신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin

Anyonghaseo from Seoul!

Hello! I am in the amazing city of Seoul, in the beautiful country of Seoul. I will not be blogging much, if at all, but I will post photos when I return!

From NPR (thanks, EJVS!)

An Adoption Gone Wrong

                      

 

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Bhagya Smolin was reunited with her birth mother in a rural village in Andhra Pradesh, India in  December 2006. Courtesy David & Desiree Smolin 

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This photo was taken in 1999, a few months after Manjula and Bhagya joined the Smolin family. Desiree (clockwise, from top left), David, Joseph (in David's arms), Justin, Ben, Nathan, Levi and Bhagya. Manjula is in the center. Courtesy David & Desiree Smolin

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Manjula Smolin (left) was reunited with her birth mother in December 2005 in a rural village in Andhra Pradesh, India. Courtesy David & Desiree Smolin

                  

Morning Edition, July 24, 2007 · One day in 1998, David and Desiree Smolin traveled to the airport in Atlanta. They were adopting two adolescent girls, and on that day, the girls got off the plane from India.

                        

"We expected that there would be some shyness at the beginning, but we expected that they would be happy to see us at least after they got over the initial shock of being here," Desiree Smolin says.

                        

"Instead, when we met the girls they were clearly very upset. They were very avoidant of us and then eventually they became very emotionally disturbed .... I've never seen anyone — and I hope to never, ever see anyone again — as upset as those girls were in the first nine months that they were in our home."

                        

In an interview with Steve Inskeep, the Smolins say that an adoption agency described Manjula and Bhagya as two girls who had been waiting a long time for a home. But the girls insisted they had been stolen — kidnapped from their mother.

                        

The Indian mother was poor. She placed the children temporarily in an orphanage, and the orphanage essentially sold them.

                        

"We read about infanticide in India and that got us thinking about whether those children were sometimes adopted out," Desiree Smolin says. With a house full of sons and no daughters, the Smolins sought to adopt girls.

                        

David Smolin says they worked with an experienced U.S. adoption agency and were told that the girls had been waiting a long time and were eager to be adopted.

                        

"We asked that the girls be interviewed to see whether they wanted to be adopted, what was their family background, what was their story," he says. "Unfortunately, almost all of the information that we got back turned out to be false. They had been stolen from their birth family."

                        

"Of course, we didn't know that," Desiree adds.

                        

But within weeks of their arrival, the couple realized something was wrong. The girls, speaking through a translator, angrily denied that they had asked to be adopted.

                        

David says that the girls' birth mother had been told that the girls were going to be placed temporarily in a boarding school. "And she went back for them, and they said to her, 'No, you can look at them through this one-way mirror, but they can't be permitted to see you.' And so she was turned away."

Transformers & Harry Potter, A Block E Love Fest

My partner and I went to see...Transformers...last night at Block E (even though Block E is hideously ugly, I love going there. Partially because I love movies, because Block E is so close to where I live, and because Block E has a clientele whose racial makeup echoes that of a Minneapolis public high school, and/or my neighborhood. African American, Latino American, Indian/Native American, East African American, South East Asian American, and White/Euro American. And the occasional Korean adoptee.)

So, my partner was underwhelmed but I was fairly entertained by this movie. I thought the transformation process was really visually exciting. I experienced almost complete suspension of disbelief (what does this say about me?). I really enjoyed Shia LaBeouf's performance--he is the new John Cusack, but less hangdog, with more range. Maybe John Cusack and...someone else's love child? My partner thinks he looks like Russell Crowe. I don't get that. Anyway, I predict great things! From Wikipedia: Shia LaBeouf (pronounced [ˈʃajə lə'bʌf], "Shy-uh La-Buff"^[8]) was born in Los Angeles, California, the only child of Shayna (née Saide), a dancer and ballerina turned visual artist and jewelry designer, and Jeffrey Craig LaBeouf, a Vietnam War veteran who "drifted" from job to job, working as a mime at a circus and as a rodeo clown. LaBeouf's maternal grandfather, who shared his first name, was a comedian who worked in the Borscht Belt of the Catskill Mountains, and his paternal grandmother was a Beatnik poet and lesbian who associated with Allen Ginsberg.^[12][3][13] The name "Shia" is Hebrew for 'gift from God' and the surname "LaBeouf" is a misspelling of "Le Boeuf", the French term for 'the beef'.^[12][14] LaBeouf has said that he comes from "five generations of performers" and was "acting when I came out of the womb".^[11] LaBeouf's father is a Cajun (once described by LaBeouf as a "Ragin' Cajun") and his New York-born mother is Jewish, and LaBeouf was raised in the Jewish religion and had a Bar Mitzvah.^{[11][14][15][16][17][18][19]} LaBeouf has described his parents as "hippies", his father as "tough as nails and a different breed of man", and his upbringing as similar to a "hippy lifestyle", stating that his parents were "pretty weird people, but they loved me and I loved them".^[11][20] LaBeouf's father used to grow cannabis, and the two smoked marijuana together when LaBeouf was ten.^[9][11] LaBeouf has also said that his father was "on drugs" during his childhood, being addicted to heroin and placed in drug rehabilitation for heroin addiction, while LaBeouf's mother was "trying to hold down the fort".^[9] His parents eventually divorced, and he had what he has described as a "good childhood", growing up poor with his mother (who worked selling fabrics and brooches) in Echo Park, Los Angeles, California, and attending a predominantly Latino and African-American school,

Transformers on a racial/political/gender level was highly problematic/unimpressive--from the American soldiers in Qatar, to the South Asian telephone operator, to the two bimbo-y female characters (one who is supposed to be a signal analyst called in by the Pentagon) who are definitely there for eye candy and not for their acting skills or plausability...but...really, I don't need to spill any ink on that. It's all too obvious. The movie was basically The Iron Giant for teenage (and older) boys. These kinds of movies make me think--is the human species really worth protecting, when we are the ultimate destroyers of all other forms of life on this planet? Upsetting.

Before we got our tickets, we decided to buy a copy of HP for our daughter, who is currently with a friend on vacation. I started reading it last night. I'm only a few pages in. I always wonder, what is Voldemort's problem? I mean, clearly he's a sociopath and a psychopath. But what's his goal? World domination? Do the muggles actually bother him? What have the "mudbloods" ever done to him? Why does he care about ridding the magic world of mudbloods? And how does this magic work anyway, is it just people from Europe, which, in the book does include people of color such as the Patel sisters, Cho Chang, etc.? And why is Harry such a...dud...and Severus Snape actually the most interesting character?

My big hope is that Rowling will start a series after this one that has a female lead. Hermione Granger is also significantly more interesting than Harry Potter, who is generally so reactive, and kind of thick. I suppose he's the classic hero--more courage than brains, more love than intellect. That's OK. I guess. Maybe there will be a spin-off series where Cho Chang repatriates to Korea and becomes the next president of the ROK and peacefully reunites the peninsula, demilitarizes the south, reforms all the oppressive labor laws, ends intercountry adoption, perfects the social welfare system, and leads a worldwide movement of nuclear disarmament. Oh, and regains food sovereignty for all non-US countries. Now that would be a series I would order in advance.

Take Action for Irregular Workers in Korea

www.kctu.org

[KCTU Call to Action] Appeal for Solidarity : E-Land irregular workers Crushed with the Police

SITUATION SUMMARY

The Police Break-up of the E-Land Workers will Legitimize the Abuse of the Irregular Workers' Bill
- The Irregular Workers Bill has now revealed its ineffectiveness and loopholes to the entire nation

On 20th of July, the Roh Moo-hyun government crushed with police shields the calls on the part of the women irregular workers that "they be allowed to work," and took all of them to police stations. The government, despite being responsible for a bill that expands irregular work instead of protecting the casual workers, used government force to repress the irregular workers' demands for their livelihood. The government has legitimized the incapacitation of what little protective measures existed in the bill by protecting E-Land's abuse of such provisions.

The struggle by the irregular workers at E-Land began when management, in order to evade relevant provisions in the new irregular workers bill that went into effect on the 1st of July, terminated the contracts for the cash register workers and contracted out the operations. The KCTU has consistently asserted that the new bill would lead to more irregular workers because the law, which was suppose to give permanent status to workers employed as irregular workers for over two years, left open the door to ways to evade such measures, such as outsourcing and termination of contracts. However, the government and the employers have ignored such warnings. The KCTU's predictions are now reality.

E-Land has used weaknesses in the law to lay off contract cash register workers, and have forced them into illicit contracts, and have contracted out their work. The management even breached the collective agreement, which had clearly stated that those who had worked for over 18 months would not be layed off, by unilaterally terminating their contracts. They have also ignored the local government labor committee's decision that it was an unfair dismissal. While E-Land management has not hesitated to engage in illicit and unjust practices, it has used such extreme language as 'terrorism' to denounce the strike and sit-in by the workers, and has sued the union leadership for obstruction of justice. There is no way for the E-Land management to evade criticism, for they are mobilizing all sorts of illicit means to evade resolving the irregular work issue, while they have accused the workers that their desperate actions for their livelihood are illegal.

Even though the root of all the problems is the irregular workers bill, the government has not put forth an earnest effort to resolve the E-Land incident. Despite numerous cases of unfair and illegal labor practices on the part of management being revealed as a result of a special labor inspection, it has not acted to correct them. Labor Minister Lee Sang-Soo, while giving the false impression that he has been doing all that he can to resolve the issue, has constantly threatened the workers at the sit-in sites that he would send in the police. E-Land management, with the labor ministry's protection, just repeated it's position that there would be no negotiations until the sit-ins at the retail stores ended. They even made it seem in the press that their offer to "give permanent status to irregular workers that have worked over 18 months at the company" was a big concession when it was the terms of the original collective agreement which they broke. They blamed the union for the failure to reach an agreement and induced the break-up of the negotiations. For them, as well as the employers association and the labor ministry, the negotiations were solely formalities from the very beginning, and the only way to resolve the issue was through sending in the police.

The repression of irregular workers at E-Land is not an isolated incident. 271 workers were arrested during the past year alone, and 200 of these were irregular workers. 73% of all arrested laborers were irregular workers. Regarding the E-Land incident, the government has already issued arrest warrants for 6 members of the company union, and 7 for the leadership of the other union that has been on strike, New Core.

The number of workers arrested under the Roh Moo-hyun government is now at 958. This is a higher number then the two previous governments(Kim Yung-sam 632, Kim Dae-jung 892). If the government continues to respond to the heartbreaking struggles by the irregular workers across the country with arrest warrants and the use of police forces, then Roh Moo-hyun will go down in history as the most vicious of governments regarding workers' struggles.

Our Demands :

- We denounce the acts by E-Land management that have led to the loss of jobs for a vulnerable sector and that have threatened the livelihood of these workers.
- We call for the laid-off workers to be reinstated.
- At the same time, we believe that the irregular workers bill, which has now revealed its ineffectiveness and loopholes to the entire nation, needs to be revoked.
- We call for a complete revision to the law, one that implements limitations on the uses of temporary or contract work.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

We are calling for protest letters to the President Roh Moo Hyun at the Blue House, +82-2-770-1690(Fax) or e-mail at president@cwd.go.kr Copies should be sent to the Ministry of Labor, Minister Lee Sang-Soo +82-2-504-6708 or e-mail at m_molab@molab.go.kr

Please be sure to send a copy to KCTU by +82-2-2635-1134(fax) or e-mail at inter@kctu.org

Your solidarity would be enormously helpful not only for the E-land workers' struggle but protecting the entire irregular workers' rights.

Books I read this week

I read Flight just now, in one setting, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Alexie is hilarious, and I love how he's not afraid to get emotional.The main character is truly lovable, and his vision quest felt very real, very urgent. An interesting take on "historical fiction" elements.

Black, White, and Jewish would be a great book for young adults, especially in 11th and 12th grade.

I LOVED Secret Daughter by June Cross. An extremely compelling story, and a very American one. Cross does a wonderful job of placing her family/ies in a historical context, and I thought her portrayal of her young self was sensitive and nuanced, without being sentimental, self-pitying, or melodramatic. I highly recommend this memoir to anyone.

Next I'm reading Caucasia, which has received mixed reviews from folks I know. But I'm eager to read it, and surely will be full of opinions myself. I'm intrigued because of my favorite poets is Fanny Howe, Senna's mother, and I've read most of her work including her wonderful memoir, The Wedding Dress. My co-editor Rachel Moritz and I have even had the pleasure of publishing Howe's work through our micro-press, WinteRed Press. In her memoir, Howe describes the desegregation era in Boston, when she was a young, poor, single mother of biracial children.

6 Days...Off the to Mothership (aka Korea)

Racism: We Can Fix It!

                                                                                                                                                         

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	$1000.00!               Now Art Grants Announced           damali ayo and YOU- the network of people engaged on her email list are proud to announce the first two recipients of Now Art Grants: Tania Ketenjian and Angela Mobley. Learn more about these artists, Now Art Grants, and the Liba Nelson Vital Voice award recipient Allison Jackson here.                            Thank you to all who contributed to Now Art Grants. Three new artists have been chosen for the autumn, so keep the donations coming in. Donate now.                                  yes yes y'all!           click the logo to help  fundraising efforts for our new president! I give $25 a month. Being counted is what matters!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      featured video                       "living flag"                    damali takes the struggle for reparations to the street and gets the job done.                                                                              In this work she panhandles for reparations- collecting money from white people and paying it immediately to black people. This performance can be done as a participatory workshop in your community or school. Find out how.                                                             participate                     I CAN FIX IT!   2000 people were asked for 5 things individual people can do to end racism. Here are the solutions in our own words.                               download now                                 more projects  Your mission is to put this guide everywhere you can: libraries, bookstores, coffee shops, colleges, high schools, kindergartens, community gardens, street corners, on line and off line. Send it to your local paper. Slide it into the Sunday paper or People Magazine while you're waiting in line at the grocery store. Donate your office copier time to making copies. Solutions happen when these ideas are actually put into action.			artist. author. speaker.               damali comes to you.                    damali ayo brings   a fresh approach to American culture and race relations using art, books,  lectures and workshops. Schedule a talk now.                     join damali Become part of a community of people who participate in now art projects, learn from each other, and get updates, inspiration, info, and announcements from damali                                                      Your email:                                                     now on iTunes!              damali ayo LIVE | How to Rent a Negro                        Ayo turns bookstores into comedy clubs with readings and stories from her book How to Rent a Negro. Available on iTunes. Download digital booklet.                               presentation schedule                                 2007                        September   4 Hampshire College, Amherst MA             13-14 Connecticut College, New London CT             19 College of Wooster, Wooster OH 3pm living flag on campus 8pm lecture                    October             19 Fargo North Dakota venue tba             30 Bradley University, Peoria IL 7pm lecture           November             6 American International College, Springfield MA, 7pm presentation, reception and booksigning to follow             8 Hudson Valley Community College, Troy NY             14 U. of Wisconsin/River Falls 8pm presentation
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Language Partner

Today I will be meeting my new Korean/English language partner (if all goes well!). She is the wife of a graduate student of one of my friends. We will practice conversational Korean and English--hurray!

Here's the movie I have waiting for me...(I must have been desperate)...

Director Sang-soo Hong dishes up a fresh take on modern courtship in this episodic tale that follows the evolution of a romance between TV writer Soo-jung (Eun-ju Lee) and affluent art gallery owner Jae-hoon (Bo-seok Jeong). Mutually attracted after meeting at an art exhibition, Soo-jung and Jae-hoon find their dalliance derailed when, on the verge of a sexual encounter, Soo-jung admits to being a virgin. Will Jae-hoon eventually deflower her?

Reproductive Ethics...

Your Gamete, Myself

Illustration by Balint Zsako

By

PEGGY ORENSTEIN

Published: July 15, 2007

 

Two Years ago, when Catherine was in sixth grade, she was given a school assignment that would have been unremarkable for most kids: make a timeline for history class in which half the events occurred before she was born and half after. For a while, she worked quietly at the dining-room table of her family’s rambling Northern California home. Then she looked up.

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Illustration by Balint Zsako

 

“Mom?” she asked. “What was the year that you and Dad met our donor?”

Sitting with me in May, Catherine’s mother, Marie, a 59-year-old therapist, smiled wryly, remembering the incident. The crinkling of Marie’s eyes gave her a passing resemblance to the actress Anne Bancroft — but not to her own daughter. Marie, who asked me to use only her middle name and a family name for her daughter to protect their privacy, is dark where Catherine is blond, olive-skinned where Catherine is fair, brown-eyed where the girl’s are hazel. There is no similarity to their jaw lines, their cheekbones, the shapes of their faces. Of course, lots of kids don’t look like their mothers; few people would consider that odd, though they might — often incessantly — comment on it in conversation.

“So, what’s going to happen with this project?” Marie recalled responding to Catherine at the time, being careful to keep her voice neutral. “Is it going to be put up in the hallway? In the classroom?”

Catherine shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. And later, “Mom, this is my timeline.”

“I got the message,” Marie told me. “But in essence, I was outed on the wall of the middle school. It was there in black and white for everyone to see. They’d all know we used an egg donor. We’d been committed to openness from the beginning, but my first reaction was, ‘No!’ ”

If Marie and Catherine are unusual, it is only because of Catherine’s age. In 1992, the year she was conceived, there were just 1,802 attempts by women to become pregnant using someone else’s eggs, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Three years later, there were more than 4,738 such cycles; by 2004, the most recent year for which data has been published, there were 15,175 cycles, resulting in 5,449 babies. By comparison, some 22,911 children were adopted from abroad that year, and although there are no official figures, one survey estimated that at least the same number are conceived annually via donor insemination. Donor eggs are now used in 12 percent of all in vitro fertilization (I.V.F.) attempts, making it among the fastest-growing infertility treatments. Despite the portentous hype around women like Frieda Birnbaum, a 60-year-old New Jersey resident who in May used donor eggs to become the oldest American to give birth to twins, the bulk of intended mothers are in their 40s. The birthrate among women ages 40-44 has risen 62 percent since 1990, while the rate among those in their late 40s has more than doubled. Among those who used I.V.F. in 2004, about a third of the 43-year-olds used someone else’s eggs; by 47 years old, 91 percent did.

With egg donation, science has succeeded in, if not extending women’s fertility, at least making an end run around it, allowing older women who, for a variety of reasons (lack of money, lack of partner, lack of interest, lack of partner’s interest) didn’t have children in their biological prime — as well as younger women with dysfunctional ovaries — to carry and bear babies themselves. It has given rise to the mind-bending phrase “biogenetic child,” meaning a child who is both biologically and genetically related to each of its parents, by, for the first time in history, separating those components. In that way, it is fundamentally different from sperm donation, though it also levels a certain playing field: mothers can now do what fathers always could — conceal the truth about their blood relationship to their children. And as with any new reproductive technology, it has provoked a torrent of social, legal and ethical questions about the entitlement to reproduce, what constitutes parenthood, children’s rights to know their origins and the very nature of family.

I first became interested in the implications of egg donation because I tried it. After five years of repeated miscarriages and invasive, futile infertility treatments, a 21-year-old friend offered to spot me her gametes, the cells containing half the chromosomes necessary for reproduction. It wasn’t something I ever imagined I’d consider — it seemed so “Handmaid’s Tale.” Then again, with a donor egg, I could feel a baby grow inside me, experience its kicks and flutters. I could control — that sweetest of words — the prenatal environment, guard against the evils of drug and drink. I could give birth to my own child, breast-feed it. After a year of discussion, my husband and I decided to go ahead, only to find that, when placed in a petri dish, his sperm and my friend’s eggs refused to tango.

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Peggy Orenstein is a contributing writer for the magazine and author of the memoir, “Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother.”

Writers of Color Reading - Myspace

Check out the blog entry about Thursday's reading at the myspace for the Intermedia Arts Writers of Color Reading Series...http://myspace.com/intermediaartsWOC...

Here are some photos to tantalize you!