"Loss is more than sadness": Reading Dissent in Transracial Adoption Melodrama in "The Language of Blood" and "First Person Plural"

Abstract

"Loss is more than sadness": Reading Dissent in Transracial Adoption Melodrama in The Language of Blood and First Person Plural By Kim Park Nelson Korean adoptee author Jane Jeong Trenka writes the words "Loss is more than sadness," in her 2003 memoir The Language of Blood (169). Describing her life at a crossroads of grief after the death of her birth mother, her estrangement from her adoptive parents, and administrative runaround from her adoption agency. Recently produced narrative works by transracial and transnational1 adoptees focus on sadness, loss, and trauma as central experiences. This idea of sadness as an integral part of the transracial adoption experience stands in contrast to the other, more dominant representation of transracial adoption as an overwhelmingly positive experience marked by familial fulfillment, generosity, and unconditional, colorblind love.2 However, within recent transracial adoptee-centered and/or authored works, a different characterization of the adoptee as a tragic survivor of adoption-related family and social trauma has taken shape. These works include the written memoirs (such as The Unforgotten War: Dust of the Streets by Korean adoptee Thomas Park Clement, The Book of Sarahs by African American-white biracial adoptee Catherine McKinley, A Single Square Picture by Korean adoptee Katy Robinson, Ten Thousand Sorrows by Korean adoptee Elizabeth Kim, and The Language of Blood by Korean adoptee Jane Jeong Trenka), and documentary or documentary memoir on film, such as Daughter from Danang (on Vietnamese adoptee Heidi Bub) directed by Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco, Passing Through by Korean adoptee Nathan Adolfson, and First Person Plural directed by Korean adoptee Deann Borshay. Like many other memoirs, each of these stories has primary elements of tragedy and sadness at the core of its narrative, but in these memoirs, tragic elements are directly related to adoption experiences, either as causal or consequential of each subject's adoption status. Though other transracial adoptee narratives have been produced, the 101 Adoption & Culture 1.1 (2007) listing I've noted here represents a majority of the currendy available creative works by (or about, in the case of Daughter from Dananģj adoptees. In this light, it appears that the genre of memoir, both filmed and written, has emerged as the predominant form within transracial adoptee cultural production, in a body of work that has been growing since the mid-1990s. Most adoptees who publish work on the adoption experience do so using autobiographical, not fictional, forms, in step with the rise of the memoir as a highly marketable genre within the U.S. publishing industry during the 1 990s. While a handful of films, television shows and novels have been produced that focus on transracial adoptee characters, the novelists, screenwriters and directors who produce these works are not themselves transracially adopted (most recendy, see the novels Somebody 's Daugbterby Marie Myung-Ok Lee and Digging to America by Anne Tyler). The genre choice of memoir and the overarching themes of trauma and sadness are related in that popular contemporary works of memoir - especially if they are authored by individuals who are not already famous - often have melodramatic narratives that focus on traumatic events and melancholic outcomes. The popularity of nonfiction forms other than memoir, such as "reality" television and television talk shows, further reflects the current popular public interest in the extraordinary (and often tragic) dramas of ordinary individuals. While studies about transracial adoption date to the late 1960s, adoptee narrative accounts of the transracial adoption experience have only recently become available. This is probably partly because the adoptees who carry these experiences have also recently come of age, and partly because interest in transracial adoption in America has grown in the last thirty years as the practice of transracial adoption has continued and expanded. Because a surge in transracial and intercountry adoptions began to take place in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the first visible generation of transracial adoptees came of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Before this time, the subjects of most transracial adoption studies were still children. Today there is yet a general lack of academic and analytical narrative material on transracial adoption; most narrative accounts were not intended for use as academic or analytical...