In what ways can the identity of a transracial, transnational adoptee be complicated?
What is the power of telling one’s story in a memoir?
Can food give access to one’s identity, sense of belonging, and narrative voice?
This week is dedicated to Older Sister, Not Necessarily Related by Jenny Heijun Wills. Her debut memoir has won the Hillary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the Eileen McTavish Skyes Award for the Best First Book, and was named the best book of 2019 by The Globe and Mail and CBC.
Wills was born in South Korea and adopted as an infant by a white family in southern Ontario, Canada. In her late twenties, she reconnected with her first family through an adoption agency. She travelled to Seoul to meet her mother and stepsister, through whom she got to know her grandparents, father, other siblings, and extended family. The memoir documents not only the initial journey leading to the reunion, but also the continued effort in maintaining a relationship with her first family in a decade that followed, as well as the complicated emotions that unfurled in the process. The book is written in episodes, each offering a snapshot of a present moment.
“I wanted it to appear very fragmented because that’s how my life always felt – like you’re putting together pieces of something a bit shattered,” Wills told CBC Books.
Wills’ memoir records her journey in a search of and establishing her root, identity, and family relations; it unsettles the happily-ever-after reunion narrative often expected of and perpetuated in transracial-transnational adoption stories. The book offers nuance in the relationships and emotions that are constantly in flux.
“I hope that people also understand that it’s more complicated than how we might imagine it to be. I have my own opinions as to whether it is positive or negative or somewhere outside of that binary. It’s not about making a judgement one way or another. It’s about understanding some of the context when making those decisions or when believing those narratives or when challenging those narratives. It is unique to be a reunited adoptee and to have sustained a relationship with your first family, despite cultural and linguistic differences.”
Wills, Jenny Heijun. Interview by Jane van Koeverden. CBC Books, 19 Oct. 2019.
The nuance of her personal writing is enriched by her academic research on the topic of adoption and its representation in literature and film. In a conference, she described the experience of adoption as such:
“Adoption, after all, is trauma, and furthermore, it is an on-going trauma that is unique in its longevity, muteness and naturalization. More specifically, Asian transracial adoption is the source of cultural trauma as the adoptee’s identity is constructed as simultaneously liminal (neither entirely Eastern nor Western) and hybrid (with qualities that are both Eastern and Western).”
Wills, Jenny Heijun. Broken Lines: Transracial-transnational Asian Adoption and the Insufficiency of Witnessing the Trauma. The First International Korean Adoption Studies Research Symposium, 31 July, 2007, Seoul, South Korea, p. 235
This points toward the severance of personal, interpersonal, emotional, and cultural ties contributing to one’s identity.
With this understanding, three imageries from Older Sister, Not Necessarily Related stand out as important referents and anchors between Wills and her relations with Korea.
Grape Juice
In this episode, grape juice evokes an unbearable sweetness. Having spent four months in Seoul, Wills left behind a box of fifty individual juice sacs from her grandparents who grew grapes. The imagery is teeming with life: “swollen like eggs”, “holding them was holding my blood. Our blood.” (76) These symbols point towards an origin story that is complicated and questioned in the life writing of an adoptee. The ownership of Wills’ newfound relations and roots are far from straightforward.
A lot can be teased out of the coincidental resemblance to grapes. The imagery of fruits, seeds, and branches are recurrent in this book – fruit is often alluded textually; paratextually the image of persimmon is displayed on the front matter of the paperback edition, whereas the section headings play around with the derivation of the Korean word for branches. While stone fruit – in particular, persimmon – reappears as a symbol of Wills in her birth story recounted by her biological mother, the climbing vines and rich-tasting grapes associated with her grandparents are evocative. The entangled, entwined relations, the far-reaching vines, the intense colour of the crushed fruit, and the lingering taste. Such analyses can run the risk of taking over the voice of the author’s own life narrative, so this segment shall end with Wills’ words:
“I could taste in it something rich. But it tasted too much, it was too intense. So I stopped.
I only drank it that one time. It stained my lips. I only needed to drink it once, because I’ll never forget how it tastes.” (76)
Kimchi
Wills’ birth parents flew to Montreal to attend her wedding. During their stay, Ummah, her mother, taught her how to make kimchi, Korean chili pickled napa cabbage, a staple in Korean cuisine. It is a significant mother-daughter bonding moment, when the two chose to meet in the privacy of home, rather than a neutral shop or restaurant as described in the earlier stages of their relationship in Seoul. At Wills’ apartment, she gathered all the ingredients – cabbage, garlic, chives, onion, ginger, red chilli flakes, unrefined sea salt, and MSG. It was a laugh-out-loud moment when Ummah took one sniff to be able to tell, with a frown, that the garlic was grown in China, not Korea. Yet another judgement on origin.
Contrasting the overwhelming sweetness associated with the grandparents’ grape juice, in this episode Wills juxtaposes the warmth and love in preparing the signature Korean household (side)dish with a sharp sense of pain:
“In those days I still bit my nails down to the quick, I still tore at my cuticles and peeled the skin off my fingertips. My eyes watered. The salt burned.” (87) “We both forwent the plastic gloves that are expressly made for mixing kimchi. By then my hands were numb anyway.” (88)
Perhaps the pain is part of gaining access to and confidence in her identity – inherited and acquired. With her mother’s kimchi lesson, and subsequent practice “hundreds of times over the course of my life” (87), Wills manages to (re)claim her cultural identity through this Korean soul food and eventually teach this recipe to non-Koreans.
Bibimbap
In 2001 when Wills was twenty and alone in Toronto, she paid a visit to a nondescript Korean restaurant frequented by international students. She was greeted by the server, “an older woman, someone I know might be called ajumma by a cheekily familiar diner or sun seng nim by a more respectful and cautious one” (153) who would give her an introduction to Korean soul food, and an entryway to her root-finding journey, already contested and questioned by her academic self.
At this diner, instincts and senses took over the intellectual mind.
Body language predominated the communications between the server and Wills, who explained her adoptee identity mimicking the action of rocking a baby, followed by splaying both arms to make the wings of an airplane (153). It was immediately understood, received by an unvoiced sympathy that quickly moved over to a matronly, matter-of-fact manner of taking her order, to which Wills replied spicy bibimbap – rice with meat, egg, and vegetables cooked in a sizzling stone bowl. The choice of food was driven by “wanting to experience what I’d read was the fiery heat of Korean food” (154).
When the server presented the dish, she stirred the ingredients in the sizzling bowl, squirted red chilli sauce, and mixed it in front of Wills who was entranced. As soon as the food was well-mixed, the lady scooped a spoonful of rice and handed it to Wills. This moment was comparable to mother-daughter bonding, except that it took place in an unexpected time and place, with a stranger.
“The woman, who was neither my mother nor my grandmother, neither my sister nor my aunt, placed her hand on my shoulder for a moment, as I tasted creamy, charred, bitter, and sweet Korea.” (Wills 154)
It was a surprisingly intimate moment, retrospectively told after the episodes of Wills’ trip to Seoul, the family reunion at her wedding, and the subsequent visits that her step-sister made to Canada. In the form of a memoir, this snapshot fits in the myriad pieces of Wills’ wayfinding through her external and internal relations with the places and people with whom she would make meaningful connections. The taste of bibimbap with fiery gochujang is complex, much like her story as a reunited adoptee.
A thematic emphasis on food episodes across the few pieces!
Yes, the theme/motif resonates so much, it is going to be a staple section in Regarding Stories.