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January 30th, 2011 by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs | Posted in adoption, Blog | No Comments »
From the late 1940s to 1980s, over 200,000 Australian unwed mothers lost their babies to “forced adoption,” a colloquialism for obtaining consent for relinquishment of parental rights under duress.
Mothers were not told of their options or rights nor permitted to see their babies who had been removed without legal authority at birth. Moreover, they were often drugged before being forced to sign adoption consents. When they changed their minds well within the time to reconsider, they were frequently told it was too late because their babies were already adopted or dead. It has been modestly estimated that unwed mothers have on average been victim to anywhere between 16-29 crimes.
From the early 50s, grieving mothers attempted to seek justice and acknowledgment of the crimes committed against them, establishing Origins Inc in the 90s. After years of struggle, the efforts of Origins led to the world’s first inquiry into past adoption practices by the New South Wales (NSW) Parliament in 1998.
In October of 2010, the Western Australian (WA) State government made an official apology to the mothers for the impact of past “adoption practices.” Though it was a world’s first apology of its kind, its official terms failed to acknowledge that actual crimes had been committed because the terms were based on falsehoods rather than a thorough and factual review of documented evidence. At the eleventh hour, Origins Inc managed to persuade the instigator of the apology, WA State opposition member Mr. David Templeman, to refute such falsehoods. On the day of the apology, Mr. Templeman not only rejected the notion that the illegal practices were conventions of the time, which were done in the best interests of the mother, but called for a national inquiry. That call was reechoed throughout State parliaments across Australia in the days immediately following the apology.
The persistent demand of the outraged mothers of Origins, in the days leading up to and beyond the WA State government apology, was rewarded in the end when they were granted a full-scale government “inquiry into the role, if any, of the Commonwealth Government, its policies and practices in contributing to forced adoptions.” Should this inquiry confirm criminal activity when its final report is handed down on April 30th 2011, it will have lasting influence on the way in which adoption agencies source their babies.
The mothers’ stories resonate with women all over the world who have lost children to forced or coerced adoption. With this Senate Inquiry, Australia has a powerful opportunity to set a significant human rights precedent that will shift global adoption biopolitics and help protect future unwed mothers from similar institutionalized practices. The whole world is watching. (From a TRACK text written with ORIGINS)
January 23rd, 2011 by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs | Posted in Blog | No Comments »
This past week has been mega productive despite a dreadful bout of flu. I couldn’t be happier or more of an insomniac! I’m in veritable writing lock down trying to make each day count before the spring term begins!
 *I recently finished editing Journal of Korean Adoption Studies no. 3 on Community, which will go to print in April. I’m happy with the issue and hope that readers will enjoy it! Anyway, I put the finishing touches on the editor’s note last night. Here’s a brief excerpt:
Since Adopterade koreaners förening (Adopted Koreans’ Association of Sweden), the first Korean adoptee organization established in 1986, adult Korean adoptees have come together to establish numerous organizations and networks in Australia, Europe, North America, and South Korea. Alongside them, adoptee-authored blogs, listservs, chat rooms, and social networking sites provide opportunities for worldwide visibility and connection. Another groundswell, the F-4 visa facilitated a more permanent repatriation wave from the late 1990s leading to pockets of adoptee community primarily in Seoul’s Hongdae, Sinchon, Itaewon, and Gangnam neighborhoods. Some of these adoptees formed Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (GOA’L) in 1998, and thereby pioneered adult adoptee services in South Korea on which current InKAS and other agency post-adoption services are based. A year later, the first adopted Korean Gathering took place in Washington D.C. “for that deep and profound gift of connecting with one another,” and in 2004 International Korean Adoptee Associations (IKAA) was founded to organize and coordinate the subsequent Gatherings.
This brief snapshot reveals early “adoptee community formations” – diverse, sometimes dissenting counterpublics seeking care, knowledge, and visibility for adoptee lives. Herein lies the original sense of “adoptee neutrality” – a value still contouring adoptee space. In Seeds from a Silent Tree (Pandal Press 1997), the first anthology of Korean adoptee writing, Jo Rankin and Tonya Bishoff write: “We seek to break a certain silence– silence from our land of origin, silence from the lands we now inhabit – tongues tied by racism; tongues tied by social mores, codes and contradictions; tongues tied by colonialist myths of rescue missions and smooth assimilations.” Adoptee neutrality means transgression in all its libratory, enlivening power. All forms of representation are equal because “there is no right way” to free one’s own tongue (Rankin and Bishoff).
*I also just finished up and submitted an abstract of my contribution, (on kind invitation from Tom Fink, editor), to an anthology on reading experimental verse. I intend to write an essay on Cathy Park Hong, Douglas Kearney, and Sun Yung Shin about– three poets who I deeply admire and have enjoyed teaching in my workshops at St. Olaf College:
Reading Race and Deterritorialized Poetics
This essay takes as its point of departure a generative paradox: How might we read race in poetry where resisting race is critical to its enactment? I raise this question in order to reflect on recent experimental work by Cathy Park Hong (Dance, Dance Revolution), Sun Yung Shin (Skirt Full of Black), and Douglas Kearney (Black Automaton) whose poetic strategies possess a deterritorializing effect such that language “stops being representative in order to [. . .] move toward its extremities or its limits” (Delueze). For these three poets, race is not mimetic representation– a fixed identity one “sees” (or assumes to see) in imagery. Instead, “racial positioning” is overheard in motion– migration across history into globalization’s futuristic desert, transnational adoption and militarized violence, and black automata where “design becomes a kind of procedure” (Kearney)– vexing grammatical as well as geographical limits through invented creole, mistranslation, and “maps of a hip hop mind.” Beyond identity’s mirror bolted to the ground, how do these poets compel new acts of attention to racial positions that are in linguistic, even topographical process?
*I’m putting on my activist hat for now and working on TRACK’s statement to the Australian Senate Inquiry on forced adoptions along with Suki and Jane to provide global solidarity for Origins’ advocacy work. It’s exciting to use my recent book research with the Korean Unwed Mothers and Families Association in order to support unwed moms’ worldwide. I’ve written from this research before in op-eds in the Korea Times and have given presentations that I have co-authored with the KUMFA moms at University of Waterloo and University of Pittsburgh. I deeply appreciate my students, Mira Yoon and Jake Jeong, and TRACK volunteer, Dongshik Won, who studied unwed moms’ issues with me this past Fall term and provided critical translation/transcription support.
*I leave on February 2-4 for Washington D.C. where I will sit on two panels — “Finding Identity in Cultural Margins: A Reading and Discussion on Transracial Adoption” and “Hired!: Landing the Elusive Tenure Track Job” — for the Associated Writing Programs. Then it’s off to University of California Riverside for Writer’s Week.
Somewhere in there I’m going to see Katie Ka Vang’s new play, WTF!, at Mu Productions. My students — Phillip, Kei, and Julia — went on opening night and emailed me a group photo that they took with the cast. (Sun Mee Chomet, WTF’s lead actress, visited my Fall 2010 Asian American literature class, which saw her perform in Cowboy v. Samurai.) It was fun to see them so delighted and engaged with As Am artistic community!
As I shared with Cleo over lunch, I grew up working class, and I get my work ethic from my dad. Love shows in your work. It keeps its head down because its focused on the task, and it shrugs off distractions. That’s how I tend to be. I work hard as an act of love, not because I am trying to rescue anyone or even myself. I work hard because I hope to clear a way for love to happen, for my family to find me/for me to find them. (sighs) I may die trying, but that’s what love does. It has a stubborn heart and mind.
January 5th, 2011 by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs | Posted in Blog, Uncategorized | No Comments »
I’m off to the MLA Convention in Los Angeles this year doing triple duty — serving on a college search committee, presenting a paper (Adoptee Affective Resistance: Rewriting National Routes in Jane Jeong Trenka’s Fugitive Visions), and reading poetry and speaking on a panel about immigration and education (an area of interest leftover from my days as founding director of SummerTIME). I deeply miss my old LA neighborhood and am looking forward to heading over to Soot Bull Jip to get my charcoal-grilled bulgolgi on!
 I remember moving to LA’s K-Town back in 2002 and being absolutely terrified, yet excited to be surrounded by Korean Americans like myself. I had internalized such deep racism to where being around community who looked like me unhinged my sense of belonging. It was terribly difficult back then to go into a Korean a restaurant (the adjumma-owned dive that only has two menu items in English) and not be able to speak or even eat some of the food, but I forced myself to do this until I learned how to feed myself, until my skin felt good and my body relaxed. Sometimes, I ate by myself at Jeon Ju Dol Sot, a bibimbap jip near my old apartment building, just to feel myself eating among Koreans and being part of a larger crowd. I didn’t want to show someone else how to eat food when I could barely feed myself, didn’t want to explain or teach or deconstruct or even reflect on something so basic — nourishment.
LA taught me how profound my hunger was, and after learning the size of my mouth and stomach, I felt greedy. I didn’t want to share this with anyone. I just wanted to eat and eat and eat the racism out of me until I became someone more human and less terrified of her own reflection in the uncle sitting at the front of the restaurant, reading a newspaper or the older brother stacking styrofoam pint-sized containers near the cash register. Being mundane in such a basic way humanized my Korean body and the bodies of those who dwell in mine giving them flesh and blood, teeth and hair, fingers gripping the spoon and dragging hot broth to the lips. A ghost wants to eat, but it’s the living who want the ghost. I see her and him when we dined together, our faces reflected in the steamy window. In the background, a mother spooning soup to her toddler daughter and her older son picking out the most delicious pieces of meat while her back is turned away. I hear water rush out of a faucet, the clanging of pots and pans, and scraping. My mother is not here, and yet it’s my father who interrupts in the face of the adjossi bringing me the bill.
I realized back in 2002 eating like this that it’s not death that separates me from them, but rather a kind of cruel simultaneity, a kind of multi-dimsensiionality stringing time’s fabric together. I was telling time by their absence pulled into the present moment. I was trying to collapse time, not mere cultural geography.
This week in LA, I give a talk on affective resistance, which is a fancy name for refusing to feel normative emotions on which adoption economy depends. Such emotions — beyond gratitude for adoption — include deadening feeling toward Korean family, othering them to the singular moment (birth). I refuse to call my family, “birth family.” I refuse this adoption agency term bracketing my Korean family’s influence on my life to one event, when their absence has riddled every moment in my life from the most mundane (eating) to the most mysterious (writing a poem). I refuse to dehumanize them to a shell of a body, because to do so is to do violence to my body, as if the body is merely a container or a shroud.
If the ghost is feeling, then it can be channeled and rechanneled again. It can possess and evade possession. If my feelings as an adoptee have that much power to enliven the fertility of the woman who adopted me, then my feeling can do the same for the woman who was socially destroyed so that another woman might take and raise her child. My feeling should be able to do the work that the privileged mother refuses to do, to bring both mothers into contact with each other for a sharing, but I am only one woman among other women. I do not possess such super human powers. I only have my heart, a kind of meat.
My heart. If I can translate all of this struggle into an elegant argument in a language that academics can understand, then perhaps I can intervene in institutionalized grammar that currently routes feeling away from my transgression to imagine my mother and father, sister and brother — the people who make me Korean American — as my own, not as ghosts who shadow hover.
The real ghosts are the bureaucracies and state machinery that conceal themselves even as they visibly practice care, even as they drain blood and feeling from our mothers and fathers, and then repackage us as social orphans available for outsourced social welfare. These are the real ghosts, not our Korean parents nor even ourselves. To fight with ghosts is to risk death for the sake of emancipation. I feel that adoptee community — by referring to our first families as ghosts or even ourselves as such — needs to look at the mirror, pull it off the wall, and give names to the blinking consoles, gyres, rows of cribs, and empty chair that were always there on the other side. But then again, isn’t that what our co-authored unwed mom/adoptee bill seeks to do?
Presentation details: Friday, Jan. 7 at 5:15 p.m. Olympic I in JW Marriot, MLA Convention in Downtown Los Angeles
Poetry reading and panel discussion on education: Sunday, Jan. 9 at 4 p.m. Please visit Pacific Hills School’s website.
January 3rd, 2011 by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs | Posted in Blog | No Comments »
 I want to begin 2011 with an affirmation: Yes. This blog is horribly outdated. For the past year, I focused on writing journalism as needed (Korea Times, Pressian, among others), revising the chapbook for resubmission (Song of a Mirror), editing community academic projects, and further developing my book manuscript about birth search politics. I completed several collaborations such as a dance/poetry/music performance, Libretto, with Jennifer Mellor and a film, The Woman, the Orphan, and the Tiger with Jane Jin Kaisen, but I neglected the blog because I thought other adoptees like KAD Nexus, Ungrateful Daughter, Jon Raible Online, Hello Korea!, Jane’s Blog, among others that I regularly read were doing a fine job raising questions and concerns rumbling around in my head. However, as I traveled to conferences and the like, I was oftentimes asked, “Why don’t you blog? When are you going to update your blog? What are you up to? What’s wrong with your blog?” I’ve learned that blogging is more than just ephemera and provides significant alternative community knowledge. Scholar and Vietnamese adoptee, Natalie Cherot, aptly articulates the critical intervention adoptee public pedagogy serves community building:
For Henry Giroux, public pedagogy is a way for communities to exercise ideological and institutional power (2000: 74). To accomplish public pedagogy, adoptees form activist narrative discourses and racial projects, where racial projects are a type of activism, an ‘interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines’ (Omi and Winant, 1994: 56). This concept assists in the exploration of the activism Vietnamese adoptees, as one of their endeavors is to insist on the racialized understanding of adoptive families. Racial projects define new adoption truths. These truths are not essentialized, but are rather a product of collective efforts. (www.culturemachine.net)
Not wanting to overlap with other blogs that act as racial projects, I’ve decided to recast mine in terms of three primary narratives lines, which I hope will help others reading this blog:
Advocacy for My Family. I began transnational travel to locate family back in 2007 and have since consistently visited Korea during summers and sometimes winters in order to try to find them. In 2005, KBS visited Los Angeles to interview adoptees searching for family at the Wilshire Hotel, and I was one of four who participated. During the late 90s while a graduate student, I sent inquiries to Dillon Adoption Agency looking for information and was awarded a scholarship (???!!!) to waive my search fees. I’ve written about this issue before for Pressian reflecting on how much searching for my family costs. My search has yet to reunite me with family, but along the way, I’ve sought to share what I’ve learned about KCARE and other institutions that present themselves as resources. Although I’m no expert, I’ve supported other adoptees’ searches leading to their reunions — an experience that underscores the collective potential of any individual search. Our stories might be unique in how we each narrate them, but they are held together by shared power relations that continue to control our access to information. I view my advocacy work as an act of love seeking to humanize my family and to glean as much knowledge as I can to prepare for our reunion.
Research. I began working on adoption and literature back in 1999 first as a creative writer and then also as a critic, studying representations of adoption with Marianne Novy. In 2001, I helped to facilitate a guest lecture by Mi Ok Song Bruining and completed my MFA thesis, a collection of poems, in which I grappled with adoption’s pressure on lyrical epistemology. (I just couldn’t — and still can’t — write a moment seamlessly recollected.) This work led to my convening the first panel on adoption and creative writing at 2001 Associated Writing Programs in Palm Springs. After the publication of Paper Pavilion, the creative portion of my dissertation for the Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing, I decided to return to the critical part, which tied together creative nonfiction and literary criticism to focus on militarized representations of Korean transnational adoption. I realized that my family search was an attempt to route through received cultural geographies (e.g. Madama Butterfly) rather than an essential move to root to reclaim a loss subjectivity. In 2009, I traveled to Korea to develop this work (also inspired by my readings of Negri and Hardt, “A site of production is a site of resistance.”) during which I became acquainted with Miss Mama Mia who had just begun to organize. Seeking to create a sustainable commitment to their work, I introduced them to TRACK at a solidarity meeting held at the Single Mothers Resource Center near Daerim. The rest is coalition history! Because the moms’ narratives are urgently needed in comparison to mine, I’ve decided to delay my birth search politics project and instead focus on finishing a book in collaboration with them to describe Korean unwed mothers’ realities. The project is provisionally titled Our Children, Our Hands and is sponsored by the generosity of the Korean Unwed Mothers Support Network. Also related to my interests in mapping sites of Korean adoption, I occasionally research North Korean adoptee narratives.
Creative Work. Of course I do not always write about adoption, although this subject currently dominates my critical prose! (Recently, I published an article in Daesan Literary Journal about adoptee diaspora, poetics, and poetry.) In fact, my present poems ask how cities survive war and how we bodily transform in order to survive. The working title of the second book is Three-Legged Bird. I remain interested in the epic and am reading Nazim Hikment’s Human Landscapes of My Country with much interest in his cinematic narrative sweep. I’m also serving as a consultant on another film project and shall begin working on an opera libretto later this year. In my spare time, I try my best to hammer as much Korean as I can into my head despite the thick wooly silence of Minnesota. Thinking about poetry remains a central activity for me. I want to continue to share my reflections on contemporary work regardless of my critical and political projects.
So three narrative lines alternating for a coil. Here’s to springing into 2011 with a full and open heart!
February 1st, 2009 by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs | Posted in Blog | No Comments »
What a treat thanks to Lee Herrick who is editing a special forthcoming issue of Asian American Poetry and Writing! An interview conversation featuring Jane Jeong Trenka, Sun Yung Shin, and me discusses divided geographies of language and diaspora and writing’s relationship with community building. This same issue includes an extensive line-up of poets and writers who are part of the Korean adoptee diaspora.
February 1st, 2009 by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs | Posted in Blog | No Comments »
 Many thanks to Tilar Mazzeo, curator of Poets on Poets, for the opportunity to record Charlotte Turner Smith’s “Sonnet LXX” and “Sonnet LXXVII.” Turner Smith is one of several overlooked Romantic poets whose influence during her lifetime extended to Coleridge and Wordsworth, both who greatly admired her Elegiac Poems. To read an online edition of her work and to learn more about her contemporaries, please visit the British Women Romantic Poets Project hosted by the University of California Davis.
January 8th, 2009 by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs | Posted in Blog | No Comments »
Many thanks to the International Writing Programs at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop! My essay, “Home as the Direction of Search,” is available at the 2008 Paros Symposium’s website.
January 8th, 2009 by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs | Posted in Blog | No Comments »
 I’m looking forward to co-hosting Kim Ki-Taek with the University of Minnesota’s Consortium for the Study of the Asias this coming February. He’s reading at the UM, Loft Literary Center, and St. Olaf College during February 23-27. Lee Herrick introduced Kim’s work to me a year ago after meeting him in California. (Kim Ki-Taek was a writer-in-residence at UC Berkeley before.) So it’s a pleasure to share his work with the Twin Cities!
Kim Ki-Taek was born in 1957 at Anyang, the southern satellite city of Seoul. He majored in English language and literature in college and Korean language and literature in graduate school. He started to write poetry after winning the poetry section of a literary contest in Hankook Daily Newspaper in 1989 (32 years old). He has published 4 books of collected poems - Fatal Sleep (1991), Storm in the Hole of the Needle (1994), Office worker (1999), Cow (2005) and has won 5 major literary awards - Kim Soo Young Literary Award, Hyundai Literary Award, Midang Literary Award, Jihoon Literary Award and Isu Literary Award.
In his poetry, he has focused on the human physicality and the relationship between the body and the violence inflicted upon it and the idea that physical and psychological violence inflicted on human body leaves its mark behind. The mark eventually manifests itself as various habits that continue to inform one’s sense of itself. He has tried to observe this process and record it in his poems. His works were often told to get the poetic characteristics by several critics “the perspective imagination” or “observation and description of minute and microscopic details.”
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