Between nullification and duplication in Jane Jeong Trenka’s identity narratives

This paper deals with Jane Jeong Trenka’s The Language of Blood (2003) and Fugitive Visions (2009): two texts that detail the author’s childhood and adolescence as a Korean adoptee in the USA, and her subsequent repatriation to Korea. The starting point of the analysis is the recognition of “the relationship between writing and rights, and the extent to which … victimized individuals, can best express and protest their situation in literary and life writing representation” (Grice 2009). Tracing the intricate textual web of duplication and repetition that structure Trenka’s life writing, the paper argues that the texts function simultaneously as a “working through” of a family trauma and as a critique of transracial adoption. Furthermore, the joint narratives of gendered violence and marginalization faced by birth mother and daughter are seen as symbolic of the collective story of Korean womanhood.