In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee
Directed by Deann Borshay Liem. 2010. 63 minutes. In English.

Study areas: Korea, adoption, identity, Korean war, race.

In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee chronicles the unusual search for an adoptee’s ghostly double. Deann Borshay Liem, whose Korean name is Kang Ok Jin, was adopted by the Borshay family in 1966 under the name of Cha Jung Hee. Before she left Korea to join her new family, the orphanage director told her not to reveal that she was actually Kang Ok Jin and not Cha Jung Hee. When Deann had learned enough English, however, she told her adoptive mother that she was not Cha Jung Hee and that she remembered her mother taking her to an orphanage. Her adoptive mother responded that her Korean mother had died while giving birth to her and that her father had been killed during the Korean War. Deann was a war orphan. And so, as Deann became increasingly immersed in her new life, new culture, and new family in America, her memory of Korea, her language, and her identity slowly evaporated.

Then, one day, she discovered two different photographs, both of which were identified as Cha Jung Hee in the back. One photo was of her and the other was not. When she saw these two photos, she immediately knew that the other girl was Cha Jung Hee. She put this out of her mind until she found her birth family and received a letter from her older brother, Ho-Jin, who was still in Korea. He told her of long lost memories of her mother, five brothers and sisters, and herself as Kang Ok Jin, a girl of whom she had no memory. Distressed and shaken, Deann became obsessed with childhood images from home videos to capture the exact moment when she – Kang Ok Jin, later known as Cha Jung Hee – disappeared into Deann Borshay, the newly adopted daughter. She felt that if she were somehow been able to identify this moment, she perhaps could have retrieved her lost memories before they disappeared. Her longing for her identity did not cease, even after her discovery of her “real” identity as Kang Ok Jin. Rather, Deann could find “no proof that I was not who I was.” In all of her adoption records, she was an orphan named Cha Jung Hee. Her driver’s license and passport have Cha Jung Hee’s birth date, not her own. This orphan identity carried her forward to the United States and continues to surface in her present life. To put this ‘ghostly double’ to rest, Deann decided to search for Cha Jung Hee.

Deann’s search for Cha Jung Hee begins with a visit to Sungduk orphanage, the orphanage where both Cha Jung Hee and Kang Ok Jin’s lives must have briefly intersected. Before the adoption, Deann’s adoptive parents participated in a Foster Parents program through which they sent a monthly donation and gifts to an orphan, Cha Jung Hee, and, in return, received thank you cards and letters written by a social worker at the orphanage on behalf of Cha Jung Hee. Unbeknownst to the social workers and the staff, Cha Jung Hee’s father came and took her away from the orphanage. A couple of months after this, the Borshays expressed interest in adopting Cha Jung Hee. A social worker firmly believed that another child could use this opportunity to better her life and so she put another child (Kang Ok Jin) in Cha Jung Hee’s place and sent her away. At this point, Deann has only been able to discover bits about Cha Jung Hee’s past and nothing yet about her present life.
In detailing the process of searching for and actually meeting with several Cha Jung Hees, the film shifts its focus from identifying the true Cha Jung Hee to forging connections with working class Korean women and Korean adoptees. The film portrays the lives of all the Cha Jung Hees – who all appear to have come from economically modest backgrounds – with a sense of empathy and affiliation rather than of estrangement and distance. Her empathic engagement continues to create a sense of belonging as she observes a gathering of sixty Swedish adoptees in Seoul, Korea. She says, “Not only I could have been Cha Jung Hee, but I could have been Swedish.” With Deann’s acknowledgment of both of these possible identities as lives that could have been hers, the film beautifully yet incisively points to the proximity between working-class Korean nationals and Korean adoptees, as well as a sense of randomness that is inherent in transnational adoption. By making the associations between these two remote seeming identities Deann furthers suggests a sense of solidarity. 

Another narrative of this film presents the historical genesis of transnational adoption practice during the Korean war and its continuous existence thereafter. By employing old newsreel images of the Korean war and enumerating the war’s massive collateral damage and civilian casualties, including hundreds thousands of orphans, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee presents a critical analysis of how what was once an emergency war relief program became a global business and asks the viewer to consider this transition in the context of working class women’s realities and life struggles. By juxtaposing the life stories of her birth mother, Chun Kil Soon, with South Korea’s troubled history, rooted as it is in Japanese colonialism, the Korean war, its subsequent division, and U.S. domination of the South, the film places birth mothers’ decisions to give up their children in the context of severe lifelong struggles. Thus, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee broadens its scope of analysis from personal quests for identity to a consideration of a historical and political framework in order to provide a deeper understanding of transnational adoption practice from the standpoint of the sending region.

The film ends with Deann meeting Cha Jung Hee. This Cha Jung Hee did pass through Sungduk orphanage, but the other details of her life story do not match with the information that Deann has. Nevertheless, this Cha Jung Hee seems to be the right person, and Deann tries to return the shoes that Kang Ok Jin was wearing when she entered a new phase of her life in the Borshay family, carrying with her the fictive past of Cha Jung Hee. “I have had a happy life here,” says Cha Jung Hee, who refused to take the shoes and acknowledged the difficulties that Deann as a child must have experienced in adjusting to a new culture, new people, and a new language.

Her search for Cha Jung Hee concludes with the critical realization that Cha Jung Hee can be viewed as “a template of a perfect orphan.” It no longer matters who the real Cha Jung Hee was. As long as such a template exists, as narrated in the film by Deann, anyone can fill it. In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee challenges the popular myth of the Korean war orphan and simultaneously engages with the unending legacies of the Korean war through imagery associated with transnational adoption.

Hosu Kim is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.  Her research interests include media theories, feminist methodologies, critical Korean studies, and cultural Studies.  She is currently working on a book manuscript, Virtual Mothering: Birthmothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea. Against an emergent figure of the birthmother in search and reunion narrative, she treads upon the Internet, television, and interviews via which to engage the terrains of virtual mothering with a critical cultural and feminist analysis.

 

 

 

Last Updated: February 24, 2014