Palimpsest: Documents From a Korean Adoption [Paperback]

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 Sj?blom, 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, Sj?blom learned to bury the feeling of abandonment.

In Palimpsest, an emotionally charged memoir, Sj?bloms 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 shes been told her whole life: that she was an orphan without a background.

As Sj?blom 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.

Sj?bloms beautiful autumnal tones and clear-line style belie the complicated nature of this graphic memoirs vital central question: Who owns the story of an adoption?Beautiful& Palimpsest: Documents from a Korean Adoption by Lisa Wool-Rim Sj?blom, in which the author, who now lives in New Zealand, tells the story of the search for her birth parents.Guardian Best of 2019

This powerful graphic novel explores the boom of adoptions of children of South Korean children during the 1970s and 1980s.Ms. Magazine

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