제인 정 트렌카의 입양의 몸: 언어, 피의 소리, 그리고 음악

Abstract

This paper aims to explore Jane Jeong Trenka's The Language of Blood: A Memoir and Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea as life-based adoptee narratives dealing with complex identity politics of displaced, diasporic, and deprived bodies under transnational geography. Trenka’s autobiographical narrative exposes the ideas of ethno-nationalism and victimization of subaltern bodies. Transnational adoptee bodies go through the ordeal of the rejected, misrepresented, and silenced - as Trenka expresses - “in my heart’s irrational math one Korea plus one America equals nothing—equals motherless, languageless, countryless.” In dealing with a trans-sphere of adoptee identities moving from Korea to U. S. and coming back to Korea, Trenka delves into new voices surmounting a distorted matrix of transcultural and translingual supposition and ensuing confusion. Trenka experiments with different layers of sounds; language, sound of blood and music, with a scale ranging from the referential and contaminated to the abstract and emancipated. This paper reads a wide spectrum of sounds in Trenka’s narratives as an ongoing exploration for decoding ideologically distorted discourse against adoptees. Trenka's search for sound of blood and music continues a meaningful journey toward bridging adoptees’ ‘exterior homelessness’ and ‘interior homelessness’ and reconstructing a holistic transnational adoptee body discourse from the eyes of the insiders. This search draws a reliable portrait of the adoptee writer as well, relating a broad picture of the generations of Korean American adoptees struggling with the deeply embedded matrix of distorted bodies and dissonant languages.