts to grasp what gratitude I felt for this you understood me to be named after as were your ancestors “Cash” for an Alabama cotton farmer bills of sale stored in his safety box receipts for adoption stuffed in tea canisters I doubted resembled your irretrievable history yet you insisted amnesia drove us both to rummage, to jimmy open basements, vaults, microfiche you unreeled to scan for plantation fields old Sussex county I had none to speak of “My all,” you said of dogwood trees, arid orchard grass where your forefathers & foremothers were buried “not my home,” you said, yet you could return to it you said, “I returned from it. I could go on.” You board first-class luggage bulging with equipment to field across all of Africa how you envied my finger on a map of Asia Korea, my “there” you called it that someone something once upon a time 38 The Puppet Maker “Might it be that this piece of wood has learned to weep and cry like a child?” -- C. Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio As he angled the screw into the joint he hesitated to fasten its knee more real than his own stiffened by winters, nights of hearth & plates of black bread that taught gratitude for the small callous on his forefinger cushioning a day’s work. The puppet in his lap flailed its stringless arms as if they were given without fire in mind & the limitless distance between it & it; yet he listened not to the reedy voice I want I want, but to the wind thrumming against the shutters, hollow knock of wood against wood, a pulse that kept measure with his, which bored the puppet, so that it leapt & spun away laughing on its spindle legs that loosened then splintered, & dragged behind as it crawled toward him weeping for repair. 39 Boy Clown In my dream, his shadow throws the rubber balls at Agua Caliente & Avenida Juarez, so the boy can walk a few paces back to see the swirling he casts everyday for coins in a coffee can at his shadow’s feet. There, he can study how to toss faster & higher to slow the oncoming traffic to surprise, or he can keep going backward till the loop seems to burn a white portal in the summer noon sky &, there, decide how much further back to go for a good start. I shall always say I’m lucky to wake remembering this part. He gets low to the concrete, pulls his body taut, & tucks his lean arms close. Then he sprints & leaps through the open door above the cars past his shadow below. 40 Doll in the Ermine Cap She stands at the edge of rupture, where the train will plunge into the lake then rise back on track to loop again. The doll withstands steel, rumble, pistons, seams. Her blue glass pools hold the oncoming riveted face. It will pass through. She is some longstanding desire to imitate motion, or she searches for the cause of trains or an opening of snowflake arms to embrace as the black wheels howl through. Her green skirt ripples. Her auburn curls ring. As her head tilts back as by an invisible string, her bud lips part. Something like a train sounds forth. 41 Section IV “But home is the form of the dream, & not the dream.” -- Larry Levis 42 Face Sheet “I the undersigned, hereby certify I have custody of the records of birth Relating to said child, in my office And as required by the law.” -- Livingstone Adoption Agency Confucius can’t spank me with a bamboo switch. I’ve folded paper cranes for your journey here, learned Hangul from tutors so that I can greet you, Father’s Name: No Records. Mother’s Name: No Records. Father’s Residence: No Records. Mother’s Residence: No Records. Father’s Family: No Records. omma, studied my face in the mirror – piecing together clues: this flat nose, pointy chin are yours; these high cheekbones, brows are father’s. Face Sheet for Child: Legitimate ___ Illegitimate ___ Foundling _X_ Distinguishing marks, features: ___ She is peevish. She takes 500 cc’s milk. My mother joked I ran into the wall, squished my head, slanted my eyes. Said My mother was a slut, trying to stay in business. I was bad for business. Said She controls her neck & bowel movements well. Orphan status: Abandoned by: Father: _X_ Mother: _X_ Include here all attitudes and motives of guardian in I was lucky not to end up a slut too or dead. Said you didn’t name me, so I’m not under contract. No agreements were made or terms defined us. Releasing child for adoption: President Kim would like the baby in a nice home. $450 Payable, Dec. 76. Remarks/File No. ___ Child’s attitude toward: N/A. 43 The Hidden Aria (With a weak gesture, Butterfly points to her child and dies. Pinkerton kneels down beside her, while Sharpless goes to pick up the child.) END – Giacomo Puccini, Madama Butterfly Now that ushers lower & extinguish the chandeliers & the satin-gowned crowd retires for ices, now that someone sweeps while crews wheel the sets to storage, now that violin cases click shut & chorus gossip fades out the stage door, now dark & the echo of the janitor’s key locking up. Now he can emerge from his hiding place & ascend the stage to continue the opera beyond paper screens, a white kimono & a long black wig dragging the floor as she clutches the blade singing the words her child, now a young man in cuff links, recites per his voice training: …senza che ti rimorda ai di maturi/ il materno abbandono. His name is Sorrow because she will not return from his father’s burned score notes, journals & photographs. His name is Tu? tu? tu? & piccolo iddio. & “Christopher” to his father’s business partners & translated “My love, my love, flower of the lily and rose.” The bit of orange silk he retrieved from the ash grate may mean nothing. He strokes the charred cloth, carried with him like one faint memory. She called him Amore, Amor as she blindfolded his eyes, 44 & the aria he cried out from blindness the music covered with a string crescendo that so moved the audience; they interrupt even now thrilled when he tries to describe how its beauty killed his mother & taught him to hate applause. 45 Shadow Theatre Not her hands or how they make the swan, but its shadow & how it arches, disturbs the pool of light without a ripple, & turns slowly to face the children in love with swans so they can see in its outline the curved soliloquy that is the swan in an illuminated field at their request. The shadow resists a gold cage & the name “swan” by how it unfurls, sweeps its one wing like a fan impossible, perhaps, for swans floating on an autumn lake amid red leaves, shaking their heads at the coming frost that will freeze into a single premise that we must break to free the trapped swan, crying of how its shadow revolves around its body & outlasts all talk of swans. 46 Digital Archive How should I index myself so that you can retrieve & cut me from the 1970 catalogs of infant headshots & paste me beside you? This I wanted to know while the grandfather held up his 1940 photo of three men laughing beside a new Buick. He said, “If you could identity them, then my life would be changed forever.” If anyone knows the names for paper as vulnerable as skin, then please tell me if I find my birth documents burned, ripped, or yellowed with information missing, am I implicated? I listened as the panelists advised the grandfather to search the database, feeling my body like too much information unsorted: all errors, useless without a way to see it linked to get somewhere else. My arms disappearing while the grandfather passed his laminated photo around the room. 47 The Pavilion on Adams Avenue Last month, they bulldozed the Barclay Hotel established 1927, “50 Large Fireproof Rooms” advertised on the east wall & once the avenue’s finest now tagged by Southside gangs & borrowed by the homeless who bring their own blankets. I watched the wrecking ball swing narrow to knock through gas pipes, privacy curtains of dust clearing away, porcelain tubs crumbling with the brick edifice dismantled for auction & scrap for a steel mill, such that construction returned to fire to question, How best to use a field cleared of debris? Already they’ve erected a sign “Coming Soon: Community Pavilion,” cordoned off the site piled with lumber. I’ve noticed on my morning walks a new foundation measured & trussed with beams, the promising outline of an entryway, steps terraced to complement a garden, eaves to extend the curvilinear bend of pines, good ponds that guests will assume had always been there. I can see barefoot lovers eating sandwiches in the corner across from harbaji nostalgic for Namwan Pavilion, his hands reassembling it before his grandchildren listening while students hunch over notepads to copy the slow ripple of a reed grove, swaying slope Choson Dynasty monks exiled to mountains discerned as an uneven basin. They built mud walls that would not enclose the azaleas but integrate their sprawl with autumn evenings spent picking fleas off blankets. Will there be bare wood brackets, interlocked columns framing the eye’s arrivals? I look forward to distance just as Chong Chiyong who hiked the hilltop alone, his lips gone dry & bitter with speaking of home dwarfed by blue expanse. 48 Adrift in the familiar, he belonged among clouds. Will this pavilion too allow us to recall the fugitive chrysanthemums submitting roots to angled parapets more natural than nature’s dig toward water, stone channels to float wine cups? Unforeseen the number of visitors who’ll enter through here vistas of their own, divided by what they long for & what they know opposes such journeys toward zelkovas, & the names of trees in another language, another clearing. I assured my friend concerned with spelling a pavilion does not decorate rather reveals tensions between the false & real shade of paulownias, inseparable as sunset lengthening their shadows’ dance, & when I go in as my friend goes in, we’ll be joined by the ancient Chewoltang Pavilion, Taejojan Hall, the Garden of Puyo, & Piwon Pavilion, & the humble ones flooded & twisted with dandelions, brothers to the secret ones we carry within. 49 Sijo for omma Outside your lit window, I stand ten thousand miles away. Our distance shifts whenever you pass from room to room, Whenever I pause from reading Kim So Wol’s poetry. 50 On the beach I walk among shells of star crabs that failed to reach ocean that reached for them with last night’s tide. Their attempts north remind that home is not where one takes a lover but longing for that lover & in longing give witness to snow-robed crags in morning fog, an incense for sutras to comfort the dead who must accept a vault of ground else they wander like an adopted child dreaming the market streets of a mother whose silence may be typical traffic weaving through stalls, meats hung above smoke cans, dogs searching wood scents caught in the sleeves of grandmothers schooled in fruit stands, eaves, stoops, arguments over prices of watches, the casualties of winter war buried in a village’s ditch, the lament I sing for alleyways, the restaurant’s backdoor dumpsters boys dig through for carrot peel & bones to run off with, to scale chain linked fences hung with Hangul signs I read as warnings not to cross. My anthem, my pledged allegiance to soldiers stationed at the 38 th parallel to keep uneasy peace, my detente with 51 scowl-faced cab drivers, who will drive me no where without overcharging my white tongue is untouchable, untouchable as a young woman pregnant by a G.I. turning on a baby’s home cot toward a screened-in window I do not look through for mother, but her half moon I follow through boulevards delivered to courthouse steps, cradle of abandoned children not registered in the rolls of ancestors, whose names are infinite. The whited-out documents, my body the first & permanent. I feel Korea – country of diaspora like a pine cone crushed, red seeds thrown from casing & eaten or scattered by wind into designs difficult to pronounce, or spilled into sidewalk crevices that choke saplings that would root anyway though categories of fracture: bastard, ghost, mix-blood, devil, illegitimate love for this country in which I am a reunion broadcast aired nightly, my telethon for clues leading to driveways, or a ramshackle shack surrounded by barrels to catch rainwater. My brother is not there. My sister is not there slicing persimmons & guessing the dead sister no one speaks of lives on as me. Her small knife pares skin 52 for the juiciest flesh that is not me. I take leave from daybreak, white sun like an egg cracked open, yolk spread over post-war buildings, crowded teeth. I cannot pass without pause dead ends, banks, bars, agencies, a father’s bedroom dutiful sons enter when asked to pull afternoon drapes across the fact of me as apparent as the thief pocketing dried fish & the vendor who yells, throws his hat. No one helps him recover his loss. No one speaks of this han, this legacy like the constant pull of tides on the shifting sand. The ocean cleaves to shore but cannot take it & recedes into memory, so I could invent a Korea in the roaring echoes of a conch shell I cup to my ear to hear a stirring, familiar & foreign currents of making that have nothing to do with history’s junked cargo of aliases, x-rayed detritus, shriveled & still, unremembered meanings folded into locked drawers, files I will not search. My dream of resonance, water answering distances. Like a peninsula, I lie in spray & listen to everything borne. 53 Section V Where a chrysanthemum blooms then vanishes, A chrysanthemum spirit arises and lives. -- So Chong Ju, “Ancient Song I” 54 Kisaeng “I want to understand the joy I felt as I was letting him go.” – Hwang Jini As I listened to the fabric of his jacket assume the casual shape of leave- taking, I learned how to unhinge form from breath unbind & unknot the numinous black, so that again I was a woman & an artist whose ravens fell onto the ondol floor like cords, not a suicide’s hair floating in a village well & souring the water. Callus on my finger, cushion for the kayabam, we shall pluck the string to forget triumphs before royalty taxing us for a celadon barge, shall sweep princes’ names into a crevice where we store besotted & sudden proposals to suck a jujube’s succulent orb, as if we required their directions to resist the stone in which a waiting life will crack a rooting. Tendril of song, evening calm, guide my sense of use across the instrument transforming my desire for vengeance into forest hearth smoke from which I fled as a pretty child, selected by the king’s men. Help me never to forget the elation I felt when my first patron swore by the river’s force his love for me, & I understood its swelling to rush & breach could teach me to survive it by emptying myself to play a perfect note. 55 Questions for “a flame of fire out of a bush” “Then Moses answered, ‘But suppose they do not believe me or listen to me…’” – Exodus 4:1 How will my people recognize me – a mumbler raised in the style of hunger revivals, landlocked travel, long stretches of porch talk to tell time by – as their prodigal, their little, their follow, & watcher of cues? How will they know me by how I press my face to the floor, doubled over to behold my elder, my similar bone structure softened by age while I strain to raise myself upright? How will they judge my open palms— clutching or generous? Will that emptiness translate? Will we require a looping glance to confirm intent? To look away? Is this a gesture of tenderness? A scar? Should I hold back? What gift of patience would they accept as winged, not perused not stolen? How to present it? As somber, as joy? What sign wired together, wrapped in foil surely checked upon by someone who is right? When does our silence resonate? What honorary suffix, or when I stutter, should someone else speak? To apologize? To clarify? Should I interrupt or answer? Or should I reach across 56 the lacquer table of cakes, grasp their hands & guide them to my face when they hesitate – uncertain how, where to go, or what to do next? 57 Song Echoing Inside a Mountain Pavilion for Dae Shik You ask why such rage in my heart. I’ll let my arms be an answer of return to your tender shadows, an aubade’s fog above inlets speckled with fishermen’s cottages, tethered boats loaded with nets checked for harvest drawn from the river, the beautiful river, my firstborn desire to dwell near its murmur. I wake from dreaming one stone & finding one stone remembered, & the names for one stone remembered, & my tongue holding its syllabic heft without effort, without conviction so returning it to its proper place among others flecked with salt & fixed in an upward stare to where branches reach for each other in whispers. What they say doesn’t matter, but that I could rest without checking every reference. Little volumes of bushes, have I the right? Chapters of fields, may I grieve? Titled ones... My foothold, a footnote for how to press my skin against yours, cleave it from sources anchoring my wandering mouth. I’d take you without a shield, the visor that obscures for the sake of progress across your chest of unlikeness. Hazardous twilight by which we perceive each other 58 by presence, unspoken but constant as breathing & forgetting names for transport, but musk will linger in our blue palanquin. Your essence or the finest oil purchased? That it could be approximated by doctors— date of birth, mix of races, fixed, & unknown by law— means that you are vulnerable to taste. What are you? I recall your story: From a street stand, your roommate selected by color kumquat, star fruit, prickly pear, persimmon— each one studied & savored. Hobbyist. He chatted about hybrids (tangelos— his favorite). “Try this,” he said, holding out a sliver. You bit into the nondescript flesh, chased it with another slice then another as your body crackled with recall, a mother whose face you sensed but could not see. Lying in bed, full beyond means, chin stained by under ripe fruit, you were like Proust who ate madeleines till numbed by the taste. Should you have rationed each one, or does memory naturally lead to loss? I love, so it’s hard to tell where Sukkul-am Cave is in Pictorial Korea. Copyright 1956. The truth is purchased from Pittsburgh’s Caliban Bookshop in ‘99, because the girl on the cover wore a striped hanbok. She is me/is not me. (I’m learning how to manage paradox.) She is smiling, not for the camera, but somewhere unseen, now 59 behind her, a house out of focus. I don’t know if I’m a native stranger or strange native, or is this tentative access? Loss, I need you on pp. 120. Granite guardians watch those going in. Those watched over are Guatama’s guests. Perhaps they want only to admire his elaborately carved fingers, so intricate they could take on without absolution for each one: the student on holiday picnic ties up her hair with a redbud scarf; The old one in the corner rubbing his rosary; he knows not what to think about requisitions. About entering properly, you remind me to place my hand over the face of the Deva King to emphasize that I am a seeker aware of those who came before & knelt. I would walk out, but you scold me, take my papers. You brush crumbs off my lank collar & spit to rub off a smudge. I can’t remember the last time you told me not to slouch. Without a kiss, this is tenderness. “Go ahead,” you say without words, without hesitation, & we enter a pavilion quarried from & set in a mountain, that takes it all back with saplings & overlooking so much there is no history, save the wild turning of vines across what could never be a home. 60 Elysian Field While soldiers check gates ridged with razor wire, an eastern wind blows off the Sachon River holding the men to routine stations & speeches blaring overhead. The tallest flag in the world snaps back & forth old caveats that flocks of ibis fly across for wintering grounds seeded with landmines still active from forty-five years ago when the gods demarcated North from South & fortified towers to play a new game of watch & wait. All the while, maple, birch, & pine invaded the zone, secured green shoots, & ringed many seasons undisturbed as wild ginseng branched in understory. It was dense enough for the white-bellied woodpecker to drill a hole & nest, so too the black bear ambled out of legend returning to rugged evergreen, where it ignored the fairy pitta’s shrill complaint to white tigers once again trailing roe deer, bowing their necks to chew new iris leaves. * How in the middle of hell is there a garden of the unnamed & thought-to-be extinct protected by danger? Someone dressed casual breaks in, hides behind bushes, whispers into a tape-recorder: 15 headed east, 22 southward. Maybe more. Red-crowned & sleek, the cranes spring from the thickets 61 as if unhinging from a museum screen landscape of bracken & a verse about happiness; the watcher forgets though he learned in school how the cities rose & pressed against mountains, tore them down, then spilled over a grid of lights. There is no light here except a distant detail tracking the man tracking the cranes flashing a signal as the flurry escapes. The squadron rushes in. They throw the man spread-eagle down, search his jacket, retrieve & rewind the scratched-up device: …headed east, 22 southward. Maybe more. 15 headed east, 22 southward. Maybe… They’re listening. They want to know more. * I knew nothing, so all summer I read sijo by an anonymous kisaeng waiting for her secret lover to return from the north until only her voice remained fashioning a boat of giant pine to cross Taedong River, & then her voice faded, but still the hull was sturdy. I boarded it for wherever it would go past the image of her breaking off a willow branch, beyond jealous ones trying to pull her headlong into quicksand. The craft glided into her silence. * I disembark beside chrysanthemums, & again, I see soldiers burn & slash the western forest so they can spy on one another unobstructed. 62 Where trees fall, seedlings push through & uncurl pale stalks beside tripwire protecting them from harvest as medicine. It’s measure, not intention that saves the rare & the beautiful. How innumerable landmines defend against all sides, so that in the center of violence, there is the impossible green that peace might level. Here, not irony nor survival. Wonder gives way to life’s drive toward transgressions of root & petal. Here, I must stop speaking; they may be listening to trace my every movement southward, east, or elsewhere. Take heart, you, still afraid of absence & myth; my silence does not mean that I’ve disappeared. 63 River My given name in Old English means “white wave,” variant of Guenever, an adulteress, so I too breach the binding cords of the book to lay flat, reading the source of my adoption: “choosing,” origin French from Latin adoptare. So the word resounds with travel across countries to the present in which I drive in my mind to the shore of forgetfulness. Once, Lethe in Latin, & now, the pier from last night I paced finding love everywhere amorous on blankets, dejected in the stranger throwing letters into high tide, in the disappearing sandals someone forgot to move to higher ground. It’s all coming back to me now. What else do we inherit but choice, not to go near the water or to plunge into surf, or not to choose at all when the law says there is only one way to hunger & to thirst? * It’s all coming back to me now in an Antonioni film about a photographer beautiful as don’t-try-to-impress-me in creased, white pants. He drags off a cigarette, cocked sixties-style, because he can. 64 He wants to see through the smoke, jones, & sentiment, the dripping black-&-white image clothes-pinned to string, the same image blown up again & again &… He’s looking for a way past the ink surface. Underneath an extreme lens, the blur comes into focus as volatile particles that take on an outline of a form running from a field cleared of trees, which must be some scene of transgression, or why is one running, or what about the image’s grain bears a trace? * How can it be pinned down when it’s constantly moving? Because the story of how omma died depends on who tells the story, how it ends with her body irretrievable among twisted, car metal or forever violated by the accurate work of a court transcriber or— I choose the negative space among the dark, magnified bits that is not a silence but an opening to slip through these stories into the possible where she is not all body, as if hunger is a child wanting back inside rocking water & the crimson interior of her name & the names given by lovers & anonymous ones. What child can count them all on his fingers, 65 when not to know is to have her more as myth from which we all descend or must confront for the source of making? * While my mother read aloud from the yellowed Aeneid, dog-eared & spine broken, I felt my body transform to pass through her pauses & turning the page, & the page turning against the Oklahoma midnight & star luster. The pages turning into an infinite white blur, a gate to the shores of the river. Her voice working left to right across long sentences of preparation (how the hero broke off a gold branch to bribe the boatman) & returning to the subject of descent into the underside of the garland strewn field, cleared of trees. Someone running for help, while she read aloud. Someone disappearing as I walked. I carried her voice. It knocked inside my ear, checked my gestures. “Do not. Do not go near the water. Do not. Do not,” a pace for footsteps behind a crag, a shielded look-out to the boat tied to the dock, the unburied souls wandering up & down the swamp. “Empty images hovering bodiless” hungry for a little earth to cover them begged the boatman for passage. I studied each one for my loss. I did not find her 66 in the deformed face of the suicide, did not recognize the wound in the little mother’s arm or the bent one whose steel hair drug the ground. The austere red of the widow resisted me, & I felt nothing but compassion for the one pulling at her braids or the old ones forever stumbling through a blasted camp, wide-eyed, as if seeing life for the first time riddled by open air fire; & the one crouching in the gutter while caissons roll north & south; & the one thrown by a landmine shaking handfuls of roots like fistfuls of dice. * They want to be buried, to be forgotten properly. They want it though the living may not string garlands, tune instruments, or choose a field of grass gleaming like water. What does one represent but a failure to stand for all the names hovering bodiless, pressing their claims for transport? How does one turn away from their calling? * How could I forget at the beach’s edge, a mound of twisted kelp laid on its side as the tides rolled in to pull it apart, rolled in pulling like midnight hands across a clock-face 67 to deny it body & so drag it back into the black water? But its knots moved like sinew with the currents; moved with, not against, & so stayed in a bed of sand carved out by undercurrents lifting it gently on to the bed. Impassive, its leaves undulated in the slow swirling, rose & fell, rose & fell, & I could see, exposed to moonlight, not a tangle of leaves but a letting go of names that would weigh down its body like cargo buoyed far then forever lost. I can’t bear this, can’t stop translating her body by water to move it again & again &… not omma, now mother, now the Indo-European root, now the sharing by Latin mater & the Greek mētēr, not measure’s source yet I count back to mater, the heart of matter, matter with a heart, māternus, & every material bearing her trace, bearing her variously in the grain of everything 68 Variation on “Azaleas” Little one, though you go away because you cannot bear with me, one day you will search the graves of ancestors not for my name, but for yourself to find the azaleas of Yaksan Hill. Surely, I will never see you again. I will not weep, because I can imagine you are a grandfather who slips off his sandals to tread gently on the flowers across Yaksan Hill. 69 Notes on the Poems “A Small Gift” is for Ku Sang, a modern Korean poet. Some of the fourth line’s language is from his long poem, “River and Fields.” My poem tonally enacts Korean han, which is difficult to explain in English. Its meaning is close to “wounded heart” but “enduring,” and not just “enduring” but finding some hope and happiness even in struggling. I draw from Thomas Park Clement’s The Unforgotten War to trigger “Homage to the DMZ.” This poem is for him. In the Korean story, a woman waiting for her beloved to return becomes an anemone, which is “slumped over” and has “gray hair” touching the ground. In this way, the anemone represents nostalgia or “endless waiting.” “Elegy for Daniel” is for the memory of Daniel Anderson, and his unpublished book, Red Cracked Earth. The epigraph for “Libretto” is from Cio-Cio-San’s final aria in Madama Butterfly Act 2: “Never know that, for you, / Butterfly is about to die… The next few lines complete her thought: “so that you may go / away beyond the sea / without being subject to remorse / in later years / for your mother’s desertion.” “Painted Fire” is triggered by Chihwaseon, a film about the life of Chang Sung- Op (Ohwon) who is the last significant artist of the Yi Dynasty. The eagles allude to a painting by Ohwon titled “Eagles.” Since according to the Shih Ching “poetry is art, and art is poetry,” Korean artists conventionally included poetry within their paintings and oftentimes responded to poems in the moment of their artwork’s creation. The quotes in “Painted Fire” are from the Tao Chien’s “Homecoming,” which set the moment of composition for Ohwon’s “Eagles.” 70 Etymologically, sijo is a combination of two Sino-Korean characters meaning “time” or “period” and “rhythm” or “harmony.” In an introduction to Classical Korean Poetry, Kim Jaihiun offers a prosodic and historical overview of the sijo, or “song of seasons” as it has been called, The sijo is a traditional lyric of three lines or verses averaging 45 syllables in a stanza, each line made up of four phrase-groupings with a major pause after each grouping. This is not exactly the same as a caesura in English verse because it cannot be syncopated with metric feet . . . Extremely elastic in form, the sijo differs from Chinese and Japanese verse forms in that it does not adhere to a strict syllable account. (xix) The sijo consists of three lines. The first one states the poem’s occasion, and the third one answers, resolves, or comments on it. In this way, the third line is a kind of volta. Recent translations of sijo sometimes break each line midway by way of enjambment in order to signal this major pause in English. This topography may imply that the sijo is a sestet or, without the line breaks, a tercet. It is neither. The quotes in “Kameoka” are from translations of Matsuo Basho’s haiku and “Saga Diary,” both of which are anthologized in Robert Hass’s Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. Kameoka is a city in Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. This poem is for Sunni Choi. The opening lines of “Prodigal” are a variation on Matsuo Basho’s haiku, “Even in Kyoto/ I long for Kyoto/ .” In the 15 th C, King Sejong developed Hunmin chong’um (also known as Onmun and now generally known as Hangul) or “Correct Sounds for Educating the People” as a way to combat illiteracy. Initially, the women at court primarily used the Korean language since the men continued to employ Chinese as the language of art, culture, and diplomacy. 71 “Paperclips” refers to zuihitsu in Kimiko Hahn’s The Unbearable Heart. The zuihitsu, or “running brush,” is a Japanese form made up of short prosaic moments wandering from subject to subject and enacting a spontaneous and fluid mind. Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book is one such classical example. Kim So Wol (1902-1935) wrote during the Independence Movement and is considered one of Korea’s finest modern poets, whose first and last book Jindallae-kkot is a benchmark in the development of Korea’s literary heritage. The widely anthologized title poem carries nationalist force given its underlying sacrificial suffering attitude to life occasioned by the Japanese occupation. “Authenticity” is for Malcolm Fitzgerald Cash and his creative nonfiction. The epigraph for “The Puppet Maker” is from C. Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio. The poet, Chong Chiyong, is a Korean modernist, and I quote from his poem “Native Village” in “The Pavilion on Adams Avenue.” The kisaeng were women artists trained in fine arts and literature, employed by the state, and considered inferior in social status. Their poetry survives despite the fact that many of their names have been forgotten. Hwang Jini, a 16 th century kisaeng, is considered the most famous due to her great poetic skill and intellect. \The first line from “Song Echoing Inside a Mountain Pavilion” refers to the opening line in David St. John’s poem “Nervalesque” from Red Leaves of Night. Deva Kings (or the guardians of the four directions – North, South, East, and West) guard the entryways of Buddhist temples. 72 In the language of birds, the crane symbolizes happiness. In the language of flowers, the chrysanthemum belongs to poets. The sijo of anonymous kisaeng, or “artist women,” referred to in “Elysian Field” are from Classical Korean Poetry edited and translated by Jaihiun Kim. The opening of “River” is after Larry Levis’s “The Two Trees” in Elegy. The poem through which “Variation” is written is Kim So Wol’s “Azaleas,” and I dedicate it to Kelly Ahern. 73 Critical Part: Routes through Transnational Adoption 74 Chapter One: Routes to Seoul “They learned that Korea stank – literally – of the human manure with which the nation’s farmers fertilized their rice paddies.” – Max Hastings, The Korean War The first feeling I have is betrayal, then elation while looking through the bus window at the pine trees and the green mountains sloping in the distance. The Gyeongin Highway from Incheon to Seoul passes airport hotels and golf courses, crosses the Yellow Sea via Yeongnim Bridge from which I see an oil tanker and a coastal refinery, and then arcs inland across a brief stretch of marshes. The sea is calm and gray unlike the monsoon clouds overhead through which a pink sun broils. It’s August, and the heat is wet and sticks to the skin. Even inside the air-conditioned limousine bus, the humidity hangs across my shoulders and drips, yet I’m not as uncomfortable as I had been warned. “You’ll simply melt,” said a friend who had attended the first transnational adoptee gathering in Seoul, “The weather slows you down. It’s just unbearable!” Instead, I’m in awe and switch several seats in order to get a better view, though I make a mental note of the other Koreans sitting in silence. Wanting to see more, I lean against the window and watch midsized cars – Honda, Hyundai, and Kia – pass the bus and speed toward home. A single SUV, a Ford maybe, exits toward a cluster of apartments. High-rise communities, like uneven teeth packed together, rise up 20 sometimes 40 stories and advertise their names, Happiness Villa and Splendor Living, on rooftop billboards. There are no gardens, only parking lots and a walkway toward a nearby two-story terminal with a glass arcade. Signs blink arrival as a silver train pulls toward the platform. 75 After the bus pays at the blue tollbooth plaza, it speeds past more shops that begin to crowd against each other jostling with hotels and parking structures for space. The city of Seoul bunches together and dramatically displays a modern cornucopia: white towers paneled with tinted glass, roundabout intersections, designer gallerias, underground parking structures, and hotel after hotel advertising European comfort and style. Four lanes of rush hour traffic flow into the city from all directions, crossing the business district that serves as a gateway across the Han River. After reading Ku Sang’s river sequence, I had imagined and written about the Han as a meditative stillness. Instead, a riverside complex of restaurants and shops sparkles illuminating people boarding small dinner ships for the evening. Nearby, some families lie on blankets enjoying picnics while bicyclists follow a trail that skirts the water’s edge. Behind them, each skyscraper is a blue glass monolith with the company name and website displayed on the top floor. At street level, Dunkin Donuts, Coffee Bean, and Starbucks provide snacks while Hewlett Packard, Samsung, and companies that I do not recognize preside above on the upper floors. A curtain of smog, not mist obscures their outlines. A modern city embracing and embraced by global economy, Seoul flourishes as part of the eleventh largest economy in the world, and as this, it has served as a case study for other developing nations seeking to emulate its success. One of the Asian tigers, South Korea attributes its economic miracle to the hard work of its citizens, who carry perseverance in their blood. Yet this romantic story downplays the cold war roots that made South Korea’s economy possible. 76 Due to the country’s strategic location and to contain global communism, the United States during the war’s aftermath “made all efforts to bolster the [South Korean] regime not only through bilateral assistance but even by mobilizing resources from multilateral agencies like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank” (Girijesh Pant 23). Combined with Japanese capital and technology “which went to Korea to take advantage of her cheap labour,” South Korean economic recovery focused first on labor- intensive products for export and then shifted toward technological development under the South Korean government’s direction (Pant 23). The United States continues to enjoy a special relationship with South Korea as both a major investor and political ally. Public statues of freedom fighters, poets, and civilians reiterate public memory of the Korean War or 6.25 War (Hanguk Jeonjaeng) for the date of its beginning, as it’s known in Korea. Yet ground-level storefronts for Staples and Pappa John’s Pizza provide more testimony to globalization’s legacy rooted in Cold War containment. Perhaps because her father served as a staff sergeant in the Korean War and her husband (my adoptive father) toured as an artillery specialist in the Vietnam War, my adoptive mother viewed Asian countries, particularly Korea, as one large rice paddy or jungle veldt no different from the wet, leach infested marshes of war films. When I asked her about Korea as a child, I always heard the same response, “Korea doesn’t fascinate me.” If I pressed harder, she would sigh, open her eyes wide, and say, “It’s really just one large rice field. That’s what my daddy used to say.” As a young girl growing up in Oklahoma before the internet, I imagined Korea through her words. Black and white images from The World Book Encyclopedia of Korean villagers bending over and 77 harvesting rice confirmed her description, as did M*A*S*H reruns, which my adoptive father liked to watch in the late afternoons while smoking his pipe. Like a first language, my adoptive family’s way of seeing Korea provided a syntax and geography. Living in a small town near Tulsa, Oklahoma, which lacked a bus system and concrete roads in some outlying neighborhoods, I did not feel dislocated, as if I belonged somewhere else, which I had known before and remembered. Instead, I was aware of limitations and partiality: Korea was three words – a rice paddy – and somewhere off the map. I couldn’t find Korea. All I could do was ask. Questions were a way to explore, to find a place. “Why do you care? You’re living in the best country in the world,” my adoptive mother said, which ended our discussion. My adoptive father, haunted by the Vietnam War, refused to talk about it. “They just do things differently over there,” he said. Over there. Somewhere out there. Once my adoptive mother confided in me, “Your daddy wanted to adopt from Korea, because he just couldn’t adopt from Vietnam though that would’ve been quicker for us.” So Korea was other than Vietnam, yet they were both one large rice paddy. Yet my adoptive parents surely would have been amazed like my fiancé, commenting loudly and shooting photos. He leans forward to take a picture of the Hello Kitty van parked in front of Burger King. The passengers ignore him but glance at me. I’m self-conscious of the difference, and simply correct myself by merely nodding at his excitement, hoping that he’ll catch the hint. “Born To Be Chicken,” he reads, pointing to a red marquee with amusement. On storefront signs, English and Korean sit side-by-side such that neither serves as a translation of the other. Rather the Korean is a phonetic double for the English word as in ham-ba-ga for hamburger. At other times, the Korean is 78 completely missing. The city is oddly accessible if you speak English, as I inferred from an airport weatherboard displaying the temperature in Korean and imperial scales, the latter meaning the imperial language, English, with which I grew up as my native tongue. As a result, U.S. tourists are able to move about easily and spend. * * * I remember my only extensive conversation with my adoptive mother about Korea. I was twelve years old and sitting on the edge of her bed, while she rested against pillows and petted her two cats, Spider and Peaches, who purred heavily into her belly. Always attended by cats, she would lie in bed, drink milk, and read before going to sleep. I always enjoyed our late night talks because she would tell stories. An oral historian, she enjoyed remembering incidents from her childhood about her father who died before I was adopted and the stories of other family members whose black-and-white portraits hung in our hallway. There was Emma, a wicked woman, who forced my great- grandaunts as children to lie underneath a feather mattress while she jumped on top of them, and Aunt Catherine, born with a veil across her face, who made moonshine during prohibition and could predict when and where you would die. My adoptive mother’s face would enact the facial gestures of her fathers (“Susie, don’t do that!”) when she spoke as him and then as herself as a child (“Yes, Sir.”) answering to emphasize the tone of the story she was telling. Proud of her Swedish heritage, my adoptive mother recited her family tree (from Duniphin to Pederson) all the way back to Ellis Island and rural central Sweden. Yet she had nothing to say about Korea. “It doesn’t fascinate me,” she said. 79 She would later deny our conversation, but I recall her telling me after much prodding that my birth mother was a prostitute, and my birth father was an American soldier. “They’re poor over there,” she said, “You might have grown up to become a prostitute too.” Her face was blank and bored. I waited for her to continue. “Besides, your daddy doesn’t like rice,” she said, “It reminds him of the Vietnam War. That’s why we didn’t adopt from there.” Then something more about a box, a name pinned to my shirtfront, and something about being found on the orphanage’s steps. Someone took me inside, and four months later, put me on a plane bound for Oklahoma. “Someone gave you up so that we could love you. You were so pretty in the photograph. We chose you. We love you so much.” So love did this. Love in Korea sacrificed so that I might have more opportunity in the United States. Love gave me a second chance. I wanted to know more. She picked up her milk glass and took a long drink. What is my Korean name? Do I have a Korean name? Where am I from in Korea? Do I have sisters or brothers? “They don’t keep records over there,” she said while putting her milk glass down. She shook her head and widened her eyes, “That’s what the adoption agency told us when we asked.” She told me that the orphanage where I was found burned in a fire. My papers were lost. The only proof that I had of my origins was my own body, which was evidence of a past transgression. A doctor once told my mother that I resembled the children whom he delivered and saved while stationed in Busan during the Korean War. Half-breeds. Undesirables. The rumor was that the Korean people killed these children out of rage and shame. Maybe I was saved because my birth father was a senator? After all, I can bullshit with the best of them. 80 “That’s why your eyes are brown,” my adoptive mother said. She laughed at her joke then picked up her knitting. The needles clicked and clicked. There was no way to question her, though it occurred to me to try. The local and school libraries had no books on Korea. (On England, there were extensive holdings, and on Japan, at least two.) So I looked up Korea in the World Book Encyclopedia, 1968 edition, and read “Korea, The Land of Morning Calm.” The 3-page entry featured photographs of an elderly man wearing a stiff, black hat and staring at a hill, and of villagers working the fields. A detailed shot of a Rose of Sharon, the national flower, illustrated a table of facts – population, climate, elevation, and landmass. Korea was a rice paddy, a hill, and a small flower. With these images, I visualized my history. Hiding in the hills, my birth mother, a vulnerable flower, slept with a white man in exchange for money to buy food, because the rice harvest was bad. Or she was a loose woman who refused to work in the rice paddy and instead dated white men to avoid a life in the hills. I pictured a skinny woman wearing a lot of makeup and wobbling on high heels outside of an army station. “Cheapy cheapy! I love you long time!” she sang just like in the movies to the American soldiers leaning against a fence posted with Army warnings. They chewed toothpicks and spat on the ground. In my mind, a bronzed one, wearing aviator sunglasses, walked toward her while she teetered and grinned a toothy smile. “Let’s go,” he said. * * * The bus cuts several sharp turns up Namsan Mountain toward Sofitel Ambassador Hotel. I slide back and forth, gripping the seat in front of me to steady myself. The sun is 81 setting. Old people walk up the steep hills overlooking downtown Seoul carrying plastic shopping bags toward their apartments. I see an old woman with a hunched back holding hands with her middle-aged daughter disappear into a shop. The city’s neon brightens. Churches flash red crosses, and green Buddhist symbols illuminate temples. Motorcyclists zip up bicycle lanes, balancing packages strapped to their backs. Digital screens on the side of two competing malls advertise the same soft drink. The double image of a slender, pale-skinned woman daydreaming about Lotte and dancing to techno music can be seen from far away as the sky darkens. I’m surprised. It all seems so familiar, or how could I forget? I’ve lived in urban space before. In Koreatown, Los Angeles, a similar digital board broadcasts ads for the Aroma Experience inside a shopping galleria on Wilshire Boulevard. A young woman slowly opens her round eyes and smiles as an image of a celadon candle floating in a mountain stream fades out. I’m not supposed to be here, but the here that my mother described is nowhere to be seen. What I don’t see – farm workers returning from afternoon shifts, old women sitting on the ground staring at a gang of orphans digging through trash, a young girl in a short dress who is drunk and leaning against a telephone pole, dog butchers shouting the price of meat, roosters blocking bicycles trying to deliver messages for the army, paper houses that cannot withstand rain, pimps and thieves, a politician’s black sedan racing through the street, a trashcan on fire, an old man sucking on live squid and cow eyes, skinny girls learning how to shout their tricks at soldiers who laugh and enter bars, power lines crisscrossing the sky, garbage and shit in the street, dogs barking, doors slamming, and wooden signs that I cannot read. 82 Instead, Seoul Tower, a modern space needle, protrudes from the top of Namsan Mountain and pierces. A dense forest covers the mountain through which two red and white weather towers blink on and off. There’s a park where a statue of Kim So Wol honors the poet’s spirit of resistance, a four-story library, the Goethe Institute where one might take German language lessons, a public arboretum and botanical garden, and dress shops that feature bold patterned skirts in the windows. The bus rounds near the top and stops at an intersection. A mother pushes a stroller as her son walks next to her pulling on her shirt. A Dongguk University student rushes across the street, then stops and tightens his backpack’s straps. City of somewhere. City where someone something once upon a time. Wherever I am, I am not lost, yet I have trouble finding my way. The familiar is everywhere again as the bus angles up the driveway in front of Sofitel Ambassador Hotel and stops. The bus driver jumps up and shouts, “Welcome to Korea!” His teeth are yellow. His gums are black from a lifetime of smoking cigarettes. My fiancé stretches his legs and yawns, as passengers stand in the aisle and file out. A bellhop in a brass-buttoned blue uniform approaches and bows toward us as we collect our luggage beside the curb. His white gloved hand gestures for us to enter through the revolving glass door. Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik plays softly in the hotel lobby, and there is the scent of gardenia, light, and beveled mirrors in which I see my image reflected and reshaped a hundred times. 83 Chapter Two: Fragments of a Missing Person “His own face in the glass had during many years been associated for him with thoughts of someone whom he must be like – one about whose character and lot he continually wondered, and never dared to ask.” – George Eliot, Daniel Deronda Inside a white box for Keds tennis shoes, a style that was coveted by preteen girls growing up in Sand Springs, Oklahoma in the 80s, I hid a newsletter from the adoption agency, newspaper clippings about the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games, and a drawing that I had made based on my face of what my birth mother and father might’ve looked like. These papers constructed a secret record for my unnamed self, who was present whenever I looked in the mirror but lacked a name and a way to speak. Her skin was olive almost ochre from summer afternoons spent outside riding a bicycle, her hair was black and braided, and her epicanthic folds were so tight that other kids teased her at school asking if she could see. Ashamed, she hid her face. While staring in the mirror, I learned somehow to avoid her gaze, to stare through her to the task at hand – brushing my teeth or picking cat hair off my shirt. She was always present, but somehow, I succeeded in separating myself from her. Disembodied, she became like a ghost because need drove her to search and rummage. What she required was paperwork, some document of her connection. The newsletter in particular was most important. I remember finding it inside the black metal mailbox nailed to the front porch of my adoptive parents’ house. Usually, I ignored the mail, which consisted of bills and advertisements, yet because I had written my first postcard to Elisabeth from Austria, a pen pal to whom I had been assigned as part of my honors sixth grade class’s pen pal exchange program, I was eager to see what had arrived. 84 Instead of a letter from Austria, a stapled newsletter, folded over and addressed to The Dobbs Family, was tucked between the utility bill and some credit card statements. It was the July issue. I had never seen one like it before. I wondered how many other issues previously had been mailed, only to be discarded as junk mail because no one was interested. Curious, I opened it. The front page featured a black and white photo of a woman sitting on a tile floor, her back turned away from the camera, and her gaze fixed on a point outside of a window. Excerpts from a birth mother’s letter to her child beginning with “Dear Little One, I shall miss you . . .” surrounded this image that was more outline than picture. I hid the newsletter in my jeans pocket. I went to my bedroom, locked the door, and pulled my shoebox out of my closet. I sat on the floor and unfolded the newsletter and laid it among my other documents. Across from me, a white Victorian armoire reflected the girl who picked up the document and began to read the text aloud from across a great distance: Dear Little One, I shall miss you. I pray that when you read this letter that you are happy and healthy. Please know that your mother loved you. You will never be forgotten. Someday we shall see each other again. So the name for this girl reading the letter was Dear Little One, and someone loved and missed her. Someone right now was looking for her. Dear Little One was missing, not necessarily lost. She was not forgotten. Someone remembered her. Someone had memories, and these were connections to somewhere else. I ran my hand across the paper. My skin tingled as if someone had touched me. Someone else. This newsletter fired my imagination in ways that were absolutely necessary to bringing into question the narratives that I had grown up with, stories that 85 were anonymously authored though I seem to recall hearing them first from my adoptive parents. They do not remember telling me that my birth mother was a prostitute, my birth father a U.S. senator, or that evidence of my birth father’s political career existed in my eye color, brown, which explained my facility with language. The plotline of operas and Broadway musicals, this story shaped my understanding of my body, proof of some transgression that was so dangerous that it had to be sent abroad for my and my birth mother’s protection. A fallen woman, my birth mother survived her error, which was my birth, and gave me the one gift that a woman in her circumstances might provide – anonymity. As a young child, this anonymity meant uncertainty, confusion, and at times, a kind of chaos that the imagination sought to organize into a story. It was based on conventions that I received from my adoptive parents and from culture – a loose woman, one-night stand, an accident, and then an opportunity for redemption for both her and me in the form of transnational adoption. “I’m a bastard,” I told my best friend’s older sister, a sixteen-year old blonde homecoming queen. “No you’re not,” she said, “only boys are bastards.” “Then I’m only half Korean,” I said, as if this fact were an improvement. “Whatever,” she said while painting silver glitter on her rose pink toenails. She was right. Whatever I knew was only a story, something made up, which meant that it was vulnerable. I longed for the hard evidence, the reality that could not be denied. Lying on the floor in my bedroom, the newsletter forming a teepee over my face, my self that someone was missing floated from story to story, each one stopped and then erased: 86 My mother pins her bangs back with a blue barrette and paints a crimson pout on her lips. Her mirror reflects behind her thin shoulders a one-room flat. A yellow-flowered cotton dress dries on the clothesline strung from the metal bed’s headboard to a nail. The dress is her most valued possession. Wearing it, she enchants the soldiers outside of the officers’ canteen to let her go inside and dance in the smoky air. Barelegged and bright, she laughs and drinks at the bar with whoever will buy her a martini. “You know what a martini is?” says a lieutenant from Akron, Ohio. “Shaken,” giggles my mother swinging her legs, “No stir.” The lieutenant pinches my mother on the cheek and puts his arm around her. Later that night after last call, he pushes a $10 into her hand and licks her ear. “Stir is better. Let’s go.” My mother giggles, rolls the bill up, and then slides it into her shoe. In the second story, my mother brushes her hair and stares through the window to the mountains. In the last month of pregnancy, she is large and tired. She sits on the floor and stares at the print of Jesus pointing at his heart that is hung above her metal bed. It is the only art on the walls of her room inside the unwed mother’s home. The brush is a small luxury. Loud talking is not aloud. My mother spends her time in prayer or daydreaming about my father, an older married man who managed the office where my mother worked as his secretary. She didn’t really love him, but she feared losing her job. 87 No. My mother is dying of cancer surrounded by sons and asking for a daughter that she could not afford to keep. Her husband, my father, holds her hand while she speaks about her regrets one of which is relinquishing me a week after I was born. She describes walking up the hill to the orphanage’s gate, the wet grass and mud, the dull ache in her shoulder as she searched for dry ground on which to set me down, and the way I woke up crying, as if I knew that she was leaving me in the best way she knew how. As each story dissolved into the Oklahoma afternoon, houseflies hit the hot glass struggling to escape. I hovered somewhere among these three stories and others that I had imagined but discarded as too fanciful or impossible. Still, nothing was completely impossible, because nothing was known. Yet probability said I wasn’t a long lost princess, nor was I the heir to a fortune that others sought to claim in my stead. I was a missing girl who should be there (wherever that was) but wasn’t, and who someone was searching for but couldn’t find. I was someone whose absence someone else felt. Or was I? I sat up, pulled the newsletter off my face, and pressed my face against the mirror, leaving an oily smear on the glass. Then I stared at “Dear Little One,” and mumbled words – more like sounds – that to my uninformed ear sounded Asian, as if I were “Dear Little One” trying to speak to my birth mother, and the louder I spoke, the more she might hear me. Yet I had never heard Korean words, did not know how to shape my mouth or move my tongue, but I continued speaking gibberish as if it were another language for a grief that I could not describe in English. The noises tumbled out, long knots and bursts, and I began to cry. Then the desire to see my birth mother’s face 88 was unbearable. So I stood up and went to the bathroom where my adoptive mother stored her makeup. Sitting in front of my bedroom mirror again, I unscrewed the bottle of Estee Lauder base and dipped my finger into Extra Moisturizing Porcelain Crème. I rubbed it all over my face, eyelids, lips, neck, shoulders, and hands. My adoptive mother’s skin tone appeared almost bisque when wet, but then dried to biscuit white. With black eyeliner, I drew arches into my eyebrows and wingtips at the corners of my eyes, and painted my lower lip Loréal Fandango Red. I wound my braided hair into a pile on my head and pinned it in place with a blue plastic comb. Rising, I pulled a white bathrobe out of my closet, belted it, and then sat down again in front of the mirror. Silent, I turned around, my back to the glass, but my gaze fixed on a point somewhere in the distance. Through my peripheral vision, I could see myself, a kind of woman outlined in black and white like the newsletter photograph, who was preparing to relinquish her child. On my bedroom windowsill, a June bug hissed, snapped, and searched for a tear in the screen to get outside. Houseflies continued to buzz. I couldn’t look directly in the mirror. Doing so would’ve meant breaking the pose, and holding it was a way to see, to feel for a moment what she might’ve experienced if she did at all. So I listened to insects knock against the window trying to find a way out. It was impossible. I was completely still, yet I wanted to say something, “Dear Little One, I shall miss you…” yet that was not what she would have said. Someone translated it. Someone might have gotten it wrong on accident. Maybe she said nothing at all, so that the silence between us was a language that we shared, a way of being present through absence, as if I could almost touch her. 89 I heard a knock at my bedroom door, the knob turning, but not opening because it was locked. “Jen-Jen, are you okay?” my adoptive father said. Pulling the bathrobe tighter around my body and standing up, I unlocked the door and opened it a crack. “Yes. I’m just reading.” “You know your mommy doesn’t like the doors shut.” “Yes, I know.” “We’re getting ready to go out to dinner at Lotta Burger. So be ready in a minute. We don’t want to wait on you like we always do.” “Okay.” I closed the door and looked in the mirror at my adoptive mother’s makeup darkening to orange, black eyeliner smearing, my hair lopsided and slipping, and the person I was missing, the unnamed one who had been with me, was gone. Instead, the newsletter and some makeup tubes and bottles remained on the floor. The insects continued to hum, while I folded the paper and tucked it into my shoebox. Pushing it under the bed, I found a T-shirt, pulled it over my head, and ran to the bathroom to wash the mask off of my face while my adoptive parents called to me to hurry up, because they were hungry and impatient. 90 Chapter Three: To Be Taped to Windows of Light Directions: Cut into strips, and then slice syntax. Affix to a glass pane with scotch tape during the brightest part of the day. Flare as white space. Love, walk away – language like the smallest, negligent gesture – walk away. In the Eastern Social Welfare Society’s dorm, I wash breakfast plates in the kitchen. A middle-aged man and woman enter, notice, and say to each other, “She must be one of the birth mothers. Look at how young she is.” At Gyeongbok Palace, I try to buy a college student ticket and lie about my age. “You’re not 25,” says the cashier, “12,000 won please.” I try but can’t help myself. Not even the grandmother walking in Biwon Garden with her hands behind her back resembles me. “J’ai vingt-cinq ans,” I say at the Auguste Rodin Museum near Hôtel des Invalides and smile at the cashier, who writes his number on the back of my ticket. In the dorm room, I open the box President Kim presented to me after saying, “I held you when you were a baby and prayed tearfully.” I examine a blue hand towel embroidered with “Eastern Social Welfare Society” in white. I shut off the water and turn around to stare at the couple. Stunned, they pick up some paper napkins, and leave. All night in the dorm room, I hear babies crying upstairs in the infant ward. Unable to sleep, I get up and walk up and down the stairs. From the fifth floor stairwell, I see a pregnant birth mother waiting for the elevator. Her stomach is so heavy that she holds it with her arms. 91 “I’ve volunteered to hold the babies,” an adoptive mother of adult twins, who are doing a birth search, tells me over breakfast, “The nurses say that after the babies are born they need touch to feel safe.” China recently placed limits on the maximum age of prospective adoptive parents. “It’s unfair,” she says, “My husband’s a lawyer in Manhattan. We have so much to give.” Listening to the babies cry, I feel my skin tingle, as if no one has touched me for a very long time. After returning for Gyeongbok Palace, I notice the maid has cleaned my room and taken the towel President Kim gave to me by mistake. Over lunch, President Kim tells the Kansas minister visiting with his adoptee daughters, “Jennifer is a Harvard professor.” Embarrassed, I say nothing, not wanting to shame him. Ms. Lee hangs up the phone and collects my birth documents while I’m reading them, because lunch is ready, and President Kim is waiting. The birth mother is older and taller than me, yet we’re both unable to sleep. We watch one another leave. Another adult adoptee from Boston chats with me in the lobby while he waits for his birth family to arrive to take him to lunch. “I’m afraid they’re going to make me fat,” he says. I’m jealous. Before I left for Korea, I offered dduk soup to my ancestors, and felt them say, “We will walk with you.” “Why are you able to cook Korean food?” the adoptive mother from Texas asks me. Trying to be friendly, I ignore her comment and offer her some kimchi bokumbap. 92 Walking through the Rodin Gallery, I am amazed by the process Rodin used to create his sculptures from sketch to cast to flame. “We have so much to give,” she says, “I could have taught the little girl how to eat with chopsticks.” I don’t want anyone to touch me, not even my fiancé who joked that this was our honeymoon before our wedding coming up in September. My fiancé and I stood behind President Kim who sat in front of us for a picture. Credits for the video about Eastern Social Welfare Society’s founding continued to play in the background. My birth mother must be at least 60 years old, I imagine. The desire to save her and my birth family is unbearable. The office won’t let me copy my documents or photograph them. Distressed, I lock myself in the bathroom, while my fiancé whispers through the door, “You’re a writer, remember? Describe what you saw.” Two polaroids – my adoptive father and mother before we met – clipped to a report: “Susan is artistic. She likes to knit and paint. Danny Dobbs is hardworking.” “Not only could I have taught her how to use chopsticks, I know Koreans,” she says, pouring soy sauce on my cooking. His family arrives in a white van. Hugging him, his birth mother pokes him in the ribs and shakes her head, while his birth father watches, smiling. No new information, only that the orphanage did not burn down, and a foster mother, whose name I try but fail to memorize – Ms. Lee would not let me write down what I was reading –cared for me until I was four months old. 93 Of course I remember nothing. “Then how are you Korean?” she asks, leaving most of the food I offered her on her plate. Lying in bed, staring at the wall, and unable to sleep, I imagine the birth mothers living on the floor above do the same, or maybe I’m vengeful. President Kim says to my fiancé, “I’m so proud of her. She has grown up to be a fine woman,” as if he is my birth father. “I do remember,” I lie to the adoptive mother, “and all adoptees do in some way.” 94 Chapter Four: Routes to a Field “This is not a real place; perhaps by-and-by” – Charlotte Mew, “The Nunhead Cemetery” In Wonju Si, the largest city in Kangwon-do, South Korea, there’s a spot of ground that’s obscured by tall grass blanketing the valley below Chiak Mountain and where the Sang Ae Won’s entrance gate once stood during the 70s – twenty years after the 6.25, or the Forgotten War as it’s known in the United States. Jetlagged and fatigued because of the humidity, I’ve traveled from Los Angeles in search of this spot where my birth mother placed me, a newborn, for someone else to find. Jae Yeong, my guide, pauses from arguing with the cab driver about the Sang Ae Won’s correct location and leans back to tell me that my orphanage had planted apple trees in 1976 to raise funds – a fact that helps me to imagine an orchard while staring through the backseat windows at powder blue high-rise apartments and billboards announcing new developments coming soon with names like Samsung Cloud Estates and Charming Courts, which promise affluent futures with full amenities. Yet I’m searching for the past, not a home. Jae Yeong – the son of a minister and a college student who volunteers with a post-adoption services agency – hands the map, which the orphanage had faxed over this morning, to the cab driver. Sun-tanned and wiry, he glances at it and, with the authority that comes with his age, shakes his head and continues to talk forcefully. I don’t need to know Hangul to understand that he’s telling us that his experience has led us to the right location. He pushes the map into Jae Yeong’s hands. Following his memory, he careens on to the freeway honking and then abruptly turns right on to an unmarked dirt road between two plastic-covered greenhouses that are 95 part of an orchid nursery. The fog-draped mountains defy the frame provided by the corrugated metal tunnel that we pass through. Though August monsoons have washed out the road, they do not prevent the cab driver from veering on to the grass to push us up the sloping hill in second gear. At the top, a white rusted sign indicates Sang Ae Won in blue letters and an arrow underneath the English points north to an empty field. This might not be a rabbit hole. Perhaps this is the way a country renews itself, not by forgetting but by preparing the land to build something necessary. I crack the window while Jae Yeong talks on the phone with the Sang Ae Won. Surprised, he confirms that this field was the orphanage’s second site during the 70s. The cab driver motions in large circles, pointing here and there, as if correcting Jae Yeong. I can’t follow. So instead, I listen to cicadas and smell the damp ground. I’m struck by how mundane these actions are such that my birth mother might’ve shrugged while doing them too almost thirty-one years ago before she became my birth mother, when she was simply my mother: a woman who must’ve carried me up this same hill through wet and mud, how grass stuck to her legs yet swung back after she passed through as if not to betray her footsteps, the same monsoon clouds hanging low like damp laundry on a hot day hiding the mountains’ peaks, and the cicadas’ roar that’s a kind of silence. Yet still, I want to make them talk, want to see something vulnerable, want to finger and rub my lips across some proof that she was here, that we were here together in this place that is not a place, really, but a clearing where there is so much history that rumor is a better map. Perhaps this same field camouflaged soldiers during the Battle of Wonju Si while they crawled on their stomachs to avoid detection? Maybe I’m wrong, rather this clearing has always known uprooting in order to plant for a winter harvest. I 96 don’t know. Stretching my imagination means possibly coming closer to touching her cheek, red and damp from our last long walk together. Her face might’ve been a hand’s length away as she bent toward me to pull the blankets tighter around my body. Or not her face and instead my grandmothers or that of a trusted friend who took pity on my mother’s condition turned and looked right then left to make sure no one saw us leaving one another. Surely, we were both silent, accepting and not knowing whether either of us would be safe. Then the first distance – someone rose and turned away. Then the second – someone descended down the hill into the evening. Or I am wrong altogether, and the distance is greater than this valley and constantly shifting, though the ground is firm here because the grass reaches deeper. The roots spread out like hands holding on to each other. I let go of the door handle and sit back in the seat, listening to the cicada song for wherever it might take me. “This is home,” I want to say. I want to give witness, want to be precise about how I cannot remember, find some relic, or locate the exact spot where I first encountered loss as black loam and mountain mist – a loss so large that its infinite possibilities terrify. Was I the child of a rape or poverty or a hunger that pulled gums away from the teeth, yellowed and cracking? Either way, some force that someone could not shelter me from compelled her or him to abandon me. Is this really a choice? Again, I don’t know. The cab driver is saying something to Jae Yeong, and his tone is softer, as if he’s remembering, and as always, I am ashamed of my limited Korean. I feel the same way in a Los Angeles shik-dang, studying the menu and practicing the correct way to ask for food, “kimchi jigae hana.” However, inevitable confusion squeezes the server’s brows together. “Number 5?” she asks. “Yes,” I say. Yes. 97 I am trying. I feel like two people – a self that’s hungry and can only be fed with language, and another self, watching in silent judgment. At the same time, I feel as if I have no self at all, as if who I am is contingent upon new information. If Jae Yeong turned around and said, “We’ve located your birth mother. She is in hospice,” then I would feel my body in a completely different way, as if it were microfiche unraveling and held up to the light showing scratches, images, fingerprints that had been there but undetected all along. The cab driver reverses our course, and we’re heading toward the tunnel to the highway and past the orchid farm. I aim my camera at the field and the orphanage sign as we speed away, but the cab hits a pothole and my arms bounce up and down. Looking at the playback picture, I see blurry images of a rain-dotted rear windshield and a gray sky – both gesturing toward what I’ve missed and lost. Again, I’m leaving without a record of this field, where something might’ve taken place. It’s too late. We’re on the freeway again passing cars because the new orphanage’s staff has been waiting over half an hour to greet me. Jae Yeong and the cab driver are silent, certain of the direction, and I know that wherever I’m going there’s another distance to be crossed. 98 Chapter Five: Sorrow’s Song: The Military Origins of Transnational Adoption “Non saperlo mai…per te “Never know that, for you, pei tuoi puri occhi for your innocent eyes, muore Butterfly… Butterfly is about to die… perché tu possa andar so that you may go di la dal mare away beyond the sea senza che ti rimorda without being subject to remorse ai di maturi in later years il materno abbandono.” for your mother’s desertion.” So ends Cio-Cio-San’s last aria in Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, an opera that literary critics have traditionally read as a Western fantasy of the Orient and that revisionists – most notably David Henry Hwang – have rewritten to deconstruct the power relationship between the West (“masculine – big guns, big industry, big money”) and the East (“weak, delicate, poor . . . but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom”) (Hwang 83). Yet critics and revisionists continue to look through, not at the implicit adoption narrative driving the opera to its tragic and familiar conclusion. Cio-Cio-San’s final words to her biracial child, Sorrow, explains her reasons for relinquishing him to her wayward husband, U.S. naval officer Benjamin F. Pinkerton, and his “real American bride,” Kate (Puccini 76). 1 In this last aria, Cio-Cio-San declares her intent to erase herself from Sorrow’s memory so that he “may go away beyond the sea” as a new immigrant to the United States (Puccini 132). Just as Pinkerton denies her status as his wife during their marriage, he similarly refuses to recognize her role as the 1 I paraphrase Marianne Novy who accounts for the critical tendency “to look through adoption in literature, rather than at it” (3). “And precisely because adoption is so useful a plot device for dramatizing issues like familial ambivalence or class or race relations,” critics have yet to theorize it as a complex discourse producing and reiterating bodies (3). 99 birth mother of his child. So Pinkerton resists all connection to her, either of which would facilitate her voyage to the United States. Though of mixed heritage, Sorrow’s blood tie to the U.S. is not sufficient passage. Instead, he must lose his birth mother in order to immigrate across the U.S. border to join an adoptive one. Cio-Cio-San’s final gestures per the stage directions – picking up the child, placing him on a mat, giving him an American flag and a doll to play with, gently blindfolding his eyes, and going behind a screen to commit seppuku – culturally rewrite Sorrow by placing him in a U.S. context and by cutting off his sense of sight. Unable to see, he is seemingly spared the violent spectacle of his mother’s death and his possible “remorse in later years/for [her] desertion” (Puccini 132). In this way, his senses are altered to privilege the hard, tactile sensations of the U.S. flag and doll over the fleeting imagery of his mother. 2 With Cio-Cio-San dead and Sorrow transformed, Pinkerton “bursts into the room” crying, “Butterfly! Butterfly! Butterfly!” and Sharpless, the U.S. Consul, “goes to pick up the child” (Puccini 134). In effect, two fathers enter the room. Though the military fathers the child, the state recognizes and claims him to broker his immigration, his movement from a birth mother to an adoptive one who is waiting. So begins Sorrow’s story, offstage and unsung. I saw this opera performed in several U.S. cities, and each time I left the concert hall, I wondered what questions would need to be answered in order to imagine Sorrow’s life. Did someone tell him about his birth mother, or was he taught not to ask about her? Would asking constitute a betrayal of his adoptive family and ingratitude for opportunities in the United States? Were all traces 2 José Rabasa’s study of Mercator’s World Map uncovers “the binary oppositions organizing the world” into hierarchical arrangements of Hard (moderns, Europe, Old World, masculine, coordinates, macrocosmos) and Soft (ancients, the rest of the world, New World, feminine, contours, microcosmos) (360). In this imperialist allegory, Europe brings a civilizing light to the rest of the world. 100 of his Japanese heritage erased – documents, clothes, and pictures locked away? Where were they kept? Were they burned, shredded, casually lost, or withheld? Was he renamed Thomas? Where was he? As a Korean American adoptee, I was conscious of Sorrow’s inability to see his mother’s final gestures and his father’s face for the first time, so that he had to rely upon what he heard and touched. I was aware of his silence; he couldn’t interrupt or talk back to the lush music constructing the world of the opera. I recognized how his story revealed something of mine: how our narratives are part of transnational adoption, how that complex discourse relies upon other discourses of gender and nationalism, and how love further complicates it. 3 Like Cynthia Enloe, I began “to broaden my curiosity, to ask new questions” of my story that appeared as a stock plot in various texts as diverse as Miss Saigon and Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (xi). I also found versions of this story in adoptee works collected in anthologies such as Voices from Another Place and Seeds from a Silent Tree. In “A War Remembered,” Susan Soon-Keum Cox writes, “My father was a soldier of that war. By the time my Korean mother gave birth to me, he was already gone from her life, and from mine” (11). In Cox’s narrative, the abandoned mother and roving soldier-father appear, and in mine, they make similar entrances: Who are my birth parents? 3 Throughout this essay, I refer to adoption between receiving and relinquishing nations as transnational adoption, rather than international adoption in order to emphasize the trans nature of this process, which as Aihwa Ong delineates “denotes both moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something” (4). In a transnational context, adoption might then be considered in terms of “the transversal, the transactional, the translational, and the transgressive aspects of contemporary behavior and imagination that are incited, enabled, and regulated by changing logics of states and capitalism” (Ong 4). 101 She was down on her luck, and he was probably a G.I. When she became pregnant, she was in a bad way. There aren’t many things that a single woman in that country can do. She left you on the orphanage steps and loved you so much that she wanted you to come to America. That’s when we chose you. Are there records of my adoption? No. They were lost when the orphanage burned down. (Dobbs, transcript) Whenever I asked questions about Korea, my birth parents, or the adoption’s circumstances, I received this story. My parents enjoyed telling it to me because it’s ours. It’s a love story. Reiterated throughout my life, it’s proof of our bond, which is thicker than blood because they chose me. 4 To question it in some ways betrays that love, which binds us together as a family despite our differences in heritage and race. I’ve always wondered why questions betray. What do they put pressure on? Why are these gendered representations of my birth mother as a “fallen woman” and my birth father as a hegemonic G.I. “needed ideas” (Enloe xiii)? What needs them? How does an irretrievable birth past compel an inattention to history, while simultaneously underscoring that past as irretrievable? 5 Despite this quandary, “it seemed that everything had a history, everything had a politics” (Enloe xi). This inattention, itself, “is a political act” (Enloe xii). Similar 4 Per “a motherhood myth” described by Karen March, the birth mother is represented as “this romantic ideal…that had to give you up and suffers in silence and still wants you” to counteract the taboo of a mother relinquishing her child (85). The “chosen child story” furthers that romance by normalizing motherhood as a chosen and desired state. 5 Not only is a birth past at stake for the adoptee, but also a present and future for the birth family continues to exist in time simultaneously with the adoptive family, despite an adoptee’s inability to contact birth ties and bring them into dialogue with adoptive ones. 102 to Sorrow’s blindfold, it conceals process, but it also provides the occasion for feminist curiosity. Yet a feminist lens facilitates only a partial view. My discussion is incomplete without considering the military’s role as a metaphorical birth father and the nationalist impulses continuing to inform U.S. transnational adoption. As Cox says, “I was birthed by that war” (11). As an institution, “international adoption was virtually unknown in the United States before World War II,” which afterward led to the immigration of “European orphans, particularly from Germany and Greece, [who] were adopted by American families” as part of the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 (Babb 47, Altstein and Simon 3). As the number of white babies dwindled, receiving countries began to look toward lesser-developed nations, predominately East Asian ones, suffering “the extremes of poverty” (Humphrey and Humphrey 119). Adoptive parent motives varied “from the wish to create or enlarge a family whilst at the same time offering a home to a needy child, to altruistic and humanitarian motives to ‘rescue’ children from suffering” (Humphrey and Humphrey 119). To represent themselves as “altruistic and humanitarian,” adoptive parent narratives required the militarized images of “a fallen birth mother,” “a missing soldier father,” and a “refugee” child in need (Humphrey and Humphrey 119, Enloe xiv). Past studies place nationalist impulses on the sideline in order to focus on “the adoption triad,” consisting of adoptee, birth parents, and adoptive parents. Upon closer examination, this triad predominantly appears as a domestic sphere privileging the adoptive mothers’ experiences and interests and analyzing matters of adoptive motherhood. The birth father and adoptive father are absent in the discussion, and the birth mother is edited out or erased per a secrecy that differentiates U.S. transnational 103 adoption practices from those of other countries. 6 The adoptee is always imagined as a child – such that both temporal and kinship contexts are conflated together – and therefore unable to speak. Others such as agencies, governments, institutions, and organizations must represent and broker the child’s best interests. As Tobias Hübinette observes: … adopted Koreans can well be likened to subalterns in the sense of Gayatri Spivak (1988), as they up until recently could not speak for themselves, represented as they were as mute physical ties by supplying and receiving governments and as grateful objects of rescue by adoption agencies and adoptive parents. (“Bodies” 147) Hübinette’s analogy between the adoptee and subaltern raises Spivak’s original question in the context of transnational adoption: Can the adoptee speak? Or, put another way, if the adoption triad is lopsided, privileging adoptive mother narratives, then how might other parts of that triad talk back to their eliding and militarization? When critics consider how a militarized nationalist mythology shapes transnational adoption narratives, they bracket it as damaging. Elizabeth Bartholet, a law professor at Harvard University and an adoptive mother, serves as an example: Egalitarian politics have also contributed to the new stigmatization, with critics attacking adoption as one of the ultimate forms of exploitation of the poor by the rich, the black by the white, the Third World by the capitalist West, the struggling single mother by the economically privileged couple. The fact that adoption functions to improve the economic situation of birth mother and child is ignored. (174) Bartholet’s argument acknowledges but does not address the disparities between adoptive and birth parents that make adoption possible. By gendering the birth parents in the triad as a “birth mother,” she partakes of the militarized imagery that recalls “a fallen woman” 6 According to Mary Kathleen Benet, the U.S. relies upon a Western ideal of adoption in which “the links between the adoptee and his original family” are “completely severed,” and the “natural parents and adopters” remain “unknown to each other” (14). 104 in economic need, which is, itself, a stigmatized image allowing for the adoptive mother to appear in contrast as a practitioner of “patriotic motherhood” improving the situation of “the struggling single mother” (Enloe xiv, Bartholet 174). Her critical resistance also stigmatizes analyses that question in addition the political and social inequalities underlying transnational adoption. Why is curiosity stylized as a betrayal? More interestingly, what does this curiosity reveal? I begin by broadening the triad to include fathers as represented by the military and the nation. What is the role of the military in constructing U.S. transnational adoption? Given that construction, how is a nationalist mythology supported? What gendered representations result, and what do they reify? My investigation further discloses how adoptive parent sympathy binds with nationalist impulses in order to establish a kinship fiction that attempts to follow the syntax of blood. At the same time, it tries to dissolve birth connections by invoking gendered representations of the birth parents and sealing birth documents. I contend that adoptee difference is absorbed and reconstituted through multicultural kitsch as a means of evacuating an adoptee’s past, while at the same time racializing an adoptee within multiculturalism. Just as essential and nationalist as a blood fiction, “the chosen child narrative” may be overly determined for the sake of upholding a nationalist mythology depicting the U.S. as a melting pot that’s sympathetic to the needs of the world’s orphans. 7 My study thus brings to the surface complex gender and nationalist narratives implicitly reaffirmed by the 7 Writing about intercultural adoption as a national fantasy, Kristina Fagan notes how Native American adoptees do not realize “a utopian cross-cultural identity” in their lived experiences and instead confront “confusion, alienation, and the feeling that they have no identity at all” (263). 105 militarizing of U.S. transnational adoption in order to understand how this institution is discursively formed. 8 Militarizing Adoption As mentioned, U.S. transnational adoption emerged as the result of World War II “with the occupied nations of Germany, Japan, Italy and Greece” serving as “the main sources of children” (Benet 120). The first transnational adoptees were war refugees, a diaspora of orphaned children, and later the biracial children of U.S. servicemen stationed in Japan (Altstein and Simon 3). The first wave arrived in 1949 via Pearl S. Buck’s advocacy “on behalf of Amerasian children” (Melosh 192). Directly appealing to the consciences of Americans, Buck “called [them] to account for these young victims of war” (Melosh 192). Alongside this altruism, “retribution towards the countries that had lost the war also played its part in preventing the large-scale effort necessary to rehabilitate families” (Benet 120-121). Instead of a provision for adoption included in the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, political measures could have reconnected child refugees with their families. Placed in this context, transnational adoption is not a foregone conclusion. U.S. white families began to adopt as a “humanitarian enterprise” to provide “homes and families to children who would otherwise languish in orphanages” (Tessler, Gamache, and Liu 8). Agencies with a white middleclass clientele in mind began to respond to the growing interest in adopting war orphans. But once the socio-ecnomic 8 I follow “narratives” because, as Sandra Patton notes, “our struggles for social meaning occur in narrative form” (4). Transnational adoptee narratives “deconstruct and denaturalize the [categories] of ‘native,’” ‘blood kinship,’ and ‘family’ by writing identities “through the trope of difference” (Patton 8). These narratives are dialectics between “cultural routes” and “roots” that create “paths of travel and paths of institutional knowledge” (Clifford 21, Patton 18). 106 infrastructures of these sending countries became stronger, “the flow of international adoptions of Japanese and Chinese children had slowed to a trickle” (Tessler, Gamache, and Liu 9). While looking at the militarized origins of transnational adoption, it’s important to note that the practice arose as part of U.S. international humanitarian efforts, an impulse that’s uniquely Western. Mary Kathleen Benet compares the Western ideal to that of Eastern countries with a long history of open adoption. The former is predicated upon the notion “that the primary reason for adoption is to rescue a child separated from his natural family” and stems from “the break-up of the extended family under the impact of industrialization and urbanization” (Benet 14). These impulses are missing from countries such as Japan and India where adoption served as a “means of allying oneself, or at least one’s child, with a ruling family” and to extend kinship connections (Benet 14- 15). In a U.S. context, this Western ideal is adjusted to include the rise of U.S. hegemony and increased U.S. military involvement as part of Cold War containment. Following World War II, the US rewrote its foreign policy to take on the positions of champion and watchdog of global democracy. Transnational adoption easily fit into the U.S.’s new view of its role in the world. As part of its new international role, the U.S. declared war on Korean communist forces, sponsored by Russia, attempting to consolidate the entire peninsula. As a result, the Korean War initiated widespread U.S. interest in transnational adoption and established Korea as the primary source of children. The largest cohort of transnational adoptees in U.S. history immigrated through a special act of Congress that bypassed race quotas limiting nonwestern immigration. “Initially, the Korean children adopted internationally – from the mid-1950’s through the early 1970’s 107 – were biracial or of mixed race, having Korean mothers and Caucasian military fathers,” suggesting that some blood tie to the U.S. was a prerequisite for adoptive kinship (Freundlich 15). The occupying army, in this sense, became the birth father assuming responsibility for biracial children, “since many of their mothers were unwilling and – above all – were unable to raise them” (Benet 121). At the same time, the willingness of the white middle class to embrace children so racially different from themselves supported the export of a U.S. mythology as the world’s leader in humanitarian effort, a country of Diaspora, and a land of equal opportunity. Rebecca Burditt, reading Look magazine’s photo scrapbook titled “An ‘Unadoptable’ Finds a Home” (published in the 1961 June issue), explores “the transformation of Hong Soon Im, a mixed-race Korean War orphan, into Susan Hughes, American” and notes how this process reveals the magazine’s efforts to narrate “how American abundance, moral superiority, and charitable outreach rescued orphans from their former lives” (107). The capacity to feel sympathy for an international child despite prevailing racial biases against transnational adoption (“Occasionally, an unthinking person would ask [the Hughes family] how they could have accepted ‘that strange little girl’ as their own”) valorizes the white middle-class family (saving “the tragic fruit of war”) within a rescue narrative that seems to lay to rest U.S. racial superiority (Burditt 109). However, this use of domesticity – informed by “the broader ideals of patriotism, humanitarian outreach, and first world superiority” – participated in the U.S. global containment of communism and specifically responded to its “most detrimental effects (depriving children of what they conceived to be a ‘proper’ family and living environment’) one child at a time” (Burditt 111). In other words, transnational adoption 108 became a means of “what Elaine Tyler May famously called ‘domestic containment,’” partaking of “a postwar nostalgia that U.S. citizens actively sought and constructed for themselves” to escape the political, intellectual, and social shifts of that time (Burditt 111). The before and after shots of Hong Soon Im transformed into Susan Hughes seemingly attest to the power of the white middle-class family to intervene against communism’s harmful repercussions and to establish a bulwark against communism. Yet despite “success narratives” such as Hong Soon Im/Susan Hughes, postwar domesticity still required national defense. Toward that objective, race quotas against non-westerners remained in place and efforts to strengthen the U.S. family dominated immigration discourse. For example, the 1952 Act sought to preserve the family unit by extending non-quota visas to “any immediate relative of a U.S. citizen;” however, “adopted children were the only group of family-based aliens omitted from the effort” (Matthews 38). The reason for this lies in the U.S. xenophobia: “Congress feared that the inclusion of adoption would invite bogus adoptions strictly for the purpose of circumventing the immigration laws of the U.S.” (Matthews 38). Adoptees consequently immigrated to the U.S. under acts such as the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, “specifically designed to enable Korean War orphans (many the children of American soldiers) to be adopted by proxy” (Benet 125). The legislation’s very name suggests that these children were not seen as immigrants, but rather as refugees and thus part of humanitarian aid efforts. (For this reason, the Korean American community calls transnational adoptees and war brides of Korean descent a silent immigration.) 109 Transnational adoption thus became part of U.S. assistance to South Korea toward helping it to rebuild its infrastructure and fortifying it against communist influence. “By binding war relief with the relief of underdevelopment,” the U.S. ensured long-term access to Korea’s children in contrast to the temporary access facilitated by post-World War II reconstruction (Benet 123). Without Western hegemony and “the increasingly underdevelopment of its client states” transnational adoption would not have emerged as a part of the U.S. national consciousness (Benet 121). Access to children would not be possible without “the necessary catalysts” of “military involvement or a large foreign community” (Benet 121). For the U.S., military involvements in Korea and Vietnam created a new pool of children who supplied a U.S. demand for infants, a group that had steadily declined given the rise of contraception in the 1950’s. Following the Vietnam War, “similar humanitarian efforts also occurred in the early 1970’s, when large numbers of children orphaned or abandoned during the Vietnam War, as well as the offspring of American soldiers, were adopted by U.S. parents” (Rojewski and Rojewski 3-4). But what the U.S. perceived as aid, Vietnam read as otherwise. The country resisted the assistance of “intercountry adopters because it did not want to become another Korea,” (Benet 123-124). Sending children abroad for adoption became a source of embarrassment and a sign of third-world status for relinquishing countries. Represented by the birth mother and therefore gendered as feminine, relinquishing countries appear weak, poor, and in need of charity. Keeping this in mind, critics against transnational adoption rally around the birth mother, arguing that the practice “moves in a single direction from Third World to developed countries” (Humphrey and Humphrey 131). Relinquishing countries seeking 110 to phase out the institution declare their children “their most precious resource.” South Korea is a good example. During the 1988 Olympic games in Seoul, world reporters criticized South Korea for treating its babies as an export commodity. Within the nation itself, Korean journalists followed the Western newspapers by labeling “their own country as the global number one orphan or child exporting country (koasuch’ulguk or agiscuh’ulguk), a humiliating self-appellation, which still haunts Korea,” despite the fact that it’s no longer the number one relinquishing nation (Hübinette Comforting an Orphaned Nation 72). Public outcry thus led the Korean government to drastically limit the number of annual transnational adoptions and to encourage domestic adoptions. However, the lack of a comprehensive welfare system to support the swelling number of orphans and their low placement rate in domestic adoptions led the South Korean government to restart its transnational adoption program in 1994 and to delay “[eliminating] the program until the distant year of 2015” much to the dismay of the public (Hübinette Comforting 74). Critics in support of transnational adoption reject claims of exploitation because “there is no real conflict between the interests of the sending and those of the receiving nations” (Harnack 185). For these critics, such political discussions are not in “the best interests of the child” (Harnack 185). What’s uncomfortable about the proponents’ position is its insistence upon centering conversation on the child, while at the same time neglecting the child’s transnational reality. By erasing context and focusing upon the child’s needs, supporters essentially place the conversation in a U.S. nationalist frame by stylizing themselves as humanitarians. The conversation thus becomes more about them as benefactors who have the potential to put children in contact with U.S. abundance. 111 Moreover, transnational adoption continues to require a gendered relationship between sending and receiving countries, whereby the birth mother relinquishes the child to an adoptive hegemony. Why must transnational adoption only be practiced in one gender normative way such that the child is uprooted and represented as an extension of U.S. humanitarian effort? The role of the military in creating and structuring U.S. transnational adoption does not stop with war. Militarization does not always require soldiers; instead, it “is a step-by-step process by which a person or a thing gradually comes to be controlled by the military or comes to depend for its well-being on militaristic ideas” (Enloe 3). Those militaristic ideas include the gendered and nationalist narratives shaping transnational adoption and the gendered and nationalist values that they uphold. Though militarization requires “both women’s and men’s acquiescence,” it “privileges masculinity” via hero worship and epic spectacle and relegates femininity to more humdrum, supporting roles (Enloe 4). From the beginning, U.S. transnational adoption upheld the militarized values of a soldier’s responsibility to his children and a nation’s desire to widen its hegemony. Both narratives easily supported a nationalist mythology of “your tired and poor, your huddled masses yearning to break free.” All the while, the birth mother was strikingly and necessarily absent. Transnational adoption followed the odyssey of the soldier/birth- father seeking to reclaim his child and served the nation’s interest in expanding its hegemony through humanitarian influence. In this way, fatherhood remained militarized even after a soldier completed his tour of duty, and the child continued to represent a successful U.S. aid campaign. 112 As the numbers of available children in Korea and Vietnam lessened, U.S. transnational adoption became seemingly demilitarized by looking to South American countries and China for children, who constitute the third and fourth waves of transnational adoptees. Though these children are not the result of U.S. military interventions, they are still represented in a militarized frame as “orphans who are in a state of great need” (Shapiro, Shapiro, and Paret 100). In other cases, such as Latin America, the role of the U.S. in producing the violence, poverty, and civil war that gave rise to orphaned children is obscured or ignored altogether. For example, Laura Riggs looks at U.S. Latin America Policy in relation to transnational adoption and observes the U.S.’s complicity in and, at other times, direct funding of Latin American insurgencies that led to the formation of illegal adoption. 9 Moreover, she touches upon the legal battles waged by U.S. adoptive families, stylized as “beleaguered innocents, duped citizen- consumers in a globalized marketplace,” seeking to keep the children despite learning that their adoptions were illegal (357). U.S. wealth, conflated with effective parenting, contrasts with birth parent poverty/poor parenting skills and suggests returning illegally adopted children to their birth families is harmful to the innocents (Riggs 357). Similar to the U.S. military’s invocation of feminism as a justification to intervene and “save overseas women from oppression,” the needs of children have in the past served as a pretense for U.S. military maneuvers. “Operation Babylift,” “the mass evacuation of 9 It is worth mentioning that Guatemala, second only to China, provides the most children to the United States, which continues to allow U.S. families to adopt from Guatemala despite U.N. documented cases of illegal trafficking of kidnapped children at all national levels. Riggs notes that “It was not until June 1998, when former president Jorge Rafael Videla was arrested and charged with running a government-sponsored illegal adoption operation during the Dirty War, that these claims [birth families seeking to prosecute adoptive families through the Argentine courts] gained official status” (359). The U.S. support of the junta throughout the Dirty War included not only training military and junta leaders, but also close political ties and assurances “that there would be no interference from the United States in the Dirty War campaign of assassination and torture” (Riggs 359). 113 children just ahead of the advancing North Vietnamese army, exposed the political use to which the war orphans were being put” and served as a classic example of how adoptees can be used as leverage at the international negotiating table (Benet 128). In contrast, the needs of the children in the Guatemalan context provide sufficient cause for perpetuating illegal adoption through a lack of U.S. political action and widespread public support for adoptive families seeking to maintain (or rather legalize) their unlawful claims in the courtroom. With the overt absence of the military, the gender focus swerves from birth father to adoptive mother. Psychologists and anthropologists have written much research about adoptive mothers, their motivations, and their bonding experiences with adoptees. According to Nora Rose Moosnick, transnational adoption allows women to resolve gendered images of “the perfect woman,” who “discards her needs for those of her children” and “the infertile woman,” who is viewed as inadequate (9). Adoptive motherhood becomes a means for women to become “whole” (Moosnick 10). When birth fathers appear in discussion or when their rights are recognized, they are portrayed as threatening presences to birth mothers, who “feared or refused to name the fathers of their babies and thus were discouraged from seeking agency services” (Hibbs 135). Moreover, they potentially damage adoptive mothers’ claims by derailing or slowing the adoption process (Moosnick 106-107). In this context, the birth father’s absence or estrangement from his child benefits the adoption process. Within the triad, the adoptee is necessarily fatherless. Though earlier agencies, oftentimes attached to missionary efforts, required adoptive families to be Christian, current guidelines “make international adoption a 114 solution for family building” by being cheaper, easier, faster, and more closed than domestic adoptions (Shapiro, Shapiro, and Paret 99). Yet adoption procedures are largely uneven and based upon the norms of the relinquishing country: “each country determines its own criteria for the eligibility of children for international adoption and for the selection of adoptive parents” (Shapiro, Shapiro, and Paret 100). 10 Still, this option is more attractive. Given the cultural, economic, geographic, linguistic, and political distances that a birth family would have to cross, the chances of them reasserting their kinship rights are improbable. Where transnational adoption was once seen as a temporary U.S. interest following the Korean War, it now appears as a long-term institution requiring more multinational measures to protect all three members of the triad, especially given the rise of baby trafficking and independent adoptions. 11 U.S. transnational adoption could easily become remilitarized via the very gendered and nationalist narratives that its militarization created in the first place. As Enloe argues, “it is precisely because guns are so easily converted from unmilitarized to militarized instruments that they and their suppliers and wielders are worthy of close attention” (4). Transnational adoption’s suppliers and receivers are likewise worthy of close attention. I now turn my focus toward the adoptive parents to discuss how their narratives partake of gendered and 10 In order to establish formal global standards for transnational adoption, the Hague Convention requires “each member state to designate its own Central Authority that will ensure the state’s compliance with its provisions,” which follow the stipulation of “the best interests of the child” (Lisa Ellingson 16). Best interests are met in terms of hierarchical possibilities with the child remaining with the birth family as the top priority and transnational adoption as the last resort. Sixty-nine member states that participate in transnational adoption either by relinquishing or receiving children belong to the Hague Convention. It is expected to come into force in the United States beginning in 2007 (Ellingson 16). 11 See Nancy C. Baker’s Baby Selling for a comprehensive study of black market adoptions. 115 nationalist impulses and to imagine ways in which the adoptee might strip these back in order to write her/his own story. A Small Circle of Light “As the dark settles in” Lima, Peru, Elizabeth Bartholet, a prominent Harvard law professor and transnational adoption advocate, finds herself playing with Christopher, her newly adopted Peruvian infant, “in a small circle of light on the floor” (21). In Family Bonds, she writes that only a few traces of civilization that illumine a way through “the adoption world of Lima” lay outside that circle (19). Bartholet catalogues “a tea strainer, which gives a sense of civilization but fails to keep the coffee grounds out of the coffee” and “the serene dining room of the Hotel Crillon, a wonderfully civilized place I have discovered next door to my apartment building” (11, 17). These with the telephone, “the one bright note in the survey of the apartment,” shine more luminously within the darkness of Lima, Peru, and their glow brings to light how “the dark settles in” her very adoptive parent narrative (11, 21). Bartholet intertwines her adoption process with the conventional hegemonic tale of a civilizing light. This fiction reaches its climax when she experiences a blackout in her apartment building provided by the adoption agency: As the door slams behind me, the lights go out in the hallway. It’s entirely black. I make my way by touch to the emergency stairs. Then I hear someone running on one of the floors above me and wonder if this person has put out the building lights as a prelude to robbing those inside. I go down the thirteen flights as fast as I dare, terrified that I will fall and bash my new baby’s head in. In the blackness I go past the lobby floor and end up in the basement garage, and I have to climb back up to reach the lobby. When I get out onto the street, there are so many people and cars that it takes me a while to realize that there are no lights out here either. I walk 116 up and down looking for Oriola, not quite believing that I am carrying all my valuables on the streets where I was told never to walk with more than a few dollars. In the blackness, I fall into a hole, and as I cradle the baby’s head, I recall having noticed the two-foot-deep potholes that riddle the sidewalks of downtown Lima. Presumably they housed gracious trees in earlier, elegant times . . . Finally the lights come on, people cheer, the gate is opened, and we are allowed to go back upstairs. As I walk down the hallway toward our door, I hold the baby to me and tell him that we will make it through the rest of what Lima and life have to offer. (17-18) Lima appears in Bartholet’s description as a literal black out and recalls light/dark metaphors recurrent throughout Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The apartment building’s design and downtown geography are both architecturally described as black holes in which she must “climb back up” to get out. They are part of a larger labyrinth. In this way, Peru terrifies as a place of cultural implosion and, at the same time, cultural evacuation. The black hole becomes a pothole reminiscent of “earlier, elegant times.” Similarly collapsed into a singular dark image, the Peruvians are represented as thieves. Carrying all her valuables on the street, Bartholet fears being robbed not only of money, but also of her child. This fear, coupled with her horror of the uncivilized dark, becomes critical to cementing her adoptive bond with the Peruvian infant. Emerging from the darkness, she speaks for the first time to the child, vowing “we will make it through the rest of what Lima and life have to offer” (18). The darkness of this scene allows Bartholet to confront her earlier concerns while in the Hotel Crillon’s light: “I wonder what is wrong with me that I have not immediately and completely attached to this wonderful child” (17). Where tears first gave evidence of Bartholet’s sympathy for an absolute stranger (“There are tears on my cheeks as he is removed. Yes, I’m tired after some forty hours without sleep. But I had begun to connect with this tiny creature during the moments I held him.”), the 117 black hole/pothole of Lima, Peru heightens her sympathy to the intensity of parental ownership. In this way, the metaphorical darkness in which Bartholet is plunged intensifies the intimacy she forges with the child. The black hole/pothole provides her with enough dramatic stakes to carve out a provisional domestic sphere figured as a small circle of light. As a nationalist space, she and her Peruvian adoptee, re-named Christopher, begin to naturalize the “play-acting quality” of their adoptive bond to prepare for return to the United States (17). But just as the darkness allows the light to shine more brightly, so does the “play-acting quality” increase the need to complete the naturalization process in the United States. This adoptive mother “feels very alone and anxious for the time to pass” (21). Bartholet’s small circle of light is an outpost for the brilliance of a U.S. mythology. As mentioned earlier, U.S. transnational adoption emerges from politically charged circumstances ranging from U.S. involvement in wars to severe domestic turmoil within sending countries. Economic difficulties result in a supply of children eligible for transnational adoption. This trend is also true for its opposite: “When things are going well, very little cross-border adoption takes place” (Pertman 73). The United States is the number one adopter of the world’s children, and it is also the last superpower. With such stark disparities, “some critics of international adoption have seen it as a form of imperialism – a transfer of children from poor to rich nations that is a repugnant extension of the transfer of natural and human resources that structures global capitalism” (Melosh 194). In response, Bartholet and others dispute these claims by citing that the social ills giving rise to adoption do and will always exist. Yet this is highly doubtful, since sending countries historically rebuild their infrastructures and then halt 118 transnational adoptions. Bartholet further argues that “while international adoption holds the potential to be exploitive, it is not inherently exploitive,” and yet she overlooks how her very adoptive narrative represents the adoptee as more than a child (xxi). As more, the adoptee disappears. In The International Adoption Handbook, Myra Alperson stylizes her “child-to-be” as an opportunity for cross-cultural exchange: “The longer I thought about it, the more the idea became an enticing way to enrich my own life by learning about the country my child-to-be came from while I would hope to share my background with my child” (xvii). Dovetailing into a celebration of difference, Alperson’s narrative reveals the insufficiency of the transnational adoption advocates’ position, which centers conversation on the child’s best interests and needs. In this context, these interests and needs are solely economical and privilege the U.S. as “the most fit to mother,” thus furthering its representation as a land of opportunity to the world’s immigrants. 12 Recalling Rebecca Burditt’s work on Hong Soon Im/Susan Hughes, Alperson’s desire to form cross-cultural connections implies participating in a global context that she is able to control. In other words, she creates personal links to political abstractions and folk culture rather than conversing with the child’s individual material realities that have created the circumstances of adoption (Burditt 111). With representations of the adoptee ranging from social experimentation to refugee and from Sorrow to chosen child, these and other meanings heavily burden the syntax of adoption. Following the syntax of blood, adoption kinship relies upon a simile 12 Studying historic representations, Claudia Nelson traces the rhetorical focus on the economic aspects of adoption as part of U.S. 19 th C concerns about “saving children.” By teaching adoptees how to respect and manage money, adoptive households inculcated middleclass morality in the children: “Julius will not grow up to be a drunkard, a brute, or an unmarried father” (65). As Nelson elucidates, “associating the displaced child with money furthers the representation of that child as someone who can, quite literally, be ‘saved’” and, by implication, portrays the adoptive parent as savior and benefactor (65). 119 “by making the constructed relationship as much like the biological as possible” (Modell 2, my emphasis). Due to the pressure of gendered and nationalist representations, this narrative falls apart and instead reveals a long history of utilizing the adoptee as discursive terrain: American writers and commentators have long used perceptions of the displaced child both to engage in major efforts at social engineering and to express deeply felt anxieties on issues central to our lives, including ethnicity, social class, work, gender, and family. Sometimes their rhetoric may seem to approximate children’s lived experience; sometimes it has relied upon child-figures whose idealized virtue, plasticity, or lack of personality may appear more imaginary than real. (Nelson 177) Therefore how a discourse approximates the adoptee’s “lived experience” discloses its larger aims separate from adoption. Consequently in a nationalist context, Adam Pertman writes, “it’s no accident” that the United States is the number one receiver of transnational adoptees; “after all every one of us came to this extraordinary country from somewhere else” (68). Pertman’s interpretation invokes a mythology that, as argued by Claudia Castaneda, is part of an adoptive parent fantasy of “morphed reproduction,” “a mode of re-racializing reproduction that does not obey the rules of historical or biological logics” (286). This power to melt adoptee differences within the pot of the United States “is a kind of morphing in that it proceeds by a similar process of evacuation, selection, erasure, and re-inscription.” Renaming the adoptee is, perhaps, one example of this process. Because of the abovementioned power, transnational adoption has become a popular alternative in “that it will allow [adoptive parents] to avoid dealing with a fundamental aspect of their children’s past: the birth parents” (Pertman 72). Moreover, sheer geography places great cultural distance between child and birth parents that 120 “would be far away and unlikely to reclaim their children” (Melosh 192-93). But why should adoptive parent love require such provisions? These among others disclose this love as a complex set of practices with high nationalist stakes. “At home,” writes Barbara Melosh, “depictions of international adoption often relied on self congratulatory images of rescue . . . such accounts dramatize the encounter of once impoverished children with American bounty” (193-94). Reading an adoptive parent’s account of their adoption of a Romanian girl, Melosh highlights a crucial shift in their narrative: “As this adopter encounters the shock of conditions in Romania, her tone changes to petulant entitlement . . . Longing for home, she fantasizes about the comforts of American consumer goods” (195). Here, Bartholet’s small circle of light widens to include the glow of the U.S. middleclass family. The great white refrigerator is a spotlight on how an abandoned waif is transformed into a prosperous American baby, “with market metaphors abounding” (Melosh 194). “Unreflective celebrations of American prosperity and disdainful recoil from the other” bolster adoptive parent freedom to evacuate, select, erase, and re-inscribe the adoptee as a means of extending American blessings (Melosh 195). And by this power, transnational adoptive parents assume “a power to reproduce” not held to the constraint or contingency of history (Castaneda 287). This morphing caters to a nationalist fantasy in which native differences are neatly blended and subsumed in such a way that remakes the nation into a global ideal. Pertman seems to support such a vision and views transnational adoption as part of that continuing American legacy: “Rather, one of the genuinely noble, enriching aspects of the American sensibility – notwithstanding the intolerance of some narrow-minded 121 people – is its celebration of people’s connection to the past” (69). But as with Pertman’s list of minority imagery (“African print dress, the delights of Asian restaurants,” etc.) that past does not necessarily clarify a specific and individual life history, but rather that past maintains and advances a U.S. mythos. Though morphing may satisfy adoptive parent desires, it does not always result in a cohesive transnational adoptee self. The adoptive parent power to evacuate, erase, select, and re-inscribe a transnational adoptee’s history oftentimes results in internal violence. In “A Few Words from Another Left-Handed Adopted Korean Lesbian,” Mi Ok Song Bruining, one of the first Holt Agency Korean American adoptees, attests to that violence as manifested in her suicidal ideations: I could not find a way, did not know how to integrate my false self – in acting and being white like my white, adoptive parents and their three children – and my true self – in feeling Asian/Korean – into one complete whole self. I was both and neither. I was suicidal. (66) What is most striking in Song Bruining’s narrative is the lack of a way to negotiate routes through cultural space as a means to establish roots of her own. If kept in ignorance about historical roots, the adoptee’s dialectic possibilities are stymied. In light of Song Bruining, a life is at stake if such a dialectic appears impossible. While not all transnational adoptees experience a feeling of loss or even anxiety, sufficient numbers have persuaded adoption agencies to abandon the fantasy of blind assimilation. Adoption agencies now “advise prospective parents to incorporate their children’s heritage into daily life” (71). 13 13 I resist interpretations of adoptee roots that view adoption as “a primal wound” such as in Nancy Newton Verrier’s work and the writings of Betty Jean Lifton. Viewing birth heritage as the true self perpetuates a simplistic binary between false and real that privileges blood kinship without realizing that it, too, is a narrative. By valuing blood as authentic knowledge, Verrier and Lifton unwittingly participate in the socio- 122 Various commodities are currently in place to aid adoptive parents in following adoption agency advice. But these cultural objects re-inscribe a nationalist view of native adoptee culture devoid of personal history and memory. Oftentimes mass-produced artifacts of folk culture, they are available online at www.celebratethechild.com and other places easily accessed through agency site links. At this site among others, a shopper can select from adoptee countries, and from there, choose among generic items such as infant-sized traditional costumes, fans, Christmas tree ornaments, recipes, and adoptive parent pride t-shirts. Lacking specific meaning, these objects appear more as kitsch, rather than as dialectical images that would place the adoptee in contact with “the transitoriness of all circumstances” or her/his particular circumstances as sources of meaning (Olalquiaga 27). Re-inscribed upon the adoptee, these failed commodities stylize an image that speaks “of all that it has ceased to be” (Olalquiaga 28). For a moment, costumes and fans clothe the adoptee in an illusion of completeness without either a past or future. It’s perhaps no wonder that the adoptee, in this scene (and even in popular imagination), is always and already suspended in time as a child. As such, the adoptee is genderless and caught in a nostalgic, U.S. multicultural narrative. This representation subjects the adoptee to constant editing and keeps her/him from a sense of history. The foreword to I Wish for You a Beautiful Life, an anthology of birth mother letters shorn of all particulars, declares the text “not intended for children.” Whether the authors intended children under 18 or children as a kinship term is unclear. Yet later in the foreword, the word “children” is revised to “the adopted person’s feelings genetic language of Social Darwinism. In a transcript from an interdisciplinary symposium of the Child Welfare League of America, the question of whether an Oriental child’s genetic inheritance would prevent her/his adaptation to U.S. society was answered negatively, which further sparked conversation about how the Oriental may be particularly suited from among all race groups for international adoption (16-17). 123 or needs,” and maturity is defined by emotional status, not biological years. The text later returns to “child” as a means of reifying an adoptive parent’s status as chief editor, “best equipped to select those parts of these letters that best express what their children need to hear at any given time.” Time, in this foreword, is heavily regulated, and it appears as a morphing process set on loop. As a child, an adoptee is always subject not only to the editor’s pen, but to the law’s paternalism. Since an 1881 Kansas Supreme Court ruling, the notion of the child’s best interests serves as a guiding wisdom for all laws governing US adoption. This same position supported a 1917 trend of sealing birth records and documents that continues to this day (Wegar 26-27). Adult adoptees have contested this practice by arguing that closed records intended to protect them as children bar them from an inherent right to information as adults. As a fully realized subject, the adult adoptee’s claim to the right to know her/his identity has gained greater visibility and momentum in the past ten years through cultural texts such as documentary films, books, and anthologies, as well as grassroots organizing in the form of political activism. Bastard Nation, for example, “which advocates for the civil and human rights of adult citizens who were adopted as children” is one such organization (www.bastardnation.org). In the context of transnational adoption, the Hague Convention privileges domestic adoption over transnational adoption, and by doing so argues that maintaining an adoptee’s social and national contexts, whenever birth kinship bonds have been severed, is more favorable (Ellingson 16). In this way, the Hague supports keeping an adoptee’s native culture intact; however, it does not provide legal provisions for ensuring that an adoptee’s birth records are safeguarded and accessible in either domestic or transnational adoption. 124 The question of transnational adoptee rights overlaps with children’s rights within the global sphere. This coupling is most evident in the language of the United Nations Declaration of Children’s Rights, which was issued in response to international concern regarding kidnapping and baby trafficking. As Mark Jerng observes, both the Hague Convention and the UN Declaration echo one another’s affirmations to provide “due regard … [to] the desirability of continuity in a child’s upbringing and to the child’s ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic background” and to recognize “the right of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family relations as recognized by law” (Jerng 2 as quoted in Sharon Stephens). Yet neither document fully defines what a child’s identity is, despite the objective to protect it “against unnecessary or unlawful displacement from origin or home” (Jerng 3). Articulating that identity in the context of rights is a difficult task. On one hand, the Hague and UN Declaration imply that transnational adoptee identity is static, retrievable, and sufficiently fixed to warrant its recognition, and on the other hand, this identity must take into account evolving relationships that include adoptive bonds and contexts. The right to an identity therefore raises the larger question of whether such a right is innate. Jerng argues that “the right to identity or continuity are not rights that inhere in a person, but rather ‘rights’ that make demands of others, that make claims on others for protection and preservation” similar to social and economic rights that impose positive obligations on government (4). However, the right to an identity places this claim on persons. In thinking about transnational adoptee self-determination and personhood, consideration needs to be given to the larger discourse that frames rights, 125 which does not necessarily follow in a transnational adoptee context due to the lack of an obvious or visible right that exists inside him/her. Yet requiring sealed documents for validation implies that adoptive kinship bonds are so weak that they dissolve when faced with blood ones, yet this need not be the case. Open records make possible dialectics between birth and adoptive narratives, cultures, and contexts that enable the transnational adoptee to forge routes across nations. In other words, adoptee rights have to do with potential mobility and the ability to create an evolving sense of personhood. Though open records give the impression of great risk, they may effectively create a dialectical space for the transnational adoptee not to look belatedly at the past, but rather to imagine a future as an adult, not a child in the temporal sense, and in this way, to speak back to the militarized forces that have shaped and continue to affect transnational adoption. Sorrow’s Aria, or Gathering Routes Beginning again after the opera ends, I imagine that Sorrow, a citizen of Japan, immigrated to the United States with the assistance of Sharpless, U.S. consul to Japan. Like Hong Soon Im/Susan Hughes, Sorrow was no doubt renamed, and his transformation, which began with Cio-Cio-San blindfolding and handing him a U.S. flag, through ignorance of his birth mother. Surely, the militarization that created the tragic circumstances of his transnational adoption was obscured in order to make his assimilation possible. Or perhaps due to his memories, he developed another narrative, which sought to understand the complexities of his birth mother’s death as well as his immigration to the U.S. during its continued naval program coupled with diplomatic 126 pressure to open up Japan’s ports to global trade. Or he might have felt ambivalence, isolation, or confusion, not knowing how to articulate them in light of the racism he encountered as a biracial transnational subject living in the U.S. during the yellow peril years (1890-1924 when public anti-Asian immigrant sentiment -- represented for example in William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers -- led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act among others, which seemingly attempted to protect the United States). By writing Sorrow’s possible narratives, I want to suggest the variety of directions that transnational adoptee narratives might take in order to grapple with the military origins of and the military’s continued investment in transnational adoption relating to U.S. nationalist stakes. By centering the militarization of transnational adoption, I have sought to bring to light the nationalist and gendered impulses shaping transnational adoption, which suggests that it is not only about the best interests of the child, but also about desire. The nation and adoptive parents represent the adoptee as a nostalgic ideal in order to write upon her/him narratives that sustain a nationalist mythology and gender norms. The adoptee remains in a precarious position. Not an immigrant or a refugee, the adoptee is burdened with additional meanings, and at the same time, he/she seemingly lacks meaning. Entangled in a complex discourse, the adoptee suffers the knowledge that her/his every gesture to narrate his/her story may implicate others and may therefore appear as an unintentional betrayal. Critical thinking appears as ingratitude. Questions seem to interrogate, threaten, or undermine love. The possibility of transgression is therefore part of the process of transversal across social and national contexts, of de-centering a U.S. context in order to recognize how forming a transnational adoptee sense of self is not merely a cosmopolitan act, but 127 rather one that’s necessary to developing a sense of personhood that fully engages with one’s histories and possibilities. Toward these interests, transnational adoptees, primarily those of Korean American heritage due to their size as a community and age range, have shared their stories and anthologized experiences in a wide variety of cultural texts. Due to their aforementioned precarious positions, their accounts are oftentimes scrutinized for cultural authenticity. Elizabeth Kim’s Ten Thousand Sorrows, one of the first nationally distributed autobiographies of a Korean American adoptee, received damaging reviews for its “incorrect cultural references” to dirt floors. The book reviewer (of Korean American descent) cited that homes traditionally have ondol wood floors. Kim’s reception brings to light the “culture test” to which transnational adoptees are unfairly subjected. Authenticity assumes that blood kinship carries cultural knowledge, yet kinship difference disrupts this idea. Alone, a transnational adoptee may “pass” until called upon to perform a cultural text/test such as speaking her/his birth language. Visually passing but unable to perform culturally, the transnational adoptee is both outside yet between cultures, navigating difficult cultural terrain and expectations. Instead of considering the transnational adoptee’s agency in terms of recovering her/his birth culture as a way to become authentic, her/his agency might be contextualized as building routes via international adoptee groups to advance transnational dialogue and advocacy. The former impulse, search for the authentic, has been supported by birth nations in order to strengthen their global political interests. South Korea provides an example of this trend. As transnational adoptees of Korean descent have come of age and economically benefited from their predominantly middleclass upbringings in Canada, Europe, the U.S., Australia, and elsewhere their 128 potential as ambassadors representing Korean blood’s vigor has led to South Korea’s interest in helping adoptees “to reconnect” to abstract notions of Korea, specifically folk culture. However, a national program that supports birth searches and open records has yet to be created. In South Korea, transnational adoptees interested in finding out more information must rely upon adoption agencies (if an agency facilitated the adoption), which have uneven policies regarding if and when they will release records to an adoptee. In some cases where adoptive parents request that their children have access, they are denied. In addition, South Korea’s discomfort with a transnational adoptee Diaspora, which represents a continuing practice that seems contradictory to their economic miracle, attempts to read adoptee birth searches “as blood calling to blood;” that is, evidence of some innate quality within transnational adoptees that make them Korean despite their adoptive kinship bonds. In my own experience, I was interviewed in Los Angeles by the Korean Broadcasting System for Happy Sunday, a television series that publicizes birth searches and reunions. The first question I was asked was if I missed Korea while growing up in the United States and followed by, “Was I treated poorly by my adoptive parents?” These questions entangled me in competing nationalisms and pressured me to shape my narrative in a way that met the expectations of Happy Sunday’s audience. Neither question was mine, nor was I allowed to ask questions during the interview. Other critics – such as Elise Prébin, Eleana Kim, Tobias Hübinette – have documented the role of similar South Korean media and governmental initiatives toward narrating transnational adoptees in such a way that brings them into its global economic interests while at the same time addressing issues of national shame. 129 At present, Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (G.O.A.L.) as well as groups organized under the leadership of the International Korean Adoptee Associations (I.K.A.A.) in the United States, Europe, Australia, Canada, and elsewhere provide transnational adoptees of Korean descent with a worldwide network of resources. These organizations are still attempting to shape their political presences through the competing interests and nationalisms of both the U.S. and South Korea, but still, they enable community and advocacy not exclusively tied to either nation. Instead, annual gatherings promote a dialectical space that, just recently in August 2007 at the fourth gathering in Seoul, featured the first ever Korean Adoptee Studies Symposium consisting of interdisciplinary panels. Another key first included a protest at Dongguk University Subway Station on behalf of birth mothers, who are collecting one million signatures to address the South Korean National Assembly about enlarging social welfare services. Mindeullae, or dandelions, are an activist group of Korean birth mothers who met through the filming of Resilience, a documentary directed by Tammy Chu, about birth mother experiences. With the assistance of Jane Jeong Trenka (author of The Language of Blood and a co-editor of Outsiders Within), they continued to organize to urge the government to support birth mothers and to end transnational adoption. Both the symposium and Mindeullae protest emerged through collaborative efforts stemming from transnational adoptee cultural work and promise future activities that will facilitate models of social justice and political intervention for other transnational adoptee groups, most notably China, as they come of age and seek to transgress militarization and nationalisms fueling inequalities, which produce transnational adoption. What’s at stake is not only love for a child, but her/his 130 enfranchisement as a self-determining adult. For children in the temporal sense, poverty, social stigma, violence, and/or a lack of domestic social welfare services should not force their separation from their families. These inequalities clarify that transnational adoption is rarely a choice that birth families willingly make. Instead, it’s a disfavored option that’s an extension of global economy, where the supply’s demand is inexhaustible. After all, what price might one put on a child? 131 Chapter Six: A Million Dollars “Love shows in the quality of their work, in their hands.” -- Sally T. Benson “If I had a million dollars,” Dad says, “then I would give you and your sister each 100 thousand to do whatever you want with.” Dad points his underdone breadstick at invisible stacks of cash, allocating the funds: 300 thousand dollars pays off the first and second mortgages on the house, another 40 thousand pays off the Kia and the new metal barn, 35 thousand clears two credit cards, and another 80 thousand takes care of a consolidated loan. As a child, I’d heard versions of this same ledger before and laughed with Dad as he played magician, but now visiting from Los Angeles, I feel distressed by his bloated and unshaven face and the stacks of unopened bills bulging from the buffet’s drawers that won’t disappear. “Yes, that would do alright. That’d sure take care of things,” he sighs, while swirling his breadstick in the sky blue gravy boat. Then he grins and says, “Well, I’d take half a million too.” Mom laughs, squeezing my arm, and says, “I’d be happy with just 100 thousand! You would too, right?” Dad offers Holly, my younger sister, another breadstick insisting that she take it before it’s gone and then pushes one on to my plate. “There. You might not get another,” he says. He winks then smiles at me. His teeth are yellow and gray from continuously smoking a pipe for forty years – a habit first meant to keep him alert as a drafted soldier touring in Vietnam but that later became a ritual after finishing evening shifts at the steel 132 mill. Amused, he stares at me, as if waiting to see if I’m going to say no. I love him, so I chew and swallow. Somehow, the bread tastes both ashy and raw. * * * As a twelve-year old, I had never visited the Sheffield Steel Mill where Dad worked nor was I told what happened there. I imagined Dad withstanding the furnace’s flames swirling around him like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abendego whom I remembered from a Sunday school coloring book. Like them, he survived unscathed and returned home smelling of Irish Spring soap. Yet when would this miracle end? Once it did, who would take care of us? So I sat at the kitchen table, obsessively checking homework and fearing that I’d earn poor grades, never be accepted to law school, and thus fail to save us all. In the background, the television chatted, laughed, sighed, gasped, and clapped. Holly slept on the couch while Mom knitted. She always was knitting something. You could tell her mood based on her needles’ speed. Fast, short loops meant she was angry. Slow, short loops implied a hidden frustration. By 1 a.m., Mom had refilled her glass with whole milk. “The real thing,” she called it. The cats, two on her lap and one on her shoulder, would creep toward her glass, dip their paws inside, and lick them clean. Skittish, they would hear Dad’s white pick up truck before we did and bolt down the hallway. We were able to tell time by watching the cats. When Dad walked through the door, he said hi to Holly and me, and then he turned toward Mom, who continued to rock in her chair. My parents’ routine was tender: she laying aside her knitting and he bending down as she stood up to greet him. 133 “Night, Pooch,” she said and kissed him on the cheek as he hugged her while still holding his scratched up lunchbox and a paper sack. Then they parted ways for their other lives – she to take her bath and he to settle into his gray overstuffed recliner. I lingered, watching Dad wake up Holly who hugged him then stumbled down the hallway to her bedroom, and plotted how much money I’d earn someday to rescue him. He wasn’t a handsome man. Unframed by shaggy brown hair, his oblong face seemed slightly off center. In crowds, he tended to smile, pulling his lips tight at the corners and pressing them together while looking around. He shrugged a lot. Yet he had the reputation at work for being reliable and was slender for his age considering most dads had buffet guts at 40. Dad could still wear his dress army uniform, which he once did for presenting the colors during my sixth grade choir recital. “A diamond in the rough,” as Mom called him, he could sketch political cartoons, namely Garfield, which he sometimes contributed to the union newsletter. The fat orange cat would point at the furnace, a smoking black box in the distance, and criticize the company’s reasons for stalling negotiations to reach a fair contract. Yet to me, Dad’s shy grin concealed a slow death that began after work. After pulling the 40-ounce bottle of beer – Natural Light usually was the cheapest at Quick Trip – out of the sack and changing the channel to PBS, he flipped open the tobacco can’s lid with a pocketknife in the glow of a Nova rerun, loaded the pipe with Paladin Black Cherry, bit the metal, clicked the lighter, and sucked the flame in, puffing a little to brighten and drag off the embers. Watching Dad lean back into the smoke, I feared that he would burn to death either inside by tobacco or outside by furnace fire. 134 Mom always shopped for 100% cotton undershirts and socks, which were $1.75 more than 50/50 blend at Wal-Mart, but cotton did not stick to the skin like 50/50 when molten steel dripped on to the fabric. She bought Gatorade mix in bulk for Dad to drink at work and stocked up on off-brand burn creams whenever they went on sale at Woolworth’s. Holly and I cut coupons from the Sunday paper for the drink mix and Little Debbie Snack Cakes for Dad’s lunches. Our combined efforts were successful. He almost never missed work and suffered minor burns, a pretty good record compared to his co-workers who were sent home because of heat exhaustion or whose arms or chests were permanently disfigured due to third degree burns. Yet it was the smaller fire that won. His heart stopped last spring while he walked the furnace floor, checking the strand conveying new posts to the cooling unit. The boss on duty called an ambulance to rush him to Tulsa. Arriving the next morning on the LA- Tulsa red eye flight, I joined Mom and Holly in the waiting room while the doctor continued to perform quadruple bypass surgery. “The doctor’s not sure if your daddy’s going to pull through,” Mom said, staring at her knitting needles stabbing the air to knot purple yarn together for a potholder. The next morning, we saw him in the ICU for five minutes, breathing with the help of a machine but breathing, his face pale and dull like paraffin wax. Mom held Holly’s hand and put her arm around me while she watched the doctor update Dad’s chart. Then the doctor ordered that Dad’s career and smoking end. He handed prescription slips to the nurse who enclosed them in a folder for my Mom, and continued his rounds. 135 “Read these,” the nurse said, pointing to tri-folded pamphlets about lowering cholesterol, “and make an appointment to see Dr. Wagoner in four weeks. Please call us if you have questions.” Without looking at the folder embossed with the hospital’s seal, Mom handed it to me to explain to her later. I opened it and drew a black star next to the hospital’s appointment line number. * * * While I pulled my airport rented Malibu into my parents’ gravel driveway, I saw Dad come outside on to the front porch to greet me. As I parked, I squinted, unsure if that was him waving the hi sign at me, his right hand under his chin flapping up and down like a wing. Dragging my suitcase out of the backseat, I turned around and tried not to stare at him shouting at me to get in here out of the cold. Despite almost a year on a no- salt, low-fat diet, his long face had bloated into an oily, unshaven square. He wore new XXXL denim overalls instead of his usual threadbare jeans held around his waist by a silver buckle engraved with Danny D. “Howdy!” he said. “Hello Dad,” I said, wheeling my suitcase up the yellow-green carpeted steps stained with pig urine, which still faintly smelled acidic and sweet even though Milton Chester Blue Rocket had died two years ago. My parents cremated all 427 pounds of him and stored his ashes in a tin barrel near the door. “You need help with that,” he asked. “No. I’m fine.” 136 “Otay!” he said. Then he held the screen door open for me and limped a little as he walked back to his recliner. Yet momentarily at the dinner table, I recognize him. The father I knew before the heart attack laughs and leans back, because he’s taking care of us all. His cheeks warm up. He waves the breadstick like a wand, and the thin potato soup that tastes like a tub of burned margarine transforms into a 6 oz. filet mignon and lobster plate. Mom’s chicken appliquéd napkins covered with cat hair suddenly loose their animals and whiten into restaurant linens. “All you can eat every night!” he says, and Mom chuckles. “Cool,” she says, “Don’t you think so, Jen-Jen?” * * * Dad has always dreamed of winning the big giveaway, the big pay off that would save us from debt, and as I studied in school and then in college, I fantasized about earning the big money too. Big money was a comet in the Oklahoma sky, and in Oklahoma, the sky is a genuine cause for concern. Strangers bond over the weather and mean it. So my family watched the sky and talked about constellations because Mom’s favorite high school subject was Latin. She and Dad were the first to finish high school in their families. Dad was a founding member of the National Honors Society but was soon drafted after graduation. Returning from Vietnam, he went to work at the Fibercast Plant and then joined Sheffield Steel after marrying Mom. Still, Dad continued to enjoy learning and watched PBS documentaries and science shows. Yet when it was time for Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, or The Price Is Right, he would change the channel. 137 Dad’s plan to get the big money was simple: win the McDonald’s Monopoly Contest. Mine was much more complex – go to college, earn a B.A. in Political Science, go to law school, marry someone rich, become a mean capitalist, and raise an influential family just like in the evening drama series, Dallas. Dad’s strategy involved going through the McDonald’s drive thru twice a week for lunch to collect Monopoly stamps off cups and cartons to complete “the game board,” a McDonald’s tray mat held on to our refrigerator door by cow magnets. That way, he stood a greater chance of finding Park Place and Boardwalk and winning the grand prize, a million dollars. Lesser combinations won smaller prizes that ranged from 100 dollars to 10 thousand to a free cheeseburger during your next visit. Mine entailed learning how to impress the right people on paper and face-to-face, something that I became so good at that friends were surprised to meet my parents, though they never said whom they had expected instead. A ledger of ifs ruled our lives. If we didn’t rent a movie from Pop-n-Go, then we could afford to buy Kraft sandwich slices, not the Bi-Lo ones that smelled like glass cleaner. If Mom cut Dad’s hair, then he saved $5 a month, which added up to an extra utility bill. If Holly and I went to the mall and picked out the clothes we liked, then we knew which dress patterns and fabric were needed for Mom to sew our school clothes. That way, we were able to help our family save almost two car payments. As a sixth grader, if I worked in the school cafeteria as a server, then I saved my parents from buying extra bread for my potted meat sandwiches. If I babysat too after school, then the extra 20 dollars I made each week covered the monthly payment for my flute, the cheapest instrument second to the clarinet. (The most expensive one was the tuba.) If I paid for my flute, then I could learn music. If I practiced arpeggios and etudes 138 at least 3 hours a day, then I might become a proficient flutist, and possibly win contests, which might lead to a full college scholarship. If Dad sold his vacation time, then he could catch up on the mortgage on our ranch-style track house built during the early 70s at the bottom of Birch Street’s cul-de- sac. If he worked overtime, then he earned time and a half. If another guy needed someone to cover his shift, he asked Dad, who always said yes and so earned a reputation for being an all around good guy. If Dad smoked, then he was able to stay awake through two straight shifts: 17 hours a day with two 30-minute breaks in the air-conditioned break room. If he didn’t have the money for his tobacco, then he wouldn’t eat lunch. Instead, he drank the break room coffee provided by the sunshine fund and smoked outside watching the crane operator unload scrap metal delivered by the train. During the McDonald’s Monopoly Contest, Dad found $1.99 ($2.13 with tax) twice a week to buy a number one combo – a plain hamburger, medium drink, and fries. A week into the contest, I realized that he had given up his 40-ounce beer. Instead of his usual brown paper sack, he brought home a wrinkled, greasy McDonald’s bag, laid it on the counter, pulled the cup and fries carton out, and peeled the stamps off each one. If he found a new street like Illinois Avenue, then he would report the news to Mom, Holly, and me. Passing the stamp around, he would talk about the odds, laugh and brag, “Your daddy’s getting lucky,” then kiss Mom on the cheek while she paused from her knitting. Her eyes closed, she’d smile, and her cheeks would ball up like two pink jawbreakers. The McDonald’s Monopoly Contest became family time, a way to share something with Dad that we all understood and cared about – his dream, his excitement, the way he took a chance and sometimes won, and how he failed but kept trying. When 139 Dad threw the entire McDonald’s bag in the trash, we knew that meant Baltic Avenue again, the easiest street to get. Other times, he would simply walk up to Holly and me, sitting on the couch and watching television, and say, “cheeseburger.” Holly and I took turns sharing the occasional stamp for a free cheeseburger, but I ended up giving her mine. “I think this one’s for you,” he said to Holly who smirked at me. “Thank you, Daddy,” she said as he rubbed her head. When he turned around to search for his tobacco can, she tilted her chin up and stuck her tongue out at me. “You know I’m vegetarian,” I said, “Enjoy your soylent green.” “No. You’re a freak,” she said and laughed. “Whatever,” I said. When Dad got Pennsylvania Avenue, I was surprised. When he held up Park Place, I couldn’t believe it. Park Place wasn’t the golden ticket, but it was halfway to a million dollars. Dad just needed Boardwalk, and Park Place was just as hard to find. Mom cheered, throwing aside her knitting, and was already spending the money on bills and a little bit left over for a vacation to Washington D.C. Holly jumped up and down singing “cheeseburger, cheeseburger” over and over again. Dad held the stamp to the ceiling fanlight in amazement. In that moment, I was hopeful and happy. He just might win. “You should invest the money,” I said, “in stocks first because they produce the highest yield despite posing the greatest risk.” My honors sixth-grade class was watching the stock market to learn how to compute percentages. I had studied the issue. “See! You are a freak,” laughed Holly, and she punched me in the arm. 140 “Bette Davis Eyes!” I yelled and pinched her on the neck. Mom and Dad ignored us and instead huddled around the refrigerator, the game board almost entirely covered except for five spaces. One of them was Boardwalk. “You know, Susie,” Dad whispered in her ear, yet Holly and I could hear him, his finger on Indiana Avenue, “I would be happy with 10 thousand dollars.” * * * “I’m writing my thesis right now,” I say. “You’re what? Honey, I can’t hear you,” Dad says. “She’s writing something, Danny,” Mom says. “It’s called a thesis,” I say, “It’s a book-length work on a topic that I’m studying.” Dad nods and takes a sip of his microwaved black coffee. He leans forward and looks me in the eyes. “You know, Jen, you should write a novel, one like those books your mommy likes by that Cat Who lady. She’s written several of them. You’d make good money.” My eyes wander around my parents’ eat-in kitchen. It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Not the dust so thick that it’s gray wool covering the plywood shelves sagging with knick knacks – Mom’s salt and pepper shakers representing all 50 states, Franklin Mint’s “Cats of the World” curio collection, unopened bills tucked in between them, neon ink pens, hair clips, Pepsi bottle caps just in case one’s the winner, and opened pouches of dog treats for the two deaf Boston Terriers that Mom’s training with sign language – nor this clutter, but this conversation about how to get the big money was not supposed to happen ever again. I was going to be J.R. Ewing with a heart, tough as tacks yet mindful of where he came from. Instead, I won a partial college scholarship, worked 141 my way through school, paid for the rest with loans, fell in love with John Milton’s “Areopagitica” and Samson Agonistes, and then spiraled toward creative writing. Now I’m working on a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing and talking about things that my parents don’t understand. The gamble that I’m taking – my dream, my vision – doesn’t involve stamps that I can pass around the kitchen table and that my parents and sister can hold in their hands. Instead, poetry seems like an endgame to them, an abstraction that doesn’t pay the bills, but I’m trying. Waiting for me to say something, Dad squeezes his lips together. He’s trying to be helpful but worries that I think his idea is silly. Yet the failure’s mine. I can’t find a way to explain to him that I know the stakes and odds. So I don’t. “I’m a poet, Dad. I don’t like novels.” “You like money, don’t you?” Dad asks, chuckling and widening his eyes. He looks at Mom, who watches and chews her breadstick. “Well, do you?” he asks. “Yes,” I say. “That’s right,” he says, “With all your fancy education, don’t end up like me and your mommy.” I already have become them despite my academic version of gambling. The clothes I’m wearing are from 6 seasons ago off the clearance rack. While driving from the airport to Cleveland, Oklahoma, I did the math in my head – return the car a day earlier and avoid the higher weekend rate, that little bit extra will make the rent check less hard to scrimp together, $2 for lunch a day saves $3 (I had budgeted $5 a day.), offer to fix dinner for my parents even though they don’t like my cooking, but at least we 142 won’t go to expensive buffets where we’re each bound to find something, don’t think about the student loans I’m racking up, and keep studying and sending out the poetry manuscript even though the contest fees mean beans and tea for a week. What I can’t afford versus what I must plus living and added to what I need for hope equals getting by on financial aid and student wages, but Dad doesn’t understand. He thinks I’m going to be Rich Uncle Pennybags wearing a black top hat. Because I’m his daughter, he wins, and because I love him, I let him think this. “I figure you’re going to make at least 300 thousand dollars, Jen. Just remember your mommy and me and send us the wrinkled-up hundreds. We’ll take those,” he says slapping his knee and opening his mouth wide. Mom squeezes my shoulder, happy to see Dad laughing again, and Holly pokes me in the ribs. “Freak,” she says. “Ouch,” I say, “I love you too, Bette Davis Eyes, and no, Dad, I won’t forget.” 143 Bibliography Alperson, Myra. The International Adoption Handbook: How To Make Overseas Adoption Work for You. New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1997. Altstein, Howard and Rita J. Simon, eds. Intercountry Adoption: A Multinational Perspective. New York: Praeger, 1991. Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. 5000 Years of Korean Art. Seoul, South Korea: Samhwa Printing Company, 1979. Babb, L. Anne, Ethics in American Adoption. Westport: Bergin & Garvey, 1999. Baker, Nancy C. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation consists of two parts: a book of poetry, Paper Pavilion, and a collection of researched essays titled Routes through Transnational Adoption. Paper Pavilion fuses together fairy tales, opera, and traditional Korean and English forms to follow an epic impulse -- beginning and ending as a quest across cultural and geographic distances -- in order to create alternative histories from paradoxes, absences, and speculations arising from a post-Korean War Diaspora of which transnational adoptees are a part. The critical part, Routes through Transnational Adoption, seeks to build embodied and communal routes, rather than retrieve cultural roots, through transnational adoption by interweaving memoir and literary research. Based on the trajectory of search, specifically one that fails to uncover personal facts, this collection of essays considers the military 's role in originating and perpetuating transnational adoption in order to write through it. Oftentimes imagined as a child refugee who benefits from U.S. humanitarianism and economic opportunity, the transnational adoptee lacks agency because others must speak for her/him. Moreover, her/his cultural authenticity is questioned due to lacking memory. Seeking to give voice to failure in all its forms that are part of building routes, the critical part of my dissertation resists this grateful child narrative to discuss adult adoptee-authored transnational spaces that are currently being developed and that advocate on behalf of shared adoptee and birth mother interests, which recognize the economic, gendered, political, and social inequalities that give rise to transnational adoption.

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Well-being domesticities: mediating 21st-century femininity through physical, mental, and emotional lifestyles

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Let us fake out a frontier: dissent and the settler colonial imaginary in U.S. literature after 1945

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A decolonial praxis of hip-hop: hip-hop culture's connection to resilient youth's critical consciousness and wellbeing

Asset Metadata

Creator Dobbs, Jennifer Kwon (author)

Core Title Paper pavilion and routes through transnational adoption

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature

Publication Date 04/22/2008

Defense Date 03/24/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag adoptee,adoption studies,Asian American studies,contemporary poetry,Korean American,memoir,OAI-PMH Harvest,poetry,transnational

Place Name Korea (countries), USA (countries)

Language English

Advisor St. John, David (committee chair), Diaz, Roberto Ignacio (committee member), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee member), Ticheli, Frank P. (committee member)

Creator Email jdobbs@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1166

Unique identifier UC1174795

Identifier etd-Dobbs-20080422 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-63447 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1166 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Dobbs-20080422.pdf

Dmrecord 63447

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Dobbs, Jennifer Kwon

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu