Fugitive Visions

A POWERFUL SECOND MEMOIR FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE ACCLAIMED BOOK


At thirty-six years old I am the mother of no one, the ex-wife of a New Yorker, an ex-Korean possessing Korean language skills inferior to those of my nephew, a two-year-old Korean boy being raised by Korean parents. I am functionally illiterate, deaf, and mute in what should have been my native language in my native country.

Whenever she speaks to a stranger in her native Korea, Jane Jeong Trenka is forced to explain what she is. Japanese? Chinese? The answer—that she was adopted from Korea as a baby and grew up in the United States—is a source of grief, pride, and confusion.

Trenka’s award-winning first book, The Language of Blood, told the story of her upbringing in a white family in rural Minnesota. Now, in this searching and provocative memoir, Trenka explores a new question: Can she make an adult life for herself in Korea? Despite numerous setbacks, Trenka resolves to learn the language and ways of her unfamiliar birth country. In navigating the myriad contradictions that have made up her life, Trenka turns to the lessons from her past—in particular, the concepts of dissonance and harmony learned over her years as a musician. In Fugitive Visions, Trenka has succeeded in braiding the disparate elements of her life into a recognizable, and at times heartbreaking, whole.

“A ground-breaking repatriation of overseas adopted voice from within Seoul’s dizzying center, Fugitive Visions rewrites myths of homecoming from both sides of the Pacific through a lyrical and perceptive music of love, community, family, and international politics. This is a visionary narrative that charts forbidden, fragmented geographies of desire where Jeong Trenka's uncanny ability to name the flux sliding among bodies, borders, and languages strikes perfect pitch. With such mastery, readers will find that her second book powerfully reveals the global ironies affecting their most difficult questions about home.”

“Trenka’s fugitive visions are elusive, peripatetic, and disjunctive, and demand new ways of seeing, hearing, and knowing, but they are also generous, compassionate, and ironic, rewarding us with moving evocations of the adversities and absurdities that confront people out of joint and out of place in the contemporary global moment.”