"In their accounts the transnationally adopted child must be viewed as being fully embedded in and embodying cultural worlds and social relations, with values and meanings attaching to her as she passes across borders of nation and family. Otherwise, those prior histories and relationships risk being marginalized, erased, or devalued in her radical transformation from needy third world orphan to privileged first world citizen."
"As Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp note, 'Throughout history, state power has depended directly and indirectly on defining normative families and controlling populations.' In modernizing South Korea, control of the population was a key concern of the developmentalist state."
"This Janus-faced nature of the American military occupation - exploitative and humanitarian - has characterized the neo-colonial relationship between America and Korea since the 1950s. As Nancy Abelmann and John Lie write in describing the role of the United States in South Korea: "Through military and civilian contacts, the United States became at once an object of material longing and materialistic scorn, a heroic savior and a reactionary intruder."
"Adoption served as a way for the state to regulate its mixed-blood population through the management of bodies and sexuality and to simultaneously maintain good will with American citizens."
"This event and personal narratives of other U.S. veterans of the Korean War underscore how the generic humanity of the children allowed U.S. soldiers to redeem their own particular humanity as Americans whose acts of charity reinstated their personal and national moral exceptionalism in the context of a dehumanizing war."
"Whereas Koreans in the West often framed them as long-lost members of the Korean community and looked upon them with a mixture of guilt, pity, and probing curiosity, adoptive parents and adoption social workers seemed to impose a whitewashed version of adoption as a highly successful social experiment."
"They contrast their proactive parenting with that of the parents of adult Korean adoptees, and while there may be some truth to this comparison many adult adoptees feel that this attitude of enlightenment disguises a defensiveness among adoptive parents who may be comfortable with providing cultural heritage in the form of multiculturalist consumer practices but who are also deeply uncomfortable with issues of racial difference and their own white privilege."
"Adoptees see white parents' inability to grasp histories of racism and experiences of racialized minorities in the United States as a problem of white privilege, which also blinds them to the inevitability that their children will fit into the nation differently than they do."
"Many adoptees feel that the discourses of pluralism and color-blindness that may have encouraged and celebrated their parents' choices to raise a nonwhite child hampered their own identity formation because they were left isolated when faced with the realities of racial difference and discrimination."
"Unlike second-generation ethnic Americans for whom cultural awakenings or interest is often grounds for strengthening family ties and belonging, for transracial adoptees this assertion may instead be the grounds for greater individuation and differentiation from adoptive family."
"For critics of adoption, however, broader structural inequalities and political circumstances inform their own moral perspective, whether they see it as an imperfect system that is in dire need of reform or as an unconscionable practice grounded in colonial power relations and centuries of white privilege."
"Seeing Korean women date white men could be particularly galling to some male adoptees who realized that the heterosexual stratifications that have emasculated them in their adoptive countries were also mirrored and replicated in Korea. They thereby witness how neocolonial relationships with the United States have produced a sexual economy in Korea in which it seems that white men, no matter how physically unattractive or morally repugnant, possess greater social capital than do Korean men."
"The suicide not only brought the hidden histories of adoptees who, in Minhee's words, 'had less of a chance to survive' but also a recognition of the limits of cultural citizenship for adoptees in Korea - who, caught between nation-states and cultural locations, can die as foreigners in thier so-called motherland. It also demonstrated clearly how adoptee kinship fills in for the absence of genealogical ties to family and nation for adoptees in Korea."
"This rather flippant characterization depends upon a neoliberal logic of rational self-actualization that radically downplays the importance not only of state regulation but also of social relations and intimacy. For other adoptees, however, the ease with which this equation or 'huge trade' can be drawn, from needing to eat to wanting a 'fat-ass computer,' and from severed kinship ties and knowledge to a 'high-speed Internet connection,' points to some of the moral and ethical dangers in uncritical celebrations of transnational adoptees as exemplars of globalization."
"It was during the 1980s, in fact, when overseas adoption was actively encouraged by the state as a form of 'emigration' and tied to the state's population control project. This policy also construed oversea adoption as a form of 'civil diplomacy' prefiguring a surplus population of children as future bridge builders and eventually as productive supplies of Western knowledge and skills to further South Korea's economic development."
"Some adoptees now view adoption agencies as seeking to reproduce their own existence and legitimacy rather than uphold the best interests of the child in ways that resonate with the description of 'goal displacement' in South Korea adoptions offered by the social work scholar Rosemary Sarri and her colleagues. Goal displacement describes a condition in which 'organizations are under pressure to secure resources to maintain themselves.'"
"All these cases reveal how agencies focused less on family preservation than on processing children, often on the basis of minimal background investigation, to shuttle them quickly through the system to new parents overseas."
"The organization CCEJ, which was established in 1989 by some five hundred Korean lawyers, professors, and ministers under the leadership of Reverend So Kyong Sok, is widely regarded as the first civic organization in postauthoritarian South Korea."
"His masters thesis conceptualized a theology of birth mothers by drawing upon minjung and feminist theologies to argue that Korean birth mothers are part of the minjung, and as such they should be liberated from their guilt by reframing the relinquishment of their children from being an individual sin to one that is embedded in structures of inequality - namely those of capitalism and patriarchy."
"As this example suggests, the personal motivations of Koreans, especially those of Revereng Kim's generation, are entirely shaped by their membership in the Korean nation, local and national politics, and a moral vision for the future of the world, as well as of democracy in Korea..."
"What Dae-won articulated is similar to what Julia Paley in her study of social movements in postdictatorial Chile calls 'paradoxical participation,' in which the encouragement of civic participation actively recruits individuals into the neoliberal rollback of state services and thereby displaces state accountability onto self-regulating, 'responsibilized' subjects: 'Participation offered a sense of meaning to citizens at the same time as it limited avenues through which citizens could act.'"
"But under the 'clean break' paradigm instituted by international adoption law, being a good mother also required the full surrender of her child and taking on a lifetime of guilt and uncertainties."
"In this logic, the orphanage is, like the camp, a zone of indistinction in which children 'die' or are 'next to nothing,' and from which children must be 'rescued' in order to become full persons."
