Lisa Wool-Rim Sjoeblom is an illustrator, a cartoonist, and a graphic designer living in Auckland, New Zealand, with her partner and two children. She has a master's degree in literature from Soedertoern University and has studied at the Comic Art School in Malmoe. Palimpsest is her first graphic novel. She is an adoptee rights activist.
"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"Lisa Wool-Rim Sjoeblom has quietly conveyed
the maddening, meandering path that a transracial, immigrant
adoptee must take in order to discover her own history. She
detangles lies, bureaucracy, and the unwillingness of others, even
as she unravels questions of her own identity: what does it mean to
be a mother? To be Swedish? To be Korean? As an American child of
Korean immigrants, I found familiarity in her search for solid
footing within herself, amid complicated notions of race, cultural
heritage, and nationality, and I was devastated to learn hard
truths about international adoption and the adoptee experience
within the Korean diaspora. Palimpsest is an honest, and sometimes
painful, record of Sjoeblom's experience, as well as an important
document and guide for others in search of their own story."
--Hellen Jo, cartoonist, and translator of Uncomfortably
Happily"Sjoeblom's beautifully crafted graphic novel about being a
transnational adoptee of color in Sweden is not just pioneering but
also functions as a powerful reparative act. Palimpsest highlights
previously subjugated and silenced experiences that might appear to
be uncomfortable but nonetheless have to be told to accomplish
truth and reconciliation for all partners involved in adoption.
Through Palimpsest, Sjoeblom helps to break the taboo in Sweden
surrounding the all-too-numerous corrupt adoptions."
--Tobias Hubinette, PhD in Korean studies and a critical race
studies researcher, Karlstad University"Sjoeblom offers a searing
first person account of her journey. Thoughtfully told and
beautifully illustrated, her memoir is sure to resonate with many
readers. Palimpsest provides an important voice."
--Elizabeth Raleigh, author of Selling Transracial Adoption:
Families, Markets, and the Color Line
"Ms. Sjoeblom's story is her own, yet it represents the many
adoptees who discover their documents have been falsified,
destroyed in a fire/flood, or simply made up by social workers to
create a more adoptable baby--transforming Wool-Rim into case
#79-167 into Lisa. Through the opening lens of giving birth to her
own children, Ms. Sjoeblom documents her relentless search for her
birth family despite being told repeatedly that they cannot be
found. This is a story about searching and finding, yearning, but
never really reuniting."
-Oh Myo Kim, PhD, Assistant Professor of Practice, Counseling,
Developmental &
Educational Psychology, Boston College"Palimpsest is not only a
dramatic and riveting story of a Korean adoptee's search for her
origins. It is also a window onto the abuses that are all too
common in transnational adoption, and too often glossed over as
insignificant. Through beautiful images and compelling prose,
Sjoeblom captures how adoption entails the systematic erasure and
rewriting of names, relations, and cultural belonging, and thereby
brings into powerful focus the indelible psychic traces that
remain."
-Eleana Kim, author of Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean
Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging
"Palimpsest is a beautifully rendered and emotionally gripping
graphic novel that underlines the multitudes of losses
transnational adoptees experience. In telling her story, Sjoeblom
illustrates the violence adoptees experience as a result of being
denied access to their own histories. Palimpsest artfully captures
the personal struggles of transnational adoptee birth searches, as
well as the inequities and injustices embedded within the history
of the international adoption industry."
--Kim Park Nelson, author of Invisible Asians: Korean American
Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial
Exceptionalism
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