by kindred | Oct 13, 2015 | Uncategorized
Over the past few years, the question that I have gotten most frequently when first meeting someone is, “Where are you from?” This single question and the response that I could give are more complex than the person asking could ever know. Usually, my response is “I’m from Pennsylvania,” which is where I spent the majority of my life. For many people, that is not the answer they are looking for. But it is the one that I give most often, hoping that the questions will stop there (they usually do not). By asking this initial question, a door to my life (which many times, I do not wish to be opened) is forced open by a perfect stranger. As a child, my parents were asked this question numerous times about me and where I came from. They became accustomed to it and formulated a well-suited response. Unfortunately, as I started getting older, this question became more and more prevalent and was asked directly to me. There is no class or formal training on how to respond to questions like this. I can remember getting this question occasionally in elementary school, especially since I was the only Korean in a predominately Caucasian school. As I continued to progress through grade school, this question did not bother me or affect me in any way. I just took it as people being curious or interested in my heritage, which I really knew little of. In college, my peers asked me this question several times, and I did not mind opening up to them about my adoption or past. For the most part, many professors and...
by kindred | Oct 6, 2015 | Uncategorized
The Voice We’re Given From the moment of transaction, a number of power structures are at play in adoption. There is the economics, the adoptee purchased by the adoptive parents. There is the adoptee’s (usual) youth. There is the historical youth, too, that (at least transnationally) adoption is young and most adoptees are young. But the lingering truth is that the adoptee’s position in these power structures does not go away when we become adults. The structure persists in how our voices are valued. The adoptee voice seems always to be positioned either in contrast to or in agreement with the adoptive parent’s (or agency’s) voice—perpetually in reference to those in power. Adoptees get the pretense of value, while the determination of that value is measured according to a disempowering context. This is all very abstract. Let’s think of it in another way: a rhetoric scholar I know said recently that she didn’t like her African American literature course because it used different terms for things she knew by other names in other courses. She wanted everyone to use the same terms, to make it easier on her (as, it must be said, a white student) She mentioned that this was the only time she was ever going to take an African American literature course, because it didn’t intersect with her studies (of course), implying that the theories would be more relevant if they were part of the majority discussion. To his credit, the professor of record was quick to point out that African American literary scholars needed to create their own terms, at least at first, in order to break...
