Closing Thoughts - Adoption Surprises & Problems

 I have learned a lot about Korea and the Korean War that I otherwise wouldn't have known if I hadn't taken this class, but an eye-opening moment for me was reading and watching the material related to the topic of adoptions. I still find the idea of "social death" that Cho and Kim bring up very surprising. I didn't realize that such a negative stigma would also be placed on the child when s/he is biracial. It is also very surprising that transnational adoption connects into the camptown of the Korean War, so it has become the birthplace of the "war orphans" who are sent overseas to America.

But the other side to this is how not all adoptions connect into the "social death" of the camptown, but instead it's disadvantaged mothers and families who can no longer hold onto and care for their children. But in a sense they still become associated with a negative stigma. And like we saw in Deann Borshay's film, many adoption agencies lie about the children's history in order to create a "perfect template" for the American families. I still find this shocking, so it makes it that much harder for these adoptees to return to Korea and search for their birth mothers and families. But most likely the government didn't want these children to return, as soon as they left Korea, it meant a "clean break" and a new identity in America or some other country. And as Borshay's film shows, many what-ifs become attached to the adoptee's new identity once they reach America. So that means they are forever left wondering, but they can't completely return to Korea even if they do go back because they were raised in a different society that doesn't mesh with the beliefs and ideologies of Korea. The people who return can try to learn about their birth culture, but as Jane Trenka wrote, "I was never supposed to return. And I was never supposed to know the word jeong" (15). But she can use this idea and feeling of "Korean togherness" to a certain degree to go against people who "insist upon her foreignness," but it will not work entirely because she didn't learn about this idea until later in her life. I think the idea of "jeong" is full culturally specific meanings that can only be fully understood if you were raised in the Korean society. So this means that Jane and other adoptees can try to use "jeong" in their defense as not being a part of Korea, but they cannot completely embody this feeling in their lives.