""Essays from a Korean American adoptee about personal and natural disasters, transnational and transracial adoption, pop culture, anxiety, motherhood, and AAPI hate"-Provided by publisher"--
How do you survive when your world explodes? By the time she was seven, Amy Lee Scott had seen her world end twice: first as an infant, when adoption brought her from Korea to Ohio, and again when her adoptive mother died of cancer. Orphaned twice over, Scott confronts her personal chaos by investigating a litany of historic catastrophes and the disruptions that followed. Witnessing a Cabbage Patch Kid born at BabyLand General Hospital inspires a meditation on the history of Korean adoption and her own origins. Recalling her miscarriage as the streets of her Detroit neighborhood flooded, she asks what it means to mourn what would have been. And she remembers her mothers illness and death amid the 1992 Los Angeles riots. In this haunting debut, Scott gets to the heart of what it means to wrestle with the grief, rage, and anxiety seething in this tender world. Ferocious and true, When the World Explodes probes the space between personal and global calamitiesfrom Krakatoa to the emotional perils of motherhoodto unearth the sharp ridge of hope that hides beneath the rubble.
Excavates both personal and public calamities to explore parental loss, motherhood, and transracial adoptee experience.
