(Emma Carew) How I Came to Accept My Adoption

I recently came across a blog on the New York Times Web site called Relative Choices: Adoption and the American Family. The blog is maintained by over a dozen authors, all with some tie to the adoption community.

Having been adopted as an infant and having just spent 8 weeks in Korea reuniting with my birth family, reading the blog has really hit close to home for me. The entries themselves, which range from topics of dual racial identity to separation and attachment issues, all touch on topics that are very real and very true in my own life, but in addition, I was amazed by the comments and discussions posted by other readers of the blog.

When celebrities like Madonna and Angelina Jolie internationally adopted their children, transnational and interracial adoption became instant buzzwords around the world. Suddenly, the concept of the only family structure I had ever known was being dissected in gossip magazines and people made adoption out to be something of a trend or passing fad.

In reality, international adoption dates back to the Korean War, when white American families (mostly from Minnesota) began taking war orphans into their homes and raising them.

Two years ago, I enrolled in the first known college course about international adoption, called Cultures of Korean Adoption. About half the class was made up of Korean adoptees, and the class was taught by a Korean adoptee who was doing her PhD. work in the area of Korean adoption.

The class was interesting, and acted as a crash course for me in the history of a system that eventually brought me to my family. It also opened my eyes to a much larger debate about the advantages and disadvantages of international and interracial adoption.

Most of the other adoptees in my class had very different experiences growing up than I had. Certainly the writers of the memoirs we read had very different experiences, having grown up a generation or two before me and my adopted friends.

In the 1970s, Korean adoptees seemed to be few and far between. Resources like Korean culture camp, language villages and dance groups didn’t exist for adoptees and their families. Schools didn’t offer counseling groups for adopted students. Agencies didn’t encourage parents to introduce their children to their native cultures.

I grew up in Minnesota, the so-called Korean adoptee capital of the world. An estimated 10-15,000 adoptees currently live in Minnesota. I met my first Korean adopted friend when I was in first grade and went to Korean culture camp first the first time when I was eight. I went to Korean school on Saturday mornings for a year, and performed Korean dance for eight years.

Our dance group, Chonsa, was mostly adoptees, including our teacher. From fifth grade all the way to college, I had adopted friends and an adopted role model. I had a support network who understood that sometimes I felt out of place in my own family, who knew that it felt weird to be the only Asian kid in a class at school.

An interesting thing happened while I’ve been at college. A group of adoptees, myself included, came together last fall and tried to form a student group for Korean adoptees. We paired with the local adult adoptee group to host an artists’ showcase, and invited adoptees from the community to come.

Many local adoptee “elders” came and all of them praised us for banding together on campus. “I wish we had something like this when I was in school,” they said.

Unfortunately, about six weeks later, our little group sort of disbanded. The semester ended and we seemed to go our own separate ways. I believe this is because so many of us grew up here, and that we really didn’t have a need for a formal reason to come together. There’s a sort of loose adoptee network in place just through summer culture camps and language villages, dance groups and Korean classes.

The adoptees who grew up in the generation before us seemed to come together as adults, finding one another for the first time. For us, we grew up with adoption as a much different part of our lives.

I still see my Korean adoptee friends, either in language class or out on the weekends. My adoption is very much a part of my life. I feel the duality of my identity every day, whether it’s a debate in our newsroom about coverage of minorities or something as simple as choosing rice or pasta for dinner.

It’s unlikely that I’ll ever be fluent in Korean, a fact that seems to drive my Korean family a little crazy. I probably will never live in Korea, because it’s a culture I feel so disconnected from. But it’s also unlikely that I’ll ever lose my connection to the adoptee culture, one which I firmly believe exists. It’s a culture of conflict, loss, identity, tragedy and confusion, but it’s mine and I’m okay with owning that.

(Beau Sia) On Adoption

"please adopt me"

i am going to be under the assumption that i was assigned this particular topic because there must be some concern within "the community," about babies from overseas, such as china and korea, being adopted here by parents who are not ethnically asian. i believe i have a t-shirt in my closet saying as much, more succinctly.

here is the united states of america. i imagine, though, that this concern also exists in france, great britain, australia, and so on...

i imagine there isn't the same level of concern for this in brazil, india, the continent of africa, and so forth.

i've received emails from adoptees, good christians all, who have written me, expressing that i am attacking their identity, because they are under the belief that my work is a direct address of their "non-asian," parents, who love them very much, and have given them everything they could ever want as a child: education, shoes, meals everyday.

i've read essays by adoptees about the anger and hurt they've felt because of a circumstance beyond their control has caused those of asian descent to judge them, ostracize them (am i using this word correctly?), and treat them less like one of them, if there is such a thing as a, "one of them."

i've met parents of adoptees who have asked me to help them, because they know they are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to explaining and fully understanding the issues their child will have to grow up dealing with in this country, by virtue of the way they look.

i've watched photographs of angelina jolie and that one son of hers, whatever his name is (as if it makes a difference to my life now. maybe one day we'll work together on a project...), going into places, leaving places, surrounded by faces that love without touching.

i've been to conferences where it is "really wrong," for this adoption to occur, because of reasons i should've been paying more attention to at 9am, i'm sure, and i've been to conferences where, "we must adopt," because so many children already live without the care and love they require to grow, and why selfishly demand that you must have your, "own child," when to own a child, to say a child is only yours if it carries the same blood within it, are both fundamentally inaccurate.

do i understand why so many children exist without parents to love and care for them? i don't know the judgement that befalls unwed mothers in christian nations. i don't experience the policies of governments giving one gender value over another. i have never been in the midst of a genocide. i am not certain there are similar sex education programs and services provided overseas, nor the time to participate in such things (i hear the days are getting shorter). i won't speculate on the effects of the unseen on the bodies of the first world (we will not speak on stress, or waves, or pills fda approved). i can't go into the horrors and acceptance of rape all over the world (uncles must continue playing their part, women are legally treated as objects, and love has been reduced to the manipulation of an act, afterall). and i'm not sure now is the time to go into all we leave behind and forget to maintain our illusions in life.

i am unable to see the village in which starvation is a factor. i have not lived in the home where moral belief is an inflexible law. i do not have to live my life as a woman, where my purity is constantly in question. that my purity is attached to my biology, and that the judgement of both rests in the hands of man.

and who can forget the fact that we have new toys every year that bore us once they give us problems, or don't give us what we think they will? as if we aren't applying our habits to all aspects of our lives. as if being raised by the community of a screen so that parents can afford vacations doesn't affect a child's ability to raise as child.

as if the problem lies in adopting the child.

i've been in the company of many children raised by their birth parents. adults now, there are enough stories to make me question the idea that one circumstance is better than the other. that we must enforce one situation at all costs. in this case, that of keeping the child with the parents she was born into.

stories of molestation, beatings, verbal abuse, neglect, being trapped in an identity they did not choose, being forced to live as an extension of another's life, being told their possibility, being exploited for their parent's gain, being shut out from the conversation completely always.

there are wars. there are economic crisis. there are governments dictating bodies and culture. there are diseases. there are children without parents.

everyone could be a better parent. everyone could be better about nurturing the life of a child. everyone could learn more about the needs of those they are entrusted with caring for. everyone should provide their children with all that they have to offer, knowing that love and understanding are non-negotiable. everyone needs to know that being entrusted with the life of someone, does not give one the right to own it, but rather to help it to grow into the life it is to become.

i cannot blame adoption for the deeper issues that have made it such a controversial topic in the last ten years, and i will not focus on adoption, when i must make choices that seem irrelevant to adoption, to try and stem the tide of children being born into this world alone.