Abstract
Imagine yourself in a theater watching a play called “Transnational Adoption.” Three actors take center stage: birth mother, child, and adoptive parent. While stage lights intensely focus on the child and adoptive parent, lights on the birth mother flash and disappear because she is insignificant and unworthy of attention. As the play progresses, the invisible birth mother is forgotten, there but not there, alive but already dead. In this performance-based ethnography, Kim’s book discloses the social death process of South Korean birth mothers who relinquished their children for adoption. The book critically examines the lives of these mothers by employing the discursive-material-affective configuration of virtual mothering to elucidate how profoundly they have been impacted by the adoption.
Kim has coined the phrase “virtual mothering” to describe the parental care South Korean birth mothers perform during and after the adoption. These mothering acts are “performative, ephemeral, fragmented, and technologically enacted” outside the normative patriarchal family (p. 5). Kim’s phrase illuminates the social erasure of birth mothers who participated in transnational adoption and their shadowy emergence in the 1990s. Using cultural insights, interviews, and observations, Kim captures the striking experiences of women who live the paradox of being mother and not mother, and explores their collective coping with loss.
Kim devoted 15 years of careful research to this book. The first of its many strengths is that, rather than focusing on adoptees’ psychological development or pertinent policy analysis, it examines the largely unrecognized lives of South Korean birth mothers. Second, her work provides rich historical and sociocultural contexts from the 1950s through the 2010s, including the economic devastation of the Korean War, government control over excess population, absence of social services, and the consequential failure to support marginalized birth mothers.
Kim’s vulnerability as an outsider resonates throughout. For example, in Chapter 4, Kim incorporates her uneasy experiences as a volunteer translator for a family-search TV show. The TV audience typically sees a mother–child relationship forming instantly as the birth mother delivers her sincere apology (performing “virtual mothering”) and the adoptee accepts the apology with an exchange of hugs. Kim, however, goes “behind the scenes” by describing a broad range of emotions felt by the participants. Kim’s positionality as an interloper into the family’s overwhelming past makes her insight into the challenges of such reunions more genuine and valuable.
Kim’s work, though, has limitations. Kim offers only a limited explanation of who the “virtual mother” is. She also refuses to establish any normative definition of motherhood for South Korean birth mothers. As a result, she severely limits the scope of her argument to performance, rather than leaving room for discussion of identity. Additionally, her observations of two divergent groups of South Korean birth mothers (i.e., elderly mothers longing for their children’s return and young “sexually irresponsible” mothers forced to surrender their children) result in a reductionist approach based on patriarchal stereotypes. Presenting only these two groups erases many other groups of birth mothers. Similarly, because birth mothers are a hard-to-reach population in South Korea, most accounts in the book are from relatively active and visible birth mothers. Including those hard-to-reach mothers in the study would have given readers a deeper understanding of the myriad of experiences. Lastly, Kim’s explanations of data analysis are limited mostly to Chapter 1. Weaving relevant information into corresponding chapters would have made her research process clearer.
Kim’s book, Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea: Virtual Mothering, richly describes the history of transnational adoption. Through storytelling, Kim brings birth mothers back on stage and de-silences them. This book captures hopeful changes, albeit small, that have occurred in South Korea over the last three decades. Kim’s book is an excellent addition to the collection of social work readings and provides insight into the history and plight of South Korean birth mothers and the performance of virtual mothering.