Resilience
Directed by Tammy Chu. 2010. 75 minutes. English and Korean.

Study Areas: adoption, Korea, birth family, search and reunion.

Resilience is a documentary film about the reunion and subsequent relationship between Brent Beesley, a Korean-born adoptee, and Noh Myung-Ja, his Korean mother. As an adopted child growing up in South Dakota, Brent had occasionally wondered, “What if I lived in South Korea with my biological family?” but never felt a particularly strong drive to search for his Korean family. It was not until much later, sparked by his daughter’s congenital heart condition, that Brent began searching for the answers to the question: “Why was I adopted?” Brent searched for four or five years without yielding any results, but was then connected to Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link, a Korean adoptee organization based in Seoul, Korea. This organization helped him to locate his birth mother, and a few months after finding her, Brent set off for Korea for the first time since he left as a child. His reunion with his birth mother was arranged by “Beautiful Pardon,” a family search show produced by KBS, a major South Korean broadcasting company. It was through this televised reunion show that Brent learned of the circumstances surrounding his adoption and was able to meet his birth mother, Myung-Ja.

Examining the development of the ensuing relationship between Brent and Myung-Ja over the next four years, Resilience fleshes out the life stories and experiences of both parties and their reflections on the reunion and afterwards. It turns out that Myung-Ja was not involved in the decision to give Sungwook (Brent’s given name) up for adoption at all. Estranged from her husband due to his gambling addiction and neglect, Myung-Ja left Sungwook with her father while she searched for work. When she returned, she found that her family had placed her child up for adoption. Without access to any information about where he had been placed, Myung-Ja lived under the assumption that he had been adopted to a wealthy family in Korea. In recollecting that period after separation, Myung-Ja cried and said, “There was no reason for me to live. I lived recklessly because I did not really want to live.”

After presenting Brent’s adoption and reunion story, Resilience gingerly examines the obstacles, such as cultural differences, language barriers and geographical distance, and the rifts that arise as a result of adoption. After their reunion, Myung-Ja said, “I don’t know anything about him. What he likes and what he dislikes ....” The reunion does bring some degree of closure to Myung-Ja’s pain and provides some answers for Brent, yet it introduces a sense of distance and awkwardness despite their mutual desire to get to know each other. The film deliberately illustrates those moments, most vividly in the halting and fragmented dialogue that occurs between Myung-Ja and Brent. Brent expresses his frustration with the language barrier when reflecting on his visits and time with his birth family in South Korea: “Every moment is precious. But ... it just seems like that we are not getting to know each other. That’s the hardest part.”

The film presents a mosaic of Brent’s life, combining Brent’s childhood pictures and testimony by a childhood friend with interviews of Brent, which is in turn juxtaposed with Myungja’s life struggles that resonate with guilt, pain, and regret as a result of her separation from Brent. Another visual cue maintained throughout the film is a striking similarity between Brent’s life in the U.S. as a single father of two daughters and Myung-Ja’s life as a single mother raising her child in South Korea. This visual narrative complements the memories and experiences of the birth mother and the adoptee that they cannot share with and for each other through language.  But more importantly, it offers a vista of connections between Myung-Ja and Brent, surpassing their biological relationship as a birthmother and her biological son so as to forge a new relationship that goes beyond the biological.

Before Brent returned to the U.S., Myung-Ja tells Brent that she would do anything for him. The film then cuts to her participating in a street campaign against international adoption. Once she realized that international adoption did not affect just her but in fact has had an impact on hundreds and thousands of Korean children over a span of almost sixty years, she became a strong advocate for single mothers. Myung-Ja reflects, “I am very happy to have met Sungwook... but in the back of my mind, I cannot forget that for the past thirty years, I was not his mother. ... The pain from such loss will be with me for the rest of my life.” In order to ensure that other women do not experience similar wounds of separation and unresolved grief, Myung-Janow volunteers at maternity homes where young, single pregnant women decide whether to raise their babies or to send them away. In addition, she has a leading role in organizing birth mothers in South Korea and formed a birth mother organization called min-dul-le (Dandelion) in 2007.

With a compelling and provocative narrative, Resilience sheds light upon what transnational adoption discourse often glosses over: the birthmother’s experience, the complex dimensions of loss, and the painful aspects of transnational adoption that accumulate over time. Throughout, the film offers a variety of discussion points relevant to themes such as race and identity; gender, mothering, and kinship in Korean society; birth family search and reunion; and post-reunion challenges. A discussion kit (available at 7thart.com/films/resilience) enables this film to be used in courses on family, motherhood, adoption, gender, modern Asian societies, ethnicity, and immigration. This film is an invaluable resource for students and for the general audience who are curious about the global processes and politics of transnational adoption practices. 

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