Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea

Virtual Mothering

Hosu Kim

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781349711512
  9781137538512
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137538529
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book illuminates the hidden history of South Korean birth mothers involved in the 60-year-long practice of transnational adoption. The author presents a performance-based ethnography of maternity homes, a television search show, an internet forum, and an oral history collection to develop the concept of virtual mothering, a theoretical framework in which the birth mothers' experiences of separating from, and then reconnecting with, the child, as well as their painful,ambivalent narratives of adoption losses, are rendered, felt and registered. In this, the author refuses a universal notion of motherhood. Her critique of transnational adoption and its relentless effects on birth mothers' lives points to the everyday, normalized, gendered violence against working-class, poor, single mothers in South Korea's modern nation-state development and illuminates the biopolitical functions of transnational adoption in managing an "excess" population. Simultaneously, her creative analysis reveals a counter-public, and counter-history, proposing the collective grievances of birth mothers.

© The Author(s) 2016

Hosu KimBirth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South KoreaCritical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture10.1057/978-1-137-53852-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: From Invisible Mothers to Virtual Mothering

Hosu Kim¹

(1)

College of Staten Island, City University of New York, Staten Island, NY, USA

End Abstract

In 1994, a few months before I left South Korea to attend graduate school in the US, my mother told me that she wished that some Americans would adopt me, and support me, as if I were their own daughter, during my stay. I was puzzled by her seemingly outrageous wish, and asked, “How can I be adopted when you’re still alive?” She said, “That doesn’t matter; there have been cases.” While my memories of that day have become fuzzy, I recall her saying, “You can tell them I am dead.” I was devastated by her motherly death wish, driven by the hope of her daughter being adopted by unknown Americans.

After moving to the US, I soon realized my mother’s wild wish had some validity, and that it seemed to be rooted in the significant, yet buried, history of transnational adoption in South Korea. I noticed its effects during my random encounters with Americans in the Midwestern town where I lived. After finding out about my Korean heritage, many inevitably mentioned their acquaintance with Korean orphans who were adopted by Americans. Though these comments were meant to be friendly, my gut response was embarrassment and annoyance. I did not know why they were telling me these stories, over and over again, nor could I guess what the proper response should be. Should I thank them for adopting my fellow Koreans? Or should I apologize for Korea’s inability to raise children domestically?

Transnational adoption binds two parties: the receiver of a child and the giver of that child. In South Korea, which has a 60-year-long history of transnational adoption, it also binds two nations: South Korea and the US. These two nations, and, thus, all their citizens, not just those engaged in adoption, share a relationship—a relationship that is caring, but hierarchical; generous, but embarrassing; loving, but violent. My mother’s wild wishes, like those of so many South Koreans of her generations, suggest that the US, as the largest receiving nation of Korean adoptees, has a powerful reputation as a prosperous, benevolent country, extending its help to all who might be deserving of its support. And, as a result, many Americans, even nonadopters, must tend to view Korea as a once impoverished, war-ravaged nation with needy orphans, and feel good about self-identifying with their fellow Americans’ good deeds.

This book was sparked by my perspective as part of the Korean diaspora. Today South Korea is known as the largest and longest provider of children placed into transnational adoption, a practice that has gone on for the past 60 years, though now in decline to a few hundred a year. Not an adoptee, birth mother, or an adopter myself, I still felt an affinity with “the givers,” and began to wonder whether the mothers of Korean adoptees were really all dead, as evoked in the powerful figure of “the orphan.” I thought to myself, “Their mothers might still be living, behind the face of death,” as my mother had been so willing to do, in her expectation that random strangers in the US might provide me with care, support, and opportunities. Who were these women, I wondered. Under what circumstances had they felt compelled to give up their child to unknown foreigners? Why were so few people interested in them?

Born out of puzzlement and curiosity, this book is about South Korean birth mothers involved in transnational adoption. Although the total number of birth mothers is unclear, South Korean birth mothers constitute the largest group from any single nation. As of 2014, 165,944 Korean-born adoptees have been displaced and are currently living in 14 different countries, primarily in North America and Western Europe. ¹ The figure is estimated to account for 20 % of all displaced children who are placed in families engaged in transnational adoption. ² As the first academic work to focus on birth mothers who have relinquished babies to transnational adoption, this book draws on my 15 years of research on Korean birth mothers and tells a history that is long overdue.

This book begins with the critical observation that two divergent figures of birth mother have come to dominate the cultural imaginary in South Korea from the 1990s onward. The first figure is of an elderly, sacrificing mother who awaits her adopted child’s eventual return in order to reclaim her motherhood; the second figure is of an unmarried, sexually irresponsible woman who has no viable option except to relinquish the child to adoption. This book observes how these two figures have been separately produced and exclusively managed, so as to assign poverty as the root cause of South Korea’s past involvement in transnational adoption, and to blame irresponsible female sexuality, as represented in single motherhood, for its ongoing involvement. With a critical awareness of the structural forces underlying South Korea’s involvement in transnational adoption, this book examines how these two birth-mother figures have been orchestrated to maintain the nation’s dissonant adoption politics and practices: for while South Korea’s past involvement in transnational adoption is remembered as part of a traumatic national past, its continuing practice today is rationalized as a necessity.

It is important to underscore that the emergence and manipulation of these two maternal figures occurred amid rapidly shifting demographic, cultural, and political terrains in South Korea in the post-1990s. During this time, the number of Korean children being placed into transnational adoption was sharply declining; however, at the same time, the number of adult adoptees living overseas “returning” to Korea to search for their families began steadily rising. These returning adoptees, under the aegis of South Korea’s neoliberal ethnic nationalism, were considered as part of the community of overseas Koreans. Their stories of searching for cultural and familial roots became a topic of growing popular interest in media, discussed in the news, and depicted in television dramas and reality shows, and in films.

After the mid-1990s, South Korea’s adoption discourse recast the stories of returning adoptees as success stories of resilient Koreans who had overcome their unfortunate past and achieved glorious success. Corresponding to the adoption narrative, a collective memory of transnational adoption tended to cluster around the figure of an older, maternal birth mother, who was portrayed as a victim of personal misfortunes, primarily poverty, in combination with her husband’s death, and/or illnesses, thus requiring her to give up her child to adoption. In this way, the figure of the sacrificing birth mother erased—and continues to erase—South Korea’s ongoing involvement in transnational adoption by framing it as ancient history. This collective memory of birth mothers and transnational adoption, while recognizing birth mothers for the first time, simultaneously enforced—and continues to enforce—a collective amnesia about other birth mothers whose stories and lives fall outside the clean-cut narrative of poverty and/or catastrophic circumstances.

While information about the existence and experiences of birth mothers is seriously limited in the South Korean discourse on transnational adoption, the experiences of birth mothers is even less acknowledged in the adoption discourse in North America and Western Europe. In particular, prior to the mid-1990s, far too often, the dominant representations depicted adopted children as orphans, and focused on the humanitarian motivations and efforts of adoptive parents to provide better lives for these poverty-stricken children. Highlighting developmental outcomes (e.g., physical growth and intelligence test results) as scientific proof of the adopted child’s well-being, the dominant transnational adoption discourse, long spearheaded by the behavioral sciences, especially psychology and social work, hollowed out the children’s lives before adoption, treating their past as irrelevant to their present lives. As a consequence, birth mothers have remained treated, at best, as a symbol of a remote, unknown, and unfortunate past, and, at worst, are assumed to be literally dead.

The lack of scholarly attention to birth mothers involved in the transnational adoption practice has persisted, even as a critical adoption scholarship has emerged over the past 15 to 20 years. ³ Arising from various disciplines, from anthropology to literary criticism, this critical scholarship uncovers the structural forces circumscribing the development of transnational adoption, a practice largely embedded in the history of Western colonialism and military violence, and their ongoing influence in the sending regions. ⁴ By pointing out the global power asymmetry between the involved nations, it challenges the all-too-prevalent benevolent salvation narrative. In addition, by illuminating the adoptees’ experiences, these critical scholars address the dilemmas and complexities of racial and ethnic identity formation among transnational adoptees, thus contributing to a reconsideration of assumptions about identity, kinship, and belongingness, and helping to develop a new theoretical terrain beyond one of traditional, blood-related kinship. This emergent adoption scholarship provides a theoretical framework of critical, geopolitical, feminist engagement, as well as rich field research, based on the experiences of adoptees; furthermore, it presents postcolonial and neoliberal critiques of transnational adoption, thus illuminating the void of in-depth, empirical research on the life experiences of birth mothers.

Engaging these two terrains—the emergent, but limited, visibility of birth mothers in South Korea, and the persistently absent recognition of birth mothers in the transnational adoption discourse—this book aims to flesh out the birth mothers’ shadowy existence and life experiences, with a critical analysis of the structural forces at work from the 1970s to the 2000s. This book examines four sites to study birth mothers: (1) maternity homes; (2) television search-and-reunion shows; (3) a birth mothers’ Internet forum; and (4) an oral history collection.

The concept of virtual mothering has been coined to refer to the performative, ephemeral, fragmented, and technologically enacted qualities of mothering that birth mothers engage in beyond the domain of the normative family. This book examines virtual mothering as a two-part process: first, there is a severing from the child; and then, a reconnection to the child, whether this connection is imagined or real. At the register of their virtual mothering, this book observes the multilayered violence implicated in adoption circumstances and the volatile vestiges of losses and trauma after the adoption placement. Via a critical and creative engagement with the existence and experiences of birth mothers, this book analyzes the global and local contexts for geopolitical, economic, cultural, and familial imperatives in the history and practice of transnational adoption in South Korea.

1.1 The Ungraspable Community: Birth Mothers in South Korea

To establish the parameters of the Korean birth mothers who are the purview of this study, let me first address the term birth mother. The birth mother has many different names, such as biological mother, blood mother, natural mother, origin mother, genetic mother, real mother, and first mother. ⁵ In the US, the term acquired a political connotation of self-validation and self-identity in the mid-1970s, as a group of birth mothers organized themselves in opposition to the secrecy and silence surrounding closed adoptions; ⁶ eventually, the self-advocacy group Concerned United Birthparents (CUB) was established in 1976. ⁷ Largely constituted by birth mothers who had given up their children during the post-WWII period into the 1960s, CUB characterized the adoption experience as “surrender[ing] [the baby] …without options and without compensations for our loss,” and gave voice to the traumatic, long-term consequences of adoption losses on birth mothers. ⁸ The birth mothers’ activism supported the rights of single motherhood, which had gained increasing social acceptance in the US during the 1970s, and led to more mothers keeping their babies. This cultural and demographic shift led to a scarcity of white babies available for adoption, thus creating an environment where birth mothers could negotiate terms and procedures that were more favorable to themselves.

The term, birth mother, once associated with the shame and secrecy of an out-of-wedlock birth, was re-signified into a self-determined, free-willed—if not altruistic—mother, planning her own pregnancy. For example, Myrl Coulter defines birth mother as “a woman who gives birth to a child she then gives up for adoption. .. or pregnant women planning to give their children up for adoption.” ⁹ Coulter’s definition suggests that the birth mother’s decision to give up her child is based on her free will, illustrating the relative leverage of birth mothers in the US.

However, in South Korea, while several terms denote a birth mother, all are still shrouded with the shame and guilt of child abandonment. For example, the term, saengmo, refers to a biological mother who gives birth to a child whom she does not raise and has no legal responsibility over. ¹⁰ Following a recent revision to the Special Adoption Law which went into effect in 2012, another term, ch’insaengmo, appears in legal texts to refer to a birth mother in the adoption context. Finally, the most popular word to refer to birth mothers is mihonmo, or, not-yet-married women, reflecting the overwhelming association of single mothers with adoption throughout the history of the practice. A misnomer, mihonmo is automatically understood to indicate birth mother in South Korea. While saengmo and mihonmo may be used interchangeably to refer to a birth mother involved in transnational adoption, these terms are neither definitive nor self-evident to even birth mothers themselves; at best, these terms may be described as amorphous, not fully sealed, and obscure.

It is important to unde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: From Invisible Mothers to Virtual Mothering
• 1. Unbecoming Mothers: A History of Gendered Violence
• 2. Reconnection: Virtual Mothering
• Backmatter