Award-winning dancemaker Olivia Hyunsin Kim has followed her deep curiosity through such diverse subjects as Korean-German identity, chronic illness, gender euphoria and space travel. Having realised just how little discourse there was on transnational adoption, her interdisciplinary troupe ddanddarakim premieres its newest work Be thankful, they said, an investigation into the practice, this month.
You’ve conducted a dozen interviews with adopted people for this performance. Why did you choose to begin this piece with fieldwork?
Some adopted children got comments of, “Oh, that is so good that you have been adopted in white countries.
To position myself, I am not transnationally adopted. [For this work] we are a mixed team of transnationally adopted people and non-transnationally adopted people. And at the beginning, the core team had not been adopted, so our idea was to interview transnationally adopted people with different views from different regions and different generations.
What were the results? Did your respondents have any commonality of experience?
Interestingly, all of them so far have said that they see transnational adoption really critically. Even the ones who do not have bad experiences with their adoptive parents still say that. And I found it interesting, because it really goes against the narrative. Some got adopted into really good families who took care [of them] and everything is, like, fine – they’ve got a “better life”. And even despite that, they are critical and would be against transnational adoption.
What are the adoptees critical of?
It is definitely about how part of these adoptions have been considered illegal. It was actually human trafficking. Depending on the country, parents have not been checked properly, so there are also cases of abuse. [Children] have been sold at points – in the case of South Korea, for a rather large sum.
Some adopted children got comments of, “Oh, that is so good that you have been adopted in white countries. That is so good because otherwise you would have starved or maybe you’d be dead. You were in a very poor country…” and things like this. But you never know what would have happened.
What a burden to bear for a child….
I think most of the migrant groups here in Germany, especially those who have been racialised, can understand this attitude. It’s expected that you have a gratefulness towards the country you’re in. It’s even a double bind, because you need to be also grateful for your family – that they chose you, that they adopted you, and this is a very big burden to carry. And it does not consider that most of these adoptive parents wanted a child concretely.
Why did you choose dance to engage this particular issue?
Because the body plays a big role. Despite people telling you, when you’ve been adopted to [for example] Sweden from South Korea, that you’re Swedish, if you’re walking out in the streets, people probably do not identify your Asian body as Swedish. And there is the clash – how you construct and how you want to assimilate as a body into the society.
Funnily, in adoption some parents tell the children their story only begins with their arrival in their family. But this is not true. It’s not true even if it’s a newborn, but it’s also not true if it’s a nine-year-old child. Unfortunately, there is still the expectation that you need to become Swedish or French – and the rest, you eliminate from your system.
There is quite a lot of work from transnational adoptees in terms of film or live performance from visual artists. There are also some theatre pieces. But there are barely any dance pieces about it.
- Be thankful, they said, Sophiensæle, Oct 4-7 English, German and Korean