Gathering “Roots” and Making History in the Korean Adopt= ee Community

“Gathering ‘Roots’ and Making History in the Korean Adoptee Community̶= 1;=

Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power and Public Life, edited by Melissa Checker and Maggie Fishman, Columbia University Press, 2004.

Eleana Kim<= /span>

Ph.D. Program

Department of Anthropo= logy

New York University

My own awareness and consciousness was raised with great pain, isolation, and alienation. I have been rejected by the local Korean community because I have white parents, and I have b= een rejected by the white society because I am Korean.

--Anne Mi = Ok Bruining (1991)

With this anthology, w= e seek to break a certain silence--silence from our land of origin, silence from the lands we now inhabit--tongues tied by racism, = some external, some painfully internal; tongues tied by social mores, codes, and contradictions; tongues tied by colonialist myths of rescue missions and sm= ooth assimilations.

--Tonya Bi= shoff (1997)

I was adopted from Kor= ea, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt, 12 years of education, 4 years of college, food and a roof over my head, and I’m Still Bitter.

--SNAPSHOT exhibit T-shirt, July 1999

Korean American Museum= , Los Angeles

On a clear September morning in 1999, nearly 400 Korean émigrés gathered at the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Hailing from 36 states and several European countries, they had come= to honor and remember the sacrifices of soldiers who served and died in the fi= rst major military conflict of the Cold War.&n= bsp; Although none were veterans, and few had memories of that time, the = commemoration was powerful enough to move many to tears. In acknowledging the brutal human consequences of war--massive social dislocation, divided famili= es, orphaned and abandoned children--they recognized the tragic roo= ts of their own histories. For these were not immigrants in the traditional se= nse of people motivated by a desire for a better life, or desperate to escape calamitous political situations in their home countries. Rather, each had l= eft Korea as a child, as a real or legal “orphan,” at the mercy of political, economic and social conditions beyond his or her grasp. They were transported across borders and emerged at airport arrival gates around the world, to be embraced by new families, given new names and the identities t= hat came with them.

The children adopted shortly af= ter the war were the pioneers of what grew into the largest and longest running transnational adoption program in the world. Since 1953, families in the We= st have adopted more than 150,000 South Korean children, and of those, America= ns have adopted more than 100,000. Although today, annual adoptions of Chinese= and Russian children by Americans significantly outnumber those of South Korean children, throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, South Korea was the major sen= ding country for overseas adoption. In the U.S., Korean adoption accounted for o= ver half of the total international adoptions during the mid-1970s and 1980s.

The adoptees at the memorial had met just two days earlier, convening in Washington, D.C. for The Gathering = of the First Generation of Korean Adoptees, or what is now simply known as The Gathering. Heralded as a “historic event,” the “first significant and deliberate opportunity for the first generation of Korean a= dult adoptees to come together,” this three-day conference included adult adoptees, ranging in age from their early 20s to late 50s, and their spouse= s or partners, along with several adoption researchers and adoption agency observers. The coordinators celebrated it as the first conference organized= by and exclusively for adult Korean adoptees, and for many in attendance, it symbolized an important moment of self-determination. For the first time, t= hey collectively asserted autonomy from families, agencies, and governments—institutions that had, for much of their lives, decided t= heir fates and mediated their realities.

From a young age, these adoptees contended with being constant sources of curiosity to others (“we were all novelties,” according to a Gathering participant), object lessons= in race relations and multiculturalism, or, as adults, “cultural ambassadors.” In the words of adoptees at The Gathering, the conferen= ce was a time to “speak for ourselves, not as children without a voice.” Or, as another attested, “we can share with each other without having to do so much explaining.”

Small numbers of adopted Koreans began meeting in Sweden around 1986, and in the U.S., the earliest adopted Korean group was started in Minnesota in 1991. By 1998, similar groups had mushroomed throughout Western Europe and the U.S., and even in Korea.= = [1= ] The Gathering thus represented the culmination of more than a decade of such activities by adult adopted Koreans around the world, consolidating what had been relatively localized phenomena into a major public event. It also mark= ed a significant turning point for a nascent Korean adoptee movement, bringing adopted Koreans into national and international visibility as adults, and m= ade it abundantly clear that adult adopted Korean have reached a critical mass.=

Historically, adoptees and adop= tive parents, especially mothers, have been overtly pathologized in the popular media. In the recent pro-adoption, and especially pro-international adoptio= n, climate, however, these images of deviancy have faded somewhat, though now = they tend toward another extreme: Asian children with white parents now appear in advertisements and magazine articles as adorable model-minority-adoptees. <= o:p>

Korean adult adoptee narratives implicitly speak against these stereotypes. Adoptees share stories at conferences, organization meetings, and on the Internet, and through expres= sive work, in the form of novels, films, poetry, spoken word, visual and cartoon art.= [2= ] This cultural work presents a diversity of Korean adoptee experiences, whil= e at the same time drawing out common threads among these differences. In this paper, I combine ethnographic data from the Gathering with my analysis of recent autobiographical films by adopted Koreans to explore how adult adopt= ees are empowering themselves, and producing their own discourses, cultures, and alternative social spaces that allow them both to speak among themselves an= d to engage a wider public.

In the course of my research, particularly at the Gathering (where I both volunteered and observed), I fo= und I could identify with many of the stories I heard about coping with racism = and struggling with identity issues. Yet the circumstances of these adopted Koreans, while on the surface parallel to my own upbringing in a middle-cla= ss white suburb, were radically different because it was transnational adoptio= n, not simple immigration, that brought them to this country. On the one hand, Korean Americans like myself and adopted Koreans share a history of migration—our lives coincided with the large influx of Asian immigran= ts to the U.S. after 1965--but, on the other hand, the historical = and political differences in our displacements make any simple equation between= our life experiences superficial at best. My observations at the Gathering made= it clear to me that transnational, transracial adoption presents a complex intertwining of race, ethnicity, and culture, as well as kinship--both biological and social--that also refr= acts intricate dilemmas of cultural belonging and citizenship.

The adult adoptees who meet with some frequency today often grew up without the adoptive family networks that have become de rigueur for fami= lies adopting Chinese children today. Many rejected parental attempts to connect= to the Korean American community or to other adoptees in their adolescent purs= uits to “fit in.” Now,= they actively seek each other out, sharing stories of isolation, assimilation, a= nd loss. Their narratives represent a new sense of agency and growing solidari= ty among adopted Koreans, and they not only articulate an untold collective history, but also have the potential to affect the course of transnational adoption in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Repairing the Broken Narrative

In 19= 93 filmmaker Me K. Ahn was producing her video, living in halftones, an experimental short that poetically comp= oses a “memory-archive” of her experiences as a Korean adoptee retur= ning to Korea. Around the same time, Kim Su Theiler was finishing her film, Great Girl, also an experimental p= iece that probes questions of memory, identity, and history for an adoptee seeki= ng information about her adoption. Remarkably, these two filmmakers were utter= ly unaware of each other until they both received notice from artist and film communities and thus heard about the similarities in their work.= = [3= ]

Ahn and Theiler were harbingers= of what, in the years that followed, has grown into a kind of mini-genre of Ko= rean adoptee films and videos. At least a dozen experimental films, personal documentaries, and narrative films have been produced in the past decade, a= nd they share themes of identity, family, and history, foregrounding the ambig= uity of ethnic, biological and social relatedness. In recognizing the larger soc= ial and historical processes in which the personal lives of the filmmakers are implicated, these works are both autobiographical and ethnographic, and thu= s a kind of “journey of the self” that media scholar Catherine Russ= ell calls “auto-ethnography.”[4= ]

Until recently, these films and their makers had primarily received individual attention in mainstream or alternative art venues, as well as from Korean American or Asian American organizations. In 1998, however, Me K. Ahn curated a film event called “Evenstill” at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Along with films by second-generation Korean Americans, it featured a program of eight films by or about adopted Koreans. Then, in 2000, Deann Borshay Liem’s First Person Plural made an impressive debut at major international film festivals and screened seve= ral times on PBS. Her outreach to adoptive family and adoptee groups led to sub= sequent screenings at adoption conferences, adoptee group meetings, and adoption agencies. Korean adoptee creative work is now regularly featured at adoption conferences, and the circulation of the films in particular is helping to f= orge community while it also serves to contribute to the broader representation = of adopted Koreans nationally and internationally.

These films share common themes with other adult adoptee personal narratives in which a desire for coherence and authenticity is enacted through the writing and telling of stories. As Korean adoptee Kimberley Saree Tomes says in her film Looking for Wendy, “A sense of natural family and history= is available in daydream and fantasy. I repair the broken narrative by dreamin= g it along.” This sense of being cut off from a genealogical history is coupled with the inescapable issues of race and social belonging for transracial and transnational adoptees. How do families construct the inalienable relationships of sameness assumed by the word “familyR= 21; when the possibility of “passing” is foreclosed by the starkly visible racial differences between parents and children? No matter how supportive their dom= estic lives may be, adoptees, their parents, and siblings, as “conspicuous families,” must confront confused, insensitive, or bigoted responses = from friends, neighbors and strangers. Moreover, despite a century or more of As= ian immigration to the U.S., Asian Americans continue to be perceived as being = from somewhere else, or, like the title of sociologist Mia Tuan’s book, as “Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites.” Korean adoptee autoethnographies show how, for adoptees, “fitting in” at schoo= l, and even at home, meant “forgetting” about race or denying the = gap between their identities as “one of the family” and the assumpt= ions made about them when they left the security of home.

Especially for adoptees who arr= ived in the U.S. before the rise of American&nb= sp; multiculturalism, pressures to assimilate required a repression of racial difference in order to achieve, or approximate, the ideal image of t= he “American family.” Deann Borshay, who was adopted in 1966 at the age of eight, states in her film, F= irst Person Plural, “The= re was an unspoken contract between us which we had all agreed upon, but never discussed, that I was an orphan with no family ties to Korea…. I belo= nged only to my American parents. It meant I didn’t have a Korean history = or a Korean identity.”

Adoptees were by and large encouraged to become “American,” often meaning the wholesale embrace of a new identity, family and history. For many, their “arriv= al day”--the day they were picked up at the airport--became as significant as their birthdays. Even if the possibility for exposure to Korean culture was available, many adult adopte= es now admit that they were resistant to being identified as “other.” In Crossing Chasms Jennifer Arndt des= cribes her feelings about going to Korean culture camp in junior high school: R= 20;I resented my Asian identity and going to camp reinforced my Koreanness when I wanted to be quote-unquote white.”

In Korean adoptee films, family photos are used to visually represent the dissonance between the adoptee’s seemingly “smooth assimilation” and her internal conflicts. The photos show the adopted child as a smiling, happy member of = the “all-American family,” yet the racially-different adoptee also disturbs that idealized vision. Like the unexpected jolt that comes from discovering that a “white” person’s name is attached to an “Asian” face, family photos present a challenge to assumptions about what families should look like. For the filmmakers, undergoing a sear= ch for an authentic self and scrutinizing their pasts, the family snapshots st= and as a kind of false consciousness. They speak to the adoptee’s complic= ity in the suppression of her difference to be one with the “American family.”

Filmmaker Nathan Adolfson interrogates the myth of assimilation in his personal documentary, Passing Through. He matches images= of himself as a child, looking like a “normal kid” in elementary school classes and family photos, with an interview with his mother who describes the lack of awareness that she and her husband had of the problem= s he faced as an Asian child in small-town Minnesota: “We really didn̵= 7;t think it was that you were having problems. You never said anything. Never said a word….We probably did try to raise you as being too American, or too… maybe we weren’t sensitive enough to your heritage…tried to turn you int= o a little Scandinavian.”

These autoethnographies resonate with stories from The Gathering. For many there, it was the first time they= had met a large group of other adoptees, and some had never really thought about their ethnicity, or spent much time with other Korean Americans. Some didn’t even know what other Koreans might look like: a self-described “tall and skinny” adoptee admitted that he “came out of curiosity to see other Korean people. Are all Koreans tall and skinny? I didn’t know!”

A survey of The Gathering atten= dees found that forty percent of respondents said they identified as Caucasian in their adolescence, and would perceive Asians as “the other.” For these adoptees who grew up fully identifying as (white) Americans, racial discrimination provoked a particularly difficult form of double-consciousne= ss. Even the most empathetic parents were perceived as unable to fully relate to the experience of racism, thereby intensifying feelings of alienation and racial difference.

The Gathering participants divi= ded up into seven concurrent workshop sessions, according to the years in which they were adopted. In these workshops, adoptees’ stories--intimate and painful memories of Korea, their childhoo= ds in America, and their negative experiences with discrimination and racial difference= [5= ]--complicated the official narratives of “success” and “achievementR= 21; that characterized the speeches by adoption agency professionals, and representatives of the Korean government in the opening plenary.

In the workshops, adoptees questioned the amount of “culture” that should be presented to a child who may be resistant to identifying at all as the “other.” Some adoptees felt that the pushing of culture on them was “overdetermined,” as if they (and not their adoptive parents) w= ere “the only ones with an ethnic identity.” One thirty-something m= ale adoptee said in reference to the racist caricature of an Asian exchange student, Long Duk Dong, in the teen movie Sixteen Candles: “We were Anthony Michael Hall in that movie; we weren’t Long Duk Dong… when our parents were pushing culture on= us, that was making us into Long Duk Dong.” At the same time, although ma= ny parents attempted to incorporate Korean culture into their children’s lives, many others did not, or even denigrated Korean culture and society.<= o:p>

Typical adolescent growing pains are difficult to separate out from adoptee- or Korean-adoptee-specific issu= es, but there was general agreement that cultural belonging was a problem in a dominant white society that equated “American” with being visib= ly “white.” Some described it as a pendulum swinging back and forth between “Korean” and “American” sides. Many agreed = with one attendee’s sense that “Koreans reject the American side, Americans reject the Korean side,” adding, “Koreans reject the adoption side. For them, I ha[ve] no family, no history.” Another ado= ptee described her identity as being “about culture, and your culture is n= ot your face—but you’re pinpointed for that all your life.” = But the recognition of a broad historical and cultural shift was clear—as= one adoptee stated, an “international identity is emerging,” and another commented, “we grew up in a Cheryl Tiegs era; now we’re= in a Connie Chung era.” Or, as another informed his cohort, “Don’t you know? Asian people are ‘in’ now.” =

“Korea”

Ameri= can multiculturalism and cultural globalization have created an atmosphere in w= hich it is now acceptable, if not fashionable, especially in certain cosmopolitan circles, to be “different,” hybrid, or nomadic. These developme= nts have perhaps made it easier for adopted Koreans to embrace their own racial= difference and to explore their cultural and emotional relationships to Korea. Although some adoptees may have little or no interest in their biological families or country of birth, it is undeniable that “Korea” holds a central place in many adoptees’ imaginations about who they are, where they c= ame from, and what they might have been. Many have always felt a yearning, laced with fear, to return to the country of their birth, to explore their cultur= al and biological roots, and perhaps to locate missing pieces of themselves.

Following the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games, Korean adoptees began returning to Korea in increasing numbers. Toda= y, an estimated 2,500 adopted Koreans return every year, some to take language= or cultural classes, others to actively search for their birth families, and s= ome to go on Motherland tours, organized by the Korean government or adoption agencies. There are also approximately 200 long-term sojourners who are liv= ing and working in Korea.

Adoptees at The Gathering who h= ad traveled to Korea, mostly without language skills, social connections or cultural knowledge, described their experiences there as being marked by frustration and sadness. As would be the case for many travelers, they suff= ered from culture shock and basic discomforts of being a stranger in a strange l= and. But as adoptees, the country bears a heavy symbolic load, embodying for them memories, lost = or too distant to retrieve, unknown histories, and severed biological connections.= = = [6= ] In Great Girl, Kim Su Theiler s= ays she went back to Korea “in a way to make my own documents of memories that exist now only in my mind.”

Adoptee accounts of their experiences in Korea reflected feelings of disappointment as the fantasy of “home” failed to live up in reality. In Korea, they confronted feelings about being adopted and worked out complicated issues about race, ethnicity, and culture. Their amazement at finally being in a place where t= hey looked like everyone else was coupled with the difficulty of not “relating” to Koreans or Korean culture. Others had more positi= ve experiences, with one attendee insisting that one or two trips would not be enough, but rather, having himself been back to Korea six times, that “you have to go several times to understand your relationship to [Kor= ea].”

Jennifer Arndt’s film Crossing Chasms provides useful ethnographic information about adult adopted Koreans living and working in Korea. In an interview, Me-K. Ahn notes about Korea, “it’s a difficult place to be…so many adoptees dream of being part of the mai= nstream, but you have to cultivate your own space to feel comfortable [here].” Later on in the film she adds, “[Korea]’s so nationalistic. If you’re not really, really Korean you’re looked down upon. At the same time, so many people have shameful feelings about sending us away…. Circumstances surrounding adoption is pretty taboo.”

This perception of being “looked down upon” was shared by adoptees at the conference, and linked to interactions with Korean nationals who tend to view adoptees as objects of pity. They assume tragic backgrounds for them, not comprehending that they may have had relatively positive and supportive family lives. Oth= er adoptees have mentioned meeting Koreans who were surprised at how well they= had grown up, for they had only heard sensationalizing stories about sexual abu= se and slavery of adopted children by foreigners. Furthermore, the primacy of “blood” in = Korean cultural understandings of individual disposition and national character has been rejected by adoptees who cannot accept the essentializing assumptions = of Koreans who subscribe to a strong ethnic nationalism. As another adoptee in Ardnt’s film declares, “People here say, you have Korean `….it’s such b.s. It doesn’t make me feel Korean. I don’t think ‘blood’ means anything.”

Korean adoptee autoethnographies explore this complex relationship to Korea as country of birth, culture, and “home.” For adoptees who were old enough when they left to have some memory of Korea, the films reveal the deep sense of alienation that th= is process of forgetting has produced, in the sense that the only thing rememb= ered is the forgetting itself, leaving a trace of memory which, never fully forgotten, cannot, at the same time, be entirely remembered. Borshay, for instance, recalls her desperate attempts as a newly adopted child to retain= a singular memory of her home in Korea: “It was getting more and more difficult to remember how to get home. I remember closing my eyes and saying, ok, don’t forget, but the last memory of Korea was starting to fade…. I forgot everything. I fo= rgot how to speak Korean; I forgot any memory of ever having had a family, and I even forgot my real name.”

Borshay and Adolfson’s vi= deos attempt to reconcile long-held fantasies about “Korea” and their Korean families with their reality. After reuniting with their birth famili= es, they return “home” to the U.S., to a stronger sense of self, an= d a greater appreciation for their “real” or “true” American families. In these a= doptee autoethnographies, “family” is represented as an achievement, something that cannot be taken for granted by ei= ther adoptees or adoptive parents, given the very different path that the adoptee’s life may have taken in Korea. For some at The Gathering, experiences in Korea visiting orphanages “put their [lives] in perspective,” especially when they learned how others from similar circumstances, but who had not been adopted, had suffered difficult fates, without the emotional support, comforts, or privileges of having a family. =

Yet the gratitude adoptees feel toward their parents for having been “rescued” from a possible = life of disenfranchisement is oftentimes also felt as a barrier to expressing ot= her painful aspects of their experience, or as a burden that holds them in perpetual debt to their parents. Filmmaker Borshay describes herself as bei= ng so eager as a child to please her new parents that she made herself ill. Any sign of unhappiness or anger would shatter the image of the well-adjusted adoptee fully integrated into her American home, and thus many adoptees, if they did not rebel, had the “will to be the best we could be.” = For one adoptee, The Gathering was a “statement to our parents that we didn’t get what we needed then, and we’re getting it now.”= ;

Unearthing the Past

Exper= iences of adoptees who suffered doubly due to abuses by their adoptive families, s= peak to the lack of adequate accountability on the part of adoption agencies. Ha= rry Holt, an evangelical Christian and logging magnate from Oregon, and his wif= e, Bertha, initiated the first wave of adoptions from Korea when they adopted eight Amerasian GI babies in 1955. Shortly thereafter, their religiously inspired mission to save needy Korean children became a lifelong crusade, a= nd the Holts established Holt Adoption Agency, which, now Holt International Children’s Services, continues to be the leading agency for transnati= onal adoption today.

Today, home study screenings are required by law of all prospective parents, yet in the past, screenings cou= ld be, as it was for the Holt agency, as perfunctory as filling out a religious questionnaire. An incredulous= Pearl S. Buck in 1964 described the questions as pertaining to “rather a primitive kind of religion…. what is called Fundamentalist.” Bu= ck, although highly skeptical of Holt’s unorthodox adoption practices, met the legendary and somewhat notorious Harry Holt in Korea, and after seeing = him in action, was quickly won over by his unwavering dedication to finding hom= es for the hundreds of half-Korean children in his care.

Although a humanitarian impulse= lay at the heart of Holt’s mission, religion alone could not guarantee a happy home. Americans wanting to adopt during the baby boom of the 1950s and 60s encountered a “shortage” of available white babies and very strict, even discriminatory, screening processes for domestic adoption. Tho= se who may have been ineligible to adopt domestically therefore found overseas adoption to be the only other viable option. Elizabeth Kim’s controversial memoir, Ten Thousand Sorrows (2000), describes her tortured life in Arizona as a Korean-Caucasian child raised by an evangelical couple whose abuse scarred = her physically and psychologically for years. She escapes the abuse of her fami= ly, only to end up in an even more abusive marriage to a mentally-ill husband, = and finally strikes out on her own as a single mother.

Another tragic case is describe= d by Tammy Tolle/ Chu Dong Soo in her film, Searching for Go Hyang. She and her twin sister were raised in Korea until the ag= e of eight by poor parents who struggled financially to raise them and their two brothers. Her mother approached an adoption agency hoping to send them to t= he U.S. for a “better life.” Despite assurances given to Dong Soo’s mother by the agency that she would be able to maintain contact with her children, the girls were sent abroad without any notice and their parents were refused any information regarding their children’s well-being or whereabouts. The girls endured eight years of abuse in their adoptive home where they were “forced to forget,” and even forbidden to speak Korean. They left their adoptive home at the age of 16 a= nd worked their way through high school, eventually reuniting with their Korean family after ten years’ separation.

Other troubling cases on the Ko= rean side have materialized as well. Situations in which birthmothers were coerc= ed or deceived into surrendering their children for adoption have come to ligh= t, and accounts have surfaced of extended family members or in-laws delivering children to orphanages without the knowledge of the parents. Between 1951 a= nd 1964, the number of abandoned children at orphanages increased from 715 to 11,319, a remarkable figure that suggests to one demographer that the “presence of efficient foreign adoption facilities encouraged the abandonment of children” in Korea (Weil 1984: 282). How the orphanages functioned in the post-war period as a surrogate welfare system and as a conduit for foreign aid money begs further investigation. One myth of Korean adoption from the early years is that these adopted children were all “orphans,” without any biological ties to Korea; in fact, most = were paper “orphans” with living kin in Korea, but to whom, in the course of adoption, legal ties had been cut.

Deann Borshay’s First Person Plural is a particula= rly telling account. She describes how, at a Korean orphanage, she was “switched” with another child, whose adoption to the Borshay fa= mily in California had already been arranged. The father of that child had chang= ed his mind and retrieved his daughter from the orphanage the day before she w= as scheduled to fly to the U.S. = Deann was then substituted for the first child, Cha Jung Hee, given her name, passport, and documents, and sent to California. Deann’s adoptive par= ents insisted that her memories of having a family in Korea were “bad dreams.” To prove it to her, they showed her the adoption agency documents that stated that she was an orphan, and that both her parents had died. Later in her life, however, she discovered that, in fact, she had a family in Korea that had been searching for her, and that her real Korean n= ame is Kang Ok Jin. Upon meeting her Korean family, she learned that her mother, struggling to raise five children alone, was convinced by a neighbor to send her daughters to a nearby orphanage to be cared for temporarily. The orphan= age asked her to consider sending her last daughter, Ok Jin, the future Deann, = to be adopted, and, believing that she would have a better life with a chance = for an education, she agreed. Perhaps worried that Ok Jin’s mother might = also change her mind at the last minute, the orphanage sent her off a day early,= and there was never even a chance to say goodbye.

The misinformation transmitted through the adoption agency is not unique to Borshay’s story. Increasingly, adoptees are finding that information that they valued as fra= gile clues to their personal histories was, in fact, fabricated--rai= sing important human rights concerns. Yet adoptees in this situation have very little recourse, and adoption agency representatives, who may regret the mistakes of the past, do not hold themselves or the agencies accountable. G= iven the dubious circumstances under which some of these adoptions were conducte= d, untangling the ethics of birth family searches and reunions also proves to = be a challenge. Adoption agencies follow strict policies to protect the identity= and privacy of birthmothers, who may wish to remain anonymous. Agency social workers are the key mediators for adoptees who try to search for their birth families, yet in cases where birthmothers do have a desire to find their children, the agency’s policies can function as a barrier to a mutual= ly desired reunion.

Of course, adoption agencies may not be intentionally deceptive, and many adoptees have had above-board and ethical adoption circumstances, as well as successful reunions facilitated = by adoption agency social workers. The adopted Koreans who started streaming b= ack to Korea in the late 1980s largely took adoption agencies by surprise, and social workers were unprepared to take on the responsibility of searching f= or birth families. In addition, given the spotty nature of many of the adoption records of that time (records may have been misplaced, incomplete, or never collected), agency social workers do not always have the adequate resources= to help adoptees who seek information about their birth families.

Faced with these obstacles, adoptees who search often resort to the Korean media, by placing announceme= nts in newspapers or appearing on television talk shows with hopes of reaching their biological families.[7= ] These methods, however, raise other ethical issues around the exploitation = of vulnerable and desperate adoptees by journalists eager to fulfill the public’s fascination with melodramatic family reunion stories, and ar= ound the privacy rights of birthmothers and fathers who may be adversely affecte= d by the discovery of these “long lost” kin.

The moral complexity of these c= ases trouble the “success” narratives of adoption agencies such as H= olt. Its advertisement for The Gathering program features an old black and white photograph of four young Asian children (“orphans”?) smiling and posing for the camera, arms across each other’s shoulders. The caption reads: “We believed in you back in the fifties. And look at you now…We couldn’t be prouder.” The paternalism in this advertisement that constructs adoptees as perennial children is prevalent in the discourses of agencies, as well as of the Korean government. Like the m= yths encapsulated in the word “orphan,” assumptions about adoptees a= re also embedded in the language—the word commonly used for adoptees in Korean is ibyanga, literally me= aning, “adopted child.” = The adoptee organization GOA’L in its outreach efforts seeks to replace t= he infantalizing ibyanga with a mo= re appropriate term for adult adopted Koreans, ibyangin, meaning “adopted person.”

Whose Voice?

The Amerasian children of the war, fathered by U.S. and European soldiers, were adopted in the late 1950s and 1960s, and the subsequent wave of children in= the 1970s was composed predominantly of children of full-Korean parentage. Rath= er than suffering the social stigma of being half-Korean, the children of this second wave were victims of economic restructuring, extreme poverty, a lack= of social service support for single mothers, and Korea’s staunchly “Confucian” social values that place paramount importance on the purity of bloodlines. Meanwhile, in American society, as local adoption opportunities decreased due to the legalization of abortion and the politic= al censure of black-white adoptions, an increasing number of Korean children w= ere adopted into Caucasian middle class homes.

Adoption from Korea has proven = to be extremely sensitive to economic fluctuations and concerns over the nation’s international reputation. There have been periodic attempts = by the government to curtail foreign adoption, most notably in the late 1970s, after North Korea criticized the South’s liberal “selling”= ; of children to “foreign marauders” (Foster-Carter 2002), and following the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games when adoption became an embarrassing subject of scrutiny for the internatio= nal press. Reportedly bringing in $15 million to $20 million per year, adoption= in Korea had become a cost-effective way of dealing with social welfare proble= ms.

As recently as July 2002, in the afterglow of the successful co-hosting of the 2002 World Cup Games, the government announced a series of measures to further bolster the nationR= 17;s image that included a plan to end overseas adoption by 2015. It is too soon= to determine whether this new plan will indeed lead to the end of international adoptions from Korea, or whether it will be set back by future economic pressures, as has been the case with other such plans over the past four decades. What is certain, however, is that Korea, with the lowest social welfare spending of any OECD country (Kim 2000: 26), will have to undertake serious reform of its welfare system, especially with respect to women and children. With over 7,000 children in need of welfare intervention each yea= r, the Korean government and adoption agencies will have to step up efforts to promote domestic adoption.

Against this problematic backdr= op, adult adoptees have experienced an unparalleled welcome from the Korean government in the late 1990s. At The Gathering the word “success̶= 1; echoed throughout the opening speeches, leading one to suspect that the cla= ss status of adoptees, as measured by their college educations and professional occupations, had something to do with how this story of success was being written. The South Korean ambassador to the U.S., in his plenary address, noted, “You demonstrate the capacity to transform oneself from humble beginnings to success.” According to The Gathering survey, 70 percent= had graduated college, 24 percent had graduate degrees and 15 percent were enro= lled in university or postgraduate work. Adoptees thus demonstrate the same prog= ress and development model offered by the narrative of Korea’s phenomenal modernization--its meteoric rise out of a tragic colonial past, through the devastation of war, to its ascendance as a newly industrialized “Asian Tiger,” boasting the world’s eleventh largest econ= omy in 1996. And at the same time, they also reflect a classic American Horatio-Alger tale of “making it” against the odds.<= /span>

Yet the official narratives of success require from adoptees a certain amount of “forgetting”—and the re-incorporation of Korean adoptees = as “Koreans” involves a letting go of the difficult pasts from whi= ch these adoptees lives emerged. In fact, at The Gathering, the First Lady of Korea’s video address put it plainly when she asked adoptees to “forget your difficult past and re= new your relations with your native country….based on the blood ties that cannot be severed.” Yet the histories of adoptees are intimately link= ed to those who were left behind by Korea’s economic rise, and those left out of the official story of Korean modernity. Returning adoptees thus bring the darker stories behind the so-called “miracle on the Han”--stories of poverty, divorce, rape, abandonment, and teenage pregnancy--into view. Some Koreans may believe that adoptees have fared well, having entered into a privileged Western world, w= ith all the opportunities for education and advancement it can afford. This cru= de calculation, however, discounts the pain and loss of family, belonging and history that adoptees must often cope with.

In one workshop, a debate ensued among some adoptees about how best to represent adoption to a wider public. Some strongly advocated that the positive aspects of transnational adoption should be promoted to counteract negative stereotypes about adoption and adoptees and to build a sense of pride in the community. Another adoptee, w= ho had a very difficult adoption experience, retorted, “do we choose to = speak in a positive or a negative way about it? It’s both positive and nega= tive and more complicated than that--it’s not a simple questio= n or statistic…. We need to emphasize the positive aspects, yes, but we ne= ed to allow us to acknowledge the pain and express it.”

Other tensions have since arise= n as well. Although the event was purportedly by and for adoptees, there were ma= ny adoption professionals in attendance (most of whom were parents of the adoptee-participants) to observe, volunteer, or facilitate the workshops. T= his fact suggested to some dissenting adoptees that their experiences were still being appropriated and mediated by adoption agencies, and they refused to attend because of Holt International’s orchestrating role. One of the so-called mini-gatherings, dubbed “KADapalooza,” took place in March 2001, and was set up in response to The Gathering. KADapalooza, deriv= ing its name from the hugely popular musical event, Lollapalooza, was organized= by the adoptee organization, a/k/a Southern California, and, according to board member SoYun Roe, was intended provide a less structured environment than T= he Gathering. It focused on bringing adoptees together to hang out and have a = good time, and to share exclusively among themselves.

Despite this resistance, The Ga= thering has expanded to become an annual international event. The 2^nd Gathering was in Oslo, Norway in 2002, and the 3^rd Gathering, scheduled for 2004 in Seoul, is being planned as a major homecoming. It has proven to be a powerful for= ce in forming a Korean adoptee global “movement” and is increasingly addressing public discourses related to the future of international adoption practice and policy, specifically around post-adoption issues of cultural heritage, ethnic identity, and birth family search and reunion.<= /span>

Following the 1st Gathe= ring, an overwhelming number of positive letters were sent to The Gathering’= ;s Internet message board, and ̶= 0;mini-gather= ings” and regional groups were formed around the country. The Gathering’s stated goal to produce “community” seems = to have been accomplished despite the wide-ranging diversity of the participan= ts. Indeed, throughout the conference, the desire to pinpoint similarities and = to draw generalizations was tempered by a sensitivity to the large group’= ;s impressive diversity.

The need for research on adopted Koreans was expressed frequently during the course of The Gathering, and of= ten in the context of trying to determine the broader significance of the similarities and differences the participants were discovering among themse= lves. The attendees recognized that the conference itself was a form of research,= but for many, having a “scientific” or generalize-able outcome study was considered a necessary and sorely lacking resource for their own self a= nd group understanding. Yet to be the subjects of their own history, rather th= an having adoption agencies, psychologists, social workers--and anthropologists-- making judgments about how they, as part of a daring “social experiment,” have fared, is an important and unprecedented development.

The Gathering was the brain-chi= ld of Susan Soon-Keum Cox, who was adopted from Korea in 1956 and is a public policy executive at Holt International. She is also actively involved in promoting Korean and transnational adoption issues on the national stage. Her influence has made The Gatheri= ng not only a social support group event, but also a political one. Despite the fa= ct that the first conference claimed to be apolitical—as a time for cele= bration and sharing—it was also used as a show of support for the upcoming vo= te in Congress on the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operat= ion in Respect of International Adoption.[8= ]

At the second Gathering, another policy issue on the agenda was for the drawing up of a post-adoption policy= declaration, as a collective response to the Hague Convention’s requirement for post-adoption services in order to secure the child’s right to preservation of her “ethnic, religious and cultural background.”= ; At the close of the 2^nd Gathering, the problem of equity and access to information for adoptees who search for birth family was raised as a possible policy focus for the 3rd Gathering. Adopted Koreans are clearly poised to have an impact on the futu= re of transnational adoption.

In addition to discussions of c= hild protection and human rights policy, there is also the ongoing contestation = over the politics and ethics of Korean adoption and its future. Over the past fo= ur or five decades, the demographics of birth mothers may have changed, but the compromising effects of modernization on the lives of women and children ha= ve not diminished.[9] T= he female factory workers of the 1960s and 70s and the unmarried college-age w= omen of the 1980s who surrendered their children for adoption have today been replaced by teenage girls whose unplanned pregnancies currently support the supply of adopted babies. Korea’s rapid industrialization, uneven economic development, and patriarchal attitudes about women’s sexuali= ty are all factors that serve to perpetuate the social conditions that contrib= ute to the abandonment or relinquishment of children in Korea. The televised se= arch and reunion stories, the circulation of adoptee art, and the conferences and public events staged by adoptee activists have made adoptee stories and the= continuing problem of adoption increasingly visible in Korea. Although Korea’s adoption program, characterized as ethical, reliable, efficient and transparent, is today a model for other overseas adoption programs, critics= of Korean adoption see it as a humanitarian project that quickly turned into a profitable substitute for social welfare services. Social work scholar Rosalind Sarri= and her colleagues point out the problematic contradiction between Korea’s wealth as a nation and the adoption of its children overseas--a contradiction that also troubles many adult adopted Koreans--and they trenchantly criticize the Korean government for its “long-term dependency on intercountry adoption programs as a major policy solution.= 221;

So, after the pomp and circumst= ance surrounding returning adoptees subside, there is the realization that for e= very adoptee who returns as an adult to Korea, another child is on its way to be= ing adopted overseas. Indeed, some adult adoptees, on their way back from Korea, volunteer to escort babies on their life-transforming journey to their new American parents, and find it very rewarding to share in the reproductive process they themselves experienced. Others, however, find the political economic circumstances that perpetuate international adoption to be distres= sing and in urgent need of reform.

Whereas adoptees express desire= s to change “the system,” these stances are often tempered by a sens= e of futility, and so far more radical calls for reform have not been made. At t= he 1^st Gathering, one adoptee movingly recounted his return trip to Korea, and his daily visits to an orphanage where he cradled the babies and imagined that = he was holding himself. He angrily questioned why the Korean government contin= ued to rely upon adoption because “it has enough money to take care of its own.” Someone suggested that because of Korea’s long and ancient history, cultural change would be slow, as opposed to the rapid changes that characterize American culture. The adoptee then wondered aloud, how does cu= lture change?

Conclusion

Adoption across politi= cal and cultural borders may simultaneously be an act of violence and an act of love, an excruciating rupture and a generous incorporation, an appropriatio= n of valued resources and a constitution of personal ties.

--Pauline = T. Strong (2001)

Trans= national adoption raises moral and ethical ambiguities that are difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle, and that run through the multifarious experienc= es, histories, and circumstances of adult adoptees. As adoption from China beco= mes increasingly prevalent and visible in cities and small towns throughout the U.S., adult adopted Koreans play an important role in educating the next generation of Asian adoptees and their parents in the challenges of being a multiracial adoptive family. =

Adult adoptees’ experienc= es as “pioneers” of transnational adoption have made them valuable resources for rethinking adoption policy and practice, and some have worked= as advisors and consultants to agencies and parents, or as mentors for younger adoptees. They speak to prospective and adoptive parents about the identity issues and psychological problems they faced, and about what parents should expect to encounter as their transracially adopted children mature. And some adoptees are now adopting children from Korea themselves, thus building multi-generational Korean adoptive families.

The social experiment of transnational adoption from Korea has been dubbed a “success” by both American adoption professionals and the Korean government, celebrated = as a beacon of a truly global and multiculturalist future. Yet this rosy picture= is darkened by the experiences of some adoptees. The Korean state’s atte= mpts to imbue adoptees with cultural “roots” or diasporic “ide= ntities” are discredited by adoptee counternarratives of loss--of birth family, cultural “authenticity,” psychic wholeness, personal history and memory, and legitimate citizenship. Moreover, the optimism of t= he official rhetoric obscures the complex political and economic contexts in w= hich gender and class inequalities continue to place birthmothers in the difficu= lt position of having to “choose” to give up their children to adoption.

Lacking even an “official” history, adopted Koreans are making history in both senses: not only are they wri= ting individual and collective histories through shared stories, they are doing = it for the first time. There are a number of competing claims to adoptee identity--from adoption agencies and the Korean state, as well = as from the media and other dominant institutions--and by articula= ting their identities and producing alternative public spheres, these adoptees a= re performing necessary and urgent cultural work.

In their work of piecing togeth= er recovered memory and forging meaning through self-examination and narrative, these adoptees are, ultimately, engaged in a struggle for personhood. These histories are vital to understanding not only the darker side of Korean modernity, but also the ongoing practice of adoption in the context of glob= al capitalism, and the conditions under which tens of thousands of children a = year cross increasingly porous national borders.
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Notes=