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Palimpsest: Documents from a Korean Adoption
Palimpsest: Documents from a Korean Adoption | Lisa Wool Sjoblom
3 posts | 2 read | 6 to read
Who owns the story of an adoption?Thousands of South Korean children were adopted around the world in the 1970s and 1980s. More than nine thousand found their new home in Sweden, including the cartoonist Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, who was adopted when she was two years old. Throughout her childhood she struggled to fit into the homogenous Swedish culture and was continually told to suppress the innate desire to know her origins. "Be thankful," she was told; surely her life in Sweden was better than it would have been in Korea. Like many adoptees, Sjöblom learned to bury the feeling of abandonment.In Palimpsest, an emotionally charged memoir, Sjöblom's unaddressed feelings about her adoption come to a head when she is pregnant with her first child. When she discovers a document containing the names of her biological parents, she realizes her own history may not match up with the story she's been told her whole life: that she was an orphan without a background. As Sjöblom digs deeper into her own backstory, returning to Korea and the orphanage, she finds that the truth is much more complicated than the story she was told and struggled to believe. The sacred image of adoption as a humanitarian act that gives parents to orphans begins to unravel.Sjöblom's beautiful autumnal tones and clear-line style belie the complicated nature of this graphic memoir's vital central question: Who owns the story of an adoption?
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jlhammar
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Excellent graphic memoir by an adoptee rights activist about the search for her birth parents and quest to uncover the truth of her adoption (from Korea to Sweden). Illuminating and emotional.

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Lindy
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At two, Lisa was adopted from Korea by a loving Swedish couple. It wasn‘t until she had children of her own that she began a serious search for her first family. What she uncovered was the dark side of transnational adoption: a lucrative industry. And the revelation that there‘s always a sorrowful aspect to adoption: mothers don‘t give up their children lightly. Eye opening graphic nonfiction translated by Hanna Stromberg et al.

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Lindy
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It was tough to keep liking my Asian face, when there weren‘t any role models, only caricatures.

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