A Single Square Picture is Katy Robinson’s attempt at teasing out tendrils of truth from the tangled yarns of faded memories of her Korean mother whom she had known as her only mother until the age of seven. The book represents what thousands of adoptees already known or will eventually come to realize about their lives: there is always a story behind the story of their origins. It is usually a constructed tale meant to replace the slow disintegration of ties to a time, place and people prior to their separation from them. Although Robinson tells her story with clarity and care, and has confronted identity issues now generally accepted and deconstructed by international, especially transracial, adoptees, by the end of the book it is unmistakable that she chooses to remain the dutiful daughter to both her first family and her second family, despite the widening gaps in truthfulness about why she was adopted and the deception involved in covering up her mother’s fate.
Robinson’s constant second guessing of her need, and right, to know what became of her mother proved to be frustrating to me throughout the duration of the book. She is clearly conflicted about pushing the issue with her extended Korean family that simply wanted to purge any memory of her father’s infidelities from its mind. Her father had been married to another woman when he had an affair with Robinson’s mother. He divorced the first wife and subsequently remarried. His relationships with these women produced five children. In fact, Robinson’s half-brother, the eldest son of their father’s first marriage, provides some background to the mystery shrouding their mutual father. This half-brother appears to be the most sympathetic among the author’s half-siblings with her quest to know more about the fate of her mother. In spite of the attempts to establish a strong sense of sibling comradery, he too engages in shameless subterfuge when one day he invites her to a restaurant for dinner and then later on nonchalantly tells Robinson the bad news about her mother having died in a car crash. No police report, no obituary, no burial mound. To her credit, Robinson does not totally believe this obviously concocted story which is meant to silence her inquiries into her mother’s past and convey the message that because of her prying into her father’s dalliances her extended family is now obliged to save face.
However, it is vexing when Robinson awards forgiveness to the very captors of the keys to her mother’s story, which could offer tangible reasons for her relinquishment for adoption in the first place. The following is her judgment on the social worker’s behavior toward her at the Korean Social Services office after this person rejects Robinson’s tearful plea to look through her own file in order to seek some trace of her mother:
She was keeping an old promise to my mother, all the while trying to protect my feelings as best she could. No matter how much I begged her for the truth, she would never tell me that my mother did not want to see me. In her view, it was better to answer with silence or lies. Even better, if she could somehow convince me to stop looking.
Maybe it was time to give up the search. Who was to say my quest for the truth and the past was more important than my mother’s honor? My mother was alive, but I would never meet
her again.
I attempted to come to peace with that stark reality.
Advocates for open records and transparency within the machinations of the adoption industry would surely point to the imbalance created by those people who are sources of information and choose not to divulge what they know about a person’s first parents. Robinson put so much faith in shared humanity and came to the table fully expecting someone in Korea to put to rest any doubts as to her mother and grandmother’s whereabouts. Despite the desire to piece together a past she is slowly recalling, Robinson tends to take into account the feelings and wishes of the stonewallers to her rightful inheritance more than she does her own burning desire to know what became of her two closest Korean relatives, her mother and grandmother. It is sad to know that Robinson’s memories and dreams will not allow her to forget them, yet she places herself in a position of weakness in relation to the gate keepers of her relatives’ information in which she can only react to the forces rising against her.
The author’s helplessness becomes that much more unfortunate because it didn’t need to be that way if she had been insistent about her unqualified right to obtain and own all information that pertained to her life. Of course, every adoptee who searches will go about it differently and will not necessarily have even similar reactions to a variety of scenarios that may or may not lead to a reunion between blood relatives separated for so long by distance, time, language and culture. A reunion also does not necessarily bring closure to an adoptee’s fractured Self, or entail any kind of epiphany or even end an adoptee’s sense of longing for something that’s missing in her life. Since first parent searches and reunions can be highly complicated and risky for all sides involved, a popular recrimination is usually ushered in by the general public who wishes adoptees, nor matter how old they are, would just sit down and accept their lives (and the lies!) they were given and refrain from uncovering any inconvenient facts from the past that would place themselves within a socio-political and historical context. In an attempt to infantilize and disempower adopted persons, the mainstream adoption community continually suggests that adoptees will not have the mental capacity, nor the emotional maturity, to comprehend and deal with the complex reasons why their first parents relinquished them and their second parents were given the privilege of adopting them.
Predictably, the hammer of paternalism rises above adoptees’ heads in search of any nails that dare protrude from the dry lumber of the status quo. Due to this induced fear, adopted persons usually end up asking, “What is in the best of interests of everyone else?”, instead of switching around the equation and asking, “What is in my best interests in the long run?” In the case of Katy Robinson, she seems unable, or unwilling, to go the distance to finally collect all the pieces of the puzzle that made up that one single square picture showing herself with her mother and grandmother at Kimpo Airport moments before she is to board a plane and step into a life that no longer resembls her Korean one. She basically acquiesces and settles for glaring uncertainty. The reader is forced to wonder about her reasons for letting the clock wind down on her search for that brief, but integral, part of her life. Was it out of deference to her Korean relatives who continually implied the distastefulness of picking at the grave of a woman who only brought shame upon their family? Or was Robinson attempting to restore and maintain her sanity in the face of repeated dead ends and attempts by well-meaning strangers to misdirect her? Or was she truly convinced that she was not worthy of the ugly, even benign, truth about her mother, no matter in which form it came?
What seemed clear at the end of the memoir was that Robinson tries to tie up the loose ends of her years of yearning and one year of actually searching for her mother by coming to terms with the fact that her past remains a mystery, but her present life is a blessing. For now, at least.
Posted by Kev Minh 
Posted by Kev Minh 
Posted by Kev Minh 
