Past Issues of Conducive:

Issue 5 – December 2009/January 2010
Issue 4 – October/November 2009
Issue 3 – August/September 2009
Issue 2 – July/August 2009
Issue 1 – June/July 2009

Read Laura Bramble’s blog here.

If you’re interested in working with Laura, or contacting her go here

It comes down to this, in order to make a better world, we first have to better ourselves. Sometimes a little advice can do you wonders.

Do you have something that’s holding you back from success? Do you have worries, feeling stressed, or suffering from burnout? How about dealing with a cultural, gender, or social issue in your life? If you have a question you want answered, or a story to share, write editors@conducivemag.com.

We know that people become science fiction and fantasy fans for a host of different reasons, one of which is to make sense of the contemporary world. Bloggers must be willing to write about the intersection of science fiction and contemporary politics, economics, and society.

Bloggers must be able to write to an audience of political progressives who may not be science fiction or fantasy fans.

Conducive Mag is devoted to critical thinking about local and worldwide social problems, with a particular focus on finding solutions. It was started by sociologists who wanted to do more than research social problems, we wanted to create a space for progressive historians, artists, environmentalists, researchers, professors, activists, and policymakers to have thoughtful dialogues about how to solve them. We want new bloggers to be part of our growing intellectual community.

This writing job is perfect for professional and amateur journalists who wish to promote their books and other projects. We will promote every blogger, and readers and fans will be able to easily find their favorite blogger’s post.

Pay will be based on how many hits your posts produce. Posting from personal blogs is fine.

Please send resume and writing sample(s) to natalie(@)conducivemag.com.

Visit us at Cchronicle.com and Conducivemag.com

Christmas season in Korea. Tonight is the first ASK/TRACK (Adoption Solidarity Korea/Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea) Christmas party for unwed moms and their children.  We support them in their efforts to increase social services to struggling families, in an effort to reduce the supposed need for adoption, and we wanted to ease their struggles for an evening by hosting a party and providing gift items that might be beyond their reach.

I get to Koroot (an organization that provides connection to Korean society and temporary living quarters for visiting and returning adoptees) late and the party is in full swing.  Little children are running around chasing each other and playing sock’em with balloons. One toddler sits at the piano banging at the keys – Jane Jeong Trenka slips in a Christmas song then slips away – the entire room claps and the girl is amazed she played so well and grins from ear to ear at the applause.

A smorgasbord is laden with ham, turkey, cheese, a heavenly high calorie casserole, bulgogi and lettuce wraps.  Cookies and tangerines are omnipresent, and wine flows.

Everywhere the children have taken over the floor, the table legs, and people legs.  I watch the adorable kids playing and watch the families interact and eat the western food, my mind freezing each image of mother and child hugging indelibly in my brain.

Each of the moms introduce themselves and their children and say something thankful.  The children ham it up for the momentary spotlight or turn to their moms and almost knock them over with the enthusiasm of their affection.  It’s almost unbearable, separated from my family, to see so much love and affection.  The little abandoned girl in me is envious. The women are not teenagers, but in  their 20’s to 30’s.  One is a hairdresser.  One is fluent in Russian.  Another is fluent in English.  Smart, capable women all.

Then to my horror it is our turn to introduce ourselves. I tell the mothers I think they are brave and strong, and that they help adoptees (end international adoption) by being a success.  Being a success meets some difficulty being translated.

Mads the Dane says something in perfect Korean, which is because he’s been in Korea fifteen years, and then the typically ebullient and irrepressible Alice follows.

Alice tells the women in Korean that she was adopted to the Netherlands, and that she thinks the women are very brave.  Then she switches to English, her voice cracking, her eyes filling, and she says she wishes her mom had been so brave.

Both Mads and Alice have reunited with their birth families.

And there we are, all of us adoptees, attempting to hold back a flood, dabbing our eyes with napkins.  I’m not sure the unwed moms are aware of how affected we all are by the evening, but it is hard to make small talk after that.

I tell Alice – how can it be possible to feel so heart-warmed and heart-broken at the same time?  “Yes,” she says, “and to think all these children were to be sent away.”

All of these women were pressured by their families, significant-and-now-absent others, and the maternity homes to give their babies away for adoption.  Some were outright coerced into giving their babies away, and had to fight to get them back.  Most of them are totally estranged from their families because they chose to keep their babies.  All of them face job discrimination, social ostracizing, and economic disadvantage.

To see these brave pioneers forge ahead in spite of these odds is inspiring.  To know that this is just the beginning of feminine empowerment is encouraging.  They are telling other unwed mothers that they have a choice, and that choice is love.  And love does not mean having to send your baby away.

Everyone considering international adoption from Korea should witness this love and these women and these children and what they have between them.  They are struggling, but they have each other.

In the adoption solution scenario, these women would have been left grieving.  They would be glorified for loving their children enough to get rid of them, and at the same time vilified for being harlots or concerned only with themselves.  Their children would grow up to be like us adoptees – also grieving.  Silently, because we are supposed to be grateful for a better life.  It is a solution which benefits adopting parents, but it is a flawed solution, when the real solution is to help these women keep their children.

One chubby little girl who looks a lot like me, the same age I was when I was shipped to America, has lost sight of her mother.  She is standing at the door, distraught, hitting it and wailing, “Omma!  Omma!”

I run and tell Jane.  And then I have to leave.

Leanne Leith is a 45 year old Korean adoptee and first-time visitor to Korea. A featured subject in an hour long documentary on mishandled adoption records, she is now living, blogging, and working in Korea. She is deeply committed to working with TRACK (Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea) on adoption reform and improving social services to preserve families.

Conducive is devoted to critical thinking about local and worldwide social problems, with a particular focus on finding solutions. It was started by sociologists who wanted to do more than research social problems. We wanted to create a space for progressive historians, artists, environmentalists, researchers, professors, activists, and policymakers to have thoughtful dialogues about how to solve them.  We have a small but lively intellectual community and we want our new blog and bloggers to be a part of this.

Our editors are assembling a team of historians to write about progressive activists and notable events in grassroots history.  Stories must be well researched.  Writers may be asked to provide primary data or photos.

This writing job is perfect for professional and amateur journalists who wish to promote their books and other projects.

We will promote every blogger, and readers and fans will be able to easily find their favorite blogger’s post.

Pay will be based on how many hits your posts produce.

Please send resume and writing sample(s) to natalie(@)conducivemag.com.

Visit us at Cchronicle.com and Conducivemag.com

Ahh, another self-portrait.

This time it’s 5:30 a.m. in Seoul, S. Korea, and I’m waiting for the first train of the morning. I’m reading Jane Jeong Trenka’s new work, “Fugitive Visions,” and it’s disjointed nature perfectly describes adoptedness. How I felt growing up in the midwest. How I struggled with all the western world put on me. How I preemptively reject everyone because I can’t deal with the first rejection. How I long for love, even though I expect only rejection. How I deal with now. How every second of every minute I am sort of nowhere, because my head is always flooded with all these complicated clashing noisy distracting frustrating churning thoughts. The therapist would ask, “how do you feel?” How can one possibly begin to put a finger on all that? Because every moment is all that, and never just one thing. We come from a place where we draw the kind of attention nobody wants. We live in this place as ghosts in society. We inhabit this space, this interstitial space.

And I look up and see this; I must dig out my camera and shoot.

You know, it isn’t just about the past or the future or fate or gratitude or luck or anger or depression or hopeness. (the mispelling is an inside joke) It’s about this photo. It’s about all these layers. How many layers? How many layers…

Somehow, Jane managed to capture those layers, after layers, after layers. We are each of us sifting through this morass of experiences, trying to organize our books in order to live. But Jane just says, “see? this is just how it is for me/us.” She is an excellent writer, but her book is no book: it is a documentary film about a reluctant exile and finding the soundtrack to describe such an epic journey. The visions are a deck of cards, shuffled. It is a document of how we think; how we must think, to just be.

There is no protection from adoptedness. There is no avoiding it or denying it, try as we might. Yet our adopters and society insist on this myth of equality, banishing us to a life of silence. No other diaspora that faces racism would be told the racism they experience doesn’t matter/is cancelled out because they were chosen. But adoptees live this daily. Neither are we allowed to grieve our losses, because it hurts others, and we are taught that their emotions are more important than ours. Is it any wonder so many adoptees have sardonic characters?

That would be me I am describing.

I have avoided other adoptees all my life, so it was surprising when I first met them to discover that they, too, had sardonic characters, biting wit, and were always recognizing the irony in everything.

When I first heard about adoptees returning to Korea; that they met and had a community, I thought how counter-productive for their self actualization. At that time, I had wanted to believe that with a little hard work, I could just slip right in and reclaim my Koreanness, and that reclaiming Koreanness WAS self actualization. But Korea won’t let me. Because my banishment was total, and I will forever be a foreigner here. The adoptees you meet from all over the world are also lacking Koreanness, despite blending in here. Adoptedness is the state we all understand, the land we all inhabit.

The truth is, we can never be like others in either society. The adopting world needs to know that. The adoptees need to recognize that before they can heal. The Korean people need to see exactly what exile does to the little people they send away. And the international adoption agencies need to stop toying with all those populations’ hopes and dreams. Their machine works. But what of the lives they have affected? Ask me. Ask both my moms, wherever they may be.

So I have decided to become a card carrying returning adoptee member and join this community here. And it is not about belonging to something/anything, out of desperation for company, for I am most comfortable with and accustomed to isolation. It is about Jane’s pioneering work and vision. It is about the kind of person I am. It is about truth and justice.

The adoptees who have chosen to live here are a resilient bunch. And for those that are activists in adoption reform, they are beyond mere resilience. They are advocates for others and proactive about improving/resolving not only their own lives, but all the other lives affected by this crazy experiment gone awry. I am proud, proud, proud to be invited into the fold.

Anyway, read Jane’s book. Maybe then you can understand. We’re not just ungrateful malcontents. We are survivors and freedom fighters.

Leanne Leith is a 45 year old Korean adoptee and first-time visitor to Korea. A featured subject in an hour long documentary on mishandled adoption records, she is now living, blogging, and working in Korea. She is deeply committed to working with TRACK (Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea) on adoption reform and improving social services to preserve families.

Today I’m a little homesick. I miss my kids, my one true family. We’re a little strange. I haven’t even spoken on the phone to them the whole time I’ve been here, but that’s not something that’s ever been necessary with us. We know we’re in each other’s thoughts. And when we’re together, we don’t have to do anything special or even talk much: just being present is enough. There is no obligation, no negative history. Only love. It is enough for me.

My stay in Korea has been…incredibly difficult. From the moment I got off the plane and the bus driver screamed at me in Korean for something to do with loading my luggage, because he didn’t understand that I didn’t understand Korean and thought I was being rude…It’s been an exceptional and incredibly draining nine months.

But still I want to love Korea.

This weekend I go to eat Thanksgiving with many other dispossessed ethnic Koreans of the adoption diaspora. We’ll eat turkey, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie. All of us here, trying to love Korea. All of us here, separated from our families, many of us estranged from our adoptive families. Do I go there because I love to hang out with adoptees? No. I only know one or two of them and don’t care to know more. In America, some gather together just to acclimate themselves to seeing other Asian faces and get to know them as real people. It starts as fear-of-Asians phobia therapy and then evolves into a sanctuary. But here, that’s not necessary, as there are Asian faces in spades. No. I don’t have to speak to even one of them. It just comforts me to see so many gathered in one place who KNOW. That’s all I need. Not community, because I’m too traumatized by something so claustrophobic and distrusting of people in general; not even solidarity, because not all adoptees agree or are in the same place in this journey. No. I go for the adoption awareness.

This month is adoption awareness month. It is a time when those promoting adoption gather their collective voices to extol its virtues, increase its numbers, and lobby for its ease.

But to me, adoption awareness is the knowing of what it feels like to be adopted. It is that unspoken thing we all share, whether we are “happy” adoptees or “angry” adoptees, we who have returned are not here for naught. That thing we share, is a loss nobody should ever know, that those who were not abandoned or relinquished will never know, but that binds us, like it or not, (for me mostly not) together.

Over three decades ago, America was riveted to their television sets watching the dramatization of Alex Haley’s Roots. It was not just an exploration of where he came from, but also how he came to be here. And to my wonder, it seemed as if the entire nation finally learned to respect African American brotherhood, and to understand that being displaced against one’s will should rightly unite them on the deepest level.

However, in this adoption awareness month, there is no popular respect for our “pilgrimages,” because we appear ungrateful for our displacement against our will. We reject the notion that our loss should be something we should also be grateful about. We are united on this deepest level. That is why we’re all here. My silence during adoptee functions just goes hand in hand with this understanding. I don’t have to speak to the other returnee adoptees to know that I love them and they me. We just know. That’s enough for me.

And so in silence I will gather with my fellow returnee adoptees. I go there for the ritual of thanksgiving, the pale substitute for the Korean Cheusok thanksgiving that venerates our first families, and their families, and their families before their families. I go there for a small taste of the only ritual feast I’ve ever known, the feast of my adoptive family’s culture, in commemoration of the voluntary displacement of their ancestors. I go here to say, “please pass the stuffing” and know others will understand what “pass” means and what “stuffing” is. I go for the saving grace of cranberry sauce. I go there to give thanks. For the little comforts we have.

And I will thank my mother for the Stove top stuffing, the Durkees freeze-dried onion green been casserole, and the Cool Whip covered Eagles’ brand pumpkin pie. And I will still wish I had never been adopted.

Leanne Leith is a 45 year old Korean adoptee and first-time visitor to Korea. A featured subject in an hour long documentary on mishandled adoption records, she is now living, blogging, and working in Korea. She is deeply committed to working with TRACK (Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea) on adoption reform and improving social services to preserve families.

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