입양아 이야기 An Adoptee Story

Sunday, 2/22/2015

The past Wednesday through Friday comprised this year's Lunar New Year celebration, or 설날 (Seollal).  Quite literally the entire leviathan city of Seoul shuts down for three days while families--stripping supermarkets bare and clogging major expressways--travel to their parents' homes across the South Korean peninsula to celebrate the most important holiday in Korean culture.

The Goo family was kind enough to include us in their celebration, so dressed in the traditional 한복 (hanbok) clothing, they prepared a traditional Seollal meal for us in the common room.  Mr. Goo and his brother then performed the traditional 차례 (charye) tea and incense ritual venerating their parents (who had passed away some time ago) and other ancestors before beginning the meal.

Group photo with Minook about to reject Minsoo's peace sign.

Charye ritual performed by the Goo brothers.

Seollal spread, all cooked by Mrs. Goo and Mr. Goo's brother who works as a chef in a nearby Izakaya (Japanese sake pub).

It was a great experience to be so graciously included in this important and intimately familial celebration and it is testament to what wonderful hosts we have.



Meanwhile, Peter peaced out--after some frenzied last-minute packing with an impatient father waiting outside in the car--to celebrate Seollal with his family at his grandparents home down south.  Therefore, without my lifeline to the city for a while, I turned my attention over the past few days to looking up various organizations around town that aid adoptees who have returned to the city.  Through various Seollal gatherings invariably preceded by 30 minutes of disoriented wandering, I've eaten a lot of free food and met quite a few other adoptees who have been living in the city for a number of years.  For one, it was a bit nice to meet and converse effectively with people in the city, as striking up a conversation with a stranger in Seoul is both something that is culturally just not done in Korea, and linguistically challenging for me.  More importantly though, I wanted a chance to talk with other adoptees as adoptee identity is something that I surprisingly have not given much thought to until very recently.

A Seollal dinner at INKAS house.

A Brief Overview of Adoption in Korea:

The international adoption of South Korean children is a recent, unprecedented historical diaspora initially brought about by the massive casualties suffered during the Korean War after 1953.  The war left many orphaned Korean children and also many fatherless mixed-race children fathered both consensually and (abhorrently) non-consensually by Western GIs stationed in South Korea during the war.  Moved by the plight of these parentless children, religious groups in the US and Europe began arranging adoptions, beginning significantly with the Holt family adoption of eight war orphans in 1955.  There was little objection from the South Korean government, as not only did these orphans place significant economic stress on their new burgeoning economy, but culturally there was also an immense amount of social stigma attached to single mothers (especially those of mixed-race children), who were often ostracized from families and excluded from jobs; adoption was the only way out for many of these women.

Don't get me wrong, adoption has provided me and many others with so many undreamable and untenable opportunities and has made many whole families out of previously isolated souls, but this is not every adoptee's experience.  Not every patchwork family is a happy one, and not every adoptee finds peace with their identity.

Moreover, there are other reasons to be skeptical of the adoption industry, as it is in fact, an industry.  South Korea as a country makes over $20 million per year on adoptions in direct profit plus indirect savings in feeding fewer adorable parentless mouths.  Even more spurious are the adoption agencies like Holt International Children's Services, founded by the Holt family, which has made millions in personal profit from adoption and are well known to have coerced reluctant, even hysterically tearful Korean mothers into giving up their only children so that Harry Holt could place them with Western families and collect tax-deductible donations--all, in the name of some divine Christian plan, of course.  In fact, today it is not an uncommon scenario for Korean mothers to be searching for their long-lost daughters and sons that were taken from otherwise happy families (unwed or otherwise) under false pretenses at a time when they had little or no social support, resources, or political voice.

Even more audacious are some of the exceptional anecdotes.  Korean high school students were often in charge of translating adoption documents from Korean to English, whose English abilities even now, let alone in the 60s and 70s are woefully inadequate at best.  This led to multiple instances of swapped babies, intentionally false identities when biological parents decided to keep their child but the adoption agency was too lazy to redo the time-consuming paperwork, and even one instance of two individuals with the same given name and birth date.  Also of note, a not insignificant number of "orphans" died under the care of the Holts and other adoption agencies and most adoption agencies now run their own maternity hospitals and "strongly encourage" their patients to consider international adoption.

Today, over 200,000 children have been adopted from South Korea to the US (predominantly), Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and other western European countries.  Over half were adopted to families in the US, and the majority of those were placed in the Midwest.  Of note, adoption has subsequently become common from countries like China, Russia, Guatemala, and Ethiopia, in large part due to the action of for-profit adoption agencies looking to expand their businesses.

If you're interested in reading more about the history and present of Korean adoption in the US, check out these articles:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/magazine/why-a-generation-of-adoptees-is-returning-to-south-korea.html?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits&_r=1&referrer=
http://transracialeyes.com/2011/08/11/a-brief-historical-overview-of-the-life-and-times-of-harry-and-bertha-holt-and-the-origin-of-international-adoption/



My Story:

My cultural identity overall has changed quite a bit over time, but it's only recently that I've really looked at the it in its longitudinal entirety and appreciated its ups and downs.  I'll start at the beginning.

Though Stephanie and I knew several other adoptees from South Korea when we were very young through an "adoption group" in the southern Michigan area, our family stopped going once we were school age.  In hindsight, adoption group was a great opportunity to get acquainted with Korean culture and language at an early age and is a mainstay of larger adoptee communities in the US, though all I have to show for mine is a couple of childhood acquaintances that wish me happy birthday on facebook and a case of chicken pox circa 1991.  However, my parents did do a good job of actively trying to keep Stephanie and me tied to our birth culture and I remember being read Korean bed time stories, learning to count to 10 in Korean, and Anna, a Korean American who worked as a dental partner with my parents for a time and would cook us Korean food.

Grade school in overwhelmingly white Jackson, Michigan was the first time I remember being confronted with my other-ness in several rather poignant and painful instances.  Yet, it was always more about being Asian rather than being adopted that I was made to feel different, and I never (really, never) experienced any kind of insecurity regarding my relationship with my family--they were loving and supportive and that was always more than enough.

Those shorts though.

Interestingly, despite these early traumas, I must have had a reverse reaction to them because the grade school years were the time in my life when I was most interested in being more Asian.  I would sign my papers at St. John's Catholic Elementary School "Oh Jin Kyu" (오진규), hung out with the one African American and two Japanese kids in the school, and--and I don't think any of you actually knew this--grew out my infamous rat tail because I thought it emulated depictions of Asians I had seen on television.

Japanese culture enrichment class at St. Johns.

Otherwise, aside from some vague and indiscriminate forays into East Asian cultures as a whole--karate, origami, Asian cuisines, math team, DDR (does that count?), and not making the basketball team--growing up, I was never terribly connected or interested in being connected with my birth culture.

Things began to change in middle school and high school, as predictably, things that made me different were perceived as threatening and, at times, worthy of ridicule.  So during this period, I largely tried to sweep my darker skin, short stature, and almond-shaped eyes under the proverbial Oriental rug, though sheltered as I was by my family and protective and loving group of [predominantly white] friends, it was in hindsight still a painfully awkward and uncomfortable time, as best evidenced by this intensely embarrassing picture:

Moving forward through Lumen Christi High School and Albion College--both still very, very white--I found that I tended to fill a kind of token Asian niche in my social circles, though still being quite thoroughly American, culturally speaking.  There were the fairly common math/violin/height jokes and the rarer, though much more damaging acts of overt and malicious racism by classmates or strangers, but in general, as I grew into myself, life as an adoptee was an overwhelmingly happy one.

It wasn't until medical school that I really met and connected with other Asians and Koreans, more specifically, causing me, for the first time in over a decade, to really examine my heritage--here, for the first time surrounded by friends that were predominantly first and second generation immigrants from Korea, Taiwan, and China, in a city (Ann Arbor) where being Asian was not a mere novelty, but a full-fledged racial identity with its own set of connotations, unfortunately not mostly positive.  It was simultaneously an unfamiliar and "oh, this makes sense" experience that felt at once both long overdue and quite foreign, but nonetheless, I threw myself headlong into it, actively participating in the United Asian American Medical Student Association, reading up on Asian race issues, dating another Asian American for the better part of my medical school career, and ultimately, ending up taking this very trip back to Korea.

Finally, Asian friends (and Franz)!

So that's my story, but as talking to other adoptees has revealed, it is not typical, but neither is it unusual, for the adoptee experience is more diverse than I could have imagined, and is a combination of equal parts individual personality and resilience (or lack thereof), family support system, and a tragic sense of non-belonging to both the Asian and white American communities.

The adoptee community in Seoul is comprised of some 500 individuals mostly in their mid 20s to mid 40s who are living here for an indefinite amount of time, though that seems to mean several years or so.  Most have been back multiple times, initially discovering their birth culture on a vacation or "cultural conference" trip for adoptees and then returning for longer and longer periods of time (usually as English teachers--a very common job for ex-pats here) until buying that one-way ticket.  While some have returned because they very rightly feel commodified and cheated out of a core piece of their identity with adoptive parents that simply don't understand or care for the implications and politics of race, just as many others seem to have returned because they want to live in another country for a few years, have no definite plans state-side, had a shitty childhood growing up in the US and are running from something, or because they feel that South Korea is a place of imperfectly articulated significance to them--a place to which they feel a connection that they only now, as a fully-fledged adults, have the opportunity to explore and truly drink in.

Though I have spent a lot of time talking about the dark side of adoption because I feel a duty to educate you all on an important issue that I was, until a few days ago, quite ignorant of, my experience was nothing of the sort.  Furthermore, if I have learned anything so far, it is that the adoptee's experience is not a homogeneous one--it is varied; it is complex; it is individual.  Everyone is looking for answers, adopted or not, but for the 200,000 some South Korean adoptees, this search may be memory-less, but I believe it comes with some sense of dead reckoning, a compass needle that marks this electrified cultural metropolis of Seoul as our magnetic north--the place where we were born, and where we need to be, at least for now.

Mark

Updates:

New Flatmates:  We have two new flatmates and unfortunately Creighton moved out today (2/23), but since this post was longer than I expected, I'll leave the introductions till next time.

Biological Family:  Bad news on this front:  it appears that my biological mother left a fake name with Korean Social Services--a fairly common practice to avoid the shame and social stigma associated with single motherhood and adoption :(  They do have her birthday and are working on contacting a woman with that birthday who utilized their services around the time I was born, but this is a major setback and it is now quite unlikely that I will be able to contact her.

Haircut:  I've decided to fully immerse myself--body and soul--into this trip, so later this week, I will be getting myself a Korean haircut (no dye or bleach--Alan).  If you'd like to weigh in on what exactly you think that should look like, post it to the comments section or send me a message and I will honestly weigh all serious recommendations as I don't much care what it looks like for the time being and can always change it when I get back if it ends catastrophically.