Asian Fusion
While Korean adoptees in Minnesota struggle with questions of self, they are inventing a new identity, blending cultures, families, and values.
By Elizabeth Larsen
Photo by David Ellis
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As conversations started, McGinnis says, adopted Koreans started asking each other what they hoped could come out of all of these newfound connections. Some wanted simply to network and socialize. Some wanted to politicize transnational adoption and reform—or even stop—the practice. Others wanted to make the experience of growing up adopted easier for younger generations. Arndt-Johns, for example, founded Rainbow World, a nonprofit organization that produces media projects geared to adoption communities.
Last May, Arndt-Johns screened Crossing Chasms for a small audience of adopted people and adoptive parents at Children’s Home Society and Family Services in St. Paul. Arndt-Johns says she organizes up to a dozen events like this every year to educate people about adoption and help members of her community discuss what it’s like to be adopted. After the film was over, Arndt-Johns fielded a round of comments. Then the group split up: adopted people in one room, adoptive parents in another. The idea was to allow everyone to talk more freely.
Other adopted Koreans have made a point of going back to their agencies and talking to them about their childhoods, explaining what helped and hindered them when they were growing up. Cox and McGinnis say that more and more transnationally adopted adults are working in agencies and other areas of the adoption field and that there have been some dramatic improvements in post-adoption services and pre-adoptive counseling for parents. “When you look at the first wave of adopted Koreans who came in the mid-1950s and [compare] their experience with the children being adopted today and the children of the ’80s, their experiences are all very different,” says Arndt-Johns. “It’s amazing to see the social changes in that time span.”
But there is still plenty of room for improvement. Currently, many agencies offer no post-adoption services; pre-adoptive counseling may be nothing more than a pamphlet. That will change if the United States ratifies the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption in 2007. That treaty will require all agencies helping in intercountry adoption to be licensed and to offer at least minimal preparation and training to help adoptive parents tackle issues of race, identity, and culture.
For her part, McGinnis is currently working on a research project that’s finding out directly from adoptees what has helped them form their sense of self. “What I’m trying to get at with my research is that [post-adoptive support] needs to go beyond culture camp,” she says. “If you send your child to culture camp to get culture [but] it’s not something that’s integrated in the family on daily basis—if you don’t bring Asian people into your home or you don’t have role models and mentors for your child—that’s not the answer. You still need to talk to your child about discrimination and racism.”
Kim Park Nelson - Photo by
David Ellis
Kim Park Nelson, who was adopted from Korea in the ’70s and grew up in St. Paul, is a PhD candidate and researcher in the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is also teaching the first college-level course in the United States that explores Korean adoptee experiences. She is particularly interested in the ways that the changing political relationship between the United States and Korea are reflected in the lives and identities of adoptees, and how adopted Koreans’ experience of race connects with race relations in America.
Park Nelson’s research isn’t about supporting or opposing transnational adoption, she says. Asking people who were adopted transnationally whether they are for or against the practice isn’t a fair question. “I think that for adoptees the question ends up being very loaded,” she explains. “Instead of it being a question about your opinion on this, that, or the other political issue, it ends up being a question about how you reflect on your life. It’s too reductive. It’s like saying to anyone who is a parent: ‘Kids? Yes or no?’ Even if you are a person who has had a lot of problems with parenting or you have difficult children, you don’t want to sound as if you don’t love your children.”
Park Nelson says she would like to see Americans get beyond the idea that adoption is a simple win-win proposition, solving America’s infertility problems and saving babies in one stroke. And she’d like people to realize that the way transnational adoption is practiced reflects inequalities in the global economy. “Transnational adoption right now depends on rich nations and poor nations and there being this huge gap between rich and poor and being white and non-white,” she says. “The reason an American woman can be 41 and wanting to have children even though she’s no longer fertile. . . is because of the way that transnational adoption is set up. It depends on some person she will never meet and doesn’t want to think about—someone who has no options and no choices and lives in a society where single motherhood isn’t a viable option or is unfeasible economically. I refuse to believe that it’s because those women don’t want to keep their kids. Women want to keep their kids.”
Helping birth mothers keep their children is one of the many causes taken on by Jane Jeong Trenka, adopted with one of her sisters in 1972 by a rural Minnesota family. Trenka’s memoir, The Language of Blood, examines her sense of displacement as an adopted Korean and her return trip to Korea in 1995. Trenka now lives in Korea and is a co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, an anthology that explores the emotional, cultural, economic, and political toll that transracial adoption can take.
Trenka would like to see countries like the United States spend less of their considerable wealth on adopting foreign children and more on improving conditions in the “sending” countries, so that birth mothers are not forced to “choose” adoption. And she strongly suggests that rather than remain fixated on transnational adoption, Americans pay more attention to the thousands of children in foster care in the United States. “Even though transnational adoption has increased 210 percent over the past 15 years, there are now 118,000 American children waiting to be adopted,” she says. “I do wish that the American public would care about the happiness of those children more. The fact that there are so many American children languishing in foster care—the largest single racial group is white—seems to indicate that transnational adoption is not so much about making children happy with love and families, as it is about fulfilling the consumer desires and fantasies of potential adoptive parents.”
Naturally, such criticisms of transnational adoption raise the hackles of many adoptive parents, not to mention adoptees who don’t share these views. When blogger Ji In (she goes by her Korean first name to protect her own and her adopted family’s privacy) writes critically about adoption-related topics on the website Twice the Rice, she gets anywhere from 200 to 700 unique visitors in a single day. “When I started out my blog I didn’t have a defined audience or a defined intent for what I was blogging about,” she says. “But I think a lot of what I was dwelling on did center around my issues with adoption and my identity as an adult transracial adoptee.”
Eventually, her involvement with adoption questions became overt. After reading some blogs and discussion groups that she felt minimized the importance of race in the lives of adoptive children, Ji In typed out a provocative posting: if she had a dollar for every adoptive parent she has met who has gotten things right when it comes to transracial adoption, she wrote, she’d have almost enough money for some McNuggets and fries.
