I'm always amazed how my kids always find me... and for them it's still a comfort-zone based on touch and smell. Funny thing is, I recall soon after they were born, I did the same thing to them. I smelled them. When I would nurse them, I would smell their little foreheads, and kiss them, and I could tell each one by their distinct smell who was who. I loved breathing them in. It was intoxicating ... even the twins had a same but different smell to me that told me they were mine, and everything was fine, because they belonged to me.
My kids joke because they love snuggling-up to me more than their dad because my skin is softer, fluffier, and I smell cozier. Sure, I am their mommy. They all came from me.
It makes complete perfect sense, feeling so close and content with someone, doesn't it?
I wouldn't want to go into the debate whether the body as a whole is a memory container, or whether it is actually the brain that creates the impression of bodily memory, unknown to our conscious self. I still voted yes to this question, even though I believe the latter of the two options to be more trueful than the first. I voted yes, because I don't see the mind all that separate from the body, even though I can be extremely cerebral at times. Still there is so much going on in my mind that I am unaware of. All sort of body functions get monitored and triggered without consulting my conscious self. All sorts of memories pop up when I haven't asked about it. Especially smells, tastes and certain textures, I have noticed, seem to have the power of bringing back not only memories, but all emotions involved at the time.
I was reading something about Fluid Memory [http://www.psicothema.com/pdf/3314.pdf], and the topic of working memory and intelligence got me thinking about the effect adoption has on the two genders. It seems to me that the female - because of her biology and ability to contain a baby within her body - is more likely to reconcile her own wounds of relinquishment and abandonment than the male relinquished by his mother, simply because of pregnancy, itself. In other words, for the adoptee, sex and pregnancy are the events that become complex turning points in our lives, making us acutely aware of where we once were, and where we are going. The question being: is it better to deny the effects of adoption, or delve into it's cause and effect on our lives and futures?
It would be interesting to learn when most adoption reunions take place, because if I were to guess, it would be during the time an adoptee questions his/her own roles as social and sexual beings.
Meanwhile, Hilbrand Westra was kind enough to forward me a piece written by Sonja v.d. Berg, an UAI member. It's called, "The Exile of the Body in Jane J. Tranka's 'The Language of Blood'". It goes into the depths of migration, and how instinct may over-ride emotional intelligence and allegience, as it relates to the political and functional adult being.
Space and Time in Literature:
Globalization and its Representations
By Sonja van den Berg
Introduction
Issues like those of migrancy and place are important features of our contemporary world which have to be faced by cultural theory and postcolonial literary studies. This paper would like to theorize one such instance of migrancy and its connections to place by analyzing an autobiographical work written by an Intercountry adoptee.
Though it may not be very common to conceptualize intercountry adoptees as migrants I will propose in this paper just such a conceptualization because it will allow us to overcome the often implicit objectification of adoptees in the context of adoption and to formulate them instead as self acting and self conscious subjects. Secondly this conceptualization holds the possibility of constructing Intercountry Adoptees as a separate group belonging to the global and contemporary phenomena of migrancy and Diaspora that has its own characteristics and peculiarities.
In this paper I will show how the autobiographical text The Language of Blood, written by an adoptee from the United States and born in Korea, foregrounds a migrant experience that is mediated by the body. It is body seen as a place that holds the possibility to activate memory in a politically conscious way to construct the past together with the future. The body mediates this migrant adoptee experience because it facilitates the ambivalent identifying and movement between the different places of the United States, the new homeland, and Korea, the country of birth.
The subtitle of The Language of Blood is “a memoir” and it is written in the first person singular by Jane Jeong Trenka. Jane Jeong Trenka has been born in Korea and has been adopted as a baby, together with her older biological sister Carol, by the American couple Brauer in Minnesota. In the story the author traces her American childhood and her life in the United States as an adoptee and a member of an ethnic minority. After graduating from college she made her first trip back to Korea where she met her biological mother and sisters.
She travels several more times to Korea until her biological mother gets diagnosed as having cancer and dies. The Language of Blood is constructed in a non chronological way.
Jeong Trenka alternates passages where she tells about the short periods she lives with her Korean mother and sisters, the bond they develop with each other and the death of her Korean mother with letters, small stage plays, memories and thoughts about her American childhood and her relation to her American family.
The first chapter of this paper deals with the formulation of the intercountry adoptee Jeong Trenka as an exile. With the help of Hamid Naficy’s concept of phobic space we can articulate her body as a container in which she uncomfortably resides. This formulation of her body is predicated upon the geographical location of the United States.
The second chapter deals with Jeong Trenka’s return to Korea which radically transforms this formulation of the body as a phobic space and changes the relation of Jeong Trenka to her body. In Korea her body traces another subject who claims ownership to the body as container. Secondly I will formulate adoption as a transgressive experience which creates a new and other child in order to conceptualize the adoptive familial relation as connecting to the dominant view of biological kinship instead of posing a potential subversive threat.
In the third chapter we formulate the body as a “place”. This concept can make clear how Jeong Trenka’s body mediates between memory and the struggle not to forget the past and integrate it into her identity as a migrant.
Exile identity
Intercountry adoption is one instance of the contemporary massive migration of people around the globe. According to Peter Selman intercountry adoption nowadays is a “phenomenon involving over 30,000 children a year moving between over a hundred countries” (Selman: 16). Explicitly formulating intercountry adoptees as migrants, let alone exiles as Jeong Trenka will do, is not extremely common. Intercountry adoption is often labelled the “quiet migration”; the inconspicuous trafficking of children after which they will seamlessly be accomodated in their new homes and families (see Selman, Weil). The identity of intercountry adoptees is generally formulated as a part of the national discourse of the new homeland and they are understood to be completely American, Dutch, French, etc. At best they are seen as satisfactorily melting the best of both worlds. In this latter instance their identity is a supposed multicultural one, where the diverse elements have neatly come together and where no dangerous strange elements threaten the dominant Western culture. A return to their country of birth is often romanticized as a search for their “roots”. It is a conception of “roots” that is made non-threatening by limiting it to an acceptable exoticism in which a tourist kind of flavour overlays the relation of adoptees to their country and culture of birth and their ethnicity (Ward Gailey: 303).
In her text The Language of Blood, Jeong Trenka questions both views of adoptee identity as either fully incorporated in the discourse of the new homeland or comfortably multi-rooted and still essentially fixed. In his article “Migrancy, hybridity, and postcolonial literary studies” Andrew Smith states that “[i]n an intuitive and everyday sense we think of our identities, whether ethnic or national or of any other form, as pre-given and stable facts of our lives” (Smith: 248). This notion of identity has become highly contestable in postcolonial literary studies. Migrants call into question just this view of identity as fixed, rooted and naturally given. They show us how to identify not solely on concepts of binary opposition, and to open up new ways of theorizing political struggle against totalization through hybridity and concepts of difference (249).
Jeong Trenka also dismisses the view of identity as stable and natural and she writes that “ ‘exile’ is the word that fits me best” (Jeong Trenka: 199). It fits her even better than the more common designation of “adoptee” which “never seemed quite right [because] it didn't address what I had lost, which was an inseparable part of what I had gained” (199). She reformulates her adoption not as solely a benevolent act in which all parties involved got their part; the birthparents who wanted to part from their child, the adoptee who needed a new home and the adoptive parents who wanted to have a child. Instead she contextualizes her adoption in a broader framework in which adoption is not an ideological neutral act and institution but is intimately connected with discourses of power relations. She gives us a typical example of these hierarchical relations that characterize adoption discourse as she writes about adoptive parents who, in trying to legitimate the practice of adoption, say to her: “Big people make choices for little people” (198) talking to her as if she was “one of their toddlers” (198). In labeling herself an exile she self consciously locates herself in the current migration streams across the globe and she implements intercountry adoption into the same structural framework that constitutes these global migrations of people.
Jeong Trenka's identifying with an exile identity suggests the existence of a land of origin which is often far away from the current place of residence. Exile also implies a yearning to that land of origin or place and can sometimes even hold the same attachment to “roots” that Smith criticized. At first sight Jeong Trenka seems to connect to a specific experience of migrancy and diaspora that has the same connotation as does the adoptee's search for “roots”. But she makes it explicit hers is not to be confused with the romantic view of exile. She has “little patience for 'ex-pates' who ricochet around the globe in search of the perfect café, willing women, cheap wine. . . . These things that other writers ruminate on - the feeling of homesickness, the sense of being at home nowhere but comfortable in many places, the power of memory - are realities, yet luxuries of the intelligentsia” (199-200). Instead she identifies with another kind of migrant experience. One in which living as an exile is an inescapable condition of life, often not engaged in willingly but forced to by outer circumstances whether they be economic, political or otherwise. So she asks herself and the reader: “Where is the outpouring of reflection from the Somali taxi driver in Minneapolis, the shopkeeper at Halal meat, the Mexican roofer covered in tar dust, the Turk and his wife who work in their restaurant sixteen hours every day? And where is the outpouring of reflection from children who are adopted, who want to be good, who want to be perfect for their new parents, lest they be returned to the store?” (200). But then her experience as an adoptee in exile does not wholly coincide with this latter migrant experience either. She writes: “When I watch the Mexican people in my neighborhood, I see what must be the backbone of a scattered people reaching out across the continent and binding them together. The backbone is many things: language, food, music, physical characteristics, religion, family. . . . As an adopted Korean, where is my backbone? How separated am I from the more than two hundred thousand Korean adoptees raised in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Canada? What can I salvage from this life [?]” (201). Though she labels herself an exile it is extremely difficult for her to conceptualize a relation and experience to and of a homeland and culture which is usually implied in this concept of migrancy.
As an exile Jeong Trenka relates in specific ways to notions of place. Important is the spatial frame of her text, her story being spread out between the two distant geographical places of the United States, Minnesota and Korea, Seoul. Moreover it is the distance that exists between these two places that is important. The Language of Blood is not a celebration of the popular view of the present world where globalization has overcome spatial barriers and has brought places and people more together in a contraction of the world (Massey: 146). It rather expresses the ongoing existence of geographical distance and therefore a physical distance as well, and the effects these distances can have on human relationships. It is precisely the migratory aspect, this traveling between geographical places, which constitutes in great part whom Jeong Trenka is. In one of the first passages of The Language of Blood, which is situated somewhere in the present, we see Jeong Trenka in Korea at the Haeinsa tempel complex. She says, by way of introducing herself to the reader: “My name is Jeong Kyong-Ah. My family register states the date of my birth, the lunar date January 24, 1972. I am the fifth daughter of Jeong Ho-Joon and the third daughter and fourth child of his second wife, Kang Ahn-Sun. . . . Halfway around the world, I am someone else. I am Jane Marie Brauer, created September 26, 1972, when I was carried off an airplane onto American soil. My State of Minnesota birth certificate declares my date of birth to be March 8, 1972. I am the younger daughter of Frederick and Margaret Brauer (emphasis mine)” (14). This passage testifies the importance of distance between places, between bodies. The attempt to overcome this distance has considerable impact on Jeong Trenka's relationship towards her American adoptive parents and it ingrains deeply the understanding she develops to her Korean family. It is only when Jeong Trenka visits her mother in Korea for the first time and is shown personal things and belongings as well as photo's and letters she has sent to her when she was a child, that she realizes her biological mother is really there: “Here is the evidence that she was there all along; she wasn't a myth or a made-up person. She wasn't just a name on a piece of paper. She was a real person all along (emphasis Jeong Trenka)” (111). The distance that previously existed between Jeong Trenka and her biological mother had the effect that Jeong Trenka somewhere had always doubted her real existence.
Identifying herself as an exile also makes explicit the relation Jeong Trenka holds to her body. The place she occupies being in exile, the geographical location of the United States, Minnesota, is not only distant from the geographical place Korea, Seoul, but also suggests a distance from her own body. In the next paragraph I will formulate Jeong Trenka's body as a container or a sack in which she holds a place. But she is disconnected from this container at the same time. She does not coincide with her body. The distance from her body is in the first place a reference to her lack of a stable and unified identity as a Korean adoptee living in the United States. In the second place it explicates the distance between her and her biological family in Korea. We will see in the next paragraphs that the body formulated as the carrier of a shared substance is the only connection left to her biological family. This connection is communicated in a language of the “blood”.
Traveling in the body
In his article “Phobic spaces and liminal panic: independent transnational film genre” Hamid Naficy states: “in transnationality the boundaries between self and other, female and male, inside and outside, homeland and hostland are blurred and must continually be negotiated” (Naficy: 128). Concerning transnational film genre he sees the concept of closed claustrophobic space as the expression and encoding of transnational subjectivity (129). Though Naficy's primary images of claustrophobic spaces in transnational cinema are the prison or the house, he also sees the body as a space functioning in a claustrophobic way. I think his concept of the body as a claustrophobic space to be very powerful for the condition of Jeong Trenka as an exile.
Jeong Trenka tells how, in the United States, she always checked “white” at the box on her college forms when asked about her ethnical background. The reason, she tells, is because: “I didn't want to be Korean. . . . Korea was the reason my face was mutated . . . ” (Jeong Trenka: 113). She considers herself as white or: “what is on the inside is what matters” (113). She longs for “wholeness, for my body to be as white and Northern Minnesotan as my mind” (207). Here we see the articulation of a body that in being racialized and inferiorised in the United States has become hollow. The skin, the primary signifier for a racial identity, is like a container which holds the “real” Jeong Trenka. Above all, it is a container which she does not like to have. It handicaps her. The skin is something of lesser value. In the United States, it identifies her with racial stereotypes and an undangerous exoticism people tend to have about East-Asians.
So in the United States, her new homeland, Jeong Trenka has a body that functions like a sack in which the “real” - read: "white" - Jeong Trenka resides. This is the conceptualization of her body in the West where her body is always constituted as the abject, the disavowal of the norm of whiteness. But something happens to her body and her relation to it, when she begins, after graduating from college, to travel back and forth to Korea and leaves her place of residence physically. What happens, in the words of the Korean (non-adopted) emigrant Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, is this: “You return and you are not one of them . . . ” (Cha: 56). Back in Korea Cha finds herself in an empty body: “You leave you come back to the shell left empty all this time” (57). As Naficy, Cha foregrounds the body as an uncomfortable space.
What happens to Jeong Trenka when she is back in Korea for the first time and meets her biological mother and sister on the airport is the following. She writes: “Strangely, all the photos . . . show me with a markedly changed appearance that I cannot explain.
Whenever I haul out the big photo album, friends ask, 'Is that you?' My face is rounder than in the photograph taken at the airport in Minneapolis before I left. The expression is different. I became someone else” (Jeong Trenka: 99). This is an important passage which we will explicate further in the next chapter. Although Jeong Trenka speaks about her outer looks that seem to have changed, it is important to see that not her body changes but the one who is “inside”. What changes is her expression, caused by the one who hides behind the face and controls the muscles. In Korea, when she meets her biological mother and sister, the container that her body is suddenly seems to be occupied by someone else. This someone else taking the place in the container is in my view predicated both upon her meeting with her biological family and the geographical replacement from Minnesota to Seoul.
2. A crowded space
Adoption as a border
What we saw in the former paragraph is that when Jeong Trenka travels back to Korea she changes in someone else. It is at that moment that she realizes she is really two different persons. She has two different lives. This doubling up of lives is important in relation to the body because it is predicated upon it. Here I will deal shortly with adoption since this can be seen as the cause of the doubling up. In the introduction I have formulated adoption as an experience of transgression. It is the crossing of a border.
Adoptive kinship is often seen as a “fictive” kinship (Schneider: 172). In Euro-American culture the biological kinship is thought to be a shared substance of genetic material or “blood” and is considered, often implicitly, to be the only true basis of familial relations (Ward Gailey: 296). Adoption is seen as an alternative method of reproduction and family making which together with the new reproductive technologies such as surrogate motherhood and IVF, can form a subversive threat to the dominant view of biological kinship. We see however that these alternative methods actively try to connect to this biological model. The elements of alternative methods of family making and reproduction that are potentially threatening to the dominant view of kinship get deemphasized in favour of the elements that are consonant with this dominant view (Ragoné: 136). In the case of adoption we see how the biological ties of the adopted child have to be actively deemphasized and largely ignored so that the newly formed adoptive relation between adoptive parents and adopted child can be set in place as a fictive biological relation. Therefore the adopted child has to be formulated as what Ward Gailey calls an “empty slate” (Ward Gailey: 308). The former identity of the adopted child that refers to the real biological background of the child, has to be erased in order to make it possible for the adoptive parents to claim the child just as if it were their own. “The language of the Intercountry adoption . . . creates conditions where the adoptee's birth parents become socially dead” (305). This is done out of reverence for the belief in biological kinship because:
“Although adoption challenges notions of genetic kinship as the basis of attachment, and although these parents felt attached to their children, the fear remains that there really is a ‘birth bond’ stronger than nurturing” (Gediman and Brown: 1989 in Ward Gailey: 305). We can see this happen as well in The Language of Blood where Jeong Trenka tells the reader about the reaction of her adoptive mother to the death of her biological mother: “She [her adoptive mother] is unaffected by my mother's death; it didn't happen, she didn't happen. In my mom's mind, I don't come from somewhere else, I don't have a birth mother . . . (emphasis Jeong Trenka)” (Jeong Trenka: 167). In a stage play which alternates Jeong Trenka's story we see the staging of the car trip home when the Brauers have just picked up their adopted children from the airport, having just arrived from Korea. I will quote a passage which scans in on Carol, Jeong Trenka's sister who was four years old when she arrived.
Behind and above the car, fade in a reel-to-reel home movie playing scenes from CAROL's (Mi-Ja's) life in Korea. Each scene in Korean language plays for fewer than five seconds before it is faded into black and the next scene plays. Scenes are various memories, showing an account of her young life so far. . . . At the end of the movie sequence, the Korean memories are completely erased, and the reel-to-reel projector shows blank frames and white noise, as seen at a beginning or ending take-up length of tape. CAROL has willed herself to become a girl with no history and is now ready to start her new life. (17)
In order to become Carol Brauer, Jeong Trenka’s sister has to begin a new life as a new individual. She can no longer be Jeong Mi-Ja and has to erase all the memories she has of this former life. The literal coming to life of Carol, because she is a girl with no history, suggests the death of Mi-Ja whose memories and history are erased.
The erasure of the former identity together with the disavowal of the biological background of adoptees makes it possible to formulate adoption as a “death”. Cathy Caruth's concept of trauma in connection to Freud is very illuminative in this respect.
In “Traumatic Departures: Survival and history in Freud” Caruth writes that “trauma consists not only in having confronted death but in having survived, precisely, without knowing it (emphasis Caruth)” (Caruth: 64). One’s survival is “incomprehensible” because it is not consciously known (64). In relation to Freud's death drive Caruth states that “life itself . . . is an awakening out of a ‘death’ for which there was no preparation” (65). It is especially the traumatic repetition that is destructive of a subject's life (63). This is quite suggestive in relation to Jeong Trenka's adoption and, in my view, of adoption in general. It is Caruth’s traumatic waking to life that parallels the creation of the adopted child as a new child with no history or memories so that it will accommodate the adoptive kinship as a fictive biological kinship. Jeong Trenka has passed beyond death, the death of Kyong-Ah, and has awakened to a new life as the adoptee Jane Brauer. The traumatic repetition is constituted by the constant confrontation with the abject Korean body in the United States.
Meeting the other you
So Jeong Trenka has survived a “death” and came to life again as someone else. We see that she does not integrate her two lives or two beginnings in one and the same person. They each lead to different individuals which are clearly separated from each other. Jeong Trenka explicates this as follows:
Dear Jane,
You are a brave young woman, keeping me alive. I am like a parasite; I exist only because you do. If you had not been born, I would have died.
People do not see me, although we share a heart, a face, a mind, and a body. You have the benefit of being the twin who is seen. Me - I must hide behind you.
Take care of me. Take care of this body because, you know, it is really mine. That face you see - mine. The hands you use to eat and work - those too are mine. You are living a borrowed life.
Don't forget.
Kyong-Ah. (Jeong Trenka: 121)
This letter makes clear how Jeong Trenka relates to her body. As Kyong-Ah, her Korean name referring to the Korean identity she lost when she was adopted, Jeong Trenka writes a letter to herself as Jane, the other child she became because of her adoption. When she became Jane, the daughter of the American couple Brauer, she literally became someone else. We see how Kyong-Ah makes it clear to Jane that the body Jane is using and living in, is really Kyong-Ah's. Although Kyong-Ah now has to hide behind Jane and is totally dependent on her there must be no misunderstanding that it is because of Kyong-Ah that Jane can live. She makes it even more explicit when she says: “You are living a borrowed life.” It is Kyong-Ah's life Jane is living because it is the body of the Korea Kyong-Ah. It was the carrier that simultaneously has kept Kyong-Ah alive, although barely, and has facilitated the birth of Jane in the United States.
This realization that her body really belongs to someone else is set in motion when she physically overcomes the distance that separates Minnesota from Seoul. We already saw how she stated that she became someone else when meeting her biological mother for the first time. What follows after the passage I quoted in the first chapter, where she is in Korea at the Haeinsa tempel, is: “In Minnesota, it is night, and Jane Brauer is missing. She is gone - only a memory in the minds of those who imagine her. Meanwhile, in the mountains of Korea, Jeong Kyong-Ah fills her pockets with stones and blinks hard in the sunlight, as if awakened from a deep sleep, or perhaps a very long fugue” (15). We see how the body mediates the migratory experience of Jeong Trenka. When she moves her body to this specific place of Korea Jane evaporates as physical existence because Kyong-Ah takes over her body. This makes us attentive to the traumatic consequences Jeong Trenka's adoption has had. Ultimately it is the trading of one life for another. The body's role is that it repetitiously confronts Jeong Trenka with this fact being an abject element in the United States where Kyong-Ah is unwished and taken over by Kyong-Ah when the body travels to Korea.
3. Body as place
We have seen how in the United States, before she returns to Korea, Jeong Trenka is not able to deal with the phobic space of her body and transform it in a liveable “place”. We localize the difference between space and place in the situatedness of place, place is a lived place and not a mere geometric location like the modernist view of space (Casey: 201). Space is also often seen as devoid of engagement. As the opposite of Time it is free from the influence of history and politics (Massey: 250-251). In the United States the body of Jeong Trenka is a container of inferior value, always referring to exoticism and racial stereotypes. The body is in this instance a space of homelessness and not fitting in.
In “A Global Sense of Place” Doreen Massey raises the questions how we can think of a progressive sense of place without the reactionary connotations of rootedness and fixity normally attached to it. She also emphasizes the political value of struggle such a progressive sense of place ought to have (Massey: 151-152). How could this be reached in The Language of Blood? What seems important is the place of the in-between. Jeong Trenka formulates it as “the crack between the time I was Jeong Kyong-Ah and when I became Jane Brauer” (Jeong Trenka: 203). There is the need to fill in this crack.
The in-between place is almost a mystical place. If we articulate it using the concept of trauma voiced by Caruth, it becomes a place of the “dead”. After Jeong Trenka's biological mother has died we can read Jeong Trenka adressing her: “My dear Umma [mother]. Now that you are dead, you are more near to me. You've always been so far away, halfway across the earth in your basement apartment in Seoul, me here in Minnesota . . . ” (192). When her mother is in the place of the dead she has overcome the geographical distance that separates Seoul from Minnesota. In this place her mother is paradoxically nearer to Jeong Trenka then she was when in Seoul. So, in the text the geographical distance is less easily crossed over than the distance that normally separates the realm of the living from the dead.
But how is this distance crossed over? I would like to propose a connection between the body and this in-between place - the “crack” between Kyong-Ah and Jane or the place where her biological mother now resides - that is constituted by the adoption and is a place of both death and revival.
How can we think a progressive sense of place in connection to the in-between place and the body? Naficy connects the phobic space of the body with memory and nostalgia for a lost past (Naficy: 134). And Massey cites bell hooks who states: “our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting” She speaks about a “politicization of memory that distinguishes nostalgia . . . from that remembering that serves to illuminate and transform the present” (bell hooks cited in Massey: 171). It is via the body that in The Language of Blood memory gets activated. The Language of Blood opens with a quote of Joyce Carol Oates stating: “ . . . Because we are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language” (Oates cited in Jeong Trenka). Memory is here a physical quality and above all a quality that can be passed on to future generations and is universally understandable. It is the bell hooks concept of memory that changes the phobic space of the body in a place. Jeong Trenka writes about her biological mother who at a certain moment showed Jeong Trenka her breasts meaning she loved and nursed Jeong Trenka and by which she seemed to say: “I made you with my own body” (Jeong Trenka: 102). Jeong Trenka writes: “Her stories worked their way through my skin and into my blood. I felt her bravery seeping in . . . , into my own stories, merging with them, transforming me into her daughter” (103). Again we see the bodily metaphor of blood. It suggests the body is the medium by which Jeong Trenka and her biological mother communicate since they can hardly communicate verbally; Jeong Trenka's Korean is basically as non-existent as the English of her biological family. Jeong Trenka underlines this bodily communication when she addresses her mother after she died and says to her: “I will carry you with me, in the language of blood” (140).
Jeong Trenka's framing of the communication between her and her biological mother in the “language of blood”, which also refers to the title of the book, explicitly connects to the physical vocabulary and metaphors of biological kinship.
The supreme value American culture places upon biological kinship is due to the view that biological or blood relations are seen to be “in principle unquestioned and unquestionable. They are states of being, not of doing or performance” (Schneider: 165). Via the language of the body Jeong Trenka learns about and gets to know her biological family. She learns about their past which is also Kyong-Ah’s and eventually it also becomes Jane's past. The merging of the stories of her biological mother with those of her own transform the body of Jeong Trenka in a livable and loved place since, as she tells her mother: “I am made in the image of you; I am a daughter after your body and after your heart” (Jeong Trenka: 140). When Jeong Trenka refers to the language of blood, to a language of the body, she explicitly distances herself from her American identity and the bond with her adoptive parents since it is on the disavowal of the biological bond with her Korean mother that the adoptive bond is predicated. She speaks to the reader and her adoptive American mother: “We also have this in common: our bodies, which remind each other of what we do not have, of who we are not. Mom, I am not from you; I will never be fully yours” (202).
In contrast to Jane's inner “self” that is constructed by the adoption, the body refers to a natural kind of identity that is predicated upon a bond between her and her biological mother that is considered to be naturally given and unquestionable. Of course this is precisely the view of biological kinship as biologically given and passed on via the substance of blood or genetics. But The Language of Blood utilizes this essentialist view of identity and kinship in a progressive manner as well. So is Jeong Trenka said by Kyong-Ah not to forget. Not to forget a former life that was situated in Korea and in which her body belonged to Kyong-Ah in a natural way. In actively negotiating the body as a "place" Jeong Trenka recalls that past and those memories that are part of the short life of Kyong-Ah. She creates the opening in which Kyong-Ah gets the ability to speak and come back. In this geographical location of Seoul her body no longer refers to exoticism and the racial abject but begins to speak for itself. The homeless space of her body becomes a place when she begins to travel back and forth to Korea and where this migrating, this hovering in between places, begins to constitute who she is.
As a metaphor for her condition as an exile Jeong Trenka uses the Monarch butterfly who migrate every year from Minnesota to Mexico and back again (33). She writes: “Monarchs migrate. This is different than species that emigrate. Species that emigrate only travel one way. Species that migrate travel back and forth between two different places. They have two homes” (34). What is important to remember is that: “[i]t takes generations of butterflies to complete the migration cycle. The butterflies returning to Mexico or California every fall are the great-great-grandchildren of those who left the previous spring. No one knows how they can find their way” (34). This passage suggests that the knowledge about which way to go when migrating from one place to another is an intuitive natural kind of knowledge, one that can not be expressed in any verbal language that is never inborn, like English or Korean, but is passed on to the following generations through a language that is connected to the body since it is via blood or genetics that things get passed on from one generation to the next. The passage further points to migration as a state of being, and not one of individuals but of a species. What is handed down by her biological mother via the body and what Jeong Trenka will give to her future daughter is the biologically given quality of migration. It is also with the metaphor of the Monarch butterfly that The Language of Blood ends.
Suspended in the air on a plane from Korea back to Minnesota Jeong Trenka dreams about her Korean mother, herself and her (perhaps) future daughter who all rise into the air together with the Monarch butterflies who have begun their migration. This dream passage is very evocative in its suggestion that as well as the Monarch butterfly Jeong Trenka too considers herself a migrant who will always travel between places. As a migrant she occupies a place in-between which is constituted by the border of adoption and which creates the possibility for Jane and Kyong-Ah to come together in one body. She and her future daughter will find their way in between these places via their bodies which are made in each others images.
List of works cited
Caruth, Cathy. "Traumatic departures: Survival and history in Freud." Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996. 57-72.
Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A philosophical history. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee. Berkeley: Third woman press, 1995.
Jeong Trenka, Jane. The Language of Blood: A memoir. St. Paul: Borealis Books-Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2003.
Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Naficiy, Hamid. "Phobic Spaces and Liminal Panic: Independent Transnational Film Genre." Glocal/ Local. Cultural production and the transnational imaginary. eds. Rob Wilson, Wimal Dissanayake. Duke University Press: 1996. 119-144.
Ragoné, Helena. Surrogate Motherhood. Conception in the heart. Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press, 1994.
Schneider, David M. A critique of the study of kinship. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1987 ed.
Selman, Peter. "Intercountry Adoption in the New Millennium: The 'Quiet Migration' Revisited." Population Research and Policy Review 21, no. 3 (2002): 205-25.
Smith, Andrew. "Migrancy, hybridity, and postcolonial literary studies." The Cambridge companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Cambridge Companions to Literature. ed. Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Ward Gailey, Christine. "Race, class and gender in intercountry adoption in the USA." Intercountry adoption. Developments, trends and perspectives. ed Peter Selman. London: British Agencies for Adoption & Fostering, 2000. 295-314.
Weil, R. H. "International Adoptions: The Quiet Migration." International Migration Review XVIII, 2 (1984): 276-293.
Life, death and revival... a theme that exists for all of us, but made more apparent to the adoptee who is given a triad-based language, replacing fluid family consistency.
Are females more soulfully aware of this, or do male adoptees sense and feel the inner death and dwellings, as well?
Comments
Comfort zones
"Seek and you will find"
I'm always amazed how my kids always find me... and for them it's still a comfort-zone based on touch and smell. Funny thing is, I recall soon after they were born, I did the same thing to them. I smelled them. When I would nurse them, I would smell their little foreheads, and kiss them, and I could tell each one by their distinct smell who was who. I loved breathing them in. It was intoxicating ... even the twins had a same but different smell to me that told me they were mine, and everything was fine, because they belonged to me.
My kids joke because they love snuggling-up to me more than their dad because my skin is softer, fluffier, and I smell cozier. Sure, I am their mommy. They all came from me.
It makes complete perfect sense, feeling so close and content with someone, doesn't it?
pain
I remember being told we can't remember pain, but I know certain headaches and certain pains in my body feel the same from when I was little.
A body of memories
I wouldn't want to go into the debate whether the body as a whole is a memory container, or whether it is actually the brain that creates the impression of bodily memory, unknown to our conscious self. I still voted yes to this question, even though I believe the latter of the two options to be more trueful than the first. I voted yes, because I don't see the mind all that separate from the body, even though I can be extremely cerebral at times. Still there is so much going on in my mind that I am unaware of. All sort of body functions get monitored and triggered without consulting my conscious self. All sorts of memories pop up when I haven't asked about it. Especially smells, tastes and certain textures, I have noticed, seem to have the power of bringing back not only memories, but all emotions involved at the time.
Memory, denial and everything in-between
I was reading something about Fluid Memory [http://www.psicothema.com/pdf/3314.pdf], and the topic of working memory and intelligence got me thinking about the effect adoption has on the two genders. It seems to me that the female - because of her biology and ability to contain a baby within her body - is more likely to reconcile her own wounds of relinquishment and abandonment than the male relinquished by his mother, simply because of pregnancy, itself. In other words, for the adoptee, sex and pregnancy are the events that become complex turning points in our lives, making us acutely aware of where we once were, and where we are going. The question being: is it better to deny the effects of adoption, or delve into it's cause and effect on our lives and futures?
It would be interesting to learn when most adoption reunions take place, because if I were to guess, it would be during the time an adoptee questions his/her own roles as social and sexual beings.
Meanwhile, Hilbrand Westra was kind enough to forward me a piece written by Sonja v.d. Berg, an UAI member. It's called, "The Exile of the Body in Jane J. Tranka's 'The Language of Blood'". It goes into the depths of migration, and how instinct may over-ride emotional intelligence and allegience, as it relates to the political and functional adult being.
The exile of the body
~ The exile of the body ~
In Jane J. Trenka’s
“The Language of Blood”
Space and Time in Literature:
Globalization and its Representations
By Sonja van den Berg
Introduction
Issues like those of migrancy and place are important features of our contemporary world which have to be faced by cultural theory and postcolonial literary studies. This paper would like to theorize one such instance of migrancy and its connections to place by analyzing an autobiographical work written by an Intercountry adoptee.
Though it may not be very common to conceptualize intercountry adoptees as migrants I will propose in this paper just such a conceptualization because it will allow us to overcome the often implicit objectification of adoptees in the context of adoption and to formulate them instead as self acting and self conscious subjects. Secondly this conceptualization holds the possibility of constructing Intercountry Adoptees as a separate group belonging to the global and contemporary phenomena of migrancy and Diaspora that has its own characteristics and peculiarities.
In this paper I will show how the autobiographical text The Language of Blood, written by an adoptee from the United States and born in Korea, foregrounds a migrant experience that is mediated by the body. It is body seen as a place that holds the possibility to activate memory in a politically conscious way to construct the past together with the future. The body mediates this migrant adoptee experience because it facilitates the ambivalent identifying and movement between the different places of the United States, the new homeland, and Korea, the country of birth.
The subtitle of The Language of Blood is “a memoir” and it is written in the first person singular by Jane Jeong Trenka. Jane Jeong Trenka has been born in Korea and has been adopted as a baby, together with her older biological sister Carol, by the American couple Brauer in Minnesota. In the story the author traces her American childhood and her life in the United States as an adoptee and a member of an ethnic minority. After graduating from college she made her first trip back to Korea where she met her biological mother and sisters.
She travels several more times to Korea until her biological mother gets diagnosed as having cancer and dies. The Language of Blood is constructed in a non chronological way.
Jeong Trenka alternates passages where she tells about the short periods she lives with her Korean mother and sisters, the bond they develop with each other and the death of her Korean mother with letters, small stage plays, memories and thoughts about her American childhood and her relation to her American family.
The first chapter of this paper deals with the formulation of the intercountry adoptee Jeong Trenka as an exile. With the help of Hamid Naficy’s concept of phobic space we can articulate her body as a container in which she uncomfortably resides. This formulation of her body is predicated upon the geographical location of the United States.
The second chapter deals with Jeong Trenka’s return to Korea which radically transforms this formulation of the body as a phobic space and changes the relation of Jeong Trenka to her body. In Korea her body traces another subject who claims ownership to the body as container. Secondly I will formulate adoption as a transgressive experience which creates a new and other child in order to conceptualize the adoptive familial relation as connecting to the dominant view of biological kinship instead of posing a potential subversive threat.
In the third chapter we formulate the body as a “place”. This concept can make clear how Jeong Trenka’s body mediates between memory and the struggle not to forget the past and integrate it into her identity as a migrant.
Exile identity
Intercountry adoption is one instance of the contemporary massive migration of people around the globe. According to Peter Selman intercountry adoption nowadays is a “phenomenon involving over 30,000 children a year moving between over a hundred countries” (Selman: 16). Explicitly formulating intercountry adoptees as migrants, let alone exiles as Jeong Trenka will do, is not extremely common. Intercountry adoption is often labelled the “quiet migration”; the inconspicuous trafficking of children after which they will seamlessly be accomodated in their new homes and families (see Selman, Weil). The identity of intercountry adoptees is generally formulated as a part of the national discourse of the new homeland and they are understood to be completely American, Dutch, French, etc. At best they are seen as satisfactorily melting the best of both worlds. In this latter instance their identity is a supposed multicultural one, where the diverse elements have neatly come together and where no dangerous strange elements threaten the dominant Western culture. A return to their country of birth is often romanticized as a search for their “roots”. It is a conception of “roots” that is made non-threatening by limiting it to an acceptable exoticism in which a tourist kind of flavour overlays the relation of adoptees to their country and culture of birth and their ethnicity (Ward Gailey: 303).
In her text The Language of Blood, Jeong Trenka questions both views of adoptee identity as either fully incorporated in the discourse of the new homeland or comfortably multi-rooted and still essentially fixed. In his article “Migrancy, hybridity, and postcolonial literary studies” Andrew Smith states that “[i]n an intuitive and everyday sense we think of our identities, whether ethnic or national or of any other form, as pre-given and stable facts of our lives” (Smith: 248). This notion of identity has become highly contestable in postcolonial literary studies. Migrants call into question just this view of identity as fixed, rooted and naturally given. They show us how to identify not solely on concepts of binary opposition, and to open up new ways of theorizing political struggle against totalization through hybridity and concepts of difference (249).
Jeong Trenka also dismisses the view of identity as stable and natural and she writes that “ ‘exile’ is the word that fits me best” (Jeong Trenka: 199). It fits her even better than the more common designation of “adoptee” which “never seemed quite right [because] it didn't address what I had lost, which was an inseparable part of what I had gained” (199). She reformulates her adoption not as solely a benevolent act in which all parties involved got their part; the birthparents who wanted to part from their child, the adoptee who needed a new home and the adoptive parents who wanted to have a child. Instead she contextualizes her adoption in a broader framework in which adoption is not an ideological neutral act and institution but is intimately connected with discourses of power relations. She gives us a typical example of these hierarchical relations that characterize adoption discourse as she writes about adoptive parents who, in trying to legitimate the practice of adoption, say to her: “Big people make choices for little people” (198) talking to her as if she was “one of their toddlers” (198). In labeling herself an exile she self consciously locates herself in the current migration streams across the globe and she implements intercountry adoption into the same structural framework that constitutes these global migrations of people.
Jeong Trenka's identifying with an exile identity suggests the existence of a land of origin which is often far away from the current place of residence. Exile also implies a yearning to that land of origin or place and can sometimes even hold the same attachment to “roots” that Smith criticized. At first sight Jeong Trenka seems to connect to a specific experience of migrancy and diaspora that has the same connotation as does the adoptee's search for “roots”. But she makes it explicit hers is not to be confused with the romantic view of exile. She has “little patience for 'ex-pates' who ricochet around the globe in search of the perfect café, willing women, cheap wine. . . . These things that other writers ruminate on - the feeling of homesickness, the sense of being at home nowhere but comfortable in many places, the power of memory - are realities, yet luxuries of the intelligentsia” (199-200). Instead she identifies with another kind of migrant experience. One in which living as an exile is an inescapable condition of life, often not engaged in willingly but forced to by outer circumstances whether they be economic, political or otherwise. So she asks herself and the reader: “Where is the outpouring of reflection from the Somali taxi driver in Minneapolis, the shopkeeper at Halal meat, the Mexican roofer covered in tar dust, the Turk and his wife who work in their restaurant sixteen hours every day? And where is the outpouring of reflection from children who are adopted, who want to be good, who want to be perfect for their new parents, lest they be returned to the store?” (200). But then her experience as an adoptee in exile does not wholly coincide with this latter migrant experience either. She writes: “When I watch the Mexican people in my neighborhood, I see what must be the backbone of a scattered people reaching out across the continent and binding them together. The backbone is many things: language, food, music, physical characteristics, religion, family. . . . As an adopted Korean, where is my backbone? How separated am I from the more than two hundred thousand Korean adoptees raised in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Canada? What can I salvage from this life [?]” (201). Though she labels herself an exile it is extremely difficult for her to conceptualize a relation and experience to and of a homeland and culture which is usually implied in this concept of migrancy.
As an exile Jeong Trenka relates in specific ways to notions of place. Important is the spatial frame of her text, her story being spread out between the two distant geographical places of the United States, Minnesota and Korea, Seoul. Moreover it is the distance that exists between these two places that is important. The Language of Blood is not a celebration of the popular view of the present world where globalization has overcome spatial barriers and has brought places and people more together in a contraction of the world (Massey: 146). It rather expresses the ongoing existence of geographical distance and therefore a physical distance as well, and the effects these distances can have on human relationships. It is precisely the migratory aspect, this traveling between geographical places, which constitutes in great part whom Jeong Trenka is. In one of the first passages of The Language of Blood, which is situated somewhere in the present, we see Jeong Trenka in Korea at the Haeinsa tempel complex. She says, by way of introducing herself to the reader: “My name is Jeong Kyong-Ah. My family register states the date of my birth, the lunar date January 24, 1972. I am the fifth daughter of Jeong Ho-Joon and the third daughter and fourth child of his second wife, Kang Ahn-Sun. . . . Halfway around the world, I am someone else. I am Jane Marie Brauer, created September 26, 1972, when I was carried off an airplane onto American soil. My State of Minnesota birth certificate declares my date of birth to be March 8, 1972. I am the younger daughter of Frederick and Margaret Brauer (emphasis mine)” (14). This passage testifies the importance of distance between places, between bodies. The attempt to overcome this distance has considerable impact on Jeong Trenka's relationship towards her American adoptive parents and it ingrains deeply the understanding she develops to her Korean family. It is only when Jeong Trenka visits her mother in Korea for the first time and is shown personal things and belongings as well as photo's and letters she has sent to her when she was a child, that she realizes her biological mother is really there: “Here is the evidence that she was there all along; she wasn't a myth or a made-up person. She wasn't just a name on a piece of paper. She was a real person all along (emphasis Jeong Trenka)” (111). The distance that previously existed between Jeong Trenka and her biological mother had the effect that Jeong Trenka somewhere had always doubted her real existence.
Identifying herself as an exile also makes explicit the relation Jeong Trenka holds to her body. The place she occupies being in exile, the geographical location of the United States, Minnesota, is not only distant from the geographical place Korea, Seoul, but also suggests a distance from her own body. In the next paragraph I will formulate Jeong Trenka's body as a container or a sack in which she holds a place. But she is disconnected from this container at the same time. She does not coincide with her body. The distance from her body is in the first place a reference to her lack of a stable and unified identity as a Korean adoptee living in the United States. In the second place it explicates the distance between her and her biological family in Korea. We will see in the next paragraphs that the body formulated as the carrier of a shared substance is the only connection left to her biological family. This connection is communicated in a language of the “blood”.
Traveling in the body
In his article “Phobic spaces and liminal panic: independent transnational film genre” Hamid Naficy states: “in transnationality the boundaries between self and other, female and male, inside and outside, homeland and hostland are blurred and must continually be negotiated” (Naficy: 128). Concerning transnational film genre he sees the concept of closed claustrophobic space as the expression and encoding of transnational subjectivity (129). Though Naficy's primary images of claustrophobic spaces in transnational cinema are the prison or the house, he also sees the body as a space functioning in a claustrophobic way. I think his concept of the body as a claustrophobic space to be very powerful for the condition of Jeong Trenka as an exile.
Jeong Trenka tells how, in the United States, she always checked “white” at the box on her college forms when asked about her ethnical background. The reason, she tells, is because: “I didn't want to be Korean. . . . Korea was the reason my face was mutated . . . ” (Jeong Trenka: 113). She considers herself as white or: “what is on the inside is what matters” (113). She longs for “wholeness, for my body to be as white and Northern Minnesotan as my mind” (207). Here we see the articulation of a body that in being racialized and inferiorised in the United States has become hollow. The skin, the primary signifier for a racial identity, is like a container which holds the “real” Jeong Trenka. Above all, it is a container which she does not like to have. It handicaps her. The skin is something of lesser value. In the United States, it identifies her with racial stereotypes and an undangerous exoticism people tend to have about East-Asians.
So in the United States, her new homeland, Jeong Trenka has a body that functions like a sack in which the “real” - read: "white" - Jeong Trenka resides. This is the conceptualization of her body in the West where her body is always constituted as the abject, the disavowal of the norm of whiteness. But something happens to her body and her relation to it, when she begins, after graduating from college, to travel back and forth to Korea and leaves her place of residence physically. What happens, in the words of the Korean (non-adopted) emigrant Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, is this: “You return and you are not one of them . . . ” (Cha: 56). Back in Korea Cha finds herself in an empty body: “You leave you come back to the shell left empty all this time” (57). As Naficy, Cha foregrounds the body as an uncomfortable space.
What happens to Jeong Trenka when she is back in Korea for the first time and meets her biological mother and sister on the airport is the following. She writes: “Strangely, all the photos . . . show me with a markedly changed appearance that I cannot explain.
Whenever I haul out the big photo album, friends ask, 'Is that you?' My face is rounder than in the photograph taken at the airport in Minneapolis before I left. The expression is different. I became someone else” (Jeong Trenka: 99). This is an important passage which we will explicate further in the next chapter. Although Jeong Trenka speaks about her outer looks that seem to have changed, it is important to see that not her body changes but the one who is “inside”. What changes is her expression, caused by the one who hides behind the face and controls the muscles. In Korea, when she meets her biological mother and sister, the container that her body is suddenly seems to be occupied by someone else. This someone else taking the place in the container is in my view predicated both upon her meeting with her biological family and the geographical replacement from Minnesota to Seoul.
2. A crowded space
Adoption as a border
What we saw in the former paragraph is that when Jeong Trenka travels back to Korea she changes in someone else. It is at that moment that she realizes she is really two different persons. She has two different lives. This doubling up of lives is important in relation to the body because it is predicated upon it. Here I will deal shortly with adoption since this can be seen as the cause of the doubling up. In the introduction I have formulated adoption as an experience of transgression. It is the crossing of a border.
Adoptive kinship is often seen as a “fictive” kinship (Schneider: 172). In Euro-American culture the biological kinship is thought to be a shared substance of genetic material or “blood” and is considered, often implicitly, to be the only true basis of familial relations (Ward Gailey: 296). Adoption is seen as an alternative method of reproduction and family making which together with the new reproductive technologies such as surrogate motherhood and IVF, can form a subversive threat to the dominant view of biological kinship. We see however that these alternative methods actively try to connect to this biological model. The elements of alternative methods of family making and reproduction that are potentially threatening to the dominant view of kinship get deemphasized in favour of the elements that are consonant with this dominant view (Ragoné: 136). In the case of adoption we see how the biological ties of the adopted child have to be actively deemphasized and largely ignored so that the newly formed adoptive relation between adoptive parents and adopted child can be set in place as a fictive biological relation. Therefore the adopted child has to be formulated as what Ward Gailey calls an “empty slate” (Ward Gailey: 308). The former identity of the adopted child that refers to the real biological background of the child, has to be erased in order to make it possible for the adoptive parents to claim the child just as if it were their own. “The language of the Intercountry adoption . . . creates conditions where the adoptee's birth parents become socially dead” (305). This is done out of reverence for the belief in biological kinship because:
“Although adoption challenges notions of genetic kinship as the basis of attachment, and although these parents felt attached to their children, the fear remains that there really is a ‘birth bond’ stronger than nurturing” (Gediman and Brown: 1989 in Ward Gailey: 305). We can see this happen as well in The Language of Blood where Jeong Trenka tells the reader about the reaction of her adoptive mother to the death of her biological mother: “She [her adoptive mother] is unaffected by my mother's death; it didn't happen, she didn't happen. In my mom's mind, I don't come from somewhere else, I don't have a birth mother . . . (emphasis Jeong Trenka)” (Jeong Trenka: 167). In a stage play which alternates Jeong Trenka's story we see the staging of the car trip home when the Brauers have just picked up their adopted children from the airport, having just arrived from Korea. I will quote a passage which scans in on Carol, Jeong Trenka's sister who was four years old when she arrived.
Behind and above the car, fade in a reel-to-reel home movie playing scenes from CAROL's (Mi-Ja's) life in Korea. Each scene in Korean language plays for fewer than five seconds before it is faded into black and the next scene plays. Scenes are various memories, showing an account of her young life so far. . . . At the end of the movie sequence, the Korean memories are completely erased, and the reel-to-reel projector shows blank frames and white noise, as seen at a beginning or ending take-up length of tape. CAROL has willed herself to become a girl with no history and is now ready to start her new life. (17)
In order to become Carol Brauer, Jeong Trenka’s sister has to begin a new life as a new individual. She can no longer be Jeong Mi-Ja and has to erase all the memories she has of this former life. The literal coming to life of Carol, because she is a girl with no history, suggests the death of Mi-Ja whose memories and history are erased.
The erasure of the former identity together with the disavowal of the biological background of adoptees makes it possible to formulate adoption as a “death”. Cathy Caruth's concept of trauma in connection to Freud is very illuminative in this respect.
In “Traumatic Departures: Survival and history in Freud” Caruth writes that “trauma consists not only in having confronted death but in having survived, precisely, without knowing it (emphasis Caruth)” (Caruth: 64). One’s survival is “incomprehensible” because it is not consciously known (64). In relation to Freud's death drive Caruth states that “life itself . . . is an awakening out of a ‘death’ for which there was no preparation” (65). It is especially the traumatic repetition that is destructive of a subject's life (63). This is quite suggestive in relation to Jeong Trenka's adoption and, in my view, of adoption in general. It is Caruth’s traumatic waking to life that parallels the creation of the adopted child as a new child with no history or memories so that it will accommodate the adoptive kinship as a fictive biological kinship. Jeong Trenka has passed beyond death, the death of Kyong-Ah, and has awakened to a new life as the adoptee Jane Brauer. The traumatic repetition is constituted by the constant confrontation with the abject Korean body in the United States.
Meeting the other you
So Jeong Trenka has survived a “death” and came to life again as someone else. We see that she does not integrate her two lives or two beginnings in one and the same person. They each lead to different individuals which are clearly separated from each other. Jeong Trenka explicates this as follows:
This letter makes clear how Jeong Trenka relates to her body. As Kyong-Ah, her Korean name referring to the Korean identity she lost when she was adopted, Jeong Trenka writes a letter to herself as Jane, the other child she became because of her adoption. When she became Jane, the daughter of the American couple Brauer, she literally became someone else. We see how Kyong-Ah makes it clear to Jane that the body Jane is using and living in, is really Kyong-Ah's. Although Kyong-Ah now has to hide behind Jane and is totally dependent on her there must be no misunderstanding that it is because of Kyong-Ah that Jane can live. She makes it even more explicit when she says: “You are living a borrowed life.” It is Kyong-Ah's life Jane is living because it is the body of the Korea Kyong-Ah. It was the carrier that simultaneously has kept Kyong-Ah alive, although barely, and has facilitated the birth of Jane in the United States.
This realization that her body really belongs to someone else is set in motion when she physically overcomes the distance that separates Minnesota from Seoul. We already saw how she stated that she became someone else when meeting her biological mother for the first time. What follows after the passage I quoted in the first chapter, where she is in Korea at the Haeinsa tempel, is: “In Minnesota, it is night, and Jane Brauer is missing. She is gone - only a memory in the minds of those who imagine her. Meanwhile, in the mountains of Korea, Jeong Kyong-Ah fills her pockets with stones and blinks hard in the sunlight, as if awakened from a deep sleep, or perhaps a very long fugue” (15). We see how the body mediates the migratory experience of Jeong Trenka. When she moves her body to this specific place of Korea Jane evaporates as physical existence because Kyong-Ah takes over her body. This makes us attentive to the traumatic consequences Jeong Trenka's adoption has had. Ultimately it is the trading of one life for another. The body's role is that it repetitiously confronts Jeong Trenka with this fact being an abject element in the United States where Kyong-Ah is unwished and taken over by Kyong-Ah when the body travels to Korea.
3. Body as place
We have seen how in the United States, before she returns to Korea, Jeong Trenka is not able to deal with the phobic space of her body and transform it in a liveable “place”. We localize the difference between space and place in the situatedness of place, place is a lived place and not a mere geometric location like the modernist view of space (Casey: 201). Space is also often seen as devoid of engagement. As the opposite of Time it is free from the influence of history and politics (Massey: 250-251). In the United States the body of Jeong Trenka is a container of inferior value, always referring to exoticism and racial stereotypes. The body is in this instance a space of homelessness and not fitting in.
In “A Global Sense of Place” Doreen Massey raises the questions how we can think of a progressive sense of place without the reactionary connotations of rootedness and fixity normally attached to it. She also emphasizes the political value of struggle such a progressive sense of place ought to have (Massey: 151-152). How could this be reached in The Language of Blood? What seems important is the place of the in-between. Jeong Trenka formulates it as “the crack between the time I was Jeong Kyong-Ah and when I became Jane Brauer” (Jeong Trenka: 203). There is the need to fill in this crack.
The in-between place is almost a mystical place. If we articulate it using the concept of trauma voiced by Caruth, it becomes a place of the “dead”. After Jeong Trenka's biological mother has died we can read Jeong Trenka adressing her: “My dear Umma [mother]. Now that you are dead, you are more near to me. You've always been so far away, halfway across the earth in your basement apartment in Seoul, me here in Minnesota . . . ” (192). When her mother is in the place of the dead she has overcome the geographical distance that separates Seoul from Minnesota. In this place her mother is paradoxically nearer to Jeong Trenka then she was when in Seoul. So, in the text the geographical distance is less easily crossed over than the distance that normally separates the realm of the living from the dead.
But how is this distance crossed over? I would like to propose a connection between the body and this in-between place - the “crack” between Kyong-Ah and Jane or the place where her biological mother now resides - that is constituted by the adoption and is a place of both death and revival.
How can we think a progressive sense of place in connection to the in-between place and the body? Naficy connects the phobic space of the body with memory and nostalgia for a lost past (Naficy: 134). And Massey cites bell hooks who states: “our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting” She speaks about a “politicization of memory that distinguishes nostalgia . . . from that remembering that serves to illuminate and transform the present” (bell hooks cited in Massey: 171). It is via the body that in The Language of Blood memory gets activated. The Language of Blood opens with a quote of Joyce Carol Oates stating: “ . . . Because we are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language” (Oates cited in Jeong Trenka). Memory is here a physical quality and above all a quality that can be passed on to future generations and is universally understandable. It is the bell hooks concept of memory that changes the phobic space of the body in a place. Jeong Trenka writes about her biological mother who at a certain moment showed Jeong Trenka her breasts meaning she loved and nursed Jeong Trenka and by which she seemed to say: “I made you with my own body” (Jeong Trenka: 102). Jeong Trenka writes: “Her stories worked their way through my skin and into my blood. I felt her bravery seeping in . . . , into my own stories, merging with them, transforming me into her daughter” (103). Again we see the bodily metaphor of blood. It suggests the body is the medium by which Jeong Trenka and her biological mother communicate since they can hardly communicate verbally; Jeong Trenka's Korean is basically as non-existent as the English of her biological family. Jeong Trenka underlines this bodily communication when she addresses her mother after she died and says to her: “I will carry you with me, in the language of blood” (140).
Jeong Trenka's framing of the communication between her and her biological mother in the “language of blood”, which also refers to the title of the book, explicitly connects to the physical vocabulary and metaphors of biological kinship.
The supreme value American culture places upon biological kinship is due to the view that biological or blood relations are seen to be “in principle unquestioned and unquestionable. They are states of being, not of doing or performance” (Schneider: 165). Via the language of the body Jeong Trenka learns about and gets to know her biological family. She learns about their past which is also Kyong-Ah’s and eventually it also becomes Jane's past. The merging of the stories of her biological mother with those of her own transform the body of Jeong Trenka in a livable and loved place since, as she tells her mother: “I am made in the image of you; I am a daughter after your body and after your heart” (Jeong Trenka: 140). When Jeong Trenka refers to the language of blood, to a language of the body, she explicitly distances herself from her American identity and the bond with her adoptive parents since it is on the disavowal of the biological bond with her Korean mother that the adoptive bond is predicated. She speaks to the reader and her adoptive American mother: “We also have this in common: our bodies, which remind each other of what we do not have, of who we are not. Mom, I am not from you; I will never be fully yours” (202).
In contrast to Jane's inner “self” that is constructed by the adoption, the body refers to a natural kind of identity that is predicated upon a bond between her and her biological mother that is considered to be naturally given and unquestionable. Of course this is precisely the view of biological kinship as biologically given and passed on via the substance of blood or genetics. But The Language of Blood utilizes this essentialist view of identity and kinship in a progressive manner as well. So is Jeong Trenka said by Kyong-Ah not to forget. Not to forget a former life that was situated in Korea and in which her body belonged to Kyong-Ah in a natural way. In actively negotiating the body as a "place" Jeong Trenka recalls that past and those memories that are part of the short life of Kyong-Ah. She creates the opening in which Kyong-Ah gets the ability to speak and come back. In this geographical location of Seoul her body no longer refers to exoticism and the racial abject but begins to speak for itself. The homeless space of her body becomes a place when she begins to travel back and forth to Korea and where this migrating, this hovering in between places, begins to constitute who she is.
As a metaphor for her condition as an exile Jeong Trenka uses the Monarch butterfly who migrate every year from Minnesota to Mexico and back again (33). She writes: “Monarchs migrate. This is different than species that emigrate. Species that emigrate only travel one way. Species that migrate travel back and forth between two different places. They have two homes” (34). What is important to remember is that: “[i]t takes generations of butterflies to complete the migration cycle. The butterflies returning to Mexico or California every fall are the great-great-grandchildren of those who left the previous spring. No one knows how they can find their way” (34). This passage suggests that the knowledge about which way to go when migrating from one place to another is an intuitive natural kind of knowledge, one that can not be expressed in any verbal language that is never inborn, like English or Korean, but is passed on to the following generations through a language that is connected to the body since it is via blood or genetics that things get passed on from one generation to the next. The passage further points to migration as a state of being, and not one of individuals but of a species. What is handed down by her biological mother via the body and what Jeong Trenka will give to her future daughter is the biologically given quality of migration. It is also with the metaphor of the Monarch butterfly that The Language of Blood ends.
Suspended in the air on a plane from Korea back to Minnesota Jeong Trenka dreams about her Korean mother, herself and her (perhaps) future daughter who all rise into the air together with the Monarch butterflies who have begun their migration. This dream passage is very evocative in its suggestion that as well as the Monarch butterfly Jeong Trenka too considers herself a migrant who will always travel between places. As a migrant she occupies a place in-between which is constituted by the border of adoption and which creates the possibility for Jane and Kyong-Ah to come together in one body. She and her future daughter will find their way in between these places via their bodies which are made in each others images.
List of works cited
Caruth, Cathy. "Traumatic departures: Survival and history in Freud." Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996. 57-72.
Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A philosophical history. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee. Berkeley: Third woman press, 1995.
Jeong Trenka, Jane. The Language of Blood: A memoir. St. Paul: Borealis Books-Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2003.
Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Naficiy, Hamid. "Phobic Spaces and Liminal Panic: Independent Transnational Film Genre." Glocal/ Local. Cultural production and the transnational imaginary. eds. Rob Wilson, Wimal Dissanayake. Duke University Press: 1996. 119-144.
Ragoné, Helena. Surrogate Motherhood. Conception in the heart. Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press, 1994.
Schneider, David M. A critique of the study of kinship. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1987 ed.
Selman, Peter. "Intercountry Adoption in the New Millennium: The 'Quiet Migration' Revisited." Population Research and Policy Review 21, no. 3 (2002): 205-25.
Smith, Andrew. "Migrancy, hybridity, and postcolonial literary studies." The Cambridge companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Cambridge Companions to Literature. ed. Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Ward Gailey, Christine. "Race, class and gender in intercountry adoption in the USA." Intercountry adoption. Developments, trends and perspectives. ed Peter Selman. London: British Agencies for Adoption & Fostering, 2000. 295-314.
Weil, R. H. "International Adoptions: The Quiet Migration." International Migration Review XVIII, 2 (1984): 276-293.
Sonja van den Berg
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This document is distributed by
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The Circle of Life
Life, death and revival... a theme that exists for all of us, but made more apparent to the adoptee who is given a triad-based language, replacing fluid family consistency.
Are females more soulfully aware of this, or do male adoptees sense and feel the inner death and dwellings, as well?