Cosmopolitanism without empire? Tense and tender ties in Don Lee’s Country of Origin

Introduction

Home is a place to escape to and a place to escape from. (George, 1996)

In her recent memoir, Fugitive Visions, Trenka (2009)—a Korean adoptee who grew up in a white household in Minnesota but now works and resides in metropolitan Seoul—describes what transnationalism feels like to her:

Transnationalism is supposed to look like choices, is supposed to look like breaking boundaries, is supposed to look like freedom. Transnationalism is not supposed to look like sisters trying to rebuild their relationship after being unwillingly separated, families struggling to talk to each other, shopkeepers tired of foreign militariziation, or ethnic Koreans asking white people for directions right in the middle of Seoul. […] In a country where “American” is used synonymously with “white,” my inability to speak fluent Korean combined with my inability to be white is a deformity. (pp. 109–110)

The paragraph is worth quoting in length because it illustrates the picture of what we have come to call “cosmopolitan,” a world that is rich in complexity and contradiction, glowing with hope yet still rooted in biases, and incredibly messy in feeling, kinship, and the idea of community. In a few broad brushes, Trenka paints a bleak world of confusion and homelessness that frustrates the clean-cut theorization of cosmopolitanism as positively being “at home in the world,” an idea that has been repeatedly revived by philosophers from Greek Stoics through Kant to contemporary critics of global society and justice. For Trenka and other transnational adoptees who are transplanted elsewhere from their poverty-stricken families and war-torn countries, cosmopolitanism is not just about the proliferation of ethnic restaurants, accumulation of frequent flyer mileage, speedy communications on the Internet, a world risk society, or the global federation of states that sociologists have theorized (Archibugi, 2003; Beck, 2006; Breckenridge et al., 2002; Brennan, 1997; Cheah and Robbins, 1998; Vertovec and Cohen, 2002). Such vertigo of globalization is certainly exciting, but the underside of it—homelessness in a world in constant flux and confusion, as documented in Trenka’s memoir and other adoptees’ stories ¹ —is equally concerning and thought-provoking.

“Adoptees embody and expose the contradiction of the global,” Kim (2010) notices, “They are like holographs—turned one way, they appear to be among the most privileged cosmopolitans, turned the other, they are the ultimate subalterns as ‘orphaned’ and ‘abandoned’ children” (p. 8). Indeed, no matter how fitting it may seem as a description of transnational adoptees that have transgressed the borders of culture, language, kinship, and nation, the idea of cosmopolitanism, ironically for them, is neither a stage of perpetual peace nor a triumphant moment of uninhibited freedom. It rather invokes an unpleasant constellation of mixed feelings—abandonment and survival, displacement and salvation, and (self-)denial and rebirth—and of stigmas of shame, loss, contamination, and impurity that seared their lives and souls. Trenka (2009) writes with much sadness: “of all the opportunities that transnational adoption gave me, gave us, the one opportunity we were not given was the chance to be an ordinary Korean” (pp. 173–174). This is a simple but impossible wish. Moreover, a transcultural, transnational background makes her an oddity in both America and Korea, for her ill-fittingness bespeaks a racial anomaly and a cultural hybrid that is at once adored (by a global-minded Korean state) and abhorred (by racial and cultural chauvinists in both countries). For transnational adoptees, cosmopolitanism is not so much about being “at home in the world” as the challenge of tracing origin and building home from the absence of the past. What defines them is not their transnationally mobile, flexible, and adaptive subjectivity, though that is what adoptees have been perceived to be, but their desire to belong and to understand the historical dynamic that transplanted them in an eternal departure where home is made unwelcoming, life distorted, and family alien. The fugitive visions that Trenka offers are the underside of global modernity: the sorrows of abandonment and the innermost desire for origin that are generated and yet unrecognized by the dreams of multicultural union, interracial marriage, diasporic linkage, and global connectivity as they engulfed and transformed the world.

Van der Veer (2002) has criticized that “Cosmopolitanism is the Western engagement with the rest of the world and that engagement is a colonial one” (p. 166). Brennan (1997) also contends that “To understand the history of cosmopolitanism is to learn something about the elusiveness of imperial attitudes themselves” (p. 1). Another trenchant critique can be found in Mignolo’s (2011) The Darker Side of Western Modernity where he argues that cosmopolitanism is embedded in the global design of Western imperialism, which began with the creation of the modern/colonial world in the sixteenth century, and has since been used “as a key concept of modernity to hide coloniality” (p. 257). ² Any inquiry of lived cosmopolitanism therefore cannot avoid an encounter with empire at its most tense and tender moments.

Taking these insights as an entry point, this article considers cosmopolitanism from its underside by asking what cosmopolitanism means when home and roots have been utterly destroyed and transformed by forces of imperialism and modernity, and how different cosmopolitanism would look from the eyes of transracial and transnational adoptees. What is the significance of roots and home in this cosmopolitan world, and how can cosmopolitan ideals come to terms with its underside? Can we envision a cosmopolitanism without empire as its political infrastructure? And what role does the adoptee play in Asia’s cosmopolitan imagination? Don Lee’s Country of Origin, a cosmopolitan novel about an adoptee’s transpacific quest for origin, provides a critical insight that cosmopolitanism in Asia is tied up with the West and is thus best considered as a reflexive engagement with imperial histories. ³ His focus on the adoptee story helps retrieve those past traces that have been violently wiped out and yet remain haunting in their absences. The adoptee’s perspective, in addition, enables us to examine how cosmopolitanism has been lived as a set of contradictions, embodied in the debates of tolerance and hospitality, and to engage it with other categories of belonging from the vantage point of the domestic and the intimate. As Ann Stoler and other critics have demonstrated, the domestic and the intimate are crucial sites of colonial governance, and the body of a mixed-race adoptee can show exactly this point (Lowe, 2006; Povinelli, 2006; Stoler, 2006). To center adoptees and their quests for roots in the context of transnational migration is thus also an attempt to rearticulate race, place, and cosmopolitanism in and against the grooves of empire.

Adoption and the politics of intimacy

Scholarly literature on cosmopolitanism has focused on two strains: the idea that cosmopolitanism is a philosophical, political scheme that seems to jump into the reality of our present-day global community with an existing world government to oversee international affairs, and the humanist, humanitarian approach to advocate the ethics of hospitality and cultivate the ability to “feel distress from afar.” In the former approach, cosmopolitanism is regarded as a sociological question, where the ever-increasing global interdependencies and everyday transactions across borders can prove the advent of a cosmopolitan world (Ulrich Beck calls it “cosmopolitanization”), while the latter directs our attention to the figure of the stranger that challenges our tribal belief in local, nation-bound loyalties and demands our hospitality. As Derrida (2001) has pointed out,

Insofar as it has to do with the ethos, that is, the residence, one’s home, the familiar place of dwelling, inasmuch as it is a manner of being there, the manner in which we relate to ourselves and to others, to others as our own or as foreigners, ethics is hospitality. (pp. 16–17; original emphasis)

In short, cosmopolitanism envisions that the human community will be rebuilt with humanitarian principles and on a global plane where strangers would be welcomed and differences embraced. It considers the planet to be the ultimate place of belonging where regional and local differences would be superseded by the creation of new subjectivity and forms of governmentality.

In America, this cosmopolitan ideal is found in the celebratory images of the United States as an immigrant nation and a multicultural union and is used as an ideology of American exceptionalism that posits a utopia to come in the bodies of mixed-raced children. As a country that has long been plagued by racial conflict, multiraciality and “beyond race” narratives are fundamental to the wager of American cosmopolitanism. Hollinger (1995), for instance, has argued that the future of American nationality lies in a postethnic perspective that “favors voluntary over involuntary affiliations, balances an appreciation for communities of descent with a determination to make room for new communities, and promotes solidarities of wide scope that incorporate people with different ethnic and racial backgrounds” (p. 3). He believes that obsession with roots and identity has become a divisive, rather than cohesive, element in American culture. It binds us to tribal identification and limits our ability to envision a national unity built on civic participation and the forging of a new identity. Hollinger (1995) argues that mixed-race people, in contrast, are “a powerful symbol” for postethnic America, because “they are reanimating a traditional American emphasis on the freedom of individual affiliation, and they are confronting the American nation with its own continued reluctance to apply this principle to ethno-racial affiliations” (p. 166).

Yet, Hollinger’s discursive investment in the future “beyond race” is precisely where race crops up time and again to challenge the cosmopolitan vision of the United States. While Barack Obama is hailed as a symbol of cosmopolitan America that signals America’s metamorphosis from a segregated, racialized polity to a multiracial, multicultural union, he is still marked by his skin color and embedded in the racialized trajectory of American empire. ⁴ For identity, especially for mixed-race subjects, is never just a matter of race but rather one about the convergence of origins, about the charted and uncharted itineraries of migration and other historical forces that have bled one life into another. Tiger Woods is another interesting example, whose multiracial makeup does not promise a future beyond race but bespeaks the imperial roots of American multiraciality. “Sex across the color line won’t save us,” as Asian American historian Yu (2003) argues, because “Woods is the product of his Green Beret father’s tours of duty in the Vietnam War … and a century of military conflicts between the United States and Asian enemies” (p. 1411). Woods is a product of American empire and a lucky boy out of thousands of Amerasians who were born, and in numerous cases abandoned, by American GI soldiers and officers. Celebrations of race-mixing tend to elide critical questions of racial hierarchy and the inequities of gender, class, and violence that mark sexual intimacy across races and continents. Beneath the triumph of multiracial America—as endorsed by the government decision to allow citizens to check more than one racial box on the 2000 census—hence resides a geopolitics of identity which is not only linked to the imperial history of war, conquest, and occupation but also imbricated in gendered, sexualized, and militarized relations of power that have created mixed-race children out of “precarious affections” (Boym, 1998: 252). ⁵ The advent of postethnic America, in short, reminds us that each “tense and tender tie” has crossed origins and produced lives in the shadows of empires.

Indeed, empire operates not only through direct and oftentimes violent means of control and exploitation but also through production of life and sentiment, even when empire appears to be a bygone past. If cosmopolitanism in ancient times, as Fine and Cohen (2002) explain, was primarily propounded by the “clanless and hearthless” people trying to survive in the rise of the Greek empire (p. 139), it makes good sense that we look beneath the glories of multiracial cosmopolitanism to investigate how empires have reproduced life and rearranged belonging. As Stoler (2006) contends,

Who had what “percentage” of blood that was labeled black, white, red, or brown may have been given credence in a language of scientific measurement, but it was recognition of sexual unions, silences about rape, acknowledgement of kinship, genealogies of affiliations, and knowledge of intimacies that mattered more to where the “color” line was drawn. (p. 13)

Lowe (2006) extends the analysis of racial intimacy to a global context. In “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” she uses the transatlantic Chinese coolie as a figure to envision a wide range of “global intimacies” out of which modern humanism emerged in sync with a modern racialized division of labor (p. 192). Although cosmopolitanism is not her concern, her analysis of intimacy—as a spatial proximity or adjacent connection between two entities; as the private, intimate relations of marriage and family that are often figured in the bourgeois home; and as interaction among slaves, indentured persons, and mixed-blood free peoples—helps us to resituate cosmopolitan visions—of transnational family, human rights, or revolution—in worldly connections that were previously circumvented or compartmentalized by our disciplinary structures of knowledge. Moreover, as an analytic tool, intimacy pinpoints and explains the “politics of our lack of knowledge” and directs our attention to the untold origins of our present. As Lowe (2006) puts it eloquently:

We must critically historicize this second meaning of intimacy, of sexual and affective intimacy within the private sphere, insofar as bourgeois intimacy was precisely a biopolitics through which the colonial powers administered the enslaved and colonized and sought to indoctrinate the newly freed into forms of Christian marriage and family. The colonial management of sexuality, affect, marriage, and family among the colonized formed a central part of the microphysics of colonial rule. Bourgeois intimacy, as an effect of the private and public split that was the sociospatial medium for both metropolitan and colonial hegemony, was produced by the “intimacies of four continents”—in the sense that the political economy of slave and indentured labor in the colonies founded the formative wealth of the European bourgeoisie and in the sense that the labor of enslaved and indentured domestic workers furnished the material comforts of the bourgeois home. (pp. 195–196)

Recent scholarship on transracial and transnational adoption has resituated intimacy in the transnational reproduction of family, the oblivion of race, and the global contexts of capitalism and imperialism. Volkman (2005) argues that the global exchange of babies addresses “the politics of reproduction at the intersection of the local and the global, situating adoption within a framework of ‘transnational inequalities’” (p. 18), thereby questioning the reproductive practices, policies, and practices with which traditional families are imagined to create “new geographies of kinship.” Eng (2010) observes how important the practice of transnational adoption is to the development of queer liberalism and the racialization of intimacy, marking “the collective ways by which race becomes occluded within the private domain of private family and kinship” (p. 10). Dorow (2006) emphasizes that transnational adoption research not only contributes to “theorizing the social hieroglyphics of identity formation” (p. 4) but also places “questions of subjectivities into the heart of family,” hence shifting our attention to “how domestic family/nation is constructed through racialized imaginaries of transnational migration” (pp. 5–6). Furthermore, Trenka et al. (2006), in their collective endeavor, remind us that multiraciality is connected to transnational adoption, and how issues of race and identity can shape and complicate the lives of transracial adoptees. They propose an agenda of transnational feminist solidarity both to critique the “global system that bequeaths power to some mothers but not to others” and to affirm that the right to parent one’s children must be protected as one of the basic human rights and the transactions that pit birth mothers against adoptive mothers must be rejected (Trenka et al., 2006: 13).

Both Laura Briggs and Tobias Hubinette, in their respective studies, moreover, point to the linkage between transnational adoption and US empire-building. Briggs (2006) argues that

Adopted children “saved” from the poverty and violence of Latin American nations may in fact be protected with the complicity of U.S. state power from repatriation in cases of kidnapping or unlawful relinquishment—a definition of “saving” that might justifiably be understood as having something to do with “taking.” (pp. 361–362)

Hubinette (2006) points out that

it is no coincidence that the countries supplying the most children for international adoption to the West, and primarily to the United States, almost all fall under the American sphere of influence and have been exposed to American military intervention, presence, or occupation. (p. 145)

Through detailed ethnographical work, Kim (2010) demonstrates how Korean adoptees have been produced in the crossovers of US imperialism and Korean modernity, occasioned by the rise of US patriotism and middlebrow internationalism in the 1950s and the Korean government’s attempts to capitalize on “the sentimental power of Korean orphans to further its diplomatic and foreign relations interests” (pp. 45–46). Since the 1990s, adoptees, through the media and state discourses, have become both a figure of Korea’s traumatic past and an icon of Korea’s transnational imaginary (Kim, 2010; Park, 2010).

Obviously, adoption is not just a humanitarian operation; it is a cross-border business built on the bourgeois family imagination, human rights campaigns, and the aftermath of war and modernity in postcolonial, development-hungry Asia. Transracial and transnational adoptees not only bear witness to the unintended consequences of American foreign policies in Asia and elsewhere; their stories, in addition, invite us to retrace their narratives of origin into the heart of empire. The “tense and tender ties,” made by seduction and coercion, can hence provide us a roadmap for understanding the adoptee’s complex identity and precarious belonging, for those moments of connection are also points of fracture, where home and roots are denied, replaced, and reset. If we were to retain cosmopolitanism as the promise of a better future, we need to confront the imperial intimacies across continents and oceans—as defined by love, loss, abandonment, betrayal, reconciliation, and hope—that scripted the life stories of transnational adoptees and learn to grapple with the haunting of empire.

Troubled origins and precarious belongings

In this sense, Don Lee’s Country of Origin can be read as a critical intervention in the exhausted narratives of immigration, assimilation, and postethnicity by turning our attention to the edges of empire to question the very categories by which identity and belonging are hosted. With a Korean American father who was a career State Department officer, Lee grew up as a military brat in Tokyo and Seoul and knows what it means to be living in the shadows of empires. Unlike the previous generation of Asian American writers whose heroes and heroines—such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s “woman warrior,” Frank Chin’s “Chinatown cowboy,” and John Okada’s “No-no boy”—claim resistance and an Asian identity in US racial, cultural, and political landscapes, Lee’s fiction shows what Nguyen (2005) calls “post-civil rights aesthetic,” in which “race or ethnicity is important but not always the primary issue, and the right to an American identity … is almost always taken for granted” (p. 190). Instead, Lee is more interested in exploring the artifice of identity and its transnational trajectories as a means to expose our racial unconscious, to place our alleged claims of loyalties on trial, and to reengage us with the foreclosed memories of American modernity. Hence, in the analysis below, I take a “biographical” approach to study Lee’s novel because the life histories sealed and veiled in mixed-race bodies hold the key to a new understanding of cosmopolitanism in relation to Asia. Biographies, in this approach, do not belong to individuals but are products of historical forces that can shed light on the troubled origins and precarious belongings of Asian cosmopolitanism. ⁶

Set in metropolitan Tokyo against the background of Iranian hostage crisis in 1980, an event that revealed America’s imperial nature, Country of Origin tells the story of an Afro-Asian American adoptee’s quest for origin. Structured like a detective fiction, rich in suspense and erotic scenes, the novel evolves around the twin searches of Lisa Countryman—with the aid of an interesting cast of other characters no less mixed, confused, and displaced—who took a deadly misstep in Tokyo for getting herself involved in the underground sex industry and the treacherous dealings of desire and profit between the United States and Japan. It begins with the disappearance of Lisa Countryman, who vanished into the darkness of Tokyo’s underworld, and proceeds with many twists and turns to reveal Lisa’s life story. By following Lisa’s search for origin across oceans, races, and complicated relations, we learn to reconsider Asian Americans as mixed-race, dispossessed subjects of the US empire and to recapture the nation’s postethnic, cosmopolitan image in the transnational sites of occupation, contestation, and abandonment.

It is not easy to define Lisa racially: her mother is from Japan, but her father’s black origin is never clear: “Creole and/or Bahamian and/or Mexican and/or German and/or Dutch” (Lee, 2004: 19). She is a “tragic mulatto” who can pass but never belong. When Lisa hit puberty, “Her Negroid and Asiatic features blended together and repudiated each other, fading both ethnic distinctions, and she became nice and light, almost white” (Lee, 2004: 19). But that only made life harder for her. She passes as Italian, Israeli, Hawaiian, French, and Native American, but she laments that “she was never black enough, or Oriental enough, or white enough” (Lee, 2004: 67), for her color insufficiency hints at the tendency to betray. Born in 1955, Lisa was adopted at the age of 4 by an African American soldier working for the Navy’s Military Sea Transportation Service in Yokohama, a key hub for shipping supplies to Korea and later to Vietnam. Growing up, Lisa moved with her adopted family from one base to another, switching between languages and countries. Yet, with each move, she felt “petrified” because as her skin tone grew lighter, she could no longer pass as black, as a legitimate member of her family. She was worried that she would be left behind at another orphanage, sent on another journey elsewhere. Her sister Susan exacerbated her fear by calling her “the illegitimate child of a Jap hooker” (Lee, 2004: 255–256). And her friends suspected her claim of racial solidarity as but an effort to “appropriate the radical-chic color of the month” (Lee, 2004: 67). Feeling ostracized, untrusted, and denied, Lisa is determined to search for her roots: “She wanted to recognize where she came from. She wanted to know who she was. She wanted to have a history” (Lee, 2004: 255).

Lisa is not alone with such desire to belong. Tom Hurley—another mixed-race character who works at the US Embassy in Tokyo and who happens to be assigned to the task of finding Lisa—also wanted badly to belong. Half-white and half-Korean, Tom, nonetheless, prefers to call himself Hawaiian—though he had only passed through there on vacation—because that is one place where “he hadn’t had to explain himself, where it had seemed possible to be both Asian and American at the same time” (p. 115). In fact, Tom’s father was a GI from South Boston and had been part of the occupation forces in Korea after World War II. Though Tom’s mother was working in a music store in Seoul where she met her husband, she was called by fellow GI wives in the base a “moose” (Lee, 2004: 125)—a derogatory term for Korean girls who married a GI—and suspected of having worked as a hooker in Itaewon, the notorious camptown in Seoul. ⁷ Worse yet, his mother was disowned her family when she had Tom, and his father divorced her 12 years later. Upon reflection, Tom realizes that it was his father who “had bullied him into adopting the nomadic life of a soldier, an infantryman, had warned him not to get too attached to anything or anyone” so that “he would never get hurt” (Lee, 2004: 163–164). As a mixed-race child raised by a dislocated single mother cut off from any family relations, Tom’s self-chosen “Hawaiian” identity is inscribed with an entangled history of US imperialism and Korean patriarchy, where romance and attachment are seared by sexism, racism, and postwar instability. Lisa’s and Tom’s births bespeak the “tense and tender ties” of empire that tore through local lives and contaminated the imagination of sex and migration. As Enloe (2000) puts it, “The ripple effects of militarized prostitution and militarized marriage do not halt at the gates of a military base” (p. 99). Lisa’s and Tom’s biographies vividly demonstrate how interracial intimacies have been gendered and militarized at the frontiers of empire, and their efforts to comprehend their origins suggest that belonging has less to do with claiming membership in a community than with knowing the history of that community and dealing with its legacy.

Questions of belonging also bother the Japanese American CIA agent, Vincent Kitamura (also known as David Saito). As an undercover agent whose job is to dine and wine and cajole with Japanese government officials to extract favors, profits, and political influence, Vincent’s “Japanese” identity is both a shortcut and a baggage. Mojo, the Japanese government official who wants to sleep with Lisa, once challenged him in Japanese: “You may be a sansei, but you’ll always be Japanese. Where are your loyalties? Are you someone I can trust?” (p. 201). It is a loaded question, as it signals not only the US–Japanese relations where giving and taking favors can in fact be done in the form of coercion but also the unpleasant memory of Japanese American internment. Vincent’s parents were in fact interned at Manzanar and his father joined the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and was killed in the attempt to rescue the Lost Battalion. His mother, struggling to find a means to survive, fell into deep depression after the war. This is a familiar Asian American story, and one that makes Lisa able to identify Vincent as a fellow traveler who feels rejected in both countries. As Vincent admits, though he is repulsed by racism in the United States, neither does he feel a visceral connection to Japan. Like Lisa and Tom, Vincent is also a cosmopolitan deprived of any roots. He can pass but never truly belong; he must fight to earn acceptance and trust, even at the expense of sacrificing Lisa for his political interest. Indeed, Lisa’s encounter with Vincent is part of the political game between the United States and Japan in which Lisa is used by Vincent as the bait to get to Mojo to extract trade benefits from Japan.

The disparate yet connected experiences of Lisa, Tom, and Vincent show that kinship is an illusion of belonging and identity. It is at once fabricated, denied, and transformed, a fiction that disguises and misguides. For Kenzo Ota, the quirky, sleepless Japanese detective whose wife divorced him for a white man, his family and country are sabotaged by US imperialism. While working on the case of Lisa Countryman, Kenzo discovered that his ex-wife Yumiko had returned to Tokyo with a 13-year-old son named Simon, who looks like him. He thought that Yumiko had taken Simon back because she wanted him to have fatherly guidance, to reconnect with his roots. But Simon, despite his Japanese look, is a typical American kid, and he is tired of people thinking that he is Japanese and irked by people trying to practice English with him when they find out that he is not. Kenzo wanted to put Simon on his koseki, family register, to provide him Japanese citizenship and a sense of belonging. However, much to Kenzo’s dismay, not only has Simon been so irrevocably Americanized that he has got no interest in Japanese culture, Simon is actually not his son, but a product of Yumiko’s affair with another man. In addition, Yumiko’s American husband has already agreed to adopt Simon. At the same time, Japan itself is becoming vastly transformed by American culture. “[The] ubiquity of American products was overwhelming,” Kenzo concludes, and the eikaiwa—English conversation—schools “were bastardizing the Japanese language into Japlish. It was an assault on all fronts, a coordinated campaign to corrupt the Japanese soul and enslave them with American values. It was another Occupation” (Lee, 2004: 131).

Kenzo’s observation, while comic, is a critical remark on America’s postwar presence in Japan. Although military occupation officially had ended in 1952, American influence became so entrenched in many aspects that Japan has lost its true color. As Iwabuchi (2008) contends, the self-Orientalizing nihonjinron literature—namely, the discourses on Japanese identity that culminated in the 1980s with the bloom of Japanese economy—help Japan define its distinctive characteristics against the West, but the advent of US-led globalization soon afterward has put Japan in “a more passive and less confident position” (p. 548), signaling the end of the economic boom. Indeed, the Japanese dependence on the United States has been an important concern in Japanese society, but little has been done to free Japan from that situation. As Kenzo’s comment suggests, the mixing of cultures—whether on the superficial level of consumption or on the level of linguistic and racial hybridization—is never an innocent business. It is a subliminal form of domination that haunts Japan’s subjectivity; the postwar cosmopolitan Japan, as depicted in the novel, is bound by its relationship with the United States. As the Iranian hostage crisis that lurks in the background of this novel implies, Japan, like the characters in it, are subjected to the state of hostage and political manipulation. The matter is not whether Simon—or Lisa, Tom, or Vincent—can ever find peace with their “American” identity, but that their identities always entail a much more complicated history than their skin color can bear. In upholding the dream of a multiracial America, Asian Americans are also complicit in the schemes of empire. As Vincent admits, in executing and facilitating America’s agendas abroad, he too is complicit in the death of Lisa Countryman. While kinship and nationality are still powerful metaphors of belonging, they do not carry much weight for transnational, displaced, “adopted” Asian Americans, for they have become pretexts of deception and complicity. Rather, the novel raises questions about what it means to belong and what it costs to stay loyal. The uncertainty of loyalty and the failure to belong in a fast globalizing world show the impossibility of understanding adoption without confronting the imperial history that enabled and forced interracial encounter in the first place. What Country of Origin brings to light is the gendered and militarized encounters that formed the darker side of cosmopolitan Asians.

Impossible return

What paths were traveled by the colonized children whose mothers’ bodies were unavailable to them, whose origins were as uncertain as their destinations? To what did they return? (Cho, 2007)

The highlight of the novel is of course the unveiling of Lisa’s country of origin. After Richard and Lenore Countryman died in a car accident, Lisa is literally left alone in the world with few strings attached anywhere. After some bitter quarrels with her sister Susan over the inheritance, Lisa came to Tokyo to find her roots. Although she speaks Japanese, being a foreigner, Lisa cannot access the koseki on which her origins are recorded. She hires a private detective to help her navigate through bureaucracy and obtain the documents she needs. Surprisingly, it turns out that although she was born in Japan, Lisa does not have a koseki. The only thing that bears any imprint of her origins is a joseki—a cancelled koseki—suggesting that her Japanese citizenship was rescinded. The cancelled family register has two critical implications: it could be a means to make Lisa an orphan ready for adoption, indexing the identity forgeries that adoption agencies have been accused of doing, and yet it could also mean that the initial registration was inaccurate, that Lisa is not Japanese. Born as an illegitimate child of mixed—especially black—blood in Japan, Lisa is doomed to be a social outcast. But she is doubly outcast because her mother is in fact not a Japanese, but a zainichi kankokujin—ethnic Koreans who had migrated to Japan after the annexation in 1910 and since resided there—a stigmatized identity that is best forgotten and never mentioned in Japan. As Lie (2008) indicates, the term zainichi kankokujin, literally translated as “resident Korean” in Japan, names an instable and complex postcolonial, diasporic identity that suggests “the conundrum of a population stubbornly struggling for recognition while being denied—and at times denying themselves—their place in Japanese society” (p. xi). It marks the national trauma of Korea’s colonization by Japan and its continuous division, as well as the limits of social and cultural assimilation in a putatively homogeneous Japanese society.

Born in Kawasaki and grew up in the resident Korean community, her mother Tomiko Higa is a second-tier enka singer who has long passed her prime. Like most resident Koreans, she passes as Japanese and has lived in Japan all her life. ⁸ She encountered Lisa’s father while working at the Navy base. Although she enjoys a career in singing, her zainichi identity remains an unspeakable stigma, a secret no one should bring up, so that people would not have to be reminded of Japan’s imperial past and confront the multiethnic reality of Japan. Thus, having her illegitimate, ainoko child revealed would destroy her life and enka career there. ⁹

Lisa came to Japan, hoping for a sweet reunion to heal herself from the pain of abandonment and to complete herself with knowledge of the past. However, as many adoptee stories have cautioned us, return journeys are no guarantees of salvation and complications abound in moments of reunion. As Yngvesson (2005) cogently summarizes:

Journeys “back” materialize a moment of abandonment by a return to the physical spaces (orphanages, foster homes, and courtrooms) in which this break was made concrete. They constitute a kind of “time travel” … that displaces “home” (even as homes are made through such journeys) and split the present with powerful memories from the past … Finally, they reveal the impossibility of ever being fully integrated, of having anything that … “constitutes both an outer and inner place where I belong.” (p. 36)

Indeed, against Lisa’s hope, Tomiko refuses to recognize Lisa as her daughter, thinking that she is sent by some paparazzi magazines to destroy her career. Lisa did not expect that her search for roots would turn out be an unexpected fall from grace, that her mother is not what she imagines her to be (for Lisa had assumed that her mother would be soft-spoken, humble, and kind), and that the visceral memories of displacement, discrimination, and denial were indeed engineered by a history of desertion and oppression, by the country that has both orphaned and adopted her. She found Korea to be her country of origin, but like Tomiko, she could not claim Korea home. For her origin lies in neither America, Japan, nor Korea, but in zainichi—postcolonial resident alien—an identity and history that is hinged on the desire and impossibility to return. ¹⁰ As Yngvesson suggests, Lisa’s return can only reenact the scene of abandonment. It shatters the idea of home as a warm, tangible entity and only invokes what Honig (2005) calls “phantom lives”—possible but unlived lives—that could in fact be worse than what she had. What is worse is that her mother refused to reveal who her birth father is, denying Lisa the last access to origin. Rather than making her complete, knowledge of the past in effect alienates her further from her roots. In the end, family, like race and nation, is but a fiction of belonging. Her origins, if once unspeakable and untraceable, must be reinvented:

Lisa looked up at the faces of her father and mother—she knew their names all of a sudden, Bobby and Miyako, sweet names for a couple in love—and Lisa thought of something Miyako had once told her. Growing up, Miyako had said, she had repeated a Korean adage to herself, one with which she had promised to live her life: chi, sun, min. Truth. Goodness. Beauty. As they passed under the Golden Gate Bridge, Lisa imagined what her mother must have been feeling right then, seeing the United States for the very first time. A land where all was possible, where truth prevailed, goodness was rewarded, and beauty could be found in the meeting of outcasts … We are orphans, all of us, she thought. And this is our home. (Lee, 2004: 315)

Like Tomiko who has “chosen” to be Japanese, Lisa—at once orphaned and adopted by America—must learn to adopt America, to envision America—as Emma Lazarus did before—as “mother of exiles” who would light up a lamp for the homeless and wretched refuse. And yet, the irony cannot be lost on us: this dream is Lisa’s final wish, her last and only means to reconcile with the stigma of origin, and her only and final comfort for a displaced life, for being a hostage to the past. As Trenka speaks from her own painful experience, “In this homelessness, then, maybe reconciliation is the best hope” (Dobbs, 2010). From Korea to Japan to America, Lisa’s tattered origins have crossed oceans and come full circle in Tokyo, where US military (even in a postoccupation era) not only seizes Japan’s land but also suspends its memories of empire, causing an amnesia that forced Tomiko and Lisa onto a second exile. ¹¹

Don Lee’s choice of Japan as the meeting place of Lisa’s origins is deliberate and suggestive. In 1853, the American “Black Ships” under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Uraga Harbor and forced Japan to open its door to the United States. However reluctantly, Japan ceded to the threat and began the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s, which turned Japan into a modern country and a colonial power. The first Korean diaspora was in this historical process caused by US and Japanese imperialisms in Asia. Almost a century later, while Meiji Edo was destroyed and replaced by war-torn Tokyo, Uraga Harbor became Yokosuka, which according to a Pentagon website, is now “America’s most important naval facility in the Western Pacific, and the largest, most strategically important overseas U.S. Naval installation in the world.” ¹² It is no surprise that Lisa Countryman should be born in Yokohama, a city next to Yokosuka, by an American soldier and a resident Korean woman. These illicit, stigmatic, and unspeakable origins of Lisa Countryman entail the imperial intimacies of the United States and Japan, an imperfect union that is marred by a history of racial hostility, atomic bombing, and nuclear radiation. Most crucially, this imperial intimacy covers up Japan’s imperialist aggression with a victim’s face and sets America up as a benevolent savior. As Briggs (2006) indicates, “adoption not only echoes but reinforces the broader cultural management of representing U.S. military and economic policy—the symbolic ‘rescue’ of national policy becomes the literal raising of ‘third world’ children by U.S. families” (p. 361). In the troubled origins of Lisa Countryman runs the morality play of American empire engendering and silencing the specter of the Korean diaspora. ¹³

The life story of Lisa Countryman shores up two layers of irony: on one level, despite her college debt, Lisa fits the superficial descriptions of a globetrotting cosmopolitan, but her cosmopolitan mobility sadly derives from a diasporic trajectory of abandonment and race-mixing. On another level, while Lisa was saved by America, her life in America is far from happy and complete. She cannot help but feel the denial and absence of origin, and yet there is no way to rectify and fill it except by facing what caused it. In other words, what is missing in her life is what is haunting her as a lonely, rootless Asian American. Celebration of multiraciality thrives in the forgetting of the sexualized and militarized contexts of empire; and the comfort of humanitarian benevolence provided by adoption is gained at the expense of mixed-race adoptees who must live with traumatic separation and stigmatization. If Van der Veer (2002) is correct to argue that “Cosmopolitanism is the engagement with the other in the colonial context” (p. 178), what is left of cosmopolitanism? Is it possible to redeem it? How should we understand the tattered origins of cosmopolitan Asia as embodied by transnational adoptees?

Conclusion: toward reflexive cosmopolitanism

Let me return to Trenka’s memoir with which I begin this article. One of the problems Trenka experienced as an adoptee returning to Korea is that in spite of her Korean outlook, her Americanness is easily identifiable and positively viewed as an asset, for transnational adoptees, as Kim (2010) points out, are regarded as Korea’s bridge to the world, a marquee of Korea’s globalization (segyehwa) project. Against her wish to blend in, to be welcomed as part of the family, and to heal the pain of abandonment and separation, Trenka (2009) finds that to her surprise, adoptees—especially mixed-race adoptee with a white parent like movie star Daniel Henney—are considered a transnational, cosmopolitan Korean, “upgraded,” “new and improved” (p. 96), who “habitually drinks wine, eats cheese, sleeps in a bed, and speaks English” (p. 99). Such is the seduction of whiteness and empire, Trenka observes, and adoptees like her are complicit in this cosmopolitan dream.

In postcolonial East Asia, such stories are commonplace. “Asian Americans,” adopted or not, have constituted the horizon of our cosmopolitan imagination. Being cosmopolitan means international travel, five-star hotel, and speaking English, the “actually existing cosmopolitanism” that Calhoun (2002) critiques, and these images are daily reinforced by the products which Asian Americans and Western-educated elites endorse. Such “banal cosmopolitanism” as Ulrich Beck (2006) calls it, is part and parcel of the cosmopolitan reality in postcolonial Asia. It serves as an indication of Asia’s progress in modernity and provides a goal that Asians strive to achieve through overseas education and immigration. As Trenka (2009) recounts, when she told her students in Korea that she went to school in America, they all exasperated, thinking that she must be rich and powerful and someone they would like to be (p. 98). In other words, seeing through the body of transnational Asian Americans, cosmopolitan imagination in Asia is loaded with imperial and global capitalist baggage. If cosmopolitanism is just another term for westernization in Asia, as Mignolo (2011) criticizes, then we as intellectual must not only seek dewesternizing, decolonial options but also confront our own embeddedness in it. If our cosmopolitanism is inevitably bound up with an imagination of the developed West as the epitome of modernity and good life, our reflection has to begin with the tense and tender ties of empire that have installed such cosmopolitan visions in us in the first place. As Mendieta (2009) contends, a critical, reflexive cosmopolitanism must “entail a self-critique of one’s prejudices, as well as a confession and disclosure of one’s own epistemic standpoint” (p. 250). It is for this precise reason why the adoptee is important for our reflection of cosmopolitanism in Asia, for they provide the local histories produced in and against the global designs of imperialism and capitalism with which Asian societies continue to engage—through learning, questioning, and critiquing—our modern/colonial beginnings and becomings.

What Country of Origin offers is a critical and reflexive look at such beginnings and becomings of Asia. It tells us that cosmopolitanism is not merely a noble ideal out there, but more importantly an everyday challenge right here, in the face and heart of Asian modernity. Viewed in these contexts, Asia is not a geo-cultural locus of primordial and uncontested identity and belonging, but a significant point of departure from which worldly relations, encompassed by such terms of cosmopolitanism, have been inscribed in our own becoming. Yet, knowing this history does not mean that we must resist comopolitanism’s utopic potential as imperialist or that we must seek alternative versions that are intrinsically “Asian.” Rather, it means that we must confront the “West in us” as our dirty and messy ground zero, for it is how our cosmopolitanism is lived and where it must be overcome. ¹⁴