양모(養母)와 생모(生母)—제인 정 트렌카의 자기서사와 모녀 관계의 재구성—

Abstract

In 2003, Jane Jeong Trenka published The Language of Blood, a memoir and autobiographical novel about her life as an interracial adoptee in the United States. In this article, I analyze Jane Jeong Trenka’s self-narrative as a process of motherhood and becoming-woman, noting that Jane Jeong Trenka, who was born in South Korea and adopted by a white family in Minnesota when she was about six months old, presents both her Korean birth mother and her American adoptive mother as narrative subjects in The Language of Blood. Jane Jeong Trenka stumbled upon letters written by her Korean mother to her daughters in the United States and attempted to communicate with her Korean mother by writing to her birth mother, who did not speak English. In her diary-like letters, Jane Jeong Trenka established a revisionary relationship, subconsciously believing that the mother who gave birth to her was far more noble than the American adoptive parents who raised her and her sister. After meeting her birth mother in Korea as an adult, Jane Jeong Trenka confirms that birth mother’s family was originally from the Yangban, only to discover that the patriarchy that remained in the Yangban was the biggest factor in her mother’s ruined life. Jane Jeong Trenka is unable to open up about the sexual violence, racism, suicide attempts, and depression she experienced in the United States, but as she listens to her mother’s story, Jane Jeong Trenka gradually comes to empathize with her birth mother’s pain. After reuniting with her estranged daughters, her mother became critically ill with a brain tumor, and as Jane Jeong Trenka cared for her mother, she came to accept her mother’s body and life as part of her own. As she mourned her mother’s death, she wrote about her mother’s life as a tribute to a woman who had never had a voice in Korean society. At the same time, she also wrote to her American mother, with whom she had adopted and raised her, and with whom she had a long-standing tense and loving relationship, conveying her feelings of grief and pain to her mother in a different body. Faced with the difficulties of understanding both her birth and adoptive mothers, Jane Jeong Trenka turned to resistant writing to place the issue of international adoption on the social agenda. Jane Jeong Trenka’s autobiographical writings reveal the literary implications and political possibilities of mother-daughter narratives.