Adopting a narrative

Adopting a child is meant to create a family, but narratives show that it can also isolate the individual.

Four panelists specializing in adoption studies participated in an English department- and Humanities Center-sponsored panel discussion called “Adoption and Narratives of the Human.” The speakers discussed why both literary and non-literary narratives of adoption — the way people write, talk and study adoption experiences — define America’s dialogue on adoption.

The event, held on Wednesday, Oct. 21, from 3:30 to 5 p.m., was a part of Pitt’s Year of the Humanities.

About 20 Pitt students and community members gathered on the sixth floor of the Cathedral of Learning to hear four narratives and engage in a question and answer session, organized by Marianne Novy, a Pitt English professor.

According to the State Department’s 2014 Annual Report on Intercountry Adoption, there were a total of 6,441 international adoptions in 2014. For the past four years, China has been the leading adoption state and country. In 2013, there were 7,092 adoptions from China and 138 from South Korea. 

Panelist Margaret Homans, a professor of English and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Yale, said there is a spectrum for adoptees — those who are not interested in their background to those who are only interested in their heritage.

Homans’ own daughter, who she adopted from China in 1991, falls in the first category. Adoptees in the second often struggle to find their identity.

Although painful, Homans suggested the experience of fabricating a narrative about a person’s heritage and biological parents could also be empowering.

“If you’re adopted — especially if you don’t know anything about where you came from — but you live in a country where where you come from is who you are, then you have to be creative,” Homans said. “That is often a painful creativity.”

While the panel was meant to discuss this creative process, for Frayda Cohen, the event held an additional purpose. Cohen, a senior lecturer in the gender, sexuality and women’s studies department at Pitt and a panelist at the event, said the panel exemplified one of the goals of the Year of Humanities — encouraging interdisciplinary communication.

The Year of the Humanities is a Pitt initiative to highlight the importance of humanities fields by funding programs and events that integrate professors and students from all fields of discipline across the University for the 2015-16 academic year.

“I am a social scientist, and being able to talk at this event shows that there is an overlapping sense of interests,” Cohen said. “It absolutely is important.”

SooJin Pate, another panelist and an independent author and professor at the Minneapolis Community and Technical College, falls on the other side of the adoption narrative. Pate, who was adopted by an American family as a young girl, said the debt she owed her adoptive family and her interest in her past got in the way of her American life.

“I had to perform the grateful child in the U.S. because they ‘rescued’ me,” Pate said. “I was five when I was adopted, I remembered everything about [my mom] and I really missed her. And my adoptive mom felt threatened.”

Although Pate’s reunion with her mother was a “fantasy dream come true,” not all adoptees have a fairy tale ending.

Maggie Jones, another panelist and a visiting assistant professor at Pitt,  advised that the journey for biological relatives can also end in dead ends or heartbreak.

“There is a tension between the romanticism of that search and reunion and the reality — [they could] uncover corruption, lies about why they were relinquished, discover that their birth mother is not the fairy and princess that they had imagined,” Jones said during her talk.

Pate, who is from South Korea, spoke about how the United States’ culture has rewritten the history of adoption from South Korea to ignore the influence of American military occupation during the Korean War on the availability of children for adoption. According to Pate, the stories of adoptees often became narratives of rescue and American generosity.

Evan Johnson, a graduate student at Pitt, said he was disillusioned by the impact of American military occupation on the increase of South Korean adoptions starting in the 1950s.

“I think it definitely raises more questions than answers,” Johnson said. “There doesn’t seem to be a solution.”

For Pate, the solution would be to provide more support for impoverished families so that they don’t have to surrender their children to save money.

“‘I’m poor so now I have to send my child to a different country’ — like there’s no way in hell that’s going to happen,” Pate said. “But in South Korea, that’s the norm, and it’s because of this neocolonial relationship that has been developed for over 60 years.”