Jenny Heijun Wills shares her journey of transracial adoption and self-discovery in moving essay collection

In 2019, Jenny Heijun Wills wrote the memoir Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related about her experience reuniting with her biological family in Korea. 

That same year, it won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and appeared on many best book of the year lists. 

Now she’s back with an essay collection called Everything and Nothing At All, also nominated for the Weston Prize, that further explores kinship and identity and continues her understanding of what it means to be an adoptee. 

“Jenny’s work is unlike anything I’ve ever read before,” said Mattea Roach on Bookends, when the two sat down for a conversation.

“I’ve seen memoirs and literature written by East Asians living in diaspora and I’ve read books about adoption by white North American authors, but never anything about the experiences of transnational adoptees.”

In Everything and Nothing At All, Wills draws upon her life experience and research to create a vision of family — chosen, adopted and biological all at once.

She joined Roach to discuss the collection and how writing helped her feel comfortable in her fragmented identity.

Mattea Roach: Can you tell us a little bit about the history of transnational adoption from Korea? 

Jenny Heijun Wills: Transnational adoption, which as you say, is largely transracial adoption as well, is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, program of institutionalized overseas adoption in the history of the world. 

Beyond Europe and North America, Korean adoptees also find themselves in Australia and all over the world, really. It began following or in conjunction with the U.S. war in Korea and a combination of both post-war poverty — but also, what would at the time be called war orphans or youths who had either been orphaned because of the war or who had been born because of American military presence in South Korea. 

South Korea, like many countries, including our country of so-called Canada today, is extremely supremacist in the ways it thinks about race and ethnicity. Biracial children were not acceptable at that time. So many of these youths were placed in orphanages. There was a call, rather a demand, for U.S. Americans to take responsibility for the biracial children left behind: it initiated this program of overseas adoption that, as I write about in Everything and Nothing at All, still persists.

This is despite the fact that South Korea is an extremely wealthy nation — and the fact that it has a lot of anxiety about low birth rates and population decline at this time. So this narrative of transnational adoption being a relief program is quite farcical in a lot of ways.

MR: What was it like to meet your Korean mother for the first time?

JHW: It was incredibly emotionally intense to the point of almost paralysis. There were so many people watching. It’s such a curated spectacle because first of all, there’s the linguistic sort of obstacles to overcome. And so translators have to be brought in. Social workers are there. There are spectators in ways that are quite shocking, so it was emotional, but it also didn’t feel safe to exhale in those emotions. I think the memoir was an opportunity to actually feel some of those things.

The memoir was an opportunity to actually feel some of those things.– Jenny Heijun Wills

This is why, these documentaries or these talk shows that document adopted individuals or kin separated for whatever reason reuniting is quite troubling for a lot of people to witness. It does turn something that’s quite personal and quite emotionally weighted into kind of a carnival-esque situation.

MR: I want to ask about the title of the new book Everything and Nothing at All, because it’s such a beautiful and poetic title to me. What does that phrase mean to you? 

JHW: The title came to me because I was doing an interview with a literary journal in the U.S. about the memoir. It was an adopted individual who was interviewing me. So I think that people in those contexts ask different questions, of course, and this individual was asking, “What does family mean to you? What does blood mean to you? What does story mean to you?” 

I felt repetitive, because to preface every answer I was saying, “It means everything, but it also means nothing at all.” And this book is a reckoning with the idea that things can be both: things can be nothing, things can be everything, really. And that is the identity that one could possibly carve out for themselves. 

MR: Do you feel that, in writing your own work, has that been a process of agency reclamation for you at all?

JHW: It’s adjacent to that experience. Creative writing has revealed to me that you don’t have to have a singular narrative: you don’t have to have a consistent character, that there are ways to live fluidly and to construct a version of yourself that doesn’t necessarily cow to these kinds of expectations that preexist us. 

Writing has been such a pleasure to me in many ways, but I also wonder — and this is something I’m thinking through in a project that I’m working on right now — how much writing is a mask for a lot of things too. But I definitely think that writing has freed me from thinking that I needed to define myself in one way or in a consistent way.

Writing has freed me from thinking that I needed to define myself in one way or in a consistent way.– Jenny Heijun Wills

People talk about life writing as a narrative or as a genre of truth-telling. I like to think of it as the genre of not lying: as an adopted individual, my birth date has changed, my location of birth has changed. The narrative of my coming into the world has changed so many times.

Part of me thinks that adopted individuals or maybe people who have flexible identities in these ways are the perfect people to be challenging our expectations of literary genres such as nonfiction — because nonfiction doesn’t have to have those kinds of strict boundaries on it.

When there’s an individual who’s like, “I don’t know when my birthday is today. It might be different tomorrow and it might be a different day like next year,” it invites us to say, “Well, why do we expect that of this genre?”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Lisa Mathews.

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