Kim Sunee, a Korean adoptee, discusses her life journey through what she describes as one of the most powerful mediums, food.
Trail of Crumbs traces her life through recipes and can be ordered on Amazon, or through her website. I will definitely take a look, and I hope you will too.
G.S.
Thanks to the K@W list for the tip on this one. Here’s what looks to be a new KAD memoir. Happy reading. G.S.
Author takes readers on a trail of discovery
BY LINDA FIELDS GOLD, STAFF WRITER
Article Created: 01/05/2008 07:15:31 AM PST
Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home
By Kim Sunee
Hanchette Book Group, $22
7 p.m. Jan. 14
Vroman’s Bookstore
695 E. Colorado Blvd.
Pasadena.
In 1973, a 3-year-old child was seated by her mother on a bench in a
crowded South Korean marketplace. She was given a piece of bread and
told not to move until the mother came back for her. Three days
later, a policeman removed the child from the bench and took her to
an orphanage.
Months later, the little girl was adopted by an American serviceman
and his wife and taken to their home in Louisiana. Thus unfolds the
tale of a woman’s search for her identity; her attempt to find out
where she “belonged.”
Now because the little girl grew up in New Orleans, and because her
adopted grandfather centered family activities around the table, and
this was how the little girl and the grandfather bonded, most
chapters end with recipes.
Sunee moved to Europe during college, studying in France and Sweden
and learning different languages. She met a voracious and gregarious
older man, separated from his wife, who has a young daughter. She
became not only his mistress, but also his hostess.
Days revolve around entertaining, menu planning, shopping for food,
cooking food, serving food. She was with him a number of years and
then realized that what little personal sense of herself that she has
was being
vacuumed out by her situation. She began therapy, left the man,
learned to support herself, found a succession of other partners,
went to French Guiana, and started to learn how to find more
stability in herself.
Parts of this book are just over-the-top amazing: the sensual food,
the rich clothes, the luxurious trips all over the world. Parts
really spoke to me; how many of us wonder how we fit into our
families, who we are like, how did we get so different from our other
relatives? And, what if on top of all the questions that children who
are with their biological parents have, the child is from a different
race and a different continent? Why don’t our parents understand us?
Is there something “wrong” with us? What will our future bring? I
suspect that these are universal questions and the combination of
Sunee’s glamorous life as well as her search for self is what makes
this such an interesting read.
Sunee lived in Europe for more than 10 years and now lives in the
American South and is a food editor for a magazine. The recipes are
varied, enticing and from all over the world.
China Ghosts: My Daughter’s Journey to America, My Passage to Fatherhood
By Jeff Gammage
- – - “After eighteen years together, Christine and I are down to our last hour as a couple. By dinner we will be a threesome. It seems strange to stand so firmly atop a generational fault line, to know that in an hour you’ll be a parent, to understand that your old life is disappearing before your eyes, that a new one is about to begin. . . .”
Aching to expand from a couple to a family, Jeff Gammage and his wife, Christine, embarked upon a journey that would carry them across a shifting landscape of emotion—excitement, exhilaration, fear, apprehension—and through miles of red tape and bureaucratic protocol, to a breathtaking land on the other side of the world where a little girl waited. When they met Jin Yu, a silent, stoic two-year-old, in the smog-choked city of Changsha in Hunan Province, they realized that every frustrating moment of their two-year struggle was worth it. But they also realized that another journey had only begun. Now there was much to experience and learn. How do you comfort a crying toddler when you and she speak different languages? How do you fully embrace a life altered beyond recognition by new concerns, responsibilities—and a love unlike any you’ve felt before?
Alive with insight and feeling, China Ghosts is a journalist’s eye-opening depiction of the foreign adoption process and a remarkable glimpse into a different culture. Most important, it is a poignant, heartfelt, and intensely intimate chronicle of the making of a family. – - -
—
Here’s what seems to be a new book about adoption, but more interestingly, a Father’s perspective of parenting transracially. There aren’t a whole lot of memoirs chronicling the parenting experiences of Adoptive Fathers, so I find this book particularly intriguing. According to Amazon, it’s available starting tomorrow.
What’s also interesting is the fact that the author works for the Philadelphia Inquirer, which I recall documented a number of stories on adoptees and adoptive families. Does anyone have any idea how large the adoptee community is in Philadelphia?
I find myself returning to this lack of Adoptive Father’s in adoption literature. It’s quite true that a majority of the literature comes from Adoptive Mothers rather than fathers. I guess I don’t really have any particularly stunning insight, or analysis short of making some sort of argument that men tend to be socialized to disregard their feelings, expressivity, or emotions. So perhaps any lurking adoptive fathers would be willing to share their experiences at the conclusion of this post.
While the term “Adoption Triad” has been used rather loosely to essentialize the relationships involved, perhaps the question that is more problematic is, “Where are men/fathers located within this dialogue?” I’ve been told that my birth father was abusive to my birth mother, so I tend to gravitate toward visualizing my birth mother as my birth family (although she may very well have formed a new family since my birth). So I wonder why the Birth Mother as a conceptual entity represents The Bastion of the birth family to many adoptees. I have extenuating circumstances, but regardless of these details I’m sure I would channel my analysis and emotions into the conceptual idea of my birth mother.
Granted, many birth mothers ARE the ones who are burdened with the responsibility of making the decision for us if our birth fathers run after they find we will be birthed into this world. But that doesn’t mean that birth fathers should be eliminated from consideration. Furthermore, in the U.S. most families who are ABLE to adopt are united by heterosexual marriages, where the fathers are also present in making the decision to adopt. Where are their voices? So you can see how this adoption triad concept can be rather tricky when envisioning who the stakeholders are.
In closing, I can’t say I’m completely floored by the title of his book. Yet I am still optimistic that the book might actually be a productive narrative and representation of the many adoptive fathers who have been relatively quiet since the “literary awakening” that we have all seen in adoption literature over the past decade or so. So if someone wants to order it, read it and review it I’d love to post it at some point.
I just found this interview in the Boston Globe about author Rose Lewis of Needham, MA. I can’t say I’ve read or heard of her first book about her daughter who is a Chinese adoptee, but judging by the content of this interview, I’m a little concerned. I know I can’t really judge since I haven’t read it but I do think there are a number of issues that I’d hope she’d set straight in her book.
In the interview below she discusses the “universal chord of falling in love with your child adopted or biological.” Perhaps she means well, but I smell some colorblind parenting in between the margins-Somebody may have to set me straight who has read her book, but my initial adoptee-radar went off when I read that sentence.
—————————–
(Boston Globe)
Crazy Cakes, her first children’s book about her adopted daughter, Ming, was a bestseller. So naturally, Needham’s Rose Lewis revisits the subject of children in her second book.
I Love You Like Crazy Cakes was a runaway bestseller. Did that surprise you?
I am still surprised by its success. I guess it struck a universal chord, because it’s about falling in love with your child, biological or adopted. The thing I was most humbled by was how this book inspired other women to adopt.
What about children’s responses?
I remember when a mother introduced me to her daughter once, and I was with Ming. She said her daughter was a huge fan of the book, so I asked her if they wanted to meet the little girl in the book. The mother quickly waved me off and whispered, “No, no. She thinks the story is about her.”
What is your new book, Every Year on Your Birthday, about?
The underlying message is the loving bond between any parent and child. I put it in the context of birthdays, because children love celebrating their birthdays. For their parents, I think it’s more powerful. Who doesn’t wonder “Where has all the time gone” after each birthday?
And why wait seven years between titles?
[The illustrator] Jane Dyer wasn’t available for five years. I wanted to wait for her.
How did you two begin your collaboration?
I was a huge fan of Jane’s, even before I wrote Crazy Cakes. When I contacted the publisher, I asked that Jane illustrate the book – I wasn’t aware at the time that you’re really not supposed to do that.
Why did you start writing?
I was looking for a book that summed up my own experience and what I wanted to say about adopting. . . . I decided to go after Jane Dyer’s publisher because I was a big fan of her books. So I contacted Little, Brown – in fact, they were the only publisher I contacted – and they said yes.
Wow. That’s almost unheard of.
It was wonderful.
You and Ming, 11, recently returned from a visit to the orphanage where she lived in China. Why did you go back?
Ming has been curious about her birth parents since she was about 5. I know she will always have a hole in her heart because she won’t know anything about her birth family. The trip was a way to help her fulfill some of that curiosity.
Did it?
There was something comforting about the experience. While neither of us said it exactly, I think we both felt that some questions had been answered, and we could now visualize Ming’s beginnings. My hope was to give her a sense of place that she can refer to, a sense of where she came from – her roots.
– Amy Yelin
(Correction: Because of a reporting error, the First Person interview in today’s Globe magazine misquoted author Rose Lewis. Lewis did not use the term real parents when referring to her daughter Ming’s birth parents.) 
I went to a book talk a few days ago for the book “Outsiders Within.” It’s probably the most comprehensive anthology on transracial adoption that I have read. It really discusses the issues that unite the transracial adoptee communities. Most TRA books I’ve read deal mostly with KADs, and never with any other TRAs.
I especially like Kim Park Nelson’s essay on the institution of the family. Her essay explores the post World War II “pronatalism” movement that institutionalized a definition of the family that hinges primarily on child rearing (biologically, or otherwise). I think it’s incredibly interesting how this definition evolved and how the mass media has coaxed this institutional addendum to the family unit into the cornerstone of family building. This “pronatalism” of the 50s and 60s and its rebirth in the 1980s and 90s has shaped the nature of adoption over the past 50 years.
Starting in the 50s with this institutional need to parent international adoptions started. In relation to media campaigns in the movies and through advertisements stressing the importance of children in family building more and more, individuals looked toward adoption as a viable method to begin their familial existence. While international adoptions began primarily through Asia fueled by the so-called “success” rates, and assimilability of transnational children it encouraged transracial adoption for many white families. In fact analysts suspect that it was this first wave of international adoptions and success rates that led to the adoption of Native Indian children in the U.S. Author Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark and Kekek Jason Todd Stark describe this racialization rationalization and the idea that Native Indian children represented something not necessarily exotic as opposed to their “Asiatic” counter-parts, but as individuals symbolically American. Many parents looked to Native Indian children with lighter complexions as a way to bridge the supposed ethnic gap in transracial families which can also be viewed as a racial-political manifesto to continue the success of the Native Indian boarding schools to not only further “civilize” but to completely genetically culturally alter Native Indians to become an extension of whiteness. This notion would come back strongly after the NABSW would criticize the TRA system as “cultural genocide” for black children into white families, and Native Indian activists would follow suit.
Thus we usher in the next racial political climate of TRA history. Black children in America. Buffered by the supposed “War on Drugs” in the late 80s and 90s, and sustained by a governmental neglect toward financially assisting Black families and their children, the adoption market which had taken flight finally found its perfect political equation. By keeping low income Black families poor, it openly created a way to not only stigmatize the institutional idea of the Black family as inferior, but allowed for white families to be seen as the angelic rescuers. Those few parents who did adopt could use their racial family make up to invade the off-limits and sometimes “reverse-discriminative” privileges of a multiracial family. As the War on Drugs continued to ravage black families, pervading “Crack Baby” images served to literally allow doctors to remove new-born infants from their parents into the care of the social ward. This racial climate became an addendum to the eugenics movements of forced sterilization of Blacks such as the Tuskegee Syphillis Study by reasserting a racial, biological and culturally inferior upbringing that insisted on removal of black children from their natural parents as a necessity to end the cycle of poverty.
Concurrently the 80s and 90s brought about yet another wave of transnational transracial adoption of Asian babies-mostly from Eastern Asia such as Korea and China. This new transracial integer in the racial equation of adoption paired with Newsweek’s growing “Model Minority” image of Asian Americans drove a deep racial and hierarchical wedge between Asians and other racial minorities (primarily Blacks and Latinos). A humanitarian and philanthropically perversed neo-liberalism birthed a massive exportation of Asian babies from the so-called “arms of conflict and poverty” to the warm embrace of safety and American Dream idealism.
Today this initially humanitarian concept has burgeoned over into a multi-billion dollar international marketplace for prospective families in the U.S. and Europe. It’s hard for me to take sides on this highly controversial topic because I view adoption as a viable means to give children a better life, yet there are so many corrupt and idealistically romanticized racial overtones that need to be confronted. But I do agree with author Kim Park Nelson who said “I neither support or condemn the practice of transracial and transnational adoption but believe strongly that power differentials between parents and children, institutions and individuals, white people and people of color, and rich and poor nations are great enough that the potential for abuse is enormous (Nelson ‘Shopping for Children’ p. 90 Outsiders Within 2006).”
