Recognizing the transracial adoptee: adoption life stories and Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life.

At the heart of Chang-rae Lee's 1999 novel, A Gesture Life, is an adoption story in which the protagonist and narrator, Doc Hata, recounts his struggles as an adoptive parent of a mixed Korean girl named Sunny. The ambivalence within the adoptive parent-child relationship can already be heard when Hata, in anticipating his adoption of Sunny, describes himself as a "hopeful father of like-enough race and sufficient means" (73). The odd phrase "like-enough race" in particular raises, at the same time that it resists, the attempt to make adoption "natural." Indeed, the phrase sits uneasily among the terms of contemporaneous debates between proponents of same-race (a policy of matching the racial background of prospective adopters and adoptees) or transracial (a policy of adoption based on the "best interests of the child" irrespective of race) adoption placements. The reference to some notion of racial compatibility only illuminates the inability to define race both between two persons and within a single person. Hata himself is an ethnic Korean who was adopted by a Japanese family. Is he of "like-enough" race so that his daughter can relate to him better, so that others will not see a difference between them, or so that the adoption can be approved in the first place? These dynamics of adoption in the novel unfold a series of psychic crises around the unsettlements of race, nation, and domesticity, which pervade larger issues in the representation of transracial adoption.

The narration of Hata's adoptive relationship with Sunny links the novel to the project of recognizing and representing transracial adoption in other forms of adoption writing, in particular, a growing literature of anthologies, memoirs, and documentaries that attempt to portray and represent how transracial adoptees themselves articulate and negotiate who they are. As political and legal debates around adoption have grown more intense, stories of adoption have proliferated. As Barbara Melosh has shown, a whole set of conventional narratives, often in relation to political debates around adoption, have emerged to codify and express the conflicting issues of adoption. (1) But the particular intersection of political and aesthetic representation that I am interested in here has to do with the recognition of the transracial adoptee as such, and how narrative crucially shapes the terms of that recognition.

Both A Gesture Life and this growing literature of transracial adoption share the problem of how to make sense of transracial adoptees as they emerge within intersecting processes of racialization, naturalization, and nationalization. By analyzing the narrative processes of this recent fiction and non-fiction, this essay addresses the problem of representation posed by the emergence of the transracial adoptee: how to narrate the subject of adoption when narrative structures often rely implicitly on assumptions of biological genealogy for coherence and continuity? (2) How to represent the situation of transracial adoption when the given languages of kinship and race often fail to accommodate such a movement from one race to another?

Recent documentaries like Outside Looking In: Transracial Adoption in America, Daughter from Danang, and First-Person Plural, and anthologies like In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Own Stories and Seeds from a Silent Tree: An Anthology of Korean-American Adoptees, mark a specific attempt to hear the voice of the transracial adoptee. (3) As their titles suggest, these texts emphasize the point of view of the adoptee; they are characterized by the desire to transform transracial adoptees from objects of discourse into subjects of their own discourse. As the introduction to In Their Own Voices notes, the purpose of the book is for transracial adoptees to "tell their stories in their own words" (Simon and Roorda xiii). Taken together, these works manifest the implicit demand to recognize the experiences and to acknowledge the interests, status, individuality, and identity of transracial adoptees through their acts of representation and narration. By recognition, I mean the process whereby identities are legitimized, valued, and given respect. (4)

But this demand for recognition cannot be divorced from the narrative dynamics and processes that mediate and precede it. For example, each of the titles above conditions the project of recognition on a specific subject-position and narrative situation: the transracial adoptee is self-possessive ("In Their Own Voices"); they emerge from a silence conditioned by genealogy ("seeds from a silent tree"); or they speak from a liminal space ("Outside Looking In"). Even as these works focus more on personal narratives, their explicit or implicit participation in a collective project of social recognition constructs what K. Anthony Appiah calls "scripts" of personhood. "Collective identities," Appiah writes, "provide what we might call scripts: narratives that people can use in shaping their life plans and in telling their life stories.... Part of the function of our collective identities ... is also to structure possible narratives of the individual self" ("Liberalism, Individuality, and Identity" 326-27). Implicit in these narratives is a narrative of d that is conditioned by the very demand for recognition.

These works, and more generally this project to hear transracial adoptees tell their stories, raise several issues around the relationship between narrativity and what it means to be recognized. At one level, in structuring "possible narratives of the individual self" and codifying what is recognizable, these scripts may preclude other possible narratives of selfhood. Moreover, we must also question the relationship between narration and selfhood that underlies this demand for recognition. The idea that we use collective scripts in order to fit into wider stories presumes that "narrative gives us the life, or that life takes place in narrative form" (Butler 39). Appiah writes, for example, "One thing that matters to people across many societies is a certain narrative unity, the ability to tell a story of one's life that hangs together. The story--my story--should cohere in the way appropriate to a person in my society" (Ethics of Identity 23). (5) But this model acts as if telling our story is a simple self-revelatory act, as in the formulation "to tell their stories in their own words." It does not take into account the problem that narrative construction takes place within the context of a relationship, an address to someone. (6) The act of narration does not simply communicate "my story" to another, as in some reciprocal exchange. Rather it is marked by what you demand of me, what I project onto you, and what we desire of each other, in the act of narration.

By reading the demand for recognition not as a simple narrative act that "tells their stories," but as a product of asymmetrical demands and desires that inhabit storytelling, we can analyze how the transracial adoptee emerges as an effect of the dynamics of the adopter-adoptee relationship. The narrative mechanisms of recognition are particularly important to analyze here because they reveal the overdetermined ways in which the transracial adoptee is both part of an emotionally-laden intersubjective relation and at the nexus of several contiguous and conflicting processes--immigration, migration, economic exchange, assimilation, domestication--that are in continual negotiation. The effort to frame the transracial adoptee as a recognizable social subject shows how these processes of racialization and domestication are negotiated. As David Eng asks in a recent essay, "Is the transnational adoptee an immigrant? Is she ... an Asian American? Even more, is her adoptive family Asian American? ... And how are international and group histories of gender, race, poverty, and nation managed or erased within the 'privatized' sphere of the domestic?" (1). By paying close attention to the relationship between the scripts of identity that produce and recognize the transracial adoptee as a subject on the one hand, and processes of narrating adoption that intersect several histories in conflicting ways on the other hand, we can see the often overdetermined ways in which categories of racial and national identity are made to cohere. (7)

I begin, then, by examining the narrative dynamics and frames of two of the aforementioned titles, In Their Own Voices and Seeds from A Silent Tree, in order to suggest that they secure the adoptee's recognition as a social subject at the cost of repressing the ambivalences of the adoptive relationship. What these anthologies of adoption stories point to is the construction of a collective script: the collective identity of adoptees into which individual adoptees are made to fit and around which they shape their life-stories. The mode of the anthology is to put fragments together and make them into a new whole. In the examples below, we see how the anthology and autobiography work together to collapse the individual narrative of the transracial adoptee into a collective identity in securing recognition. However, the stories of the transracial adoptees do not necessarily follow the scripts staged for them, allowing us to see some of the assumptions behind the norms of recognition. By reading these fissures between the collective narrative and its interruptions, we can identify how the narratives used to claim recognition resist and foreclose the difficult asymmetry of the adoptive relation itself.

I then turn to Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life in order to show how his story offers a different model for narrating transracial adoption, one that pays closer attention to the psychic demands and desires of the adopter-adoptee relationship. Less confined by the need to either justify or condemn the practice of transracial/transnational adoption, or the demand to construct a narrative of identity that is peculiar and particular to the experience of transracial adoption, A Gesture Life calls attention to and questions the role that norms of recognition play in fashioning the life-stories of transracial adoptees. I pay particular attention to the confusions of temporality and the ambivalence of address in A Gesture Life in order to argue that adoption is figured in terms of a transference: a relation in which the parent sustains the adoptive relationship through taking the child as someone else. The language of Doc Hata--a little too comfortable, a little too familiar--discloses the ambivalences, erasures, and resistances that are embedded in adoption writing itself.

I. Anthologizing the Adoptee: Collective Scripts and Unscripted Responses

The anthology, In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Own Stories, published in 2000, dramatizes the conflict between the scripts of recognizing the transracial adoptee and the demands and desires embedded in the dialogical situation itself. In Their Own Voices is a collection of interviews with transracial adoptees whose purpose is to allow transracial adoptees themselves to narrate their daily lives and experiences. These interviews are engaged in a project of individualizing these adoptees and emphasizing the complexities of their identity formation. But at the same time, the narrative trajectories of these interviews often narrow down the contingencies of identity formation that the subject of transracial adoption raises in their life-stories. The social recognition of transracial adoptees becomes more and more dependent on fitting them within a narrative that makes their personal identities contingent on the construction of origins as an effect of cultural difference. In other words, the self-narration of adoptees is overdetermined by the demands of recognition, which tie present contingencies backwards to fixed origins.

Throughout this group of interviews, the collective script of transracial adoption becomes quite clear since the adoptees' narrative trajectories are geared toward a certain moment of recognition. At the same time, we can read the demands and projections within the act of narration that interrupt this narrative reconstruction. In an interview with a mixed-race adoptee named Tage Larsen, whose brother, Peik, is African American and Vietnamese, we see how race gets singled out as the major component in processes of identification and the formation of identity. For even though Tage insists that his relationship with Peik is strong because of closeness in age, and not race, the interviewer singles out the racial aspect as important, making it both origin and destination:

   Did you feel naturally drawn to him [Peik] because he is part black?
   No. It was pretty much free reign [sic]. [...]

   Once you interacted with society outside of your family, did you
   then feel a certain connection to your brother Peik because of his
   ethnicity and skin color?

   No, not at all.... I didn't share a special bond with him because of
   that. (Simon and Roorda 249)

The direction of these questions locates relationality and identification solely along lines of racial resemblance. They seek to tie together a fictive moment in the future (racial consciousness) with an earlier moment in which racial consciousness is less fixed and contingent: "did you then feel a certain connection ...?"

Despite the complications that Tage's family suggest around the whole notion of family or understanding one's family in relation to race, the interview questions relate race to identity as both cause and effect: race is the primary component of identity in that it is both the originary relation and that toward which one is driven. The interview gradually turns toward issues defined by "blackness": "Were there other African Americans in these groups or were you the only one?"; "How does one excite persons in the African American community, young people specifically, about the world of classical music?" (253). Several times toward the latter part of this interview, different versions of "what does it mean to be black" or "to be an African American, what does that mean to you?" are asked (250-51).

In another of the interviewer's questions, she locates Tage's blackness within and against his family metaphorized as a "melting pot": "In a family that reflected a 'melting pot' of different races and ethnicities, how did you maintain your blackness, or did you?" (249). The metaphor of the melting pot fixes the terms of opposition between transracial adoption and its homogenizing drive against which blackness must be a resisting force: "how did you maintain your blackness, or did you?" This last "or did you" evaluates the are of Tage's life based on recognizing blackness. As a result of this frame, the contingencies of family formation are related back to a notion of recognizing cultural difference as origin. The processes of acculturation--through schooling or through sibling relationships--are related back to the "originary" moment of adoption in which the opposition between the "white" family and the "black" community is dramatized and repeated.

What becomes a common refrain through these interviews is the desire for the white family to "recognize" the racial identity or cultural choices of their transracially adopted sons and daughters. In one example, the interviewer asks, "Do you think that a black child has a 'future' in a white family?" The interviewee responds with the familiar refrain, "Yes, if the family recognizes that the child is from a different culture and makes a point of actively engaging themselves and the child in that culture" (125). Here, the adoptee rehearses the terms of the opposition between "black child" and "white family" that structures the conceptualization of transracial adoption. But what does recognition mean here? To think of the child as "from a different culture" is to define culture solely as a past origin that somehow inheres in the child. To "engage the child in that culture" is to produce another version of a matching (8) process, one that produces distinct conceptions of what black culture and white culture are, and one that presumes a transparent and deterministic relationship between the child's background or place of origin and what he or she should be. This way of framing the adoptee's story reveals the way in which the project of recognition relies on narrative to relate the different, non-synchronous, moments of recognition that co-exist uneasily. In relating the present and future life of the adoptee back to a fixed origin, these narratives perform a proleptic trajectory for the project of recognition. At the same time, the claim that these adoptees are telling "their own stories" reduces the very interview situation--the projections and demands of the interviewer--from which this story is made. The constant back and forth between question and answer allows us to read some of the intersubjective demands within the narrative situation itself.

In Their Own Voices dramatizes the desire to narrate a certain trajectory of racial recognition, as well as the temporal mechanisms of that desire. The direction of the questions continually dramatizes, repeats, and returns us to an "initial" moment of adoption in which the adoptee's origin is fixed in terms of racial and cultural difference. Likewise, the frame of Seeds from a Silent Tree: An Anthology by Korean Adoptees, edited by Tonya Bishoff and Jo Rankin, naturalizes the moments of recognition that are then made to be formative of the self. This text is a collection of short stories, poems, and non-fiction essays (mostly in memoir or autobiographical style) written by Korean adoptees. But it specifically reuses and appropriates the family tree in order to frame these adoption experiences. All of the Korean adoptees in this anthology are said to "share a specific common origin," thus remaking a form of family and genealogy for these anthologized adoptees (Bishoff 1).

The selections are grouped into four sections titled (in sequence) "Roots Remembered and Imagined," "Transplantations," "Reunions," and "Seeds of Resolution," which mimic a biographical model or developmental model that moves from the explorations of roots to the negotiation of new environments to a return to biology and finally to some form of reconciliation. This framing makes a collective set of experiences into a linear form: the sections chart an individual, teleological journey from beginning to end. They highlight the moments and encounters that are privileged in self-formation. In this way, the frame of the anthology makes clear that the social recognition of transnational adoption is premised on the terms of a biological model, some kind of natural process. It relies on imagining one's birthplace as a kind of originary relation that needs to be negotiated at some psychic or social level.

This formal trajectory that dichotomizes birthplace and the act of adoption also dichotomizes Korea and America, and makes the pattern from Korea to America and (sometimes) back into a single, continuous movement. In this way, we see theproblems of adoption played out as a series of oppositions. As Catherine Ceniza Choy and Gregory Paul Choy note, "many of the entries in the anthology border on what are by now considered hackneyed expressions of racialized identity in Asian-American literature--either/or, inside/outside, white/nonwhite binaries; encounters with racists and fetishists; and quotidian orientalism" (270). For example, David Miller in Seeds from a Silent Tree writes: "Walking a tightrope / Pulled on both sides / Korea / America / For if I fall either way / I lose a part of me" (107). These "hackneyed expressions" should also be seen, however, in the context of how the frame of the anthology links these oppositions to forms of racial recognition. The frame constructs Korean adoptees as recognizable only in their difficult relation to a cultural and racial origin (Korea) on the one hand and a white family on the other. Seeds from a Silent Tree--from its title, to the structure and titles of its four sections--reiterates the terms of public recognition.

None of the authors in Seeds from a Silent Tree self-identify as Asian American, but rather refer to themselves as "adopted Korean" in keeping with the collective script set up by the anthology (Choy and Choy 270). At the same time that the organizing term of "Korean adoptees" helps codify a narrative of return and origins, or an unresolved movement between the fixed terrains of two national cultures, we can also hear a note of tension within the narrative construction itself. As one of the writers in Seeds from A Silent Tree writes, against the grain of this frame, "Being adopted Korean is far more complex than choosing racial designation (my emphasis)" (143). Rather than recapitulate the terms of choosing "Korea" or "America" or the impossibility of doing so, this writer holds out, if only negatively, for other narratives. Another one of the stories in Seeds calls attention comically to the desire for a transparent way to recognize if one is adopted or not: "I have adopted Korean radar, I'm sure of it. Perhaps all adopted Koreans have it built inside" (73). The speculative fantasy that adopted Koreans have some built-in connection to each other begs the question of what exactly constitutes the connection or commonality between adopted Koreans. Instead of basing commonality on the division between Korea and America, as the framing of Seeds suggests, the problem of recognizing other adopted Koreans questions the very categories that we are using to narrate and collectivize the adoptees.

The "adopted Korean" has come to be its own identity category in this anthology at the same time that it has an uneasy relation to other statuses or minority identities. Younghee in her short story, "Laurel," writes, "Being adopted into a white family does give one a unique perspective.... I no longer believe I am white, but I still have days when I desire to look white.... I still do not know what it means to be Korean American, but I do have a sense of what it means to be Asian American" (88). At first she recapitulates the framing of her own subject position (her "unique perspective" that the experience of transracial adoption supposedly confers; her grappling with the 'whiteness' of her family), but then it is slowly revealed that none of these 'collective identities'--"white," "Korean American," "Asian American,"--necessarily has a given content. "Knowing" what it means to be Korean American seems to be far more about desire than it does any concrete understanding.

Both these anthologies frame the demand for social recognition. But a close look at this mediation between collective scripts and individual identities reveals the organizing terms that govern social recognition and the assumption of a single frame of reference that is used to make sense of the asymmetrical relationship between adopter and adoptee. The collective scripts embedded in the frames of these anthologies facilitate this project of recognition, condensing the multiple conflicts of race and kinship within the adoptive relationship into a proleptic narrative of recognition as return. Both these anthologies codify norms of recognition that rely on securing the particular ground of one's own culture or one's own race.

But as we have seen, the narrative production of a collective script is marked by its own moments of non-recognition. The ground opened up by Younghee between the terms "Asian American," "Korean American," and "adopted Korean" is precisely where Chang-rae Lee locates his engagement with adoption discourse. Chang-rae Lee shows how adoption intertwines lives and histories in ways that problematize the closures of a narrative drive toward recognition. Indeed, Doc Hata's attempt to settle the account of his life and be comfortably "at home" is the perfect analogue for an adoption narrative that can never quite settle down in one place.

II. Adoptive Relations as Transference in Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life

A Gesture Life is, in fact, structured by adoptions, constantly putting into question "where you're coming from," the relationship between background and identity so necessary for the project of recognition. The main character, Doc Hata, is an ethnic Korean adopted by a Japanese family. When he moves to the United States, he lives in a suburb named Bedley Run and is thought of as a Japanese person. He adopts a girl, Sunny, from Korea, who is of ambiguously mixed race--some references are made to her being of mixed black and Korean ancestry--as his daughter. Doc Hata's adoption of Sunny, at one level, seems to mimic the standard narrative of transracial adoption: raising Sunny in Bedley Run matches the classic setting of transracial adoption--the predominantly white, upper-class suburb. Doc Hata is a good, assimilated immigrant, and his adoption of Sunny takes the form of this classic narrative of giving the adoptee a better life. At the same time, this mixing and matching of race and nationality makes it unclear whether the adoption is same-race or transracial; in fact, it seems to disrupt these very categories.

I focus on this novel because of the way in which these narrative dynamics center on the intersecting issues of recognition, the narration of transracial adoption, and the asymmetrical relation of adoption more broadly. Two narrative drives co-exist uneasily within this text: Doc Hata's drive to belong and find closure for his life as an assimilated Japanese American in the suburban town of Bedley Run; and his constant returns to and flashbacks of the past, the traumatic events of his participation as a Japanese soldier in World War II. What connects these two narrative movements is Doc Hata's adoption of a Korean girl, Sunny. Throughout the novel, Doc Hata's experiences with comfort women (9) during his years as a wartime medical officer are juxtaposed with the troubles of raising his adopted daughter. His adoption of Sunny explicitly repeats his relationship with K, a comfort woman whom Doc Hata met while stationed as an officer in the Japanese Army. He works out his feelings and relationship toward the one in terms of the other and vice-versa. Adoption thus constitutes something of a problematic mediation between these two narrative movements: its place as a pivot between past and present exemplifies the nonsynchronous nature of the adoptive relationship. Doc Hata's drive is to normalize experience, to make everything "familiar," which is, in a sense, the drive of adoption. But this rubs up against the difficulty of narrating the event of adoption, the persistence of the inability to relate Sunny back to an understandable origin. A Gesture Life is characterized by how this relationship between two narrative drives embeds the difficulties in narrating transracial adoption.

The story of how A Gesture Life was first conceived and then re-written helps us think about the place of adoption in the novel in relation to the ethics of recognition. (10) As Lee notes in an interview, "I originally wanted to write a book that was told from the point of view of a 'comfort woman'.... I was doing some reading about Korea, and I found out about what happened to these women, and I was just blown away.... I remember being on a bus after reading what was otherwise a pretty dry academic article on the subject, and I had to get off and walk home just to think about what had happened" (Garner 6). As Garner goes on to note, Lee flew to South Korea and interviewed several of these women and returned to write. Lee continues, "I probably wrote three-quarters of a book in that vein.... But I began to feel that what I had written didn't quite come up to the measure of what I had experienced, sitting in a room with these people. I began to feel that there was nothing like live witness" (Garner 6). Instead of writing a book from the point of view of a comfort woman and inhabiting their subjectstatus, he instead tells it from the point of view of a 'kind' victimizer, the highly mediated persona of Doc Hata. I do not wish to put an undue amount of attention on Lee's statements or the narrative that did not ultimately materialize. But I do wish to note the displacements. He moves from the impossibility of 'live witness' to an ethically ambivalent position, from the assumption of "reliable" narration and the transparency of truth with justice to unreliable narration.

The politics and ethics of this displacement become clearer in relation to Schaffer and Smith's book on human rights and lifewriting, which has a chapter on the comfort women and their emergence into subjects of representation through their first-person witnessing of the atrocities done by Japanese soldiers (123-52). Speaking about the grave silence that followed the atrocities of World War II, Smith and Schaffer write:

   After World War II there would be no receptive public for the
   narratives of former comfort women, no cultural intelligibility to
   their stories, no urgency attached to their particular acts of
   remembrance and recovery, no juridical or public recognition of
   their claims, no identity as victim of a rights violation. "Without
   recognition," comment Brunet and Rousseau, "there can be no
   punishment, reparation nor rehabilitation. Worse still, there are
   neither victims nor aggressors." (192)

In this paradigm, identity and cultural intelligibility are clearly premised on rights claims and the status of victimhood. It is through narrative and the status of victimization that these women can stake a claim for public recognition.

By recognizing the impossibility of "live witness" and choosing instead to 'adopt' the voice of a compromised, complicit, and benevolent doctor in 'the army, Lee foregrounds issues of guilt and reparation, and mediates the opposition of 'victim' and 'aggressor.' By transferring the ambivalent ethical relation between Doc Hata and K to the adoptive relation between Hata and Sunny, Lee's narrative resituates the question of recognition within the dynamics of adoption. Instead of the witness producing a narrative of fights-claims and voicing the demand for recognition of the victimized in a dialogic relationship with the victimizer, the problem of recognition gets played out across the asymmetry of their relations: the difficulty of acknowledging each other and each other's desires.

Adoptive relations in this sense are best considered in terms of psychoanalytic notions of transference, which suggest both the invention of others on the basis of our past relationships and the acting out of the past in the present in the form of an unconscious repetition. But this transfer is not simply one-way, where the past is the originary relation that is projected onto the present, or where the present is simply thought through the past. (11) Rather, the transference enacts the difficulty of two subjects ever meeting on common ground. This model of transference is first suggested in Freud's essay, "Constructions in Analysis," which deals with the recovery of the past in a present narrative.

In "Constructions in Analysis," the process of re-telling a life in psychoanalytic practice becomes considerably more complicated because of Freud's seemingly simple recognition that the work of analysis "is carried on in two separate localities, that it involves two people" (258). For Freud, analytic constructions proceed in an alternating fashion. The analyst's constructions based on material given by the analysand, its "effect" on the subject of analysis, the production of new material by the subject, and further constructions, are "carried on side by side, the one kind being always a little ahead and the other following upon it" (260-61). Construction and the working-through of life-history overlap in an uneven way. In this way, there is no simple "possession" of the story. Working toward a story that "makes sense" is always, in a way, incomplete; the process of re-telling a life depends radically on the constructions of the addressee and the continual re-symbolization of the past. This way of thinking about the relationship between life-history, narrative, and dialogue is quite different from one in which there are already given narratives that "provide models for telling our lives," as Appiah puts it ("Liberalism" 326). The latter model presumes a relationality in which the subject and what is outside of it are relatively stable. But Freud's emphasis on the continual construction and re-construction that never quite meet--"the one kind being always a little ahead and the other following upon it" destabilizes the dialogic, mutually constitutive relation ("the self is ... the product of our interaction from our earliest years with others") privileged in Appiah's account (Ethics of Identity 20).

These beginnings of a theory of transference in Freud's essay that emphasize the uneven dialogue between analyst and analysand are taken up in Jacques Lacan's similar emphasis on transference as being "both an obstacle to remembering, and a making present of the closure of the unconscious, which is the act of missing the right meeting just at the right moment" (145). Here, Lacan argues counter-intuitively that the act of transference is not a way of remembering and restoring the past through another relationship, but rather that it is an "obstacle to remembering." The repetition of transference does not repair the past relationship, so much as it repeats what was repressed in the past relationship. In other words, it repeats exactly what is missed in the past, what is unable to be remembered. (12)

I elaborate Freud's essay and Lacan's thoughts here to suggest that transference is not just a displacement from one person to another, from the past to the present, but a process of constantly alternating between past and present, in which the past is misconstrued through present needs and disavowals, and the present repeats past repressions. Adoption as a transferential relation that continually repeats the illegibility of past relations is at the center of A Gesture Life, and we see this manifested in the uneasy temporality of the novel. The double-movement of the narrative, oscillating as it does between looking forwards and looking backwards, acts out this model of transference in narrating the adoptive relation. Unlike the notion of narrative so prevalent in adoption literature based on the reconstruction of a life through the recovery of origin--a narrative that facilitates the 'transfer' of the child from one country to another, or one race to another--this adoption narrative continually moves back and forth between two temporal moments, creating a dialogue between the reconstruction of the past and the construction of the present. This transferential relation destabilizes the frames of reference that are used to capture the movement of the adoptee from one place to another.

A Gesture Life inhabits and disrupts the conventions of how we think about adoption by making us rethink how the adopted child is imagined and made to "fit" into narratives of belonging. It refuses to give us clear-cut categories in which to think of the adopted child: the child is neither a blank slate whose history is erased, thus enabling his or her fit into the family; nor is the child recognized as simply being from a different culture, thus providing a narrative that reconciles belonging and difference. (13) Instead, Sunny is placed at the intersection of several latent histories and relationships, the site of the transitional space of transference. This occurs in the novel through the technique of flashbacks and flashforwards. By making these correspondences, A Gesture Life suggests an identification between K and Sunny, a way in which Sunny is trapped in an earlier, guilt-ridden relationship that involves the Japanese occupation of Korea. As Mary Burns, Doc Hata's neighbor and one-time love interest in the novel, states, "But it's as if she's a woman to whom you're beholden.... I don't see the reason. You're the one who wanted her. You adopted her. But you act almost guilty, as if she's someone you hurt once, or betrayed, and now you're obliged to do whatever she wishes, which is never good for anyone, much less a child" (60). Mary Burns cannot understand Doc Hata's relationship to his daughter because it is not commensurate with the usual way in which adoption discourse structures feelings, which is by locating desire and benevolence within the adopter and gratefulness and obligation within the adoptee.

But I do not wish to read the dynamics of this correspondence simply in terms of Doc Hata reworking and repeating the 'guilt' involved in his past relationship with K through his adopted daughter, Sunny. This line of thinking would assume that the past is being repaired or cured in the present relation. Rather, this structure of transference suggests a way in which the adoptive relation inhabits histories and identifications that remain uneasily present. Hata's prior relationship lives on in the construction of his adopted daughter, destabilizing how both these relationships get constituted in the first place.

A Gesture Life repeatedly shows how Hata's relationship to Sunny is confounded by the transferences enacted in the very act of narration. This attempt is revealed to be particularly problematic at the scene of recognition or encounter. My first example is a recounting of an emotionally laden scene in which we must attend to the ambivalent voice and position of Doc Hata and track the dizzying array of desires and demands embedded in his narration. While Doc Hata is looking for his daughter in a bad part of the neighborhood, he flashes back to a moment in his past when he fails to help a comfort woman pleading for help. The memory of the comfort woman provides the background for his search for Sunny, which ends in another act of guilty witnessing (repeating the guilt of the prior relationship), in which he sees his adopted daughter engaging in sexual acts through a window:

   I had never seen her move in such a way.... I saw her as I believe
   any good father would, with pride and wonder and the most innocent
   (if impossible) measure of longing, an aching hope that she stay
   forever pristine, unsoiled. But to gaze upon her like this. She was
   running her hands over herself.... And it was then that I wished she
   were just another girl or woman to me, no longer my kin or my
   daughter or even my charge, and I made no sound as I grimly
   descended, my blood already trying to forget, growing cold.
   (114, 116)

In this scene, his sexual desire for Sunny becomes explicit at the same time that the imperative form of "to gaze" absents his gaze and erases himself from the scene of desire. He looks on and tries to forget, trying to make himself into someone who could look on in a neutral fashion by transforming her: "I wished she were just another girl or woman to me." But his wish to make her into "just another girl" both makes her sexually accessible and marks the adoptive relation, one in which she is not "kin" in terms of blood or descent.

This scene is one example of how Doc Hata is continually confronted with the question of what he is seeing his daughter as. What the structure of transference brings into view is the problem of how one repeats the past missed encounter in another relationship, and "takes someone for someone else": (14) the problem, in short, of how to address the other. Does Doc Hata see her as "just another girl," or as his kin, his daughter, or his charge? Or does he see her as "any good father would"? The moment of recognition-"I had never seen her move in such a way"--is followed by a transformation of the subject in the act of looking: "I saw her as I believe any good father would." This process of "taking someone for someone else" is both "normalized" and resisted by Doc Hata. Any father would, he suggests, naturally have these thoughts and feelings. But this sentiment only attempts to naturalize how one sees another in terms of some standard father-daughter relation, avoiding the uncertainty of his relation to Sunny.

This problem of address--how one "takes" the other, what one is seeing the other as--is repeated in Hata's relationship with K. Here again, adoption figures the uncertain play between background and identification in deciding how one can relate to another. K identifies Hata as a confidant, as someone with whom she can speak, because of his appearance and language: they share a common, originary tie in the Korean language. She first thinks that he is Korean because his voice is just like her younger brother's, but he denies it, saying that he has lived in Japan since he was born. She insists that he is "different" than the other Japanese soldiers. After she learns about his background, she is fascinated by his status as a Japanese adoptee and likens it to her own marginal status as a daughter in a patriarchal household, in which she is treated "as if [she] were of the most distant blood" (245). Yet, as much as their lives intersect, as much as they seem to find 'originary' ties to each other, their relationship plays out as a series of missed encounters, continually questioning one's primary relation to the other. She takes him to be Korean, as a sympathetic presence; he takes her for a love-object and wants to save her. But she does not want his help, exposing his difficulty in acknowledging desire: "You think you love me but what you really want you don't yet know" (300). Their relationship is an impossible one, precisely because they cannot address each other: You are taking me for someone else.

Instead of symmetry--they are both on the margins of kinship, they both speak Korean--their relationship is characterized by the play between familiarity and unfamiliarity. Doc Hata tells K that he loves her, but what does he love her as? As a comfort woman? As a lover? She is, as she puts it herself, "unaddressable" (245). Likewise, the question of how Hata is to be addressed haunts him throughout the novel. As the "venerable" Doc Hata? Or is he always to be haunted by prior identifications: as a Korean, as someone who is not-quite Japanese, as someone whose loyalty and belonging are always in question. The problem of addressing somebody "as" is never just a one-way projection; it is a question of an asymmetric relation that transforms both the addresser and the addressee. Constructing somebody "as if" they are Korean or a lover is simultaneously an act of disavowal. In other words, if Doc Hata sees Sunny as "just another girl," or K as a lover, then what does that make him, and what is he avoiding?

This transferential relation complicates the earlier formulation of thinking about the child as "from a different culture," or, I might add, as having a different history. It figures more largely the problem of how history, culture, or origin, are imagined to inhere in a person. In other words, how we relate to another is also the question of how we place each other in a certain history. Hata's, K's, and Sunny's lives intersect through the histories of Japanese-Korean colonization. Hata is a Korean adopted by a Japanese family, who then goes on to fight in World War II; K is a Korean woman captured by the Japanese army; Sunny is a child of the Korean war, of ambiguous ancestry.

In A Gesture Life, the adoptee becomes a site for the overlapping and intertwining of multiple histories, revealing a disconnect between Hata's imagined (desired) relations and his relation to his "own" history. For example, Doc Hata tells of his own imagined relation to Sunny: "I was disappointed, initially.... I had assumed the child and I would have a ready, natural affinity, and that my colleagues ... though knowing her to be adopted, would have little trouble quickly accepting our being of a single kind and blood. But when I saw her for the first time I realized there could be no such conceit for us, no easy persuasion. Her hair, her skin, were there to see, self-evident, and it was obvious how some other color (or colors) ran deep within her" (204). This is one of a few ambiguous references to the possibility of Sunny's black blood, but it reveals how histories of racialization crop up, uncannily, to disrupt familial imaginaries premised on a "single kind and blood." Doc Hata's perception of the "obvious.... color" that runs "deep within Sunny" makes present his own blind-spots in his desire for a natural affinity with his adopted daughter, which is premised on forgetting the history of relations between Korea and Japan. In other words, just when he thinks he can erase his own participation in the Japanese army's imperial efforts by adopting and forging a natural father-daughter relationship with a Korean girl, another history of war and occupation, the US role in the Korean war, emerges in the very place of that erasure.

Several histories intertwine and Overlap in Hata's adoption of Sunny: the history of Japanese colonization of Korea; the presence of the US army in Korea during the Korean War; the history of black-white relations and Japanese-white relations in the US. The adoptive relation in A Gesture Life suggests that the child always emerges into pre-existing histories. Sunny, as Hata's adopted daughter from Korea, figures these doubled, layered histories, emphasizing the notion that one's story does not begin from a single, whole, origin, but is always preceded by and embedded in other histories. The desire to trace our lives back to a single, whole origin co-exists anxiously with the unsettlement of context that is enacted by the adopted child.

III. Unsettling the Closure of Adoption

The anthologies representing the life-stories of transracial adoptees restlessly seek closure by staging the recovery of origins and the act of racial or cultural recognition. But just as A Gesture Life de-couples the imagination of the transracially adopted child from a narrative project that privileges a singular history and origin, it simultaneously reveals the difficulties in such closures. Indeed, Doc Hata reveals the ambivalences embedded in the language of adoption itself and in its attempts to enact closure. In sounding the well-intentioned voice of adoptive parenthood, Hata gives us a voice often at war with itself over its own desires and imaginative constructions. The fissures and ambivalences in Doc Hata's voice, the problematic affect of this text, betray the avoidance and missed encounters that are at the heart of thinking about adoption as a transferential relation.

Hata's voice reveals a split between affect and language in the narration of adoption. There is a persistent gap in his narrative voice between what he feels and what he does not want to acknowledge. For example, Doc Hata recounts his adoption of Sunny thus: "My Sunny, I thought, would ... not be so thankful or beholden to me, necessarily, but at least she'd be somewhat appreciative of the providence of institutions that brought her from the squalor of the orphanage ... to an orderly, welcoming suburban home in America, with a hopeful father of like-enough race and sufficient means" (73). While the narrative rhetoric has all the trappings of the standard adoption sentiments, the reader is also made aware of the strangeness, or uncanniness, of the language in which this relation is couched. The language matches the rhetoric of adoption at the same time that it seems oddly out of place. "Providence of institutions" alludes to the idea of adoption as salvation even as Hata is disavowing the idea that Sunny would be "thankful" or "beholden" to him. The idea of a divine providence makes adoption less arbitrary and more natural, but "providence" is matched strangely with precisely what it is trying to erase: the social "institutions" that mediate the process of adoption. The phrase "of like-enough race," as discussed earlier, alludes to the norm of matching the parent and child based on racial and/or national background, at the same time that the oddness of the phrase reveals the absurdity of "racial matching" as a concept. Even as Hata's language seeks to close off the ambiguities and anxieties of the adoption process, the words he uses betray the difficulties of closure.

Hata continually defends against his own desires, often reconstructing his relation to Sunny in order to fit this misrecognition. His desire for a child is clouded: "But I wanted a girl, a daughter--I was (as I think of it now) strangely unmovable on the issue.... My desire for a girl was unknown to me ... but I ... explained how I'd always hoped for a daughter, the words suddenly streaming from my mouth as though I'd long practiced the speech. I found myself speaking of a completeness, the unitary bond of a daughter and father" (74). Hata repeats the romantic and sentimental language of adoption as if it were second nature. But this repetition is also a form of avoidance that manifests the entanglements of recognizing desire. The slippage in his prose--moving back and forth as it does between wanting a "girl" and wanting a "daughter"--reveals the inseparability of the act of recounting from the desires that remain opaque to the speaker. Even as Hata recounts his explanation (he is telling the story of his explanation to the social worker), his language is inhabited by his unacknowledged emotions, the projections and demands that he makes on the other, and the desire that confounds his speech.

Likewise, the adoptive relation ambivalently moves between the refusal to acknowledge the other and the desire for an acknowledged relation. While Doc Hata often points to his desire for a real father-daughter bond, having a real family, he also recounts his willful ignoring of his daughter, Sunny, as part of how he manages his "cherished relations." For example, in convincing "his" Sunny to have a very late abortion, Hata recounts: "I forced her to do it.... In a way, it was a kind of ignoring that I did, an avoidance of her as Sunny--difficult, rash, angry Sunny--which I masked with a typical performance of consensus building and subtle pressure, which always is the difficult work of attempting to harmonize one's life and the lives of those whom one cherishes" (283-84). The work of "harmonizing one's life and the lives of those one cherishes" is revealed as a process that avoids the difficult asymmetric nature of the parent-child relationship. A Gesture Life gives us both the sentimental language of adoption (which wishes away the problems of kinship) and exposes the ways in which unacknowledged desires are embedded in the language of adoption itself.

The problematic closure of adoption is made evident, finally, in the ambivalent closure of the novel. The first line of this novel, "People know me here," rubs uneasily against the final line of the novel, "Come almost home" (1, 356). The former announces the project of recognition at the heart of this life-story. Doc Hata narrates himself as the example of the good, assimilated immigrant whose quest for recognition and belonging has been fulfilled. But this process of assimilation is complicated by the ambivalences of the adoption narrative, captured by the latter phrase, "come almost home." Indeed, the ending of the novel unsettles the events and scenes that typify some form of closure in the adoptive family romance: reunion with Sunny and her son; some form of shared understanding with her; property left as a legacy to be transferred to a daughter. Each of these acts of constructing and transmitting family is haunted by the very closures wished for. As Hata intones: "We wish it [parent-child relationship] somehow pure, this thing, we wish it unmixed, unalloyed with human hope or piety or fear or maybe even love. For we wish it not to be ornate. And yet it always is" (351). Even the haltings and ambivalences of these sentences, and the odd language choice of "ornate," speak to the ways in which the language of family often covers over its own ambivalences and gaps.

Throughout the novel, adoption and the 'familial' holds out the promise of the unity of the parent-child bond or of a whole family. But phrases like "as I assumed a real father would or should be," "former daughter," "almost home," or "a 'whole family'" shadow the kinds of closures attempted by the discourse of adoption (275, 58). The meditative, elegiac nature of the ending resists closure, as evident by the series of negations that specifically run against a narrative of recognition as return: "Perhaps I'll travel ... to land on former shores. But I think it won't be any kind of pilgrimage. I won't be seeking out my destiny or fate. I won't attempt to find comfort in the visage of a creator or the forgiving dead" (356). Resistant to the narrative closures that mark the search narratives and roots narratives of adoption discourse to the very end, Lee's novel forces us to dwell in the uncomfortable space of being "almost home." Adoptive identity, in A Gesture Life, is embedded in the ways we are traversed and criss-crossed by stories, histories, and relations that both precede us and are outside of us. Lee's novel suggests the impossibility of narrating adoptive identity in terms of a single origin, a singular life, or in recognition of where you come from. But it is also finally attendant to the closures that both adopters and adoptees often wish for, but never quite receive.

I wish to thank Lawrence Buell, Homi Bhabha, John Stauffer, Werner Sollors, Colin Milbum, and Gillian Prowse for thoughts and suggestions on earlier drafts; Shirley Geok-Lin Lim for her encouragement and advice; the anonymous readers for MELUS for their thoughtful critiques; and Laura Thiemann Scales and Alisa Braithwaite for their careful readings and comments throughout the process.

Works Cited

Anagnost, Ann. "Scenes of Misrecognition: Maternal Citizenship in the Age of Transnational Adoption." Positions. East Asia Cultural Critique 8.2 (2000): 389-421.

Andersen, Susan M., Noah S. Glassman, Serena Chen, and Steve W. Cole. "Transference in Social Perception: The Role of Chronic Accessibility in Significant-Other Representations." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69.1 (1995): 41-57.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. "Liberalism, Individuality, and Identity." Critical Inquiry 27.2 (2001): 305-32.

--. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.

Beizer, Janet. "One's Own: Reflections on Motherhood, Owning, and Adoption." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 21.2 (2002): 237-55.

Bertelsen, Phil, dir. and writer. Outside Looking In. Transracial Adoption in America. Big Mouth Productions, 2001.

Bhabha, Homi K. "Minority Maneuvers and Unsettled Negotiations." Critical Inquiry 23.3 (1997): 431-59.

Bishoff, Tonya, and Jo Rankin. Seeds from a Silent Tree: An Anthology. Glendale CA: Pandal Press, 1997.

Butler, Judith. Giving An Account of Oneself Assen: Van Gorcum, 2003.

Cheng, Anne Anlin. "Passing, Natural Selection, and Love's Failure: Ethics of Survival from Chang-rae Lee to Jacques Lacan." American Literary History 17.3 (2005): 553-74.

Cheng, Vincent. Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers UP, 2004. 62-84.

Choy, Catherine Ceniza, and Gregory Paul Choy. "Transformative Terrains: Korean Adoptees and the Social Constructions of an American Childhood." The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Caroline Field Levander and Carol J. Singley. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers UP, 2003. 262-79.

Dolgin, Gail, and Vicente Franco, dir. American Experience: Daughter from Danang. PBS, 2002.

Eng, David. "Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas." Social Text 21.3 (2003): 1-37.

Freud, Sigmund, et al. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 23. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953. 257-69.

Garner, Dwight. "Interview: Adopted Voice." New York Times Book Review 5 Sept. 1999: 6.

Haimes, Erika. "'Now I know who I really am:' Identity Change and Redefinitions of the Self in Adoption." Self and Identity: Perspectives Across the Lifespan. Ed. Terry Honess and Krysia Yardley. London and New York: Routledge, 1987. 359-71.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. New York: Norton, 1998.

Laplanche, Jean, and John Fletcher. Essays on Otherness. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Lee, Chang-rae. A Gesture Life. New York: Riverhead, 1999.

Liem, Deann Borshay, et al. First Person Plural. San Francisco: NAATA, 2000.

MacIntyre, Alasdair C. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd ed. Notre Dame IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1984.

Melosh, Barbara. "Adoption Stories: Autobiographical Narratives and the Politics of Identity." Adoption in America. Ed. E. Wayne Carp. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002. 218-47.

--. Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002.

Simon, Rita J., and Rhonda Roorda. In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories. New York: Columbia UP, 2000.

Schaffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith. Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Taylor, Charles. "The Politics of Recognition." Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. 25-73.

Yngvesson, Barbara. "'Going Home': Adoption, Loss of Bearings, and the Mythology of Roots." Social Text 21.1 (2003): 7-27.

Mark C. Jerng

Harvard University

Notes

(1.) For example, narrative conventions such as the adopted child's search and reunion with her or his biological parents have undergirded adoption debates about whether or not the adopted child should search, and should the adopted child have the right to know who his or her biological parents are even if it infringes on the interests and desires of the latter. See Melosh ("Adoption").

(2.) MacIntyre describes narrative in a way that suggests an implicit biologism: "I am what I may justifiably be taken by others to be in the course of living out a story that runs from my birth to my death; I am the subject of a history that is my own and no one else's, that has its own peculiar meaning.... I am born with a past.... The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide" (217, 221). This implicit biologism gets reiterated in arguments that show that adoptees lack a coherent sense of themselves precisely because they cannot construct their own life narrative. Haimes, for example, writes that adoptees' search for origins is expressive of their need for narrative continuity. Haimes's account of adoption suggests that narrative assumes organic continuity. The "beginning, middle, and end" of narrative history are biologically coded. The material signs of biology--a mother's medical history, "full" birth certificates, a family tree become the materials for a narrative sense of self. Modeling the need for biography on the search for origins naturalizes and biologizes the narrative act: adoptees cannot have biographies, they cannot account for themselves, without recourse to the construction of narrative based on the logic of biology. Biology forms the ground for both a narrative identity and an adoptive self. Perhaps this is why, as Janet Beizer has noted, "there is an equally powerful move [in adoption discourse] to readmit biology, genealogy, and genetics into the adoption picture" (245).

(3.) I do not wish to dismiss the difference between the polemical aspects of sociological work on adoption and fictions that utilize the trope of adoption. But what I wish to trace is how both fictional and non-fictional works that treat adoption share narrative norms that embed assumptions about racialized personhood within adoption. My focus on narrativity and recognition is my attempt to re-orient the framework of authenticity and inauthenticity. See Vincent Cheng's critique of attitudes toward authenticity in the discourse of adoption.

(4.) What I am calling transracial adoptees' demand for recognition should be read in the context of Taylor's influential account, "The Politics of Recognition," which argues for the centrality of the notion of "recognition" in modern democracies. His model for recognition, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin, is dialogical, suggesting that "We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us" (33-34). Taylor argues that the politics of recognition should begin with the presumption that "all human cultures ... have something important to say to all human beings" (66). It is then through a dialogical process that we can find substantive support for that presumption. Bhabha critiques Taylor's notion of recognition as being based on a notion of reciprocity that presumes the horizon or "background," to use Taylor's terms, by which their dialogue makes sense: "there is a presumption of dialogical recognition as a form of social and psychic reciprocity that makes the fusing of horizons a largely consensual and homogenizing norm of cultural value or worth, based on the notion that cultural difference is fundamentally synchronous" (450). Bhabha critiques Taylor for making the negotiation of cultural difference into a synchronous process that already assumes a reciprocal relationship between two whole cultures. I draw on this critique in reading the asymmetries and non-reciprocal aspects of the adoptive relation and in order to elaborate on a notion of dialogical recognition.

(5.) Appiah draws on the work of Taylor and MacIntyre in order to emphasize the constitutive role that narrative plays in making sense of our lives (Ethics of Identity 22).

(6.) Butler critiques the assumption that narratives can transparently tell or recount our lives (38-39).

(7.) Although this piece focuses mainly on narrative, the problem of recognition is present in the practices of transracial and transnational adoption more largely. Roots trips, in which adoptive parents and their adopted children return to the site of adoption, are organized in order to help parents and children alike construct a narrative of origin and beginnings. Culture camps organized for parents who have adopted transnationally are meant to give adopted children a sense of their culture, and (perhaps more importantly), help adoptive parents 'place' their children imaginatively and securely in terms of a socially recognized identity (based around a culture or nationality of origin). Yngvesson does an ethnographic study of these roots trips in which Swedish parents take their adopted children 'back' to Chile. Swedish parents, as Yngvesson suggests, attempt to materially reconstitute their child's origins so as to complete a narrative for themselves and their family, and produce a ground of recognition. Even as the parents treasure and memorialize pictures of their child's orphanage in order to replace the lost past and background for their child, Yngvesson notes how it was often the case that the adopted children themselves experienced the trip in much more ambivalent terms. Likewise, Anagnost's study of adoption from China refers to the "difficulties that adoptive parents face in their struggle for recognition as parents, a struggle that is intensified for the parent of a child identified as racially other" (395). Both of these studies suggest how the parents' struggle for recognition is inseparable from their desire to construct a socially recognized identity for their child. Both of these attempts to construct a ground for recognition reveal how the problem of recognition exists as a struggle between parent and child, an insight that is central to my thinking here.

(8.) In the 1920s and 1930s, the practice of "matching" children with parents on the basis of characteristics such as race, nationality, and religion was the norm. The debate between "matching" as a practice and producing transracial or transnational families is one that continues to this day. If the purpose of the early twentieth-century practice of matching was to naturalize adoption in terms of sameness, the multicultural version of transracial adoption, I am arguing, naturalizes difference.

(9.) The term "comfort women" is the name given to those women, often from Korea, but also from Malaysia, Burma, and the Phillipines, who were sexually abused by the Japanese army during their war-time occupation of parts of Asia during World War II.

(10.) See Anne Cheng for her excellent article on recognition and assimilation in Lee's A Gesture Life.

(11.) "Transference" has been used in literature on social cognition to mean the way in which we take parts of our prior relationships and use them to understand others. Mental representations of (past) significant others are applied to encounters with new persons, such that our encounters with new persons are distorted by our applications. Andersen, Glassman, Chen, and Cole write: "Mental representations of significant others serve as storehouses of information about important individuals from one's life. Interestingly, these representations can also be triggered by a new person and applied to this person in the context of everyday interpersonal relations. When a new person activates a representation of a significant other, the person may come to be remembered as having qualities that he or she does not possess" (41).

(12.) This is what I take Lacan to mean when he says that the transference is "a making present of the closure of the unconscious" (my emphasis). Lacan elaborates: "If the transference is only repetition, it will always be repetition of the same missed encounter. If the transference is supposed through this repetition, to restore the continuity of a history, it will do so only by reviving a relation that is ... syncopated. We see ... that the transference ... cannot be satisfied with being confused with the efficacity of repetition, with the restoration of what is concealed in the unconscious" (143).

(13.) This is how Yngvesson characterizes adoption narratives as a whole: split between these two alternatives of the "story of the freestanding child" and the "story of the rooted child" (8).

(14.) Laplanche's discussion of transference is central to my understanding. He begins his discussion of transference with a dialogue:

Analyst: You are taking me for someone else, I'm not the person you think.

Analysand: But the other in the originary relation was, precisely, not the person I thought. So I'm perfectly right to take you for someone else. (214)