In Kate-Hers Rhee’s 2006 video 놓침 (missing), she opens the video with an extended clip of her sitting on a chair in a field excessively shoving Nabisco Premium saltines (read: crackers, aka a popular term often used to describe whiteness and white people) down her throat, causing crumbs to spill all over her lap. She then conceals her eyes with a black bar, further taking away her individual identity. Such is a not so subtle, symbolic visual Rhee employs to describe the experience of being a Korean-American adoptee, specifically one that was a part of the adoption process motivated by Christian American ideals.

놓침 (missing), HD, single channel video, 2006 from 이미래 on Vimeo.

In the same 8 minute video, Rhee goes on Korean national television, speaking in Korean in an effort to search for her birth parents. She is standing next to an ironic “missing persons” poster of herself, pointing to her missing Korean identity and yet employing it at the same time through the Korean language. 놓침 (missing) was deliberately the last work Rhee created about her adoption.

On her website, Rhee writes: “Despite being in solidarity with the many adoption rights movements and activists worldwide, she does not identify with the word, Adoptee, and rather recognizes her abandonment and subsequent adoption as a past act that was done to her, but ceases to define her. In addition, parents who choose to adopt have identities outside of this act and are not usually called Adopters; albeit this term is sometimes used (pejoratively) within adoption circles of those who were adopted.”

Eleana Kim includes Rhee in her essay “Producing Missing Persons: Korean Adoptee Artists Imagining (Im)Possible Lives,” chronicling the Korean adoptee diaspora and their subsequent artistic community (aided by the advent of the internet in the 1990’s and increased number of adoptees seeking art educations). Kim writes that these “adult adoptees” have created “vibrant networks of collaboration and exhibition, making their work more visible and accessible to the broader adult adopted Korean community and the global art world” (Kim, 77).

Kim calls the works produced by this artistic collective as “experimental” and “conceptual,” and as “as representing and/or performing “missing persons” rather than depicting the autobiographical lost-and-found or search-and-reunion narrative organized around a quest for the ultimate truth of adoption or one’s ‘real’ identity. The missing persons in this work are, not long-lost natal kin or the already forfeited authentic self, but, rather, products of the radical contingency effectuated by adoption as a form of displacement and exile” (Kim, 78).

This description Kim provides is evident in Rhee’s explanation of her own work, the “Missing Persons Project.” Rhee calls adoption “forced emigration,” citing the fact that Korea “exports” 3-4 babies a day (statistic pulled from 2008, which makes me question if these numbers have changed in the last 11 years). Rhee does as Kim writes, actively questioning this cultural product, further calling out the facts that Korean families illegally abandon their children, Korean hospitals and adoption agencies coerce parents into giving up their children (mothers often unaware of the relinquishment of their child), and that the Korean “state then fabricates the child’s status as “orphan” in order to lawfully expedite the export to the Western receiving countries.” Ultimately, Rhee’s work not only explores her identity, but also questions the legality and morality of the modern adoption process in Korea.

Rhee’s work and Kim’s essay reminded me of an incredible SCA Senior Honors Thesis that I had the privilege to hear about this past Friday at the SCA Honors Conference. Senior Margaret Angela Ying Yannopoulos’ thesis (she is a Korean adoptee herself, I believe, who presented right after me that day!), titled “In The Face of Society’s Insistence on Race-Based Identifications, Asian Adoptees Construct Ontological Adoptee Kinships,” unpacks exactly what we’re discussing this week.

In Erica Vogel’s ethnographic work studying K-pop fandoms in Mexico City, she uncovers the main reason there is such a strong fanbase there: community. While a major incentive for Mexican K-pop fans in performing so much unpaid, affective labor is the media and global recognition, as well as the potential reward from the Korean culture industry, the first and most important reason Vogel finds these fans entering K-pop spaces is for local community.

Vogel writes that local imagined community helps “mitigate feelings of anonymity in an increasing globalizing world” and increasing globalized culture industry (Vogel, 58). K-pop, essentially, makes these people feel less alone on both a local scale and a global scale. Through working with their fellow local fans, they reaffirm their sense of significance in relation to other countries (Peru and the US, for example, which also have massive K-pop fandom communities) and in relation to their own lives.

Vogel goes on to say that “perhaps the most important thing the K-pop machine gave Mexican fans was the ability to find each other…to find a local group where they belonged.” (Vogel, 66-7). K-pop she argues has become the great equalizer for Mexican communities – when you find K-pop, you find instant community, and discovering that community becomes more important than discovering Korea.

Not to relate everything I learn about in this class back to my experience in the One Direction fandom (because as a newbie to K-pop, this is really all I have to go off on, and this is what I’m doing my final project about), but a lot of what Vogel was writing about in relation to community really resonated with me. I was severely bullied all throughout middle school and early high school, so my 1D fandom was an escape.

Yeah the boys were hot and I loved their music (Steal My Girl SLAPS and you can’t deny it), but I still consistently talk to and meet up with people I befriended online in that fandom and in real life. When I moved to a different city at the start of my sophomore year of high school, I made my first friend because I found out she also loved One Direction. When she told me, I literally started crying because I finally (a week into going to that school) found someone that would talk to me for hours on end and not let me sit alone at lunch because of that common interest. Wow, this is getting really sad, sorry.

Anyways, community was the driving force behind going online to scroll through my 1D Tumblr feed all day after school – I couldn’t wait to see what my friends were posting, what fanfictions they were reading or writing, I couldn’t wait to fangirl about 1D with them. It was a community experience at heart, sealed together because of our shared love of a dumb boy band who all had bad tattoos and horrible, everchanging hairdos (see below).

Ultimately, what Vogel is speaking on is not unique to Mexico. She is discussing affective notions of belonging, acceptance, and love that are almost guaranteed upon signing up for those social media spheres (tumblr, twitter) or in person experiences (dance groups, flash mobs, concerts, etc.).

#TBT