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An adoptee's search for identity takes her on a journey from
Minnesota to Korea and back as she seeks to resolve the dualities
that have long defined her life: Korean-born, American-raised,
never fully belonging to either. For years, Korean adoptee Jane
Jeong Trenka tried to be the ideal daughter. She was always polite,
earned perfect grades, and excelled as a concert pianist. She went
to church with her American family in small-town Minnesota and
learned not to ask about the mother who had given her away. Then,
while she was far from home on a music scholarship, living in a big
city for the first time, one of her fellow university students
began to follow her, his obsession ultimately escalating into a
plot for her murder. In radiant prose that ranges seamlessly from
pure lyricism to harrowing realism, Trenka recounts repeated close
encounters with her stalker and the years of repressed questions
that her ordeal awakened. Determined not to be defined by her
stalker's twisted assessment of her worth, she struck out in search
of her own identity-free of western stereotypes of geishas and good
girls. Doing so, however, meant confronting her American family and
fighting the bureaucracy at the agency that had arranged for her
adoption.
Confronting trauma behind the transnational adoption system-now
back in print Many adoptees are required to become people that they
were never meant to be. While transracial adoption tends to be
considered benevolent, it often exacts a heavy emotional, cultural,
and economic toll on those who directly experience it. Outsiders
Within is a landmark publication that carefully explores this most
intimate aspect of globalization through essays, fiction, poetry,
and art. Moving beyond personal narrative, transracially adopted
writers from around the world tackle difficult questions about how
to survive the racist and ethnocentric worlds they inhabit, what
connects the countries relinquishing their children to the
countries importing them, why poor families of color have their
children removed rather than supported-about who, ultimately, they
are. In their inquiry, the contributors unseat conventional
understandings of adoption politics, reframing the controversy as a
debate that encompasses human rights, peace, and reproductive
justice. Contributors: Heidi Lynn Adelsman; Ellen M. Barry; Laura
Briggs, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Catherine Ceniza Choy, U of
California, Berkeley; Gregory Paul Choy, U of California, Berkeley;
Rachel Quy Collier; J. A. Dare; Kim Diehl; Kimberly R. Fardy; Laura
Gannarelli; Shannon Gibney; Mark Hagland; Perlita Harris; Tobias
Hubinette, Stockholm U; Jae Ran Kim; Anh Dao Kolbe; Mihee-Nathalie
Lemoine; Beth Kyong Lo; Ron M.; Patrick McDermott, Salem State
College, Massachusetts; Tracey Moffatt; Ami Inja Nafzger (aka Jin
Inja); Kim Park Nelson; John Raible; Dorothy Roberts, Northwestern
U; Raquel Evita Saraswati; Kirsten Hoo-Mi Sloth; Soo Na; Shandra
Spears; Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark; Kekek Jason Todd Stark;
Sunny Jo; Sandra White Hawk; Indigo Williams Willing; Bryan Thao
Worra; Jeni C. Wright.
"A book that translates, and transcends, the eternal question of
home, belonging, family,
identity." --"Star Tribune" (Minneapolis)
"My name is Jeong Kyong-Ah. My ancestry includes landowners,
scholars, and government officials. I have six siblings. I am a
citizen of the Republic of Korea. I come from a land of pear fields
and streams, where people laugh loudly and honor their dead.
Halfway around the world, I am someone else."
Jane Jeong Trenka and her sister Carol were adopted by Frederick
and Margaret Brauer and raised in the small, homogeneous town of
Harlow, Minnesota--a place "where the sky touches the earth in
uninterrupted horizon . . . where stoicism is stamped into the
bones of each generation." They were loved as American children
without a past.
With inventive and radiant prose that includes real and imagined
letters, a fairy tale, a one-act play, crossword puzzles, and
child-welfare manuals, Trenka recounts a childhood of insecurity, a
battle with a stalker that escalates to a plot for her murder, and
an extraordinary trip to Seoul to meet her birth mother and
siblings. Lost between two cultures for the majority of her life,
it is in Korea that she begins to understand her past and the power
of the unspoken language of blood.
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