[New Book] Growing Up at the Border

[Financial News] A daughter who has communicated in sign language with her deaf parents becomes a mother and considers the world she will pass on to her child. Documentary filmmaker Lee Gil-bora’s essay, Growing Up at the Border, published after a three-year interval, records her experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing as she moved between Korea and Japan.
The author, who grew up as a CODA (child of deaf adults), wants to pass sign language and Deaf culture on to her child as well. She writes about the attitudes toward disability she encountered during pregnancy and her own inner conflicts, as well as her experience reporting on the trials of victims of Japan’s former Eugenic Protection Law, which deprived people with disabilities of their right to give birth.
She encounters unfamiliar scenes in everyday life communicating in English with her Japanese partner, in nursing rooms and daycare centers, and even at film festivals she attends with her baby in her arms. Living as a mother and artist, and as a foreigner in Japanese society, she questions the norms society has taken for granted across the boundaries of disability and non-disability, language and nationality.
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