Paper pavilion and routes through transnational adoption

Unrestricted This dissertation consists of two parts: a book of poetry, Paper Pavilion, and a collection of researched essays titled Routes through Transnational Adoption. Paper Pavilion fuses together fairy tales, opera, and traditional Korean and English forms to follow an epic impulse -- beginning and ending as a quest across cultural and geographic distances -- in order to create alternative histories from paradoxes, absences, and speculations arising from a post-Korean War Diaspora of which transnational adoptees are a part. The critical part, Routes through Transnational Adoption, seeks to build embodied and communal routes, rather than retrieve cultural roots, through transnational adoption by interweaving memoir and literary research. Based on the trajectory of search, specifically one that fails to uncover personal facts, this collection of essays considers the military 's role in originating and perpetuating transnational adoption in order to write through it. Oftentimes imagined as a child refugee who benefits from U.S. humanitarianism and economic opportunity, the transnational adoptee lacks agency because others must speak for her/him. Moreover, her/his cultural authenticity is questioned due to lacking memory. Seeking to give voice to failure in all its forms that are part of building routes, the critical part of my dissertation resists this grateful child narrative to discuss adult adoptee-authored transnational spaces that are currently being developed and that advocate on behalf of shared adoptee and birth mother interests, which recognize the economic, gendered, political, and social inequalities that give rise to transnational adoption.