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A review by nini23
Palimpsest: Documents From a Korean Adoption by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom
emotional
informative
5.0
International adoption was established as the practice we know today after the Korean War. Children are moved from the global South to the political West, where they are placed in white families, renamed, and have their mother tongue replaced. The demand for adoptable children outgrew the supply. Adoption became more about childless adults who wish to create a family, than orphans in need of protection. As large sums of money are involved, there's a strong incentive to illegally supply the market with what it needs: adoptable children, as young as possible. p 41
The children are supplied with documents claiming they're orphans - laundered like money and transformed into legal "paper orphans." With the adoption comes a fabricated back story that the children were anonymously abandoned, maybe found on the footsteps of a church, at a police station, or outside a hospital. Or there's an emotional story about a loving single mother with no choice in a patriarchal world, and who made the ultimate unselfish sacrifice a mother can make: giving up her child so they can have a better life. One could easily assume that the global South is overflowing with parents abandoning their children. p41
Critical adoptees are brushed aside as angry, bitter and ungrateful. Our yearnings for our original families and our pursuits for answers about severed biological ties are dismissed as only of interest to adoptees with mental issues, misfits, people who haven't "successfully" attached, people not capable of receiving the love offered to us. P47
In Sweden I’m at home, but I feel like a stranger. In Korea I’m a stranger, but feel at home. P84
Many adoptees sink one by one. Many of us take our own lives. Many of us have tried. Many of us have been abused, some even murdered by our own adoptive parents. Many of us are rejected, abandoned again for not fitting into our new families. Many of us are so, so lonely. P 109
It's too late for us to be mother and daughter. And the language barrier makes it impossible to close. p109
I can't help but thinking that taboo thought, that a life in an orphanage in my own country wouldn't have been worse than life in a foreign one. The lives of these children are depicted as horrific, and are used as examples of why an orphanage isn't a home. But who decides that? Who decided that it's better for a child to lose everything - including their name - and be sent to the other side of Earth with their past erased? p141
There is a word in Korean culture - 한 /HAN - which describes the sorrow people feel after an enduring suffering, after having been wronged, persecuted, and oppressed. 한 is a part of Korea's cultural identity, and it comprises hope, despair, acceptance, and a resilient desire for revenge. At this very moment, another vulnerable family is currently being torn apart, another child is being dispatched to a distant country with faked papers, under false pretenses. For them we must bear witness. p152
Addendum December 2022: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/09/1141912093/south-korea-adoptees-fraud-investigation-western-families
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/08/south-koreas-truth-commission-to-investigate-dozens-of-foreign-adoptions
The children are supplied with documents claiming they're orphans - laundered like money and transformed into legal "paper orphans." With the adoption comes a fabricated back story that the children were anonymously abandoned, maybe found on the footsteps of a church, at a police station, or outside a hospital. Or there's an emotional story about a loving single mother with no choice in a patriarchal world, and who made the ultimate unselfish sacrifice a mother can make: giving up her child so they can have a better life. One could easily assume that the global South is overflowing with parents abandoning their children. p41
Critical adoptees are brushed aside as angry, bitter and ungrateful. Our yearnings for our original families and our pursuits for answers about severed biological ties are dismissed as only of interest to adoptees with mental issues, misfits, people who haven't "successfully" attached, people not capable of receiving the love offered to us. P47
In Sweden I’m at home, but I feel like a stranger. In Korea I’m a stranger, but feel at home. P84
Many adoptees sink one by one. Many of us take our own lives. Many of us have tried. Many of us have been abused, some even murdered by our own adoptive parents. Many of us are rejected, abandoned again for not fitting into our new families. Many of us are so, so lonely. P 109
It's too late for us to be mother and daughter. And the language barrier makes it impossible to close. p109
I can't help but thinking that taboo thought, that a life in an orphanage in my own country wouldn't have been worse than life in a foreign one. The lives of these children are depicted as horrific, and are used as examples of why an orphanage isn't a home. But who decides that? Who decided that it's better for a child to lose everything - including their name - and be sent to the other side of Earth with their past erased? p141
There is a word in Korean culture - 한 /HAN - which describes the sorrow people feel after an enduring suffering, after having been wronged, persecuted, and oppressed. 한 is a part of Korea's cultural identity, and it comprises hope, despair, acceptance, and a resilient desire for revenge. At this very moment, another vulnerable family is currently being torn apart, another child is being dispatched to a distant country with faked papers, under false pretenses. For them we must bear witness. p152
Addendum December 2022: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/09/1141912093/south-korea-adoptees-fraud-investigation-western-families
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/08/south-koreas-truth-commission-to-investigate-dozens-of-foreign-adoptions