Jane Jeong Trenka | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1972 (age 52–53) Seoul, Korea |
| Education | Augsburg University |
| Occupation(s) | Activist, writer |
Jane Jeong Trenka (born 1972) is a South Korean activist and an award-winning writer. [1] She is the president of the organization TRACK (Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea).
Trenka was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1972. When she was six months old, Trenka and her sister were adopted into an American family in rural northern Minnesota. Her Korean mother found her daughters in 1972, shortly after the girls were sent to the U.S. and before they were legally adopted. Trenka reunited with her birth mother in South Korea in 1995 when she was 23. [2] In 2004, she returned to live in Korea. While applying for a visa in 2006, Trenka discovered that the Korean adoption agency that had overseen her adoption had lied, both about her background and about the people who were going to adopt her. [3] Trenka became an activist for standard and transparent adoption practices to protect the human rights of adult adoptees, children, and families. She officially repatriated to South Korea in 2008. [3]
Trenka received a degree in music performance from Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minnesota [4] and became a piano teacher in Minnesota before her return to Korea. [2]
While studying at Augsburg University, Trenka was consistently stalked, and she has spoken publicly about her experience in order to raise awareness to the issue, including discussing the incident in her book The Language of Blood. [5] Her experiences were adapted for an episode of the Investigation Discovery series Obsession: Dark Desires . [6]
In 2013, Trenka attended Seoul National University to pursue a degree in public administration. [2]
She has written two memoirs on her experiences with international, transracial adoption: The Language of Blood and Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee's Return to Korea.
Adoption is a process whereby a person assumes the parenting of another, usually a child, from that person's biological or legal parent or parents. Legal adoptions permanently transfer all rights and responsibilities, along with filiation, from the biological parents to the adoptive parents.
The international adoption of South Korean children started around 1953 as a measure to take care of the large number of mixed children that became orphaned during and after the Korean War. It quickly evolved to include orphaned Korean children. Religious organizations in the United States, Australia, and many Western European nations slowly developed the apparatus that sustained international adoption as a socially integrated system.
Holt International Children's Services (HICS) is a faith-based humanitarian organization and adoption agency based in Eugene, Oregon, United States, known for international adoption and child welfare. The nonprofit works in thirteen countries, including: Cambodia, China, Colombia, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Mongolia, Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, Uganda, Vietnam, and the United States. This work includes a range of services for children and families including efforts in nutrition, education, family strengthening, orphan care, foster care, family reunification, and child sponsorship. The organization's stated mission is to seek a world where every child has a loving and secure home.
International adoption is a type of adoption in which an individual or couple residing in one country becomes the legal and permanent parent(s) of a child who is a national of another country. In general, prospective adoptive parents must meet the legal adoption requirements of their country of residence and those of the country whose nationality the child holds.
The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study examined the IQ test scores of 130 black or interracial children adopted by advantaged white families. The aim of the study was to determine the contribution of environmental and genetic factors to the poor performance of black children on IQ tests as compared to white children. The initial study was published in 1976 by Sandra Scarr and Richard A. Weinberg. A follow-up study was published in 1992 by Richard Weinberg, Sandra Scarr and Irwin D. Waldman. Another related study investigating social adjustment in a subsample of the adopted black children was published in 1996. The 1992 follow-up study found that "social environment maintains a dominant role in determining the average IQ level of black and interracial children and that both social and genetic variables contribute to individual variations among them." Both Levin and Lynn argued that these findings support a hereditarian alternative, while other researchers believed the findings were consistent with both genetic and environmental explanations.
Sandra Wood Scarr was an American psychologist and writer. She was the first female full professor in psychology in the history of Yale University. She established core resources for the study of development, including the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study and the Minnesota Adolescent Adoption Study. She served as president of multiple societies including the Association for Psychological Science and was honored with multiple awards including the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award. She was also active in the development of commercial childcare. Her work with twins in the 1960s revealed strong genetic influences on intellectual development. One of her key findings was that this differed with race and socioeconomic status (SES), with poor and non-white children showing less genetic influence on their IQ and more environmental influence. She demonstrated a successful intervention in premature infants, showing that stimulation improved their health and developmental outcomes.
In the United States, adoption is the process of creating a legal parent–child relationship between a child and a parent who was not automatically recognized as the child's parent at birth.
Interracial adoption refers to the act of placing a child of one racial or ethnic group with adoptive parents of another racial or ethnic group.
Sun Yung Shin is a Korean American poet, writer, consultant, and educator living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Katie Hae Leo is a Korean American playwright, poet, essayist and creative nonfiction writer. Her writing has been published in Water~Stone Review, Asian American Poetry & Writing, Kartika Review, 60 Seconds to Shine: One-minute Monologues for Men, MN Women's Press, and Utne Reader. Her stage work includes Four Destinies, first produced by Mu Performing Arts, and N/A, a solo piece the debuted at Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia and was remounted at Dreamland Arts in Saint Paul. The themes in her work involve place, identity, and her experience as a transracial Korean adoptee. Her influences include Suzan-Lori Parks, Young Jean Lee, and Kristina Wong.
The Brothers' Home was an internment camp located in Busan, South Korea during the 1970s and 1980s . The camp was home to some of the worst human rights abuses in South Korea during the period of social purification and has been nicknamed "Korea's Auschwitz" by various Korean media outlets.
Jeong Kkeutbyeol is a South Korean poet, literary critic, and professor. She studied Korean literature at Ewha Womans University and graduated with a Master's degree. Along with numerous volumes of poetry, Jeong has published several collections of critical essays, including The Poetics of Parody and The Language of Poetry Has a Thousand Tongues.
Transracial is a label used by people who identify as a different race than the one they were born into. They may adjust their appearance to make themselves look more like that race, and may participate in activities associated with that race. Use of the word transracial to describe this is new and has been criticized, because the word was historically used to describe a person raised by adoptive parents of a different ethnic or racial background, such as a Black child adopted and raised by a White couple.
Julia Chinyere Oparah, formerly Julia Sudbury, is a faculty member at the University of San Francisco. She is also the founder of the Center for Liberated Leadership in Oakland, California. Oparah is an activist-scholar, a community organizer, and an intellectual focused on producing relevant scholarship in accompaniment to social justice movements. She has worked at University of California, Berkeley, University of Toronto, and Mills College prior to the University of San Francisco.
Birth mothers in South Korea (international adoption) refers to the group of biological mothers whose children were placed for adoption in South Korea's international adoption practice. The decades-long phenomenon of international adoption in South Korea began after the Korean War. In the years since the war, South Korea has become the largest and longest provider of children placed for international adoption, with 165,944 recorded Korean adoptees living in 14 countries, primarily in North America and Western Europe, as of 2014.
There have been several high-profile cases of deportation of Korean adoptees from the United States. Prior to the passage of the Child Citizenship Act of 2000, the adoptive parents of adoptees had to file for their child to naturalize before the age of 16. Many parents were unaware of this requirement, assuming that their adopted children automatically derived citizenship from them, and therefore did not apply. The Child Citizenship Act sought to remedy this issue by extending citizenship to all international adoptees who were under 18 at the time that the bill was passed, but did not apply retroactively. This left those adopted by American families prior to 1983 vulnerable to deportations.
Return to Seoul is a 2022 drama film written and directed by Davy Chou, starring Ji-Min Park as a 25-year-old French adoptee who travels to South Korea seeking her biological parents.
Sandy White Hawk "Cokata Najinn Winyan" is a Native American writer, speaker, and indigenous rights activist.
Jean M. Paton was an American adoptee rights activist who worked to reverse harmful policies, practices, and laws concerning adoption and closed records. Paton founded the adoptee support and search network Orphan Voyage in 1953, helping connect adoptees with their birthparents, and was instrumental in the creation of the American Adoption Congress and Concerned United Birthparents in the 1970s.
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