Author(s): Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom

Graphic Novel | Sweden | Korea | Biography and Memoir

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 blom'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 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 blom's beautiful autumnal tones and clear-line style belie the complicated nature of this graphic memoir's vital central question: Who owns the story of an adoption?

Review:

"Beautiful... Palimpsest: Documents from a Korean Adoption by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjoeblom, 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 Sjoeblom 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