Interpreting some Korean American poets like Sun Yung Shin, Lee Herrick, and Jennifer Kwon Dobbs through the lens of dialogism provides readers with original insights into the ongoing process of Korean adoptees’ dilemma. It is arguably impossible to homogenize Korean adoptees into a single experience, but poetries of aforementioned contemporary Korean–American writers articulate Korean adoptees’ dialogic reconciliation with their birth parents who would abandon or relinquish them for various reasons decades ago. To reconnect their adoptive lives to their home country from a critical dialogic perspective, the path of their lives is classified into four stages in this paper: pre–adoption, post-adoption, return journey, and dialogic interconnections. Unlike conventional narratives of adoptees in which the speaker’ intention is to search for and shape some authentic identities, the speakers of the three poets’ poems attempt to achieve the dialogic communion with their two woven countries while reaching the fourth stage. Authentic identities may make them feel alienated from the two countries, whereupon they break through an exclusive division between their adoptive country and home country and facilitate a dialogic penetration into unreachable conceptual limits. In the poetic texts, on the basis of tearing down the solid wall of rupture, the speakers create dialogic spaces in which adoptees living in the US imagine and reconcile with birth parents living in the home country.
1. The First Stage: Pre–Adoption
2. The Second Stage: Post–Adoption
3. The Third Stage: Return Journe
4. The Fourth Stage: Dialogic Interconnections