Talk
Adoption Survivors, the Return
| Date | 5. 25. (Mon) 18:00 |
|---|---|
| Venue | Ae Kwan Theater 2 |
| Moderator | LEE Jong-chan (Essayist) |
| Panelist | Jane Jeong TRENKA (Writer) |
Overseas adoptees from Korea are being confronted with a disturbing truth: that their adoptions were, in fact, nothing more than a “disguised orphan trade” or a “family dissolution business.” As time has passed, these individuals have returned to Korea as “adoption survivors.”
Jane Jeong Trenka. Born in Korea in 1972 and adopted by a white family in Minnesota at just six months old, Jane Jeong Trenka is an author of autobiographical works such as The Language of Blood and Fugitive Visions. She is currently working as an insurance agent in Incheon.
Jeon Mikyung and Lee Kyungae. Two women who were adopted into Germany in the 1970s return to Korea, now as mothers themselves. Their intimate stories are captured in the documentary film To You.
Following the screening of To You, a talk will be held with writer Jane Jeong Trenka. How did the lives of these three women of the same generation converge and diverge across Germany and the United States? Their individual stories will be layered one atop another.
Screening
To you
Director CHO Beomseok
Korea, Germany, Austria | 2025 | 101‘ | Documentary | Ⓖ
Two women who were adopted to Germany in the 1970s return to Korea after becoming mothers. The film follows their present lives as they search for their identities, as if wandering through a lifelong fog. Between their voices and silences, it pays attention to memories that cannot be reduced to images and identities that resist definition.
LEE Jong-chan
Essayist. He studied literary criticism and cultural theory in the Department of English Literature at university, and was an active member of the critical cultural studies group Center for Cultural Society. He is particularly interested in the social ontology of literature and art that emerge from reflections on the notion of boundaries. His representative works include “Disaster, and the Community of Screams,” and “Diaspora and Death.” He also co-authored several books, such as Rereading Suh Kyung-sik, and 20 Cultural Keywords of the 1990s.
Jane Jeong TRENKA
Born in 1972 in Seoul, Jane Jeong Trenka is an internationally adopted Korean and the author of two memoirs, The Language of Blood: A Memoir and Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea. Together with Sun Yung Shin and Julia Chinyere Oparah, she co-edited the anthology Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption. She collaborated with Jeon Hong Kihye and Dr. Lee Kyung Eun on the series “65 Years of Overseas Adoption,” published in the online newspaper Pressian, which won the 20th Amnesty International Media Award in 2017, and was published as The Baby-Selling Country. She works as an insurance agent in Incheon.
