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The Korea Times
10-02-2008 17:08
The Face of Adoption
By Andrei Lankov
For decades, South Korea was the major source of adopted babies throughout the Western world. According to a recent estimate, over the years 1950-2000, some 150,000 Korean infants found a new home overseas.
Nowadays, the Korean adoptees form a large community ― and in recent years they have begun to rediscover their connection to Korea.
Most of the infants were adopted by middle and upper-middle class families who had next to no information on Korea _ and in many cases were not that interested in this East Asian country. This meant that many Korean adoptees grew up without any exposure to the Korean language and culture.

San Francisco Chronical
Sunday, September 14, 2008
'Asian Americans' documents the diaspora
Sandip Roy
Asian Americans in the Twenty-First Century
Oral Histories
Edited by Joann Faung Jean Lee

The Korea Herald
August 22, 2008
Number of Korean adoptees to U.S. dropping: State Dept.
The U.S. State Department issued visas for 939 Korean orphans last year, according to the department`s figures released recently.
The number compares with 1,376 for 2006, 1,668 in 2005, 1,773 in 2004 and 1,817 for 2003.
Korean nongovernmental organizations have called on their government to look into irregularities involving international adoption agencies in Korea, citing alleged abuse cases involving Korean adoptees abroad.
They said earlier this year that six cases of international adoption from Korea were made in the past decades without their mothers` consent, that the cases were revealed upon the adoptees being reunited with their Korean families as adults.

Yonhap News
2008.08.22
Number of Korean adoptees to U.S. dropping: State Dept.
By Hwang Doo-hyong
WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 (Yonhap) -- The number of South Korean children adopted by U.S. families declined gradually for the past years as a growing number of Koreans adopt Korean orphans following several prominent international cases of alleged abuse of adoptees.
The U.S. State Department issued visas for 939 Korean orphans last year, according to the department's figures released recently.
http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/news/2008/08/22/0200000000AEN20080822000500315.HTML

JoongAng Daily
August 18, 2008
Korean-born adoptee represents U.S. in Olympics
BEIJING - In February 1983, a girl was born in Daegu in southeast Korea. But she soon ended up at a local orphanage, and three months later, Allen and Marjorie Bashore adopted the girl and raised her in Shoemakersville, Pennsylvania. A quarter century later, the girl is now representing the United States in women’s field hockey.
Kayla Bashore, 25, is a midfielder and defender on the U.S. team, which is playing in its first Olympic women’s field hockey tournament since the 1996 Atlanta Games. Bashore is the first Indiana University graduate to represent the U.S. in field hockey.
Bashore is the second Korean-born adoptee to represent the United States in the recent Olympics. At the 2006 Torino Winter Olympics, Toby Dawson won the bronze medal in men’s moguls in freestyle skiing, and in 2007, he met his biological father, Kim Jae-su. Dawson said he wanted to use the publicity to find his birth parents.
Bashore has no memories of her native land. When asked about her name, she said, “All I know is it’s something Kim. I moved to the United States when I was three months old and I’ve never been back to Korea.”

JoongAng Daily
August 18, 2008
Swiss-Korean helps adoptees search for their cultural roots
Kim Dae-won works for Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link, the biggest nongovernmental adoptee-support organization in Korea. By Park Sun-young
“We hope the Korean people will treat overseas adopted Koreans as the ‘same Koreans’ they are. Many of them still regard overseas adoptees as foreigners,” said Kim Dae-won, 42, Secretary General of Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link, the biggest nongovernmental adoptee-support organization in Korea.
G.O.A.'L provides various programs and services for overseas adopted Koreans, including birth family search assistance, organization of family reunions and post-reunion support.
Its list of services and programs reach as far as one-on-one Korean language tutoring and mentor programs to help overseas adopted Koreans resettle in their mother country.

Joongang Daily
August 20, 2008
Outreach work helps adoptee rediscover roots
Mo In-ae, 31, has three moms - a biological mother, an adoptive mother and a stepmother.
She also has a second name: She was christened Kara Carlisle when she was adopted by an American couple five months after her birth in 1978.
This unique background is perhaps why she’s the youngest, and the only Asian-American, of the 11 members of the Human Relations Commission in Los Angeles.
She graduated from college in 2003 with financial support from her adoptive parents. Since then, she has been working on issues related to Korea and Koreans.

South China Morning Post
20th June, 1998
Korea's 'IMF Orphans'
(by John Larkin )
Ji Seung-yeop is too young to know why his father went to jail, or why his mother dropped him and his sister off some week ago at an orphanage.
Technically they are not orphans: their parents are alive. But for the time being four year-old Ju-hyun and five year- old Yu-na have effectively been orphaned by South Korea's deepening recession, which is breaking up marriages at an alarming rate.
Their passage form home to orphanage is typically of a growing number of cases this year. Rising unemployment and the resulting financial stress on low-income families is creating a social phenomenon of recession orphans. It started when their father lost his office job and went to jail for bankruptcy. Their mother disappeared after packing them off to Seoul's Angels Haven Orphanage.

North Korean Orphans: A Long-Running Story
Posted on November 16, 2007 by somefiercething

Three North Korean children found wandering in northeastern China have been granted refugee status in the United States, andoverseas rights groups say there could be thousands more. These “second-wave” orphans are mostly the children of North Korean women who were forced to marry Chinese men. But the problem isn’t new.Georgeta Mircioiu, 75, worked with North Korean orphans in her native Romania from 1952-59. Thousands of North Korean children had lost parents during the 1950-53 Korean War, and many were sent to like-minded Communist countries including China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern European countries. Here’s what she had to say about that experience. “Between 1952 and 1960, about 3,000 North Korean orphans were taught at special schools in Romania. About 1,000 were high-school and college students, and about 2,000 were younger,” Georgeta Mircioiu said in an interview.
“All of the other Eastern bloc countries offered to look after North Korean orphans, but Romania took the greatest numbers. Only about 500 orphans were sent to Bulgaria. All of them arrived in Eastern Europe after being housed in China for a while. Their voyage by train took about 10 days.”
“Some of the orphans were street children. Some were the children of deceased high-ranking North Korean officials, who still had families in the North, but were sent to Romania because the living conditions were better there. Romania was not great either, but at least they had good food, clean and decent shelter, and good sanitation and hygiene.”
“Many of the North Korean children were sick when they arrived in Romania. After the Korean War, due to poor nutrition and hygiene, many of them had parasitic diseases, such as intestinal worms or scabies. Some of them even had to be hospitalized for a while. When I arrived at the school in 1952, the school year was supposed to begin on Sept. 15, but it actually began on Oct.1, due to a quarantine caused by an infectious disease outbreak.”

Vanity Fair web exclusive
8.18.2008
The Chinese Adoption Effect
by DIANE CLEHANE WEB EXCLUSIVE August 18, 2008
Since 1991, American families have adopted more than 60,000 Chinese babies, almost all of them girls. But as the Olympics introduce the world to a modern, telegenic Beijing, one adoptive mother reflects on the grim realities of her daughter’s birthplace—and copes with the knowledge that her own happiness came at the cost of another mother’s loss.
I began to notice them a few years ago. Beautiful little Chinese girls with shining black hair, dark eyes, and round faces. I was drawn to these adopted daughters peeking out from their strollers as their Caucasian parents happily wheeled them around Manhattan. I found myself approaching the mothers who looked the most accessible to cautiously ask, “Is she from China?” in hopes that I could somehow glean insight into how they forged this seemingly magical connection and became a family.
It is still a bit of a mystery to me how I wound up the mother of a child born half a world away to someone I will never know. What I do know is that I cannot imagine my life without my daughter, Madeline Jing-Mei. In October 2005, my husband, Jim, and I made the trip to China to pick up our nine-month-old baby and bring her home. Our “referral” (the official document issued by the China Center of Adoption Affairs) stated she “was found abandoned at the gate” of the Social Welfare Institute of Fen Yi County on the morning of February 9 and taken in by Li Min, a worker at the orphanage. Her umbilical cord was still attached. According to the note that had been left with her, she had been born one day earlier. The workers named her Gong Jing Mei. The report went on to describe her as “a lovely and healthy baby with chubby face, fair skin and smart eyes.” We know nothing of her birth parents or why they gave her up. Chances are we never will.