About the Book
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 Sjöblom, 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, Sjöblom learned to bury the feeling of abandonment.
In Palimpsest, an emotionally charged memoir, Sjöblom's 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 she's been told her whole life: that she was an orphan without a background.
As Sjöblom 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.
About the Author :
Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom is an illustrator, a cartoonist, and a graphic designer living in Auckland, New Zealand, with her partner and two children. She has a master's degree in literature from Södertörn University and has studied at the Comic Art School in Malmö. Palimpsest is her first graphic novel. She is an adoptee rights activist.
Review :
"Beautiful... Palimpsest: Documents from a Korean Adoption by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, 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
"With help from her husband and a Korean-raised friend, she begins an investigation into her origins that reveals the dark history of foreign adoption....The participating institutions, meanwhile, do their best to dismiss, obfuscate, and gaslight Sjöblom as she investigates. An unflinching indictment of foreign adoption."--Publishers Weekly
"Palimpsest paints an intergenerational umbilical cord whose cutting we mourn throughout our lives."--Mutha Magazine
"A powerful and political read telling a much-needed tale of the adoption experience. It shows the vivid emotions that are universal among adoptees seeking to learn more about their lives while facing stark bureaucracy."--Blogcritics
"While anyone interested in adoption should appreciate the memoir, it is particularly revealing of the abuses of the transnational adoption system that not only obscured her history when she was a child, but continued to resist her attempts to find the truth as an adult."--Popmatters
"Palimpsest is as much a detailed and convincing argument for change as it is a personal testament of self."--Comics Beat
"Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom has quietly conveyed the maddening, meandering path that a transracial, immigrant adoptee must take in order to discover her own history. She detangles lies, bureaucracy, and the unwillingness of others, even as she unravels questions of her own identity: what does it mean to be a mother? To be Swedish? To be Korean? As an American child of Korean immigrants, I found familiarity in her search for solid footing within herself, amid complicated notions of race, cultural heritage, and nationality, and I was devastated to learn hard truths about international adoption and the adoptee experience within the Korean diaspora. Palimpsest is an honest, and sometimes painful, record of Sjöblom's experience, as well as an important document and guide for others in search of their own story."
--Hellen Jo, cartoonist, and translator of Uncomfortably Happily
"Sjöblom's beautifully crafted graphic novel about being a transnational adoptee of color in Sweden is not just pioneering but also functions as a powerful reparative act. Palimpsest highlights previously subjugated and silenced experiences that might appear to be uncomfortable but nonetheless have to be told to accomplish truth and reconciliation for all partners involved in adoption. Through Palimpsest, Sjöblom helps to break the taboo in Sweden surrounding the all-too-numerous corrupt adoptions."
--Tobias Hübinette, PhD in Korean studies and a critical race studies researcher, Karlstad University
"Sjöblom offers a searing first person account of her journey. Thoughtfully told and beautifully illustrated, her memoir is sure to resonate with many readers. Palimpsest provides an important voice."
--Elizabeth Raleigh, author of Selling Transracial Adoption: Families, Markets, and the Color Line
"Ms. Sjöblom's story is her own, yet it represents the many adoptees who discover their documents have been falsified, destroyed in a fire/flood, or simply made up by social workers to create a more adoptable baby--transforming Wool-Rim into case #79-167 into Lisa. Through the opening lens of giving birth to her own children, Ms. Sjöblom documents her relentless search for her birth family despite being told repeatedly that they cannot be found. This is a story about searching and finding, yearning, but never really reuniting."
-Oh Myo Kim, PhD, Assistant Professor of Practice, Counseling, Developmental &
Educational Psychology, Boston College
"Palimpsest is not only a dramatic and riveting story of a Korean adoptee's search for her origins. It is also a window onto the abuses that are all too common in transnational adoption, and too often glossed over as insignificant. Through beautiful images and compelling prose, Sjöblom captures how adoption entails the systematic erasure and rewriting of names, relations, and cultural belonging, and thereby brings into powerful focus the indelible psychic traces that remain."
-Eleana Kim, author of Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging
"Palimpsest is a beautifully rendered and emotionally gripping graphic novel that underlines the multitudes of losses transnational adoptees experience. In telling her story, Sjöblom illustrates the violence adoptees experience as a result of being denied access to their own histories. Palimpsest artfully captures the personal struggles of transnational adoptee birth searches, as well as the inequities and injustices embedded within the history of the international adoption industry."
--Kim Park Nelson, author of Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism
