Korean Quarterly

Giving Voice to the Korean American Community

Hollee McGinnis

After a tragic Lunar New Year, hope

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Minnesota’s Asian American caucus steps up with bills to recognize hate crimes, curb gun violence | By Martha Vickery (Winter/Spring 2023)

The Minnesota Asian Pacific caucus: Rep. Ethan Cha, Sen. Susan Pha, Sen. Foung Hawj, Rep. Fue Lee, Rep. Liz Lee, Rep. Kaohly Vang Her, Rep. Samantha Sencer-Mura, Rep. Samantha Vang, Rep. Jay Xiong and Sen. Tou Xiong.

In a race against time, Minnesota’s legislature, with its slim Democratic majority in House and Senate, along with its Democratic governor Tim Walz, is engaged this winter in a fast-changing session, working on bills at a quick pace, as can only be done in a so-called “trifecta” state. The roster of bills is a hopeful one, featuring many that will improve life for marginalized Minnesotans, including children, elders, new immigrants, and the poor. 

Trifecta as it applies to politics was a new word to me this year, maybe because it is such a rare occurrence in our state.  A trifecta state is one in which a House majority, Senate majority and the state’s governor are all of the same party. Nationwide, it is not so rare, but it is in Minnesota.  The last time there was a Minnesota trifecta was in 1990, which was also accomplished with a very slim majority of the Democratic Farmer-Labor (DFL) party for one session.  

There are currently 22 Republican trifecta states and 17 Democratic ones in the country.  There are 11 divided governments in which neither party holds trifecta control, according to the website Ballotpedia. In 2022, Democrats flipped the Michigan legislature from red to blue, and gained governorships to achieve trifectas in Massachusetts and Maryland. Dems also retained the control of the legislatures in Colorado, Maine, Nevada and Oregon.

.MAP caucus town hall forum for Asian American community, held February 17.

Perhaps one of the busiest groups in the Minnesota state legislature is the Minnesota Asian Pacific Caucus (the MAP Caucus), which gave a press conference on January 23, just after the Lunar New Year weekend and the horrific mass shootings of Asians and Latino victims in two separate incidents in the communities of Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, California, at which two shooters killed 18 people. The Monterey Park shooting was at a Lunar New Year event.

The mood was somber but also hopeful at the first press conference of the re-formed DFL MAP Caucus, chaired by Rep. Ethan Cha (D-47B), who was newly elected in 2022.  Rep. Kaohly Vang Her later noted in her newsletter that their 10-person caucus of seven representatives and three senators is the second-largest Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) state behind Hawaii. She also wrote that Minnesota’s AAPI community (which in the 2020 Census topped 365,000) is the “fastest growing demographic in the state.” The MAP caucus also held a town hall-type event on February 17 to hear issues from the community.

Back in 2021, after the Atlanta shootings, and well after more than a year of growing numbers of hate crimes against Asians in Minnesota and nationwide, a very similar anti-hate crimes bill was patiently shepherded through a contentious legislature by principal author Rep. Samantha Vang (D-38B), with other coauthors. Vang, co-founder of the MAP caucus, appeared at the January 23 press conference to speak again about the same bill she has been championing for two years, now updated to this year’s version  (HR 181, nicknamed the Stop Hate bill). 

Two years ago, Ron Latz (D-46), DFL lead for the 2021 conference committee, speaking to KQ 10 days before the 2021 session ended ended, was presciently pessimistic about preserving the anti-hate/bias crimes portion of the bill.  Despite strong support and preparation, and testimony by Katie Wright (the mother of Daunte Wright, who was killed during a traffic stop by a Brooklyn Center police officer), and Brandon Williams, nephew of George Floyd, the bill disintegrated. Republican members, Latz remarked, were only focused on the budget.

This session, it’s different.

In its press conference, the group talked more about anti-hate legislation and anti-gun legislation than the rest of the bills that are priorities for this year. Rep. Her noted that their caucus knows they are only chipping away at the edges of a pandemic of gun violence. “No one law is a panacea,” she said. The MAP caucus is strong on topics like safe gun storage and increased restrictions for open-carry laws, in addition to setting up a structure to educate law enforcement about and legally define and recognize hate/bias crimes.

Even if stricter gun laws are achieved, no Minnesota law will prevent the flow of guns from other states, Her noted.  The caucus is strong on gun laws “at the risk of doing nothing,” she said. Federal legislation must happen too.

Other hopeful bills for Asian Minnesotans and the larger community include a bill to increase funding for English language learners (authored by Rep. Her); a bill to make ethnic studies a requirement for every high school student in Minnesota (authored by Rep. Samantha Sencer-Mura (D-33A) ); capacity-building grants for Minnesota non-profit community organizations which filled public service gaps during COVID and reached many immigrant and marginalized Asian Minnesotans (authored by Sencer-Mura); and an AAPI Veterans’ Bill to boost mental health care and other health coverage for Asian American veterans (authored by Sens. Foung Hawj and Susan Pha).

You can’t be a pessimist if you are also in the business of creating legislation. Vang, along with her anti-hate coalition in 2021, would not shut up about the need for educating police and changing the structure of police departments to recognize hate crime for what it is. She is still talking.  The Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition started up in 2019, and educator and now-representative Sencer-Mura has championed their bill.  They are still talking after two years.  This session is the first opportunity for progressive causes like these to get real traction. 

That opportunity could slip away quickly – the governor’s desk will soon be buried in an avalanche of new bills. Between now and the end of May, there will be some new progressive laws to report on, in this state and in other Democratic-trifecta states nationwide.

Brave spirit

Over the winter 2023 quarter, a new book was launched by long-time KQ contributor Heinz Insu Fenkl, and KQ got one of the first post-launch interviews.  A prolific writer, Fenkl has published only two novels, both autobiographical, about his childhood and early-teen years as the son of a GI father and Korean mother, growing up on the military bases and in the camptowns near Inchon.  Over the last 25 years, while not writing his novel, he taught English literature at State University of New York- New Paltz, and translated Korean prose and poetry into English, publishing eight books of Korean literature in translation.  He also learned a lot about ancient spirituality, philosophy and religion as a part of it. In the interview, he discusses his youthful, often funny misadventures of his youth and the unique culture in which he lived. He also reflects how, through his childhood, Korea changed and Westernized at a fast pace, while its ancient beliefs held sway, just below a thin veneer of modern life.

The joy of learning sijo

Another interesting literature project is a book on the Korean poetry form sijo, by the Chicago-based Sejong Cultural Society’s co-founder Lucy Park along with Wisconsin high school literature teacher Liz Jorgensen. The Sejong Cultural Society recognized a long time ago that to have a sijo-writing contest, the contestants first need how to write a sijo, not exactly a standard form in elementary and high school curricula. However, before students can learn it, teachers need to learn how to teach it – for some, teaching any poetry form is tricky.  The Society has been sponsoring classes in instruction of sijo for teachers for many years. Jorgensen, who embraced the craft, teaches it every year, and helps her students to enter the poetry contest, collaborated in this book designed not only to teach the poetry form, but to help other teachers to persuade students to try it and learn to love it.

The life course of adoption

How adults experience and grow into their lives as adoptees is the topic of a new survey of adult adoptees, now live and available from a website. Hollee McGinnis, an activist and researcher, has created the survey to further study her own group, adult transnational adoptees, to learn more about how their identity, and also their mental and physical health, may be affected as they age.  

This time of year is all about hope, especially right now in Minnesota, where spring is only an intellectual exercise. Staying strong as the snowbanks grow in late winter is the only way – that and snuggling in with a good book – we have a few recommendations.

Happy late winter, someday to be spring.

Mapping the life course of adoption

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Researcher initiates study to look at health and social influences for older adoptees | By Martha Vickery (Winter 2023)

She has been at adoption research for 25-plus years, a long time in a scholar’s career.  If circumstances had been different, adoption researcher/activist Hollee McGinnis might have decided to put adoption-related research away for awhile.

However, some significant recent events, including a life-altering bout with cancer, and the introspection brought on by pandemic times, has motivated her to give adoption research another look.

Specifically, she wonders if answers to some key questions might help her own peer group, the more senior members in the community of international adoptees, to understand their identity and their health as they get older.

Her current project, ongoing but still taking shape, is a study of older transracial adoptees and what is important to their identities and relationships. The project, under the umbrella name  Collaborative on Adoption and Alternative Care Research (CAARE) will receive research on adult adoptees, a seldom-studied group, and results will be shared with the adoption community.

The project is starting with a survey questionnaire intended to “map the life course of adoption.” McGinnis will administer this initial research, called the MAP study, with help from other adoptee researchers and adoptee organizations.  The information gained from this and future studies is intended to build “a practice of collaboration and co-creation of knowledge and wisdom by and for adoptees,” according to the website.

College to community organizing

When in college, McGinnis changed her major from Asian Studies to American studies “to learn more about who I was as a person with an Asian face, an Irish name, and a blond-haired mom.” Being an Asian Studies major was wrong for her, she said, because “my Asian studies aim was to learn about being Asian to fulfill everyone’s expectations about what I should know to be Asian.”

Her instincts continued to lead her to research her own group. Her senior project looked at Korean adopted young women, and collected information on how they viewed their own identity. “I was basically studying myself,” she said. 

Following that, in 1996, she enrolled in a self-expression and leadership course that challenged participants to do a project in one of their own communities. There were a lot of younger Chinese adoptees at the time, which was the impetus for her co-founding, with a group of adult Korean adoptees, the New York City-based Also Known As (AKA). The group celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2021. It was created, in part, to give international adoptees a structure for creating mentoring relationships with younger adoptees.

Also Know As (AKA) 25th anniversary celebration in New York (Hollee McGinnis lower right, in green).

AKA was in a small group of the first adult adoptee groups to form, and a network grew as a wave of other adult adoptee groups formed around the same time. The growing power of  internet technology also helped this quiet revolution gain strength. Finding Korean adoptees is easy now, she said, “but back then, I never would have imagined there would be such a community. In 1996 you could not google “adoptee” and find an adoptee!  I had to go to adoption agencies and adoptive parents’ groups and it was hand-to-hand, phone-to-phone kind of effort to find each other.”

One goal of the MAP study

One of the two goals of the MAP study will be to discern the significance of adoptee organizations to adoptees’ in their adulthood.  McGinnis’ own experience and her observation of the work done by many other adoptee organizations indicates to her that adoptee organizations are important.  However, no researcher has inquired into the ways they are important, and to what extent they are important in adoptees’ lives.

Getting the participation of adult adoptee organizations for the study will be the easy part. She will be calling on the member organizations of the International Korean Adoptee Association (IKAA) for networking help.  Choosing a “control group,” the people who have not been involved with adoptee organizations, is the only way to show if adoptee organizations have had an effect on adult adoptees. Finding those participants will be more challenging. 

By talking to AKA members and others in adult adoptee groups, McGinnis said many have told her they realized the importance of the group to their lives only after they stumbled into the group or went because of a friend’s invitation.  “It’s not like other affinity groups,” she said. “Like ‘oh, we’re all adopted – let’s go hang out?’ It may not make sense at first.”

“When I decided to reach out and connect with other adoptees and their experiences when I was 24, it was like multiple refractions of my experience mirrored back at me,” she said, showing her all the directions her life could have taken, but didn’t.

“There’s no way for you not to begin seeing your own life in different ways when you are hearing other people talk about their own experience. That’s how you suddenly see what you couldn’t see.” But, she added, the adoptee has to be developmentally ready to really hear other’s stories, and to think about them in the context of their own life.  That developmental step occurs at different times for adoptees, she added, and some are not ready to get the full benefit of an adoptee group until they are in their 20s or older.

In 2009, for her Ph.D. dissertation, McGinnis studied the mental health of Korean school children who were raised in orphanages. When she started her job in 2017 as an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Social Work, her youngest son was barely two. She wanted to do more research in Korea, but with young children at home, she decided not to go that route.

For the Eva B. Donaldson Adoption Institute,  McGinnis led a study dubbed Beyond Culture Camp. She learned that, from a 486-person sample of 50 percent Korean adoptees and 50 percent white adoptees, adoption identity became stronger over time. In the same group, the importance of racial/ethnic identity became less important over time.  She always wanted to follow up on this finding.  

The Beyond Culture Camp results hinted that adults are not done with adoption when they are 18 or 20 or even 50 – a good reason to look at the significance of adoptee groups as to adoptees as they grow older, she said.  

“I began to think that there was a need to literally map the life course of adoption,” McGinnis said. “We have not done that yet.  That’s what I am hoping this project is going to be the beginning of.”

Life happened, time flew by, and in summer 2019, at the beginning of lockdown times, she was diagnosed with lump in her breast, and she had a lumpectomy. The lump was benign, but in the margins, there was cancer.  The benign lump allowed the doctor to find the hidden cancer early.

The experience “catapulted me into some really deep soul work. I call it my ‘Adoption 2.0.,’” she said. She wondered why she had cancer, despite not having any genetic markers for it in any of her tests.  “It was something environmental,” she said.  There were no simple answers to the “why.”

While at home and recovering from cancer treatment, she noticed that Korean adoptees and other transnational adoptees got together more frequently during the pandemic.  After being out of the adoptee community conversations for some years, she said, “I started to just kind of join in.”

She discovered that the people Zooming were a different population than those who were formerly active in adoptee organizations.  Some had never participated in an adoptee event before.  “They were like the people I missed 20 years ago,” when finding people to join Also Known As, she said.   They were not averse to getting together with fellow adoptees – they were just “doing other things in their 20s,” she said.  

The pandemic Zoom meetings made her even more curious about the 40-somethings who had never been in any group with fellow adoptees.

Mapping the health of transnational adoptees

Another wake-up call was that “in my close group of Korean adoptee women, maybe eight of us, about half of us were diagnosed with breast cancer in our 40s. That was another thing – what the hell was going on?” McGinnis had read research about complex trauma causing the kind of stress that creates physical symptoms. She wondered about her adoptee women friends, so many with similar early breast cancer.  

Before getting too far into the project now online as CAARE, McGinnis said she reviewed the literature of adult adoptee physical and mental health.  “We don’t really know very much,” she said.  Because there have been no recent studies, the oldest research participants in any study are in their late 20s.  Charting adoptees’ health in adulthood became the second aim of the study.

The goal must include mental health influences as well, she noted.  She hopes to identify stressors and traumas, such as systemic racism, that may affect the physical and mental health of adoptees as they age. “Complex trauma is the way people internalize the things that have happened to them,” and how they talk to themselves about it, McGinnis explained. “In other words, the voice that says ‘I’m not good enough,’ and ‘I’m not lovable,’” she said. “Those are the things that, early on in life,  get lodged in the mind and the body, and, I think, make you sick, potentially, if you don’t identify them, bring them up to the light, love on them, and shift them profoundly.”

As old as adoption research is, looking at adult adoptees as a research topic is still relatively new.  Policies around child welfare have been around “rescuing children from what are perceived as dangerous situations, and getting them out of childhood, but not setting them up for what they need for a thriving adulthood.” One of her  hopes, she said,  is that “if we can map what adoption looks like in adulthood, we can go back and change policies so children can get what they need for thriving adulthoods.”

Sharing knowledge in the early stages

McGinnis plans to invite community discussions of initial study results, rather than the traditional approach of waiting for a final report.  This sharing method, called the “decolonizing methodology” was developed by indigenous scholars who were tired of researchers extracting information from their communities, and never sharing with the communities it came from, McGinnis explained. With this approach, adoptees can “take that knowledge and make meaning out of it, and have it help them, instead of having it hidden behind some kind of expert paywall.”

McGinnis will discuss some initial results in a session to be held at the IKAA conference to be held in July in Seoul. Her presentation will be part of the Sixth International Symposium on Adoption Studies to be held during the IKAA meeting, on July 12.

The perspective of mid-life “makes us ask deeper questions about our legacy, meaning, and one’s sense of self – it is a different focus than adults have in their 20s.” Although experts always say that adoption is a lifelong journey, there is little information on how transnational adoptees view this lifelong relationship, and how social and cultural connections affect it. 

The survey (website link below), for U.S. placed adoptees (international, domestic, or from foster care) age 18 and older, asks questions about physical and mental health, and tries to get at whether participation in adoptee-led spaces and groups affects adoptees as adults, and if so, how. It also asks participants about exposure to trauma as a child and as an adult, and any experiences related to loss.  It takes about an hour to fill out, according to McGinnis.

As part of her legacy, McGinnis wants to help fellow adoptees to offer their experiences navigating adulthood as an adoptee to inform the perspectives of future adoptees and adoptive families. Going from community organizing, to work in policy, and then research, McGinnis describes herself as “still a story-teller, but I am trying to tell stories with data and patterns.”

For her, thinking about the data and patterns of adoption started with listening to adoptees’ stories. “That is an education you cannot get in a graduate program. It is profoundly transformative.  I was always thinking ‘where are the threads?’ and ‘what are the themes in common?’ and ‘how are these stories converging and diverging?’ and that’s what I am still doing now.”

The website for the Collaborative on Adoption and Alternative Care Research (CAARE)  www.caare-research.org and the MAP survey is on a clickable link on the site.

The annual gathering of the International Korean Adoptee Association (IKAA) annual meeting information is at: https://www.ikaa.org/2022/09/27/2023-ikaa-korea-gathering/

An emerging racial reckoning

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Profiles of KAD Relations with the Black Community: ’92 to ’20 ~ By Woo Ae Yi (Ame Ai)

(LitPrime Solutions Press, Torrence (CA), 2020, ISBN #978-1-9533-9721-8)

Review by Bill Drucker (Summer 2021 issue)

In 2020, at the height of the racial tensions, something else was occurring.  The Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) received support from the Asian and Latin communities.  Among Asian American supporters was a subset of Korean adoptees (the author uses the term KAD in the title and throughout the book to refer to Korean adoptees). These minority groups all have in common the issues of dealing with social inequity and racism.

Author Woo Ae Yi’s publication could not be more timely.  It examines the cultural and historical views of Korean American and African American conflicts in America.  Her specific social timeframe is from the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (Sa-I-Gu or 4-29 to Koreans) to the 2020 George Floyd shooting in Minneapolis.

Yi’s observations as spectator and participant resonate on many levels.  Black, Asian and other groups are moving in solidarity, and activists are not just demanding a call to action, they are offering workable solutions to the challenging racial moment in which they find themselves.  The author believes that the 2020s decade could be the new proving ground for social and racial reforms. 

Yi makes a key point that Korean adoptees can serve a significant role in ethnic/racial justice movements, particularly as a bridge to the BLM movement.  She sees that Korean adoptees share many commonalities with Blacks, and but also occupy a special status in the social mainstream.  As Yi states, Korean adoptees are accustomed to relationships across cultures and races, with whites, Blacks, and other people of color.

The author discusses Korean American and Korean adoptee relations with the Black community.  She argues that the media has largely profiled African Americans and Korean Americans in a negative light.  While the stereotype of Blacks is that they are a group to be feared, Koreans conversely are unseen and invisible unless some conflict arises, such as the recent rise of anti-Asian hate crimes.

The relationship between Koreans and Blacks in the U.S. has been poor overall, mainly due to mutual ignorance and distrust of the other group.  The racial collision of immigrant Koreans and Blacks in a small, poor section of Los Angeles culminated in the 1992 LA Riots with the burning and looting of Koreatown. There was a slow rebuild of the neighborhood after the riots, but today, LA Koreatown thrives as a tourist destination.

Demographic shifts have altered the landscape and social fabric.  The influx of new Asians and Latinos into predominantly Black areas altered the neighborhoods from Black to Black-mixed culture neighborhoods.  Koreans moved into sections also occupied by Blacks and Latinos.  Korean adoptees also moved into Asian-strong or mixed communities in larger cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Paul-Minneapolis, and New York.

As Yi notes, Koreans and Blacks misunderstand one another.  Even when living in close proximity in LA, DC, and other metro areas, Blacks and Koreans have traditionally stayed apart.  In community development, the Black community has been strong politically, but weak financially.  The opposite occurred in Korean communities.  Despite similar social disparities and racism, seldom did the two groups cross over.

If Korean Americans tended to dislike Blacks, they also disliked Korean adoptees. The Korean adoptee brand of Korean-ness was not enough them to be accepted into the very stratified social system which is Korean America.  It was only when Korean adoptees found each other that a new international community was created, the Korean Adoptee Nation.  KADs united, forming an empowered base.  They lobbied for adoptee rights, then moved on to social and racial activism.  It was a matter of time when KAD activities intersected with the Black and other communities.

The author also profiles some influential Korean Americans and Black Americans.  Among the two groups are the issues of identity and acceptance, racism at home and work, dating and marriage, familial and social expectations, conforming or living outside the box.  As adoptees and in mixed-race homes, Korean adoptees experience with racism can be overt and/or subtle.  Conflicts arise with family, friends, and co-workers. The same or similar issues may resurface in marriage and child raising. 

The first group (interviewed in  2007) are Korean and Black adoptees who belong to white American families.  Interviewees include Hollee McGinnis, Jennifer Arndt-Johns, Nabiya, Rhonda Roorda, SooJin Pate, Tabetha Jones and Thomas Park-Clement.

The second group of adoptees (interviewed in 2020) was more engaged in transracial and transcultural relations.  As a group, they were more familiar with Black Americans and activism.  Issues of racism come up being Korean or Black, or Korean Black.  Included are Amy Elizabeth, Bree Davis, David Taylor, Enetty Taylor, Hayley Hoffman, Helsen Valdes, Holly Choon Hyang Bachman, JaeHee Melanie Chung-Sherman, Jessica Farrell, Jordan Davis, Lisa A. Quaites, Matthew Goodman, Milton Washington, Monica Kim, Rachel Kavanagh Baldwin, Renford Reese, Rutledge, SooJin Pate, Yoon-Sook Kim, and Young-wha.

All the interviewees have dealt with racism.  They are aware of or witnesses to the 1992 LA Riots and the 2020 George Floyd killing.  All have become more sensitive to racial justice issues as a result.  For Korean-Black couples, navigating color, race, and gender issues in their personal relationships can be a rude awakening. 

The author, a Korean adoptee, writes that adoptive white mainstream parents tend to see their children as white, whether the child is Korean or Black.  She questions whether they are colorblind, color-ignorant, or color denying.  As Yi states, to deny that an adoptive family is now an interracial family can be as detrimental as prejudicial remarks about people of the adoptee’s race.  While parents practice liberal colorblindness, the adoptees unfortunately still feel their racial difference in the home and outside.  One Korean adoptee mentions it as the sense of Asian token-ness.

Another adoptee brought up that  “most white [parents to adoptees] have seldom been the minority in a room.  My surrogate birthmother’s family invited us to a traditional Korean celebration that was in Korean.  My mother clung to me, for the first time in her life experiencing what I experienced most of the time.”

Notably, as adoptees select mates, interracial relations impact the adoptive parents.  They may act colorblind, the author writes, but race does matter to adoptive parents. Parents may accept out of a sense of liberal posture, push for same race relations, or may outright object.  At least two families and two races are involved in negotiating such new relationships, and no choices are easy or simple.  

Yi states that among Korean adoptees, colorblindness in itself is considered a form of racism, specifically microaggression. One Black adoptee pointed out that the Black parents see you as the same color, even if you are mixed race.  On the other hand, the Korean culture has had trouble accepting Koreans orphans or mixed-race children.

Author Yi discusses the less-addressed issues of racially-motivated emotional trauma.  Black and Korean adoptees shared many common emotional issues.  Among Korean adoptees, “never rock the boat” is a common mantra.  The author asserts that Korean adoptees tend to bottle up traumas, such as school bullying or name-calling. As one adoptee states, maybe if we spoke out sooner, the topics of racism in interracial families could have been addressed more openly, honestly, and supportively.

Korean adoptees have some of the highest rate of suicides in America and Europe.  Trauma in this community stems from loss of identity and culture, racism, and abuse.  For Black adoptees, the trauma can be more physical and violent.  For mixed Korean-Black adoptees, the issues are compounded by racism, color, gender, and status.  All three groups of adoptees have experienced racial trauma, as children and as adults.

The issues of Korean adoptee and Blacks and Black Adoptees trauma are underserved.  The seminal reference book, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is criticized as being an authoritative reference with a “white” lens.  Yi argues for the inclusion of adoption-based and race-based trauma into the DSM.

Yi points out, “It’s apparent that we’re not asking the right questions to understand how we can fix this country, and the problem is that we want quick and easy solutions, but it will require depth and compassion to understand and hear the depth of someone’s pain.  What we are actually dealing with is deep trauma, for both the transracial adoptee, the Black adoptee, and Blacks in general.”

The author writes that Korean and/or Black adoptees can lobby for the inclusion of both adoption-based trauma and race-based traumatic stress into the DSM so it can be studied, diagnosed, and treated in an official manner.  Adoptees can create forums, open discussions, and provide support those who are experiencing trauma.

Yi and her interviewees often point to educating and correcting white authorities.  The white community or the nameless institutions cannot bear full brunt of the tense, racial environment.  A better social understanding is necessary.  Voicing serves its purpose, but protests and demands only go so far.  Solutions should come from adoptees, Blacks, Koreans, and other people of color – in solidarity, to create inclusion in the challenging social issues of the day.  Yi stresses that the participation of Korean adoptees can be a bridge between white, Black and other ethnic/racial communities.

Yi was born in Seoul, South Korea and is a U.S. citizen.  She was adopted into a white family and grew up in the Little Korea neighborhood of the metropolitan DC area.  She has published 12 books on a variety of subjects.  She is a volunteer at the adoptee organization AdopteeHub as a copywriter.

The future of Korean adoption

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Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States ~ By Kimberly D. McKee

(University of Illinois Press, Champaign (IL), 2019, ISBN #978-0-252-8405-8)

Review by Bill Drucker (Fall 2020 issue)

Author Kimberly D. McKee offers a detailed and critical examination of the complex history and issues of Korean overseas adoption, particularly the adoption relations between Korea and the U.S.  Adoption programs have sent nearly two-thirds of the estimated 200,000 Korean infants and children placed for adoption globally to America.  McKee views of the transnational adoption as one that has become “normalized as a child welfare policy.”  She examines the social, gender, and familial repercussions of adoption.

This critique stands in excellent company with other critical Korean adoptee studies, many by adult Korean adoptees.  Eleana Kim, Kim Park Nelson, Tobias Hubinette, Hollee McGinnis, and others have produced in-depth analyses of transnational Korean adoption.  Adoption has been established, monolithic and institutionalized in both the U.S. and South Korea.  On the other side is the adult Korean adoptee community which has responded with its own criticism, challenging and writing its own accounts of the adoption experience.

McKee writes that transnational adoption has been transformed into a “transnational adoption industrial complex (TAIC) — a neo-colonial, multi-million-dollar global industry that commodifies children’s bodies.”  These are strong words, and they are well argued in six compelling chapters.

McKee examines the disruption of identity, citizenship, and kinship of transnational adoption by adoption of Korean children into mostly white, Christian, American families.  The mindset of advocating a humanitarian rescue of children who were orphaned and abandoned during Korean War does not have the same validity today as back in the 50s.  During the years that covered the growth of transnational adoptions, the dynamics around culture, race and identity in the U.S. has changed. 

The lack of South Korean government oversight and a limited social welfare infrastructure incentivized and forced single mothers and irresponsible parents to give away their children, ostensibly for a better life. 

A recent polarizing issue is the controversial “baby box” established by Pastor Jong Rak Lee outside his home in South Korea (and explained in a 2015 documentary film The Drop Box about Lee, his wife, their 19 adopted disabled children , and their Seoul church that supports abandoned and disabled children).  It is a box into which anyone may anonymously drop an unwanted infant. 

Because babies are dropped with no identifying information and no documentation declaring the baby is legally released for adoption, baby box children cannot be adopted, and potentially face childhood in an institution (pending a law change).  The issue is contentious.  In the end, the box is not a solution, the author points out.  Rather, it perpetuates the practice of the abandonment of infants and children.

The author also examines the controversies in the U.S. around adoptees who, due to ignorance, negligence, and/or disrupted adoptions, were not made citizens by their adoptive parents or legal guardians.  Until recent years, Korean adoptees were not automatically citizens upon their adoption; citizenship was a separate legal process.  Notably, there are an estimated five Korean adoptees have been deported and now live in South Korea.

Deportation is triggered after a non-citizen adoptee (or any non-citizen)  is convicted of a minor felony (such as drug possession).  A case-in-point is the adoptee Adam Crapser.  Deported in November 2016 Crapser is still living in South Korea as of December 2020. 

Crapser is filing suit against his adoption agency Holt International and the South Korean government for negligence in not ensuring that he and other Korean adoptees were made citizens.  The case has shed light on the whole problem of non-citizen adoptees in the U.S  Advocacy organizations such as Adoptees for Justice are lobbying for solutions, such a law to confer retroactive citizenship for all adoptees, no matter what year they were adopted, and the opportunity for deportees to return to the U.S.  So far, the current administration is not supportive.

Within the household of the adoptee, there is a racialized tension.  The Korean child does not look like the mother and father, the brothers and sisters, or the extended white family.  Transnational adoption disrupts the normal monoracial understanding.  It also questions reproduction, the impact of future family makeup.  The racialized household does not go away because the white parents deny it.

Korean adoptees look Asian, but are brought up thinking, acting, and seeing themselves as white Americans.  There is also the underlying belief that white hegemony is superior.  All adoptees face a reckoning of race and identity at some point.  The real pain is not having a true kinship to either culture.  The conflicts of familial dysfunction surfaces again in the adoptee’s marriage and child rearing. 

One chapter looks at memoirs and compilations of stories by adoptees.  The first was Seeds from a Silent Tree (1997) and the was second Voices from Another Place (1999) articulating the adoptee’s life experiences.  Korean adoptees, after the milestone 1999 Gathering of Korean adoptees (organized through Holt International Children’s Services, a major international adoption agency), had a communal awakening.  They questioned the adoption process at the birth and host country levels.  Not satisfied just to articulate their adoption experiences, adoptees challenged the adoption norms, adoption institutions, and both American and Korean policies on adoption issues.

Memoirs, films and other new and more critical adoption anthologies address the racial, gender, and kinship issues endemic to international adoption.  Among them are The Language of Blood, Dust of the Streets, the film Twinsters, the anthology Flip the Script: Adult Adoptee Anthology, and others.  The narratives are personal: Some painful, others critical, some accepting, others still conflicted and unresolved.  These new adoptee narratives question the validity of American mainstream views on adoption and the Korean adoption agenda. 

In one section the author details, in an oral history format, the stories of 13 adoptees (nine women and four men).  The adoptee descriptions of core issues of identity and kinship go against the mainstream stories of the adoption experience.  There is a paradigm shift of who are the authorities on transracial adoption.

The well-educated, adult adoptee community is organized, globally connected, and challenges the institutional policies and practices.  In a section entitled Who are You Calling Angry? the author looks at the mentality of blame and misunderstanding of adoptees.  Are the adoptees ungrateful?  Are they angry?  Are they unhappy?  These are platforms the mainstream, adoption agencies Korean and American question when confronted by the adult adoptees.  Neither the birth nor host country expected such numbers to question the rationale of international adoption.   Not satisfied with the institutional rhetoric, adoptees want more answers and are pursuing them right up to adoption reform.

In conclusion, McKee makes the point that the standards on adoption established by what she calls the “transnational adoption industrial complex” used as a model for other adoption countries, must answer to the scrutiny of legality, responsibilities of birth and host countries, reports of child abuse, adoptee and birth parent rights.  The argument or excuse of “rescuing a child without question” is invalid.  The author writes, “As adoptees engage publicly in recuperating stories of adoption, society must disabuse itself of the notions that all adoptees are open books ready to share their personal journeys.”

Transnational Korean adoption has had an enormous impact on American and Korean social and family structures.  For the current generation of Korean adoptee readers, inundated with too many adoption references, author Kimberly McKee provides an insightful and very contemporary critical analysis.  Her book invites the reader to reframe and rethink the whole adoption experience.  Her emphasis is on the adoptees themselves to define or redefine their own ideas of identity and kinship.  The book also provides an extensive list of adoptee authors.  

Author, adoption scholar, and Korean adoptee Kimberly D. McKee is associate professor in the Integrative, Religious, and Intercultural Studies Department at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, MI.

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