by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs
Jennifer Kwon Dobbs
While visiting Seoul in June, I had the opportunity to talk with Jane Jeong Trenka at her home about her recently released memoir, Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea (Graywolf, 2009), a follow-up to her highly acclaimed The Language of Blood (Graywolf Press, 2003), praised by Publishers Weekly for its originality and beautiful writing. The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Jeong Trenka is also cofounder and president of Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK), a progressive organization that advocates for full understanding of the practices of adoption, both past and present, to preserve the human rights of children and families.
Jeong Trenka’s house sits at the end of a narrow side street in Seoul’s bustling historic center. In this urban solitude, I’m struck by the maps of language and maps of place in Jeong Trenka’s new book, in which overseas Korean adoptees have returned to Seoul to live as “Fugitives of destruction, fugitives of failed marriages, fugitives of racism, fugitives of ourselves and of our pasts, or memories we can’t remember, looking for something we can’t name, not necessarily our mothers . . .” Fugitive Visions offers complicated answers to the frequently asked question, “Why have you decided to live in Korea?”
Congratulations on the release of your much-anticipated new memoir, Fugitive Visions! I’m excited to be here in Seoul with you on the eve of its publication! Compared to your award-winning first book, The Language of Blood, the opening scene of Fugitive Visions has shifted its address to Seoul yet remains very much in that third space of dream life and hovering from place to place. Where did you begin writing the book?
Jane Jeong Trenka
Thank you, Jennifer, for taking time out of your own activism in Seoul to talk with me.
I started the book soon after I finished The Language of Blood, in my house in Saint Paul. I turned in my proposal, and little did I know that six months later, a trip to Korea that was intended to last only four months would turn into over four years, that my marriage would end abruptly, and that a new and very different life would open up for me in Korea. So obviously I did not start this book with a beginning, middle, and end! Its creation was animated by a physical feeling in the gut and a vision of what the page would look like, and how the book would actually feel in my hand. I guess it was kind of sculptural in that respect. Later, as my own life unfolded, the memoir shifted here and there accordingly.
It seems that Korea interrupted a “beginning, middle, and end” in many contexts—how you view your writing life and the shape of narrative—that compelled you to look again at the page, but this time with your hands. The body has always been an important dialogue in your work for how it confounds, interrupts, and resists one language while at the same time revealing another one native to itself—its rhythm of blood, viscera, muscles, bones. I wonder how this “physical feeling in the gut” and a tactile vision of the book led you back to the piano?
Form is a container. The more overwhelming the emotional content of my subject matter became, the more it needed a form to contain it. Visions Fugitives, the set of piano pieces, was premade in the art form I know best formally, music, and it was very useful to use the music as a vehicle to contain the emotion. The nature of traumatic memory seems, to me, to be outside time or in hypertime, constantly in the present, and in intense flashes. This is how I experience my adoption and its lifelong consequences—a rather disjointed affair, but with certain recurrent themes. Therefore that particular music—the musical equivalent of a series of prose poems—was the right form, as opposed to a sonata or a symphony, which would be more like a novel with a clear beginning, middle, and end, and a clear path working out ideas in many ways. There is no clear path in Fugitive Visions; it is rather accumulative or agglutinative, like the Korean language. It piles meaning upon meaning and builds a whole picture in that way.
In Fugitive Visions you often work between Korean and English, trying to enact that vulnerable space where the two languages touch one another intimately. Going back for a moment to “how the book would actually feel in my hand,” was writing this book more intimate for you than creating The Language of Blood, or were the intimacies that emerged in the text simply different?
The text utilizes some Korean and old-style written Chinese, which Koreans also use, and my intention was for the English-language reader to be able to understand everything, which is why I included English translations. But in reality, I don’t think the Korean and the English language usually touch, except in some “Konglish, ” where we see that it is not really intimacy but the domination of English over Korean. Now that I think about it, it is kind of sad that in Fugitive Visions, too, the Korean text is subservient to the English text. This is a sad thing because as Koreans, and as adoptees, we can see on the political level that what is between the United States and Korea is not really consensual intimacy between equals but domination, and what we have in our personal lives between ourselves and Western institutions, adopters, lovers, and so forth can also be framed like that. It pervades at every level, and in most cases, there is a certain amount of complicity in that. To the one being dominated, it is more convenient to safely comply than risk being the nail that gets hammered down. I am not sure that in this text, there is intimacy between languages, or just the reality of being an adoptee inhabiting two different worlds, one subservient to the other.
So if the text feels intimate, I think it is because it is emotionally important and true to me, and I’m not trying to hide anything from the reader. My understanding of my writing is that I make sentences because expression is how I maintain my integrity as a human being, how I am true with history, how I survive in this world as an adoptee—an imperfectly assimilated Westerner, an outcast Korean. From birth, then orphanage, then being sent away in 1972, to my first return to Korea in 1995, my foundational experiences in Korea were all preverbal, yet highly emotional. I’ve read that we are bombarded by so much sensory input every day that we cannot possibly pay attention to all of it. So emotions are the signal that tells you what is important. My emotions told me that my experiences—which were not symbolically, but literally, without language—were very important. So the act of writing about my adoption, and about those first two years in Korea, actually doesn’t have much to do with language itself. It is, rather, about pure, preverbal emotion. If I had to sum up the whole thing, I would say The Language of Blood was about re-creating the emotional and physical memory of carrying my dying mother on my back, the emotional and physical memory of holding her hand as we slept together on the floor. Fugitive Visions is more wordy, although there are fewer words. But I was coming out of a preverbal state, struggling with the Korean language while also trying to write what cannot be written in language. So what I am trying to say is that words are necessary but by themselves insufficient. The words are the car, the emotion is the gas, your politics are the map. A lot of writers have really great, sleek, muscular new cars, but they run out of gas too quickly or they never had a map. I think I’m driving a ten-year-old Hyundai Sonata, but I have two spare cans of gas in the trunk and satellite navigation.
As adoptees, we oftentimes turn to translators—usually strangers who volunteer in order to practice their English—to search for, find, and finally (or to begin again to) reunite and reconcile with our families. For adoptees who stay in Korea, greater fluency is critical—a language beyond visitation. How has your relationship to the Korean language changed since deciding to live in Korea?
Fugitive Visions was written mostly from 2005 to 2007, and it’s now 2009. So my relationship with the Korean language has changed even since Fugitive Visions was completed. To be self-critical, maybe the Korean language is romanticized a bit in Fugitive Visions. It is not factually incorrect, but I wouldn’t write the book like that again. I‘m glad I experienced that love affair and I needed to, but that’s not where I’m at now. To illustrate what I mean: When I first came to Korea in 1995, I remember having a dream that I thought was in fluent Korean, at my mother’s house. Maybe it was fluency, maybe it wasn’t. But I remember that very vividly, being immersed, drowned in that language. It was wonderful, and it happened once. These days, I do dream in Korean, and it is the same broken Korean that I use in daily life. So the language just is what it is—a daily reality of having every sentence be like a robotic math calculation, or, if not, a phrase that I’ve spent enough time memorizing that it sounds natural, even though it’s not something I would ever come up with myself. My latest memorized phrase is, “The monthly salary is as a mouse’s tail!”
Although language is important, the unspoken code behind the language is also important. It is possible to understand all the words without understanding the code. For instance, if our group TRACK is making a request to a government official about the “adoption problem,” as they call it in Korea, they may respond by saying, “It’s not easy.” In my overly optimistic and positive can-do American way, I want to reply, “I understand it’s not easy. So let’s work together to make it easier for both of us!” But what they are really saying, in code, is, “No, I don’t want to do that, and I rank higher than you”! They don’t want a response. Actually, this kind of code is very much how I was brought up—very Minnesota Scandinavian/Germanic Lutheran, but I think most Americans view it as passive-aggressive or behavior that you go to therapy to learn to ignore! Adoptees, as code breakers, can learn how to read the code, invoke it when we want to, and also make it clear that we should be allowed to decide when the code applies, or doesn’t apply, to us. I wish that there were a critical mass of adoptees who could code-switch/shape-shift at will. It could be like the ultimate real-life hero movie or horror movie, depending on who you are and what you have at stake.
I’ve heard that adoption agencies tell single mothers that they should relinquish their children for adoption because then “at least your baby can learn English.” It sounds really disgusting at face value. The meaning or the code behind that one is, “Your baby has a chance to be successful in the world if you send him for adoption.” And behind that code is the other code of being subservient to the West, the logic of a country that remains in some ways colonized even after liberation from Japan at the end of World War Two. This kind of logic of colonization, the retraining of the mind through the tongue, the claiming or ownership of the body, is inscribed, carved, cut into adoptees in the most intimate of ways.
This cutting and retraining is also what pays my bills. I talk about the irony of this in Fugitive Visions. During most of the time I was writing the book, I was working at “private academies” teaching Korean youngsters English. This is how most adoptees earn their living in Korea. Although most of us would really love to be able to speak Korean, we eat by teaching English. Now I’m working as an English-language proofreader for a newswire agency that could probably safely be called an “iron ricebowl.” So I have a very troubled relationship with the English language. On one hand, I would rather speak Korean as my first language, as I was born in Korea to a Korean family. If I conceive of myself in the Korean way—as just one person in a whole family stretching back in time and forward in time—my adoption and being sent to the U.S., and my language, is a freak occurrence. But on the other hand, it is a permanent fact that I was adopted, and a fact that English is consequently my working language. So therefore it is my unwilling colonization, the purchase of my body to replace a white child who never existed, that now puts rice into my bowl. And of course, if I had stayed in Korea like my siblings, I would speak Korean and do some other job. My sister owns a successful appliance store; my brother worked for the Korea Highway Corporation until his retirement.
I am reading a lot of “world English” every day at work and also using “world English” in my interactions with European adoptees. I probably think about usage much in the way that people do if they are speaking English as a foreign language. I like to see the working machinery of a good sentence. I like to know specifically what things mean. I have come to think of English and also Korean as tools to get something done. That means I have learned to appreciate good translating and editing. Though the author has to assume ultimate responsibility in the end, she is only part of a larger collaborative process, if she is lucky.
It seems adoptees develop many kinds of Korean, much like types of English; yet always there is the urgent need to be correct and precise. Regardless, there is so much struggle around our mouths.
Is it true that Eskimos have forty words for snow? Koreans have a different word for cooked rice, uncooked rice, and rice when it’s growing. Koreans love color, and I have been told there are forty words for different shades of yellow. I hate to think of how many words there are in Korean for “to pickle” and “to ferment.” Likewise, in the vocabulary that adoptees need to learn when we work on the “adoption problem” in Korea, we have to learn five different words for someone we would simply call in English a “single mother.” At once, we have this level of precision, and on the other hand, there is the Korean habit of using written Chinese or English to clarify meaning. “Privacy” is a word that I hear Koreans saying in English in relation to adoption, which I find really interesting.
The adoptees in Seoul will often mention “swallowing the red pill” to each other, which is code for awakening from a peaceful white-identified oblivion to a more feminist of color point of view on international adoption. What we are referencing, of course, is the movie The Matrix, and we also make references to wanting to download the Korean language program directly into our brains, just like the Matrix characters can download skills, but the sad fact is that learning language is a lot of doing flashcards and making a fool out of yourself, mixing up similar-sounding words for each other, such as “novel” (so-seol) with “diarrhea” (seol-sa) and “teacher” (seon-saeng) with “fish” (saeng-seon). “Mr. Fish, I read diarrhea until dawn, so to Mr. Fish will give homework tomorrow, will be okay?”
So we have to do our memorization work just as when learning any other foreign language. That said, I think Korean is even harder for adopted Koreans to learn than it is for other people because of social reasons. In language classes in Korea, adoptees are treated linguistically—because Koreans have a particular way of speaking amongst themselves—and socially as foreigners, even though the only reason we’re in Korea and learning the language is because we were born Korean. It’s really all too ironic. I wish someone would do a study on Korean adoptees’ language loss and acquisition as opposed to a control group of Korean emigrants or foreigners in Korea. For adoptees, it is a much different matter than learning just any random foreign language.
Let me posit that the struggle around the mouth is a struggle around power, ownership, authority, passing, acceptance, and identity; that robbing us of the language of our mothers is one way the adoption industry punishes desperate women and ensures that the relationship between the adoptee and the natural mother, if they ever are reunited, will remain locked in a preverbal state out of which no real adult healing is possible. This is why I come back to the knowledge of the body, always. Because that’s really all there is left. In the beginning, and in the end, all we had between us—adoptees and mothers, adoptees and the country—was our bodies. Our legal relationships with our families can be stolen, our culture, our history, our language, our minds. And as the adoption agencies who sold us know, our bodies are the only thing they cannot take from us. And because of that, they are worth more than anything.
In Fugitive Visions, this “knowledge of the body” ricochets through male bodies—I’m thinking of Bad Dominique in particular—and returns complicated insights about adoptee masculinity’s struggles in Seoul. Most of all, it seems, male adoptees confront violence in ways that could only emerge from an overwhelming sense of loss or theft.
Or maybe some confront loss and theft with violence—not necessarily physical—against themselves, against strangers, against women. Separating babies from their mothers is a violent act. So that is how many of us have started life. I wrote about “Bad Dominique” because he was with me for about two years, and he touched my heart in a way that allowed me to relate to him, and how he used addictions and violence to fill up his utter sense of emptiness and loss. Actually I was at a loss for words when it came to writing about him, who shaped so much of my experience in my first years living in Korea. How can you describe what it’s like to go to bed alone, knowing that meanwhile adopted men are getting beaten up in bars because they look Korean but they are not conjugating their verbs in the correct honorific form when talking to Koreans? How can you describe what it’s like to see a very rough man meet his mother for the first time after years of searching for her, and be so gentle with her, his arm around her and his forehead touching hers, and simultaneously see that there must be something wrong with her, mentally, that makes her eyes blank? “People like us should just die,” he told me when I asked him about having children. I remember many things he said to me verbatim because he was a French speaker, so his way of expressing things to me was that of someone who speaks English as a foreign language. The adoption agencies talk so much about love, but what they never talk about is how the method in which they sell this dependent child’s love—which looks to many adoptees like separation from families followed by years of enduring severe racism and Western stereotypes about Asian men and women—ultimately affects the adult adoptee’s ability to maintain loving and trusting relationships. Though the adoption agencies put a lot of spin on transracial adoption to make it seem natural, the fact is that other people can see us. We interact with the world through our bodies. I am convinced there is no such thing as color blindness. Color blindness just means we pretend everybody is neutral, and neutral means default white. Defaulting to white is white supremacy. By the way, Bad Dominique’s white French parents seem like totally wonderful people, and they provided for him very well, encouraged him to experience Korea and so forth. The adoptee state of having been robbed, of having to use so much brain space just to deal with racism in adoptive societies, and having to invoke the male currency of violence both in Seoul and adoptive countries, is not necessarily connected to how wonderful or nice one’s adoptive parents are.
Your book resists the sentimental homecoming story—“She moved to Seoul and lived happily ever after in Korea”—or the fairy tale’s inverse that’s equally familiar—“She moved to Korea and realized just how American she is.” Instead, you discard these plastic frames and turn toward source materials to reactivate all their truthful messiness. Is home possible, I wonder, or is this the more apt ending—“And she lived reconciled in Korea”?
If “home is where the heart is,” then I guess “home” is where one experiences love. What does that mean for people who are attachment disordered, meaning their ability to love is somehow compromised? In this homelessness, then, maybe reconciliation is the best hope. I think it is both necessary and possible. In Korea, on a personal level, reconciliation would look like Bad Dominique’s mother getting the support she needs because society does not blame one individual woman for the adoption, but rather points to overall conditions and systems that are to blame. Reconciliation would look like adopted Koreans getting into the school history books so young Koreans know we exist, and then Bad Dominique is not going to get beaten up for looking one way and sounding another. Reconciliation would look like more than just 2.7 percent of the adoptees being reunited, because there will be corrections made to the systems that separated us from our families. Reconciliation about the past would inform future laws and policies on family services in Korea. Reconciliation must also extend to adoptive families who did not know what they were getting into, who wanted to adopt orphans and instead got children with married mothers and fathers, who were only poor, not dead. If societies, governments, and private businesses and individuals become trustworthy through a formal truth and reconciliation process, I think that would do a lot toward adoptees’ ability to trust them, and others, and therefore to love, and find home.
Thank you, Jane, for our conversation and for envisioning in your activist and artistic work the language that can get us there. Is your house in Korea a good place in which to write? What can we look forward to reading from you in the future?
My house is not exactly a sanctuary—it’s pretty noisy, as you observed, but I suppose that’s a sign that my work is engaged with Korean society. I have big dreams to write a novel someday, but right now what urgently needs to be written is the work about adoption, in the Korean language, and this is going out in magazine articles, Web sites, and pamphlets. Writing a novel in my own language, for an audience that is “foreign” to Koreans, would be a great luxury as a writer. But I don’t have time for that right now, because what I am writing, through the filter of translation, is—to borrow from Frantz Fanon—a “literature of combat.”
Jane Jeong Trenka received a Loft-McKnight Artist Fellowship and a Loft Career Initiative grant in 2005, and participated in the Loft LEAP Committee (2002–2004) and the Loft Creative Nonfiction Mentorship (2001). Her books are The Language of Blood: A Memoir (2003), Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption (coedited with Julia Chinyere Oparah and Sun Yung Shin, 2006), and Fugitive Visions (2009). She now lives in Korea, where she works for Yonhap News Agency by night and is president of Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK) by day.
www.languageofblood.com
www.adoptionjustice.com
Jennifer Kwon Dobbs was born in Wonju, South Korea. Her first book of poetry, Paper Pavilion (2007), won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award. Her essays, reviews, and poems have appeared recently in Blackbird, Crazyhorse, Joongang Ilbo, Korea Herald, Marsh Hawk Review, Review Revue, and MiPOesias; have been anthologized in Echoes upon Echoes (Asian American Writers Workshop, 2003) and Language for a New Century (W. W. Norton, 2008); and have been translated into Greek, Turkish, and Korean. She is assistant professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and a member of Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK).
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