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The Language of Blood
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Product Description
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.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #88318 in Books
- Published on: 2005-07-01
- Released on: 2005-06-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 244 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Trenka remembers with gross delight headless chickens dancing around until collapse at her adoptive family's farm. She writes, "I wanted my head to be removed, a metaphor so strong that only later did I realize that it was not a death wish at all.... What I longed for was wholeness, for my body to be as white and Northern Minnesotan as my mind." Original and beautifully written reflections like these fill Trenka's memoir, a brave exploration of her identity as a Korean adoptee and pensive young woman trying to negotiate between two mothers and two lives. She traces her life from young, eager-to-please child to questioning adolescent. Once at college, she is stalked by an acquaintance with a sick fascination with her Asian heritage, forcing her to ask important questions about exoticization and violence. Finally, she brings readers with her to Korea, where she is reunited with her birth mother and homeland. Unlike some first-time writers, Trenka is unafraid with her prose and rarely falls into cliches, which is especially admirable given the subject matter. She brazenly dabbles with playwriting, screenwriting, crossword puzzles, myths and dream sequences throughout her account. Her journey, from the conservative Christian roots of rural Minnesota to her cramped and corrupt homeland of Korea, is winding, but it ends at an important place for both reader and writer: transformation. She writes, "I have made it my task to reconstruct the text of a family with context clues, and my intent is... to trust in the mysterious; to juxtapose the known with the unknown; to collect the overlooked."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Adoption memoirs are not rare, but this one stands out because of the quality of the writing and because of the aspect of adoption it portrays. Jane at six months and sister Carol, at four and a half, Korean by birth, were adopted by a Minnesota couple with strong German Lutheran roots. The girls were from a home beset by poverty and the drunken abuse of their birth father. Being sent away was an act of love by their Korean mother. Their adoptive parents loved the girls and raised them as their own. And here lies the problem for Jane. Their Korean identity was never addressed, leaving her with a strong sense of not belonging in either culture. Eventual contact with her birth family leads to a rift with her American parents. The author interweaves the account of her life, already tangled in time and place, with legends and plays, creating an incredibly introspective and moving piece. Perhaps not a comfort to transcultural adoptive parents, but thought-provoking reading on an important issue. Danise Hoover
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“A powerful addition to the literature of American identity.” —Minnesota Monthly
Customer Reviews
Carefully beautiful writing on the messiness of selfhood
Using an interesting, if not always successful, mish-mash of styles and narratives, Korean adoptee Trenka tells of the experience of a violent stalker in Minnesota, her experiences of racism, going to Korea to find her birth mother, an older sister, and ultimately, love. It is her personal search for American, Korean, and Korean American identity. The prose is as luminous and carefully beautiful as the reviews say. I came away with a sense of the writer's youth, and how her search has perhaps, only now, really begun.
A great book
There were two negative reviews for this book (the third is a repeat and is unfair). Frankly neither of them show any kind of knowledge bout the psychology of an adoptee. First of all being an adoptee and a Korean national are different. Second being a parent and an adoptee is different. I've clashed with many more adoptive parents than I have with adoptees (in views of adoption).
I didn't find that this was atypical of a Korean adoptee. I was isolated from Korean culture as well and this was in the 80's. I was only able to research and find anything on Korea until recently. This book proves that point--that it's hard to find something to root you to your birth culture.
The book traces a view of adoption. It does not make judgments. It merely tells what happened and in what fashion. It tells the truth as she saw it. It tells about her struggle with identity, her triumphs, her sadnesses, the humor she saw. It also tells about her regret and efforts to try to get her adoptive parents to understand.
As a Korean adoptee I found parts that I could and couldn't relate to, but I don't think this any less valid than my story of adoption. Adoption is individual as the search for identity is. I believe that this book showed that without telling anyone what to think. That's to be admired.
not perfect but very worth reading for anyone connected to adoption
I find it interesting that three of the negative reviews for this book all use the same language but the writer/s claims to be the parent of Korean children, a Korean with no connection to adoption and a Korean adoptee. Um...okay? If you are going to write an angry review it would be advisabe to pick an identity and stick with it .
