Korean Quarterly

Giving Voice to the Korean American Community

Alice Stephens

Novel reveals truths of adult adoptee reality

by

Famous Adopted People ~ By Alice Stephens

(The Unnamed Press, Los Angeles, 2018, ISBN #978-1-944700-74-4)

Review by Bill Drucker (Summer 2024)

The story begins with Lisa Pearl, who is living in Japan and teaching English. On a trip to Seoul, she reunites with Mindy Stamwell, her best friend since the two met at Korean camp as children. The two have planned to locate their birth parents through an organization called MotherFinders.  While Mindy is wired at the idea of meeting birth family, Lisa is distracted.  She has skipped out on her teaching job in Japan, and is making up for loss of sleep by fueling up on alcohol, drugs, and Dunkin Donuts.

Lisa never had much need-to-know feelings about her past, but through a series of events, she is about to encounter her past in an extraordinary way.

So begins Alice Stephen’s novel Famous Adopted People. Stephens cleverly uses two juxtaposed techniques to drive the story and to discuss issues of adoption as adults experience them.  There is the cynical, often drug- or alcohol-induced voice of Lisa Pearl as she spouts her feelings about adoptees’ issues mixed with confessions of personal failures. 

There is also the interesting addition of 18 chapter intro pages.  Each page is a North Korean propaganda poster, depicting typical images, such as an armed soldier or smiling peasant girl.  Part of the face on each poster is covered by a chapter bar and a second larger bar below it with a quote from or about a famous adoptee.  The first is Moses.  As the reader gets further into the story, these bits of data are incorporated into and become important to the overall narrative. 

Lisa is well educated, and speaks some Chinese and Japanese. However, she seems unable to put her considerable education and skills to bear on her life.  She drags her butt, unable to write, plan or set any goals.  She loves Mindy, but her friend’s constant lectures to Lisa to get it together are grating. 

Harrison, a smooth-talking Korean guy gains Lisa’s trust.  He comforts her, takes her to bars.  When he brings her a McD Happy Meal, she takes the coffee but says she only eats Wendy’s fast food because of course, the Wendy’s founder is the famous adoptee, Dave Thomas.

Harrison (or Ji Hoon) introduces Lisa to the arrogant Jonny, a Korean guy who drinks and talks about himself and the expensive consumer items he can afford, such as Audi, Rolex, and Johnny Walker Black Label.  In the trusting haze of alcohol, Lisa does not really care when Ji Hoon covers her mouth with a white handkerchief.  The words she hears as she fades out are, “We knew we’d find you.”

Lisa wakes up in what seems like a luxurious palace where she is apparently being imprisoned.  Rather than get any straight answer, she is given a vague runaround by the people she encounters.  In a short time, she meets the head of the house, one Honey LeBaron who is white and claims to be Lisa’s birth mother, saying that she got pregnant with Lisa through a brief encounter with a student rioter.

The ironic plot further unrolls as Lisa discovers that the palatial house, which is located in North Korea, and the constant attention and monitoring by servants, are because Honey is the lover of the Dear Leader of North Korea. Honey is also a pampered prisoner in the house, and the mother to Jonny, an heir to the North Korean ruling dynasty. She is also hungry for power.

Lisa can barely believe this delusional woman is her birth mother.  When Lisa accidentally calls her “Mom,” the woman softens and responds.  “Say that again.  Tell me you love me.”  But it is short lived, and the monster mom resurfaces. 

A servant, Ting, helps Lisa escape to China when all hell breaks loose after the Dear Leader suddenly dies. In the chaos, the people cry for leadership as Jonny seizes power.  In his path to the throne, he will kill anyone in his way, including Honey and Lisa, for knowing too much.

The story is a manic roller-coaster ride.  The reader tags along in the protagonist’s strange adventure, one that alters the trajectory of her unfocused life.  Threads of identity and belonging are woven through this acerbic and surreal story.  Is Lisa a birth child of a delusional monster or the adopted daughter of a Jewish American family? She has used the excuse of adoption as the bane of her existence, but her story — and, by inference, all adoptees’ stories — is much more complex once she knows more.

The first pages of each chapter, with famous adoptees’ quotes, get more biting and bitter.  The Chapter 7 intro page shows a grim-looking soldier with an AK-47.  A quote from musician and famous adoptee Liz Phair is: “I don’t think you can be adopted without being a little bit screwed up.” 

In Chapter 8, Steve Jobs is quoted as saying his biological parents were a sperm bank donation.  “That’s not harsh, it’s just the way it was, sperm bank thing, nothing more.”  In the chapter narrative, Jobs is described as “a genius, a revolutionary, an asshole.”  Other remarks by famous adoptees are negative about adoption.  Soon Yi Previn disowns her adoptive parents (Mia Farrow and Andre Previn).  One chapter intro page notes that Korean adoptee Toby Dawson, the Olympic bronze medalist, is still denied by his birth mother. 

These famous remarks give the novel a sense of both the uniqueness and the commonality of adoption issues.  In the final chapter, Lisa is back among the sane. She blogs on a website called FamousAdoptedPeople.com.  What begins as Lisa’s narrative becomes the author Alice Stephens’ thoughts. 

The author clearly believes that the meaning of adoption should not be defined by others, rather that the adoptee has ownership of his or her own narrative. She points out in ironic ways the onslaught of racist and stereotypical remarks adoptees are subject to, such as Jonny in Seoul telling her to eat up because “there are hungry kids in Alabama.”

In her bizarre plot which borders on black comedy, Lisa/Alice Stephens points out effectively that knowing one’s own story may still not be enough. For the adoptee, there may be no happily ever after. 

Stephens was born in Korea, and is among the first generation of transracial international adoptees.  She currently lives with her family in the Washington, DC area.  She has published short-form writings in many literary publications.  Famous Adopted People is her first novel.  Her creativity in crafting this story, with social insight and wry humor, makes us hope that this first novel will not be her last.

Evidence of empire

by

The First Amerasians: Mixed Race Koreans from Camptowns to America ~ By Yuri W. Doolan

(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2024, ISBN #978-0-1975-2329-7)

Review by Alice Stephens (Summer 2024)

Though Americans first left behind their mixed race offspring in countries such as the Philippines and Japan, according to Yuri W. Doolan’s groundbreaking study, The First Amerasians: Mixed Race Koreans from Camptowns to America, it was not until the U.S. involvement in Korea that the demographic earned a designation: Amerasian. Doolan reports the term was popularized by Pearl S. Buck, who advocated for the removal of Amerasian children from their countries of birth (and their mothers) to be raised in America. Buck was but one of several Americans who saw adoption of mixed race Koreans by American families as a moral, and often a religious, imperative.

Born in Korea in 1967 to a Korean woman and an American soldier, I was adopted into an American family through Pearl S. Buck’s Welcome House agency. I grew up familiar with the term Amerasian. And yet, in America, I was seen as Asian first, American second, if I was seen as American at all.

Doolan argues that the Amerasian is “a Cold War construct” created to disseminate “a master narrative [that] the U.S. government was not motivated by imperialistic ambition but embarked on a global crusade to spread democracy and freedom to all those willing to take it.” In the fight against communism, “mixed race Asians were transformed from bastard children of little significance into Amerasians worthy of rescue.”

An assistant professor of history and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and the child of a Korean woman and an American soldier, Doolan traces the origins of the concept of the term “Amerasian” to 1945, when Americans first arrived in Korea after decades of brutal Japanese occupation.

Settling into the Japanese Imperial Army’s facilities, the U.S. military filled in the footprint left by the Japanese, which included “a well-established system of regulated prostitution, developed by the Japanese during the colonial era.” Circular No. 9, issued by military leadership on January 25, 1947, instructed troops to refrain from romantic relationships with the local women and to only mingle with them “through the lowest form of prostitution.” Thus, the author maintains, the military established a template for interactions with Korean women that reverberates today, resulting in sexual exploitation, family separation, and the development of a robust intercountry adoption system that soon spread to Vietnam and beyond.

As the American military presence in Korea grew, so did the prevalence of sexually-transmitted diseases in the population local to military bases. The solution was to introduce rigorous, invasive monthly “health checks” for women who worked in the camptowns, confining them for treatment if they were found to have venereal disease.

The Korean War brought a huge influx of soldiers. Because an armistice was never signed, America maintains a large military presence in South Korea to this day, the heavily-militarized boundary between the two Koreas the frontline between communist and capitalist ideologies.

In the camptowns, prostitution was allowed to flourish. “In the 1950s, the camptown military sex industry would continue to grow alongside the establishment of semi-permanent military installations, transforming from large populations of camp followers servicing troops out of tents and cardboard houses in shantytowns into small cities complete with commercial entertainment districts catering to a stable troop presence.”

My adoption papers state that my mother was married to a school teacher, but ran away from him due to his ill treatment. The social worker noted, “Accordingly she began to associate with American soldiers.” 

Anti-Asian immigration policies made marriage between an American citizen and a Korean almost impossible. Additionally, marriages had to be approved by the U.S. military, and many soldiers were denied permission by their superiors, who had the power to transfer soldiers away from their Korean fiancées and wives.

My mother and father were in a 13-month “common law” marriage. I believe he would have brought her, and me, back to America but history, which brought them together, also conspired to keep them apart.

Inevitably, children were born of liaisons between American military personnel and South Korean women. As one of those children, I have been told, and in turn have asserted, that South Korea had no place for mixed race citizens. Without a Korean father, we mixed race children were excluded from family registries, and therefore ineligible for South Korean government services. Socially, we were targeted for discrimination and abuse.

However, Doolan contends that mixed race children were largely tolerated, with growing acceptance of them by the general population, before American evangelicals and aid workers intervened. He cites International Social Service case records that observe changing attitudes toward mixed race children, with some caseworkers claiming that there was no observable discrimination against them. As they became more common in towns and cities close to army bases, people accepted them and their mothers were less willing to relinquish them.

This was counter to the narrative that was being employed by adoption professionals working for agencies like Holt Adoption Program and Welcome House that were marketing mixed race Korean children as the abandoned offspring of lowly prostitutes who faced a life of exclusion and misery unless they were saved by adoption. Indeed, my own adoption papers say, “Recognizing her difficulty in providing care for the baby because of her limited financial situation and the baby’s different coloring and appearance, she has decided to release her baby for adoption abroad.”

In order to facilitate American adoptions, evangelical Harry Holt established a method “whereby the prospective parents signed a power of attorney that allowed for a proxy in South Korea to complete the adoption on their behalf.” Without having to leave the comfort of their own country, adoptive parents could obtain a Korean child. This method also meant “Holt parents had bypassed the lengthy background checks, home studies, and mandatory period of adjustment whereby the emotional and physical needs of adoptive children were carefully observed in their new homes before social welfare professionals made a legal recommendation for adoption.”

When my mother relinquished me at approximately two weeks, I became the ward of Paik Kun Chil, the director of Korea Social Service, Inc. (KSS), which then authorized Welcome House to arrange for my adoption and immigration. KSS was not involved in investigating my adoptive parents. Though my parents had to fill out reams of paperwork, they do not recall being visited by a social worker. By the time I left Korea at nine months old, I had had a mother, a foster mother, and a legal guardian. My mother visited me during the eight months I languished in foster care.

According to Doolan’s research, the stark choice that Harry Holt presented to the American public was to leave these mixed race orphans to starve and die in a backwards, barbaric nation, or welcome them into Christian homes. He states that Pearl Buck framed Korean adoption in even more urgent terms, as a propaganda triumph against communist nations. The American public, alerted to their patriotic, Christian and humanitarian duty, responded with unanticipated enthusiasm, creating a demand for adoptable mixed race babies that eventually encompassed all foreign “orphans” in need. This fervor and the lack of proper screening, the author contends, resulted in many children being placed into inappropriate homes.

My own parents were motivated to adopt due to concern about overpopulation. Moved by the plight of unwanted mixed race Korean children, they decided to adopt through Welcome House. Though we were matched in October 1967, it was six months before I left Korea. During that wait, disturbed by a February 6, 1968, New York Times article, A Legacy of the Korean War: Outcast Children, my parents sent a desperate plea to Welcome House “to speed the issuance of visas to all of the children, including our own, who have their applications approved.”

As Americans clamored to adopt mixed race Koreans, Doolan reveals that American entities undermined South Korea’s effort to integrate mixed race Koreans into its public school system through a program called Eurasian Children Living as Indigenous Residents (ECLAIR). Recognizing that many mothers gave up their children because they were ineligible for education, ECLAIR gained admittance for mixed race children in schools and helped with fees and other incidentals.

But due to the narrative of marginalization and abuse that adoption agencies had successfully used to encourage Americans to adopt, it was in their interests to perpetuate the segregation of mixed race Korean children. The author lays the failure of ECLAIR on Pearl S. Buck and her foundation, which was raking in donations for their work with Korean mixed-race children.

In 1965, enough money had been raised to open an office in South Korea. “In doing so, they had set their program up in direct competition with ‘three established social agencies’ already concentrated ‘on helping mothers of racially mixed children.’” The foundation lured these mothers away from Korean programs with monthly payments of $25. “Ultimately, the foundation’s activities upended the progressively successful integration and rehabilitation work of local organizations.” Subsequently, the Korean government defunded ECLAIR because the Pearl S. Buck Foundation ran a similar program.

Through an exploration of the Amerasian adoption experience, the author exposes “the various ways mixed race Koreans became American and how adoptive parents — bolstered by the institutional power of professional social work and the ideological power of U.S. empire — furthered the problematic work of humanitarians, the military, government officials, and other adoption advocates in the making of the Amerasian.”

The first Amerasian adoptees immigrated to a country still under anti-Asian immigration and Jim Crow segregation laws. Many were placed in families who had no experience with Korean culture or Asian people; some prospective parents even expressed a desire to have their adopted children undergo plastic surgery to make them look less Asian. Parents were urged to practice “complete and total assimilation,” and adoptees who could remember were urged to forget the past.

The racism that these mixed race children were supposed to have escaped in South Korea also occurred in America, with adoptees reporting incidents of assault, taunting, and sanctioned discrimination. Some entered emotionally and physically abusive households, especially those adopted by proxy. Doolan cites the testimony of one adoptee who “ran away from home, ‘slept under bushes,’ and ‘ate out of garbage cans’ just as Americans alleged mixed race children did in South Korea.” The author states that adoptees were told their mothers were prostitutes and were hypersexualized by adoptive family members in ways that manifested from sexual abuse to an extreme preoccupation with the adoptee’s chasteness.

I grew up in isolation from other Asians. I was never taught about Korea and had little knowledge of my birthland, even as I explored Chinese and Japanese culture. I always felt safe with my family, but on the street I was relentlessly cat-called and harassed as American men felt free to project their sexual fantasies on my Asian body. When people asked me about my adoption, I said it probably saved me from prostitution.

When America withdrew from Vietnam in spring 1975, the Korean Amerasian story regained urgency, and was used to promote the rescue of Amerasians left behind in Vietnam, recasting Americans as saviors after a humiliating defeat. The author writes: “Saving the Amerasian was framed in congressional testimony as a Cold War imperative and a matter of American prestige.” Congress passed the Amerasian Immigration Act of 1982, granting entrance to America for certain Amerasians — excluding those born in Japan, the Philippines, and Thailand — as long as they were sponsored by a U.S. citizen and born before October 22, 1982.

The act “marked the first time that the federal government named and legally defined any of the nation’s mixed race populations born from its many military incursions across the globe.” A subsequent act and later extensions have allowed approximately 100,000 Amerasians and extended family members to enter the U.S. by 2002.

I was one of only 317 mixed race Koreans adopted out of the country in 1968. As a percentage of humanity, the Amerasian demographic is miniscule, but we hold enormous significance as living examples of the complexities of American empire, abandoned by our American fathers only to be adopted to America (Amerasians were also adopted to other Global North countries) as foreign orphans, propagandized by evangelicals, humanitarians, and politicians.

I very much value and appreciate Doolan’s scholarship on the damaging role played by American adoption agencies such as Holt and the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, but I am skeptical of the assertion that South Korea could have integrated mixed race children into a welcoming society if not for the meddling of those organizations.

Should South Korea get credit for that small attempt represented by ECLAIR before going full throttle on exporting babies well beyond the Amerasian population? From my standpoint as a mixed race adoptee searching for my mother and experiencing seemingly insurmountable obstacles due to draconian privacy laws, I say no. South Korea under a military dictatorship (overseas adoption flourishes under authoritarian governments) found it convenient and profitable to send its unwanted Amerasian citizens away, which worked so well that the adoption program quickly expanded to Korean nationals born of two Korean parents. Doolan’s excellent scholarship does not change my mind about Korea’s culpability in the ethnic cleansing of its mixed race children and systematization of a rapacious solution to an inadequate national welfare system.

Nonetheless, The First Amerasians is an eye-opening investigation into the conversion of the Amerasian from an empire’s shameful by-product to proof of the open-hearted benevolence of American democracy and Christian charity. Doolan painstakingly exposes the rotten foundation of the narrative of American saviorism, as thousands of children deserted by their American fathers were then irrevocably separated from their Korean mothers in order to complete American families.

According to the limit set by the Amerasian Immigration Act, the Amerasian demographic ends with those born in 1982. Doolan closes by describing the mixed race adoptee community today, emerging from the shadow of an imposed identity to define our own place in history. The First Amerasians is an essential resource for understanding the heavy burden of empire that mixed race Korean adoptees have had to bear, and the power we have to reshape our own narrative.

Looking at how we can do better

by

Adoption Fantasies: The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood ~ By Kimberly D. McKee

(Ohio State University Press, Columbus, 2023, ISBN #9-780-8142-5892-7)

Review by Alice Stephens (Spring 2024)

Transracial adoption is a failed experiment in multiculturalism, according to Kimberly D. McKee’s latest critical adoption study, Adoption Fantasies: The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood. Through an examination of representations of transracially-adopted girls and women in popular culture, McKee highlights the contradictory characterizations of adoptees as perpetually-stereotyped outsiders treated as sexualized, tokenized, and humorous objects, even within their own families and communities.

According to the author, “Adoption Fantasies makes visible the nuances that shape the nexus of objectification experienced by Asian women and girls as a lens through which to consider the ethics of representation and the ramifications of how racialized and heteronormative gendered tropes become operationalized on a specific subset of adoptee experiences.”

Focusing on cultural works that feature female Asian adoptee characters, the book begins with an examination of Sex and the City and Modern Family, two popular TV shows that depict the adoption of an Asian baby girl by white families. McKee dissects their plot lines in order to illustrate that “Adoption was never about the adoptee. It was always about the fantasies of adoption held by white adoptive parents.”

In Sex and the City, adoption is presented as the disappointing alternative to having a biological child. After being unable to conceive, the character Charlotte and her husband decide to adopt. Cue the racist reaction from relatives, the misconception that hordes of unwanted third world orphans are just waiting to be saved, and the centering of the white adoptive parents as they have to settle for a Chinese infant.

The adoption of a Vietnamese infant, given the name Lily, by a gay couple in Modern Family, McKee asserts, demonstrates the couple’s “homonormative conformity to ideals of family.” However, by making the adoptee Vietnamese, the show ignores that Vietnam prohibits same-sex couples from adopting. “By overlooking the legal fictions necessary to render their adoptive family possible, Modern Family is complicit in reducing adoption to ahistorical narratives designed to bring joy to white consumers — those viewing the series as well as (prospective) white adoptive parents who see themselves represented in the Tucker-Pritchett family.”

McKee picks out multiple instances of factual elisions and racial microaggressions in the show as Lily’s Vietnamese identity becomes conflated with other Asian cultures, representing the paradox of “racist love,” defined in a quote from Amy Tang as “attitudes of admiration and acceptance that nonetheless work to uphold white supremacy by valorizing nonthreatening attributes like industriousness and docility.”

To frame “racialized sexual harassment,” McKee discusses two movies with secondary female Asian adoptee characters, Sideways and Better Luck Tomorrow. In the former, a transracial adoptee character, played by Sandra Oh, is an object of the white male gaze, characterized as sexually voracious. Pairing with a schlubby white man, she is an expendable sex object that enhances his story of the triumph of white maleness. Her sexual appetite (the white male protagonist crows, “She fucks like an animal”) is presented as a racial characteristic rather than a personal one. And while the characters in Better Luck Tomorrow are all Asian American, that does not shield the adopted female character from “hypersexualized representation” as a prop to explore Asian American masculinity.

McKee’s interpretation of the relentless sexual preoccupation with the bodies of young Asian girls and women is expanded as she analyzes the scandal surrounding Soon-Yi Previn’s relationship with Woody Allen, her adoptive mother’s romantic partner, through the HBO series Allen v. Farrow, as well as the memoirs of her adoptive mother, Mia Farrow; and her now-husband, Woody Allen. Farrow is one of Hollywood’s original transracial adopters, amassing a brood of children from Vietnam, South Korea, India, and the U.S.

Though never married, Farrow and Allen together adopted a white girl, Dylan, who later accused Allen of sexual abuse. Allen’s sexual relationship with Soon-Yi was exposed to the world when Farrow found naked photos of Soon-Yi in Allen’s apartment. McKee argues that Allen’s incestuous behavior was overlooked by the general public who do not recognize that incest can occur in adoptive relationships. “Diminishing the possibility of incest within adoptive families upholds the notion that adoption is somehow a lesser version of biological kinship while overlooking the psychological trauma of incest.”

The author points out that the media blamed Soon-Yi for being a homewrecker, rather than interrogating Woody Allen’s role in the relationship that came to light when and he was a powerful cultural icon at age 56, and she only a college freshman at 19. No matter his claims of not being a father figure to Farrow’s children, he was the long-term partner of Soon-Yi’s mother, and yet it was Soon-Yi who was characterized as the aggressor.

Additionally, McKee believes that Soon-Yi’s claims of physical and emotional abuse from Farrow were dismissed, as they contradict the popular view of transracial adoption as saviorism. “The assertions of abuse also call attention to Allen’s ability to manipulate Soon-Yi to leave one form of abuse for another.” Even her brother, the crusading journalist Ronan Farrow, has “failed to interrogate how uneven power dynamics affected [Allen’s] pursuit of Soon-Yi.”

To show how Koreans and Korean Americans also exploit the adoption trope, McKee turns her attention to the movie Seoul Searching, in which a group of Korean diaspora teens visit Seoul on a homeland tour. Each of the characters represent a stock teen-movie trope: The rebel, the tomboy, the bully, etc. As an homage to John Hughes blockbusters, the film also replicates the American director’s use of misogynist and racist tropes, which the author meticulously details.

As this is the Korean diaspora, there is also a transracial adoptee character, who is successfully reunited with her mother by the end of the film.

The film’s ability to facilitate conversations about the realities of reunion ensures that it departs from other portrayals of adoption, including documentaries that may celebrate reunion with little consideration of its ramifications in the lives of adoptees. Nevertheless, the film reinforces the notion that adoption leads to a better life, because it overlooks the losses and struggles adoptees experience in favor of a flattened perception that absolves the South Korean government, orphanages, and adoption agencies of the conditions that made those adoptions possible.

Finally, the author scrutinizes the popular Netflix documentary, Twinsters, as well as the accompanying memoir, Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited, as “adoptees’ entrance into 21st century U.S. middlebrow culture.” Written, starring, and co-directed by Samantha Futerman, the film tells of American adoptee Futerman’s discovery that she has a twin who has been adopted to France, and of the two sisters’ subsequent reunion.

McKee notes that the story is presented as a heart-warming tale that celebrates adoption and makes the adoptees into cute objects, while never interrogating why the twins were separated from each other or the underlying issues with the South Korean adoption system. Futerman’s adoption papers claimed she had been a single birth, reflecting a troubling lack of veracity in official documents that is commonly reported by Korean adoptees. Rather than investigate the darker aspects of the twins’ stories, the documentary adheres to the popular notion of adoption as a fairy tale. Nonetheless, McKee celebrates the twins’ “biographic mediation, asserting autonomy over what, how, and when details of their adoption are disclosed.”

Though adoption fantasies are deeply entrenched in the popular narrative, the author notes that there have been recent works that are offering a wider and more authentic perspective on what it is like to be an Asian adopted female. McKee observes, “Perhaps what I have learned since embarking on this project is that we will write our way out.” There is an ever-burgeoning canon of works by adopted people to counter the false, sentimentalized narratives that trap adoptee characters as the objects in their own narratives, rather than the subjects.

Though the language can veer into the academic, Adoption Fantasies is an important text that presents a fresh and unapologetic inquiry into a culture that objectifies adopted Asians from infancy to adulthood, perpetuating racism and misogyny under the guise of multicultural love. By training a keen critical eye at widely-consumed cultural products, McKee makes visible the embedded racial and cultural attitudes that have provided the scaffolding for transracial, transnational adoption in America, and asks us all to do better.

Families across cultures

by

In Reunion: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Communication of Family ~ By Sara Docan-Morgan

(Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2024, ISBN #978-1-4399-2283-5)

Review by Alice Stephens (Spring 2024)

All human relations require some kind of communication, and communication is integral to the family unit. When the adopted child enters a new family, they take on the cultural characteristics of that family, regardless of their ethnicity or country of origin. If the adopted person then reunites with their first family, they must learn how to bridge the years of separation.

This fraught process becomes much more complicated when the person has been adopted from abroad. Sara Docan-Morgan, a professor of communication studies and a Korean adoptee in reunion, examines how Korean adoptees and their birth families navigate reunions, and the communications issues involved, in the extensive new study In Reunion: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Communication of Family.

Though the focus of Docan-Morgan’s book is how communication affects reunion, In Reunion serves as an excellent primer on Korean adoption, from its origins as a way to “rescue” war orphans and mixed-race children, to the Korean government’s reliance on it as a substitute for a social safety net and an effective way to raise money for depleted post-war coffers, to its global reach and sociological effect on adoptees and their families, both Korean and adoptive.

By introducing the chapters with personal testimony of her own reunion story, Docan-Morgan adds a relatable tone to In Reunion that elevates it beyond an academic text, making it accessible to interested readers. The author is explicit about how, when, and from whom she gathered her data, including a handy table of participants, fourteen adopted to America and four to Denmark, even providing the questions that she asked in two interviews conducted 10 years apart. The author’s stated goal “is to understand, examine, and illuminate the experiences of transnational Korean adoptees in reunion… [and] draw special attention to the role of cultural and language differences in the development and maintenance of relationships between transnational adoptees and birth families.”

Delving into why adoptees seek out their original families, the author points out that even within the same adoptive family, one sibling may choose to search while another chooses not to. Some have the blessing and participation of their adoptive parents, including five whose parents initiated the search while the adoptees were minors, while others did not involve their adoptive families. The author writes, “[R]eunions occur through a series of incremental decisions.” The adoptee must initially decide to search, then whether to meet the family, and finally whether to maintain a relationship.

Often, the first meeting does not match the adoptee’s expectations. Many report being in shock, disassociating, masking their emotions, and/or reacting with less outward emotion than their birth parents. That introductory meeting is an unsettling initiation into the arduous process of establishing a relationship with one’s closest blood relatives across yawning chasms of culture and language. Along the way, the adoptee must carry the burden of everyone else’s feelings, careful not to seem to be rejecting the family that raised them for the one that birthed them, or favoring natural parents over adoptive ones. Docan-Morgan notes that “letting go of expectations for a specific type of family relationship can create space to build a closer relationship.” The less expectations and more flexibility everyone in reunion has, the better.

But cultural assumptions are hard to overcome, and confusion, hurt feelings, and misunderstandings are inevitable. Some interviewees spoke of not being able to see themselves in their genetic families, while others were put off by birth family members’ direct criticisms about weight, appearance, marital status, and other personal characteristics. Due to patriarchal values, females comprise the majority of Korean adoptees, and many raised in the Western tradition struggled to perform to their birth family’s standards of feminine beauty and behavior.

Some birth parents refused to tell other family members about the adoptee, straining the relationship and causing pain. A few adoptees found contact with siblings or cousins more rewarding than with parents. The author concludes that familiarity with the cultural and historical reasons behind their Korean families’ actions made adoptees more able to accept behavior that might have otherwise offended them.

Not surprisingly, Docan-Morgan found that one of the hardest barriers to overcome was that of language. None of the interviewees retained any of their native language, and most hadn’t studied it before they were reunited. Those who did try to learn Korean found it very difficult, requiring years of dedication to achieve basic conversancy. Respondents in the study also said that few Korean relatives spoke any English. Moreover, some family members expressed disapproval at the lack of the adoptee’s Korean language proficiency, putting the burden of communication entirely on the adoptee without acknowledging their own role in the loss of language.

There is an “emotional weight” to studying Korean, as well, that adoptees may find too heavy to carry. Therefore, it is helpful for interpreters to be present during meetings, though instances where long spoken passages are whittled down in translation to a short sentence or two led to trust issues in the reliability of the translator. In many instances, nonverbal communication becomes crucial to the relationship.

While straddling two countries and languages in their new relationship with birth family, adoptees reported that they must also tend to their adoptive families’ feelings and concerns. Some parents may be excited about their child’s reunion, while others may fear that they will be replaced by the birth parents. Traditionally, adoptive parents have controlled the adoption narrative, celebrating adoption (“Gotcha”) days, emphasizing a “meant to be” bond, promoting the notion of a “forever family.”

Some interviewees felt obliged to reassure their adoptive families that they still reign supreme in the adoptee’s heart, and to withhold their true emotions around reunion. Meetings between the sets of parents can be stressful and awkward as the birth parents express guilt and shame. Many felt a lack of emotional agency, as they were obliged to tend to everyone’s feelings before their own.

Ten years after Docan-Morgan’s initial interviews, she conducted a second interview with 17 of the original participants. In the interval between interviews, new communication technologies had emerged in the form of smartphones, the messaging app KakaoTalk, video chats, translation apps, and social media. While a few had lost touch with their Korean families, most had persisted in the relationship, whether that meant annual visits or an occasional text.

In the intervening years, participants had become more aware of the history and politics of transnational Korean adoption and the larger social forces that shaped their lives. “Whether it was through interacting with other Korean adoptees online or in person, or reading about the topic, interviewees spoke of issues such as deception by orphanages and adoption agencies, ensuing trauma for birth families and adoptees, power discrepancies between women and men in Korea, and the lack of agency for single mothers in Korea.” They accept that there will always be an “adoption information gap” in their stories, as details have been altered by adoption documents, or because birth family members hide facts, or due to knowledge simply lost to the relentless march of time.

Docan-Morgan makes clear that, just as with adoption, reunion is no fairy tale with a happily ever-after ending. She surmises that the most successful reunions are those where the adoptee understands their relationship with their first family “through the lens of Korean culture.” In order to do this, they must adjust their communication techniques to transcend language and enculturated thought systems. The book concludes with recommendations for the adoptee and adoptive parents going into reunion.

By examining Korean transnational adoption through the lens of communication and reunion, Docan-Morgan has written an accessible work of scholarship that will enlighten all readers about  the complexities and challenges of transnational adoption.

Defining themselves

by

Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants ~ By SunAh M. Laybourn

(New York University Press, New York, 2024, ISBN #978-1-4798-1478-7)

Review by Alice Stephens (Spring 2024)

As the demographic age of Korean adoptees becomes older, they have assumed control of their own narrative, producing literature, media and works of art in which their own identify is defined. They have also taken control of their group’s critical legal and human rights issues, lobbying for a law that would protect adoptees’ citizenship even when adoptive parents failed to secure that citizenship as children. 

These creative and self-aware activities by what is now a mature and established U.S. immigrant group are described in depth by sociologist (and Korean adoptee) SunAh M. Laybourn in her recent book Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants.

As a Korean-born person in a white, American family, I have spent a lifetime grappling with being a transracial, intercountry adoptee, but there was one part of my identity that I habitually ignored. It was not until my 40s that I recognized how being Korean is part of my heritage, and that another piece of my identity is that of an immigrant. I could perhaps efface that part of my story and identity because my father was an American soldier, making U.S. citizenship part of my birthright. But the reality is that he abandoned me in South Korea. If I had not been adopted, I would not have been eligible for U.S. citizenship.

Adopted in 1968, I was naturalized in 1971, and among my adoption documents are my naturalization certificate, a welcome letter from Richard Nixon, and a pamphlet explaining my rights and responsibilities as an American. It was not until Adam Crapser’s deportation case hit the news in 2017 that I became aware that the American government had no laws in place to guarantee citizenship to all children adopted from abroad.

Laybourn explores the “exceptional belonging” experienced by Korean adoptees and the impact it has on their identity construction. The author explains in the introduction,

I define ‘exceptional belonging’ as the condition for being extraordinarily equipped for inclusion through culturally constructed narratives of deservedness while also being routinely identified for exclusion whether through formal policies, informal practices, or interpersonal interactions.

Through the lens of exceptional belonging, the author closely scrutinizes the unique place that Korean adoptees occupy in the American continuum of hierarchy, with whiteness as the apex.

In the course of her research, Laybourn gathered information from an online survey, in-depth interviews, Korean adoptee events, and analyses of adoptee-centered films. The majority of those interviewed were adopted into white families and were in their 20s to early 30s in 2016, when the interviews were conducted. Some had been long involved in the adoptee community, while others were new to it.

The popular American immigrant story usually depicts loss, struggle, and self-sacrifice. But the typical challenges of immigration — such as gaining entrance to the U.S., assimilating to a new culture and language, establishing financial security — do not apply to the infant or toddler adoptee. Through proximity to whiteness, they are not subject to the usual indignities of being a fresh-off-the-boat newcomer.

Growing up, it is not unusual for the Korean adoptee to identify as white, and to deny or reject their Korean origins. Laybourn claims that for adoptees “it was within their family that they first encountered positive feelings associated with being American (i.e., white) and negative feelings associated with being Korean.” Socialized to view themselves in a white racial frame, Korean adoptees then encounter resistance from others in society, and even from within their own families, who may engage in overtly racist language, or convey a more subtle form of othering through comments like “We don’t see you as Asian.”

Once the Korean adopted person is separated from the protection of their family, it becomes clear that they are not allowed the benefits of being white. They are asked insensitive, probing questions such as “Where are you from really?” and “Do you want to look for your real parents?” They are held to the stereotypes of the Asian model minority — hardworking, obedient, good at math — and the girls and women are subject to sexual fetishization — exotic, eager to please, sexually knowing.

They experience the same garden-variety racism of racial epithets, jeers, and casual or explicit discrimination experienced by every other Asian in America. This can be perplexing to the adoptee. “Transnational transracial adoptees confuse the ‘us’ and ‘them’ of in-group/out-group boundaries. Korean adoptees raised in white families are one of ‘us’ — white family members — and one of ‘them’ — Asian foreigners — conflicting racialized positions,” the author observes.  

This idea of being a foreigner despite proximity to whiteness has manifested itself into frightening reality for some intercountry adoptees who, upon reaching adulthood, discover that their adopters never obtained American citizenship for them. Adulthood, according to Laybourn, transforms Korean adoptees from “adoptable orphans” to “deportable immigrants.” Laybourn uses the example of Adam Crapser’s deportation to South Korea as testament to the transformation of a child in need of saving to a foreign adult with criminal tendencies.

Twice adopted into abusive families who neglected to get him naturalized, Crapser was a catalyst for adoptee activism, as numerous intercountry adoptees began to discover that their parents, too, had abrogated their responsibility to naturalize them. The adoptee community was outraged that Korean children could be separated from their families in order to complete an American family, then left with no legal protection when their adoptive parents failed in their duty to make them American citizens.

“The irony was that for undocumented adoptees this better life [that adoption purportedly offered] was similar to the life they may have had in their home country. They existed on the fringes of society, unable to partake in the benefits as citizens,” the author writes.

The Child Citizenship Act of 2000 rectified the situation for intercountry adoptees under 18 years old, but does not cover adoptees who were older than age 18 at the time the act became law in 2000.  Galvanized by this issue, adoptees began to organize and advocate for themselves, creating groups such as the Adoptees Right Campaign and Gazillion Strong to promote passage of the Adoptee Citizenship Act (ACA), which would bestow automatic citizenship on people adopted by U.S. citizens.

“Advocacy for the ACA was distinct from previous adoptee citizenship legislation, as it was primarily spearheaded by adoptees for adoptees rather than by adoptive parents or adoption agencies,” the author points out. While trying to move away from the image of adoptee as child, ACA advocates found that “legislators could be moved by thinking about white interests more than immigration interests just as they were at Korean adoption’s inception.”

Therefore, it was more efficacious to emphasize the protection of white family interests, and to emphasize that adoptees were “good” citizens who were in this situation through “no fault of their own,” distinguishing them from “bad” undocumented immigrants, who have been subject to increasing vilification in this time of extreme political polarization. Though iterations of the bill have been introduced multiple times in Congress, the ACA has yet to be passed, leaving an untold number of adoptees in jeopardy of being deported from the only country they have ever known. Meanwhile, immigration laws have only become more draconian and the naturalization process more fraught.

From the collective identity of adoptee activism, Laybourn then examines individual identity formation, which typically happens well into adulthood, once the adoptee is somewhat autonomous of their adoptive parents and fully cognizant of the micro-aggressions and othering that happen within society, friend groups, and their own families. Often, they begin to reclaim what was denied to them, such as Korean culture and Asian solidarity. They no longer avoid thoughts of their birth families for fear of being disloyal or ungrateful to their American parents. That change in perspective often leads to their engaging in active searches, including trips back to Korea. They find validation and support by being in community with adoptees, no matter class, religion, sexual orientation, and other differences.

Creative works that seek to capture the Korean adoptee experience have sprung from adoptee efforts to define themselves in society, and Laybourn plays close attention to the film documentaries Twinsters and aka Seoul, which she explains as “two contemporary mainstream adoptee cultural productions created by adoptees, as sites of disidentification, where adoptees rework the normative meanings of adoptee, adoption, family, race, and citizenship.” Taking a fine-tooth comb to the documentaries, the author makes an argument for how these films reframe the Korean adoption narrative by giving adoptees control of the story and making the broader public aware of the global community that is manifested in meetings like the International Korean Adoptee Association’s tri-annual Gathering in Seoul.

She also dissects the controversy around the non-adoptee-directed movie Blue Bayou, which was perceived as using Crapser’s story without his consent, and not going far enough in promoting adoptee citizenship rights, resulting in a disavowal by adoptees, meant to be its target audience.

Events are moving fast in Korean adoption studies, and Out of Place does not include recent news such as South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation investigation of adoption, Sweden’s halting of Korean adoptions following claims of malfeasance, and Denmark’s commitment to end Korean adoption for the same reason, all of which were instigated by adoptee activism. Popular movies such as Joy Ride and Return to Seoul, while not adoptee-directed, are moving the adoptee narrative away from sentimentalized savior stories. And within the last five months, three critical adoption studies by Korean adoptees have been published, including this one.

Though this is a scholarly work, the writing and concepts are accessible to the general reader. Through terms like “exceptional belonging,” “public racialization,” and “adoptable orphan, deportable immigrant,” Laybourn gives a vocabulary to that peculiar niche Korean adoptees inhabit in their own country, whether citizens or not.

Copyright ©2024 Korean Quarterly. All rights reserved.

Show Buttons
Share on X
Hide Buttons