I interviewed Kayla Phillips, singer for Nashville grindcore band Bleed the Pigs, occasional essayist and all-around badass, for the Nashville Scene’s annual People Issue. Photo by Eric England. And yeah, she’s really screaming, which prompted a concerned visit from an office worker down the hall.
The Problem With the New York Times Magazine Piece on Korean Adoptees
The first time I read Maggie Jones' long New York Times Magazine feature on Korean adoptees, it was the end of a long day. I was tired, and found myself skimming through parts where I felt like I already knew the story well enough. (I wrote about adoptees, adoptee activism and changes in South Korea's Special Adoption Law — in other words, much of what the Times story covers — for NPR last year, and am an adoptee myself.)
Overall, I found Jones' piece to be exceedingly well-written, sensitive and nuanced. I thought it did a great job explaining some complicated history and — most importantly — foregrounding the voices of adoptees who've returned to Korea, some of whom I've also spoken with. Moreover, I felt it got so much right about adoptee attitudes, about the complexities of identity, about the sense of being from two places and belonging in neither, of anger and sadness.
The next day, I got a notification on Twitter: mid-conversation, someone had tagged me, so I waded into the thread to see what was going on. The basic complaint at the top was more or less this: With so many adoptees quoted in that story, couldn't an adoptee have written it?
My first reaction, as a writer and an editor who has worked some in The Media, was to think that, well, a story gets written by the person who pitches it. If they've got the chops, they've got the job. That is generally How It Works. The author in this case has written about adoption, including some about Korean adoptees in particular, before. She can obviously write at a high level. She obviously knows how to source a story. She obviously approached her subject matter with empathy. She obviously listened.
So I went back and read the piece again. Slowly this time. And then it really started to bother me. Not that a non-adoptee had written it, because a good journalist should be able, and permitted, to tell stories that are not her own. But because Jones had inserted herself into the story in such a way that, on a second reading, and subsequent readings since, feels unforgivable.
The title of the article — and I realize this was probably written by an editor, not Jones — is "Why a Generation of Adoptees Is Returning to Korea." Headlines have to sell, and sometimes oversell, to rise above the din. But this is clearly labeled as a story about Korean adoptees returning to Korea, and their reasons for doing so. By and large, the story addresses those aspects, and many others, admirably.
But it also does something else.
The first time Jones goes first-person, she writes, "I was among that wave of adoptive parents," and in so doing places herself within the statistics she cites. She talks about her husband and her daughters, the older of whom ("part Japanese and part African") was adopted domestically, the younger from Guatemala. This tangent provides context and detail about international adoption more generally — territory that also concerns adoptee activists in Korea. It also serves as a kind of personal disclosure that it might seem odd (perhaps even unethical) to leave out. Fair enough. And before long, we're back on topic. Again, the writing is attentive and detailed.
But endings are important. In a slow-burn piece like this, it's what you're building toward the whole time. Here's how Jones closes the piece:
... Both of my daughters’ birth families and their roots tug on their hearts. If they eventually decide to live in the countries of their birth mothers for a year or five years or more, I hope to support — even encourage — them. If living there fills some void, creates some peace, fosters a sense of belonging, how could I not want that for them?
In the years ahead, I also expect my kids will have tough questions for me. Perhaps they will ask why my husband and I thought we were equipped to raise a child of a different race. My youngest may ask why we chose international adoption. Did we understand its failures? Did we do anything to fix them?
I hope to answer without defensiveness — and with candor and empathy. I hope, too, that I remember two things may be true simultaneously: Our daughters’ love for us and their need to question why and how we became a family.
Again, this is ostensibly a story about Korean adoptees. And yet it concludes with this show of worry-doll-making, with the author talking about her own daughters, who are not Korean, and who have not returned to Korea, from where they are not.
It's especially odd given that Jones has already written about her own story before. Here's how she ends a 2007 Times piece about birth-mother searches:
As adoptive parents, my husband and I do believe that love matters most. But we know that blood matters, too. And if one day Lucia searches for her blood connection, we will encourage her. But before she heads out the door, I’ll probably have words of advice: Think hard about whom and what you may — or may not — find.
So why shoehorn her family narrative again here, in a story where the stated focus is so specific to a time and a place that has nothing to do with her own experience? It's weird. Not to mention that the line from adoptee Amanda Eunha Lovell's email would have made a perfect ending: "I am, maybe, in a way, proud of my in-betweenness."
But my biggest question isn't so much why a Korean adoptee was not chosen to write this story — though I think that's a fair question to ask — but why it was allowed to finish on this note.
Why, in the end, it centers a white adoptive parent's concerns.
In 2014 I left my staff position at the Nashville Scene after seven years there, which was not an easy decision to make. In the process I somehow managed to have arguably the most productive writing year of my life, so on balance it seems to have worked out, even if I don't quite have the rhythm of freelancing down just yet. Here are a few of my favorites from the past year.
"In Korea, Adoptees Fight to Change the Culture That Sent Them Overseas" (NPR's Code Switch): a look at changes in Korean law intended to eventually put an end to overseas adoption, and a survey of Korean adoptee history — a story that is close to my heart. (I'm particularly indebted to my editor, Matt Thompson, for helping give this piece a coherent structure and for encouragement along the way.)
"Gentrification Is Threatening Nashville's Soul" (The New York Times): an op-ed on the ways the city is changing, some for the not-so-good.
"White privilege, ethnic kabuki and old problems with the new Nashville" (Nashville Scene): a riff on race and restaurants. It prompted this response (if you can call it that) from a local restaurant owner, and subsequently this rejoinder from me.
"Diversity in Space: Tracking the First Asian Pilot in the Star Wars Movies" (NPR's Code Switch): I've always wondered about the Y-Wing pilot who appears for a few seconds in Return of the Jedi. Turns out he has a name, is technically two different guys (possibly because of a continuity error) and was played by Eiji Kusuhara. Many thanks to Leland Chee of Lucasfilm for going down the rabbit-hole and giving me a glimpse into the Holocron.
"The Korean Fan Who Sparked Kansas City's Playoff Run" (NPR's Code Switch): the ballad of SungWoo Lee. Yeah, the Royals came up a game short, and I'm a lifelong White Sox fan, but it was such a magical season.
I also got to write about drones, diversity in advanced science education, the weird business phrase "open the kimono," the culture-trolling strategy at Urban Outfitters, John Cho in Selfie, Patricia Lockwood's Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals and Barry Mazor's terrific biography of roots-music pioneer Ralph Peer. Thanks as ever for reading.
Here are a few things that didn't make it into my story for NPR's Code Switch about the first Asian pilot in the Star Wars franchise.
“That figure is a mess,” Chee says. “It’s wrong on so many levels. They made him red, which is the color of the B-Wing pilots. They gave him a Y-Wing helmet, [1] but they gave him the name of an A-Wing pilot.” [2]
1. This is a different design from what is shown onscreen. "There's probably multiple helmets," Chee says.
2. The name given is Arvel Crynyd. As Chee points out, "Arvel Crynyd is from the radio drama, so he was always clearly an A-Wing pilot. He's the guy who crashes into the Super Star Destroyer."
This is exactly the sort of mistake Chee and his comrades in the Lucasfilm Story Group are now responsible for preventing. [3]
3. "The process then is a lot different from the process now," Chee explains. "Because the people approving it weren't as steeped in the continuity necessarily ... the departments were a little more fragmented."
Like many minor characters, Telsij didn't get his name until after the fact. [4]
4. "There's another character named Telsij, and it was probably the intent for this character to be the same," Chee says. In fact, Chee thinks that Telsij "probably ... was not created by Decipher." The X-Wing comics also have a lieutenant named Telsij. "That character was a caucasian female with blond hair," Chee says. "Judging from my experience with that set — because there's a bunch of inconsistencies with that set — it's more likely that there had been some confusion with these two characters. So the name definitely came from the comics Either there was confusion, or there was a desire to make this a relative of that character or somehow tied to that character. These are the only Telsijes that we have in Star Wars ... in fact ... Lt. Telsij, that sounds like a last name and Telsij Cayr sounds like a first name."
Elsewhere in the Star Wars universe, there are more Asian characters than there might appear to be at first glance ... [5]
5. "On the Blu-Ray release [of Return of the Jedi there are] some deleted scenes where some fighting goes on inside the bunker," Chee says. "The call sheets themselves would specify they were looking for ethnic actors, either caucasian or black ... specifically, it said Chinese."
“That guy’s definitely Asian,” Chee says of Selig Kenjenn. “And that one I definitely named myself.”
So does the name carry some special significance?
“Ummmmm, not that I’m going to say,” Chee demurs. “ ‘Selig’ comes from one of my other fandoms, I’ll say that.” [6]
6. Might that be Eli Selig from the DC comics universe, who eventually catches up with his android creation in a place called Gnosis? And with encyclopedic knowledge at stake, could the last name possibly be a reference to Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings?
UPDATE: Chee says via Twitter that I'm wrong about the name Selig. Reading between the lines, I think that means I'm right about Kenjenn?
This is a "two-on-one," a truly weird species of housing that has evolved in Nashville during the current gentrification boom, which I wrote about for The New York Times.
In Korea, Adoptees Fight To Change Culture That Sent Them Overseas
In the Gwanak-gu neighborhood of Seoul, there is a box.
Attached to the side of a building, the box resembles a book drop at a public library, only larger, and when nights are cold, the interior is heated. The Korean lettering on its front represents a phoneticized rendering of the English words “baby box.” It was installed by Pastor Lee Jon-rak to accept abandoned infants. When its door opens, an alarm sounds, alerting staff to the presence of a new orphan.
The box, and the anonymity it provides, has become a central symbol in a pitched debate over Korean adoption policy. […]
In the years after the Korean War, more than 160,000 Korean children — the population of a midsize American city — were sent to adoptive homes in the West. What began as a way to quietly remove mixed-race children who had been fathered by American servicemen soon gained momentum as children crowded the country’s orphanages amid grinding postwar poverty. Between 1980 and 1989 alone, more than 65,000 Korean children were sent overseas.
Corrections Corporation of America has eight lobbyists on Tennessee’s Capitol Hill — and yet it says it doesn’t lobby on incarceration issues. Maybe it doesn’t have to.
An Open Letter to Patrick Burke, Owner of Two Ten Jack
shoots of bamboo and chrysanthemum leaves.
Before the beef, veined with fat, thin as gauze,
I stir what for years I could not love.
Hold that image in your mind for a moment, especially the last nine words. Later in the poem, he addresses his wife:
… Think of all
the devourings of flesh, the way a babe
suckles, nuzzling the nipple with gummy jaws,
or how some Mifune samurai slouches to his hashi;
how our daughter nibbles pea pods, grasses, beans,
or the earth swallows our dead, sanding
flesh, leaves, bones; peeling hair, eyelids,
bark, bugs and bacteria searing through soil.
What do I find here in the gaze of a toddler,
this ancestral food, the lines my father once cast
in the L.A. surf, or those I paste to this page?
When you hold a great sorrow, it lasts
almost too long. And then it lasts some more.
But the same is true also of a great joy.
In the island of light we make with our bodies,
in the lullabies where our daughter sleeps,
we open a picture book, and the images are
for the first time. Once I lost something
of great value. And then I sought it.
Everything changed then. Everything changed.
Do you know what the "great sorrow" he refers to is, Mr. Burke?
Do you know?
As a child he wanted so badly to assimilate that he forsook Japanese food. He hated it, because he had learned to hate himself as others hated him. He wanted to melt in the pot — to rehash a tired metaphor you use in your open letter to me — but that isn't so simple for some of us. People seem to notice that we've not melted, though our insides have in so many ways. That's what I wanted you to consider, Mr. Burke, but you seem not to have considered it very long or very deeply, if you considered it at all. Why else would you try to lecture me about how irrelevant one's ethnicity should be — as if I hadn't said the exact same thing in the first place?
Do you know that many Japanese Americans were so ashamed of what they lived through during WWII that they refused to talk — to their own children, even — about how their government imprisoned them under the pretext that they might betray their country? Do you know about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team? Do you know what I mean when I say, "Go for Broke"? Do you know that Japanese American men fought and died for the United States while their own families were locked up in concentration camps on our soil? Do you know that Japanese Americans in the post-WWII era out-married at a higher rate than any other ethnicity?
Do you know what the speaker in David Mura's poem means when he says he lost something of great value, Mr. Burke? Do you know what he means when he says everything changed once he sought it? Do you know what it means to eat the food of the culture you descended from and to find yourself overwhelmed by the sensation that, at long last, it brings you happiness instead of pain? Do you?
"I really think we deserve to have our story told," you wrote in the email accompanying your letter. Deserve. Where and when have you been denied that opportunity? In the Nashville Scene?
Here you are laying out your plans for Two Ten Jack to Dana Kopp Franklin. Here is Lesley Lassiter delighting in your media sneak preview. Here is Chris Chamberlain singing the praises of your official opening. A review of Two Ten Jack is forthcoming.
How did my expression suppress yours? How?
Do you know that schoolteachers often told Japanese American kids they were lying — lying — when they asked about the camps years later?
In my piece I asked you, and other nextifying white people of Nashville, to consider a perspective other than your own. Consider it. That's all. I never said you shouldn't serve Japanese food. Not once. Your "passion for this business" is irrelevant, but I never questioned it. I never doubted the provenance of your grill. But thanks for telling me the effort and expense it took to procure.
Do you know that Asian American kids are the most frequently bullied in New York City schools?
What I hoped, more than anything, was that you would think — meditate, if you will — on how your gestures might resonate beyond and in spite of your intentions. I never second-guessed those intentions, or your culinary knowledge, or your willingness to learn more about Japanese culture. I didn't ask you to go to Japan to prove your commitment to craft. I asked you to look around the city we both live in and try to picture how it looks through someone else's eyes.
Your response is not a response — it's a refusal to respond. It's an attempt to present your virtue as unassailable and to suggest that anyone who finds your effusive display of Japanese-ness off-putting has misunderstood you, not the other way around. Of course I can never completely empathize with you, Mr. Burke, or anyone who owns a restaurant, but I do know what it feels like to be misunderstood.
So I'd like you to read my piece again, slowly this time. Carefully.
And the next time you eat a plate of meticulously prepared Japanese food, I’d like you to imagine, if you can, that it’s the first time you can ever remember feeling joy, instead of sorrow, when those beautiful flavors delineate along your tongue.
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