Jane Jeong Trenka was born in Seoul, Korea. In 1972, Trenka and her sister were adopted into a white family in rural northern Minnesota. In 2004, she returned to live in Korea where she became an activist for standard and transparent adoption practices to protect the human rights of adult adoptees, children, and families. She reunited with her birth family in Korea in 1995.
She has written and/or collaborated on the following three books:
Fugitive Visions
Outsiders Within
The Language of Blood
"My name is Jeong Kyong-Ah. My ancestry includes landowners, scholars, and government officials. I have six siblings. I am a citizen of the Republic of Korea. I come from a land of pear fields and streams, where people laugh loudly and honor their dead. Halfway around the world, I am someone else."
Jane Jeong Trenka and her sister Carol were adopted by Frederick and Margaret Brauer and raised in the small, homogeneous town of Harlow, Minnesota—a place “where the sky touches the earth in uninterrupted horizon . . . where stoicism is stamped into the bones of each generation.” They were loved as American children without a past.
With inventive and radiant prose that includes real and imagined letters, a fairy tale, a one-act play, crossword puzzles, and child-welfare manuals, Trenka recounts a childhood of insecurity, a battle with a stalker that escalates to a plot for her murder, and an extraordinary trip to Seoul to meet her birth mother and siblings. Lost between two cultures for the majority of her life, it is in Korea that she begins to understand her past and the power of the unspoken language of blood.
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Book Review by Thea Brown
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