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In her debut book, Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism, Kim Park Nelson draws from the oral histories and life stories of sixty-five Korean American adoptees to critically explore race as it is understood by Korean adoptees raised in white families as well as investigate how race is understood and produced in American society. Park Nelson's ethnography, informed by a feminist epistemology and post-modern ideology, positions the experiences of Korean American adoptees as a compelling community through which to explore "the multiplicities of Asian American identity, American race relations, U.S.-Asian foreign relations, and historical changes in the American family" (17). To introduce her book, Park Nelson provides an overview of media coverage of South Korean adoption in the United States over the past sixty years, inviting readers to consider the ways in which media representations shape and inform social and cultural perspectives. In particular, she notes three dominant tropes used to normalize and characterize Korean American adoption: the pitiful orphan, the benevolent rescuer family, and the well-adjusted, American-assimilated adoptee.
Park Nelson contends that the master narrative around Korean American adoption problematically glorifies American militarism, oversimplifies assimilation as a signifier of positive adoptive placements, and tokenizes adoptees as exemplary embodiments of U.S. multiculturalism. By purposefully and strategically centering the voices of Korean American adoptees, Park Nelson offers a much-needed counternarrative about transnational adoption to the dominant discourse that heralds transnational and transracial adoption as a "remedy for racism, or at least as evidence that racial divides in the United States are mending" (9). Through her interdisciplinary examination of transnational Korean American adoption, Park Nelson interrogates questions of racial identity formation and performance, and the pervasive myth of transnational adoption as...