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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Some readers took this to be an anti-parent manifesto. “In retrospect, I didn’t mean to suggest that there is a ‘right’ way or a ‘wrong’ way to parent,” she says. “I think what I intended to get at, but might not have phrased very effectively, is that there’s this quest among transracial adoptive parents to seek out a foolproof way to get things right, when really, each parent must determine his or her own…philosophy. Parents who tell me that they’ve printed out my blog or have taken down notes—I really don’t know what to say to them. I want to remind them, ‘You do realize that this is my life, right? And that your daughter is different from me?’ ”
While the majority of Ji In’s visitors are lurkers, some adoptive parents write to voice their support of her right to her opinions. Others are less than civil. “I’ve been told to shut up, or that I’m polluting the minds of younger adoptees, or that I need to be saved,” she says. “Somebody hinted at the idea that I need therapy.” Ji In says that while she tries not to take these reactions to heart, the personal nature of blogging makes it hard to stay detached. Some e-mails to Twice the Rice are from adopted people who want her to know that they are very happy with their families. The fact that readers assume she is not happy with hers (an incorrect conclusion, she says) highlights one of the risks of questioning the system that gave her an American family.
With the 10th-largest economy in the world, South Korea can afford to support its children. But there are social and cultural obstacles. Changing Korean attitudes about domestic adoption and eventually ending adoptions altogether are the goals of Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK), a Seoul-based group of adoptees. Almost all adopted Koreans are born to single mothers, a situation that Trenka likens to the so-called “baby scoop” era in the United States—the time between the end of World War II and the mid-1970s when unwed pregnant women were sent to maternity homes to deliver their babies, and the babies were placed for adoption, often against their mothers’ wishes.
While the Korean government publicly endorses domestic adoption, Cox says the social stigma of single motherhood means that adoption is still largely taboo. “Any Korean family who adopts today does it in secrecy,” says Cox. “They move to a different neighborhood or opt for the pretense of a woman wearing clothes that make her look pregnant.” While Cox believes that the end of transnational adoptions from Korea will be cause for celebration, she’s also adamant that children should not be raised in orphanages, even if avoiding them means removing kids from the smells, tastes, and sounds of their birth cultures. “If intercountry adoptions were to stop today, there would be children who would go without families,” she says. “That’s the reality.”
Some adopted Koreans want increased recognition from their birth country. Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (GOAL) helps adopted Koreans visiting or living in Korea. The group also promotes adoption awareness in the Korean government, in adoption agencies, and in Korean society at large. That’s no small task when you consider the remorse Koreans feel about their country’s history of transnational adoption. “I was shocked to learn the prevailing Korean belief—not necessarily the government’s—that the Korean adoption program is a national shame and tragedy,” says Trenka. “Korean adoptees are portrayed a lot in the media; all you have to do is turn on the TV and the shame, regret, pity—and quite frankly, the ignorance about our lives—are blatantly obvious. You don’t even need language to catch the meaning.
“I think most Koreans are thankful to the adoptive parents for taking care of their children, while simultaneously feeling enormous sadness about not being able to do so themselves after the Korean War and during the country’s rapid industrialization. But I don’t think the general public is aware that the adoptions still continue, even though Korea is now rich.”
Not all adopted Koreans see the issues surrounding transracial, transnational adoption through a geopolitical lens. Some have no interest in finding community with other adoptees. Some live happily in the white worlds in which they were raised. Others have forged new ties with non-adopted Asian Americans or Koreans. And still others have decided to adopt children from Korea themselves. According to social worker Johnson, a lot depends on the generation in which people were adopted and whether they are male or female. “How old they were when they were adopted, what part of the country they were adopted in—in Minnesota, whether they were adopted in the Twin Cities or in the outlying rural areas—all matter,” she says. “Whether an adoptee is the only adopted person in the family, whether they have biological siblings or adopted siblings makes a difference, too.
“You have to take into consideration the level of isolation an adopted person may have experienced—isolation not just from other Koreans or other adoptees, but from any diversity in their home communities. And you also need to consider how well adoptive parents have been prepared for raising a child of a different race and culture. My parents had a very different preparation than families who are adopting now from Korea. That preparation, or lack of preparation, really shapes how and when adoptees start to work through some of their issues of culture and identity.”
Daniel Martig is a University of Minnesota undergraduate who grew up in Lino Lakes. He has been learning Korean for four years and is spending the 2006–2007 academic year studying at Yonsei University in Seoul. He says that he wants to use the year to be an ambassador for the benefits of transnational adoption. “I want Koreans to see that there is a very positive side of adoption and that I know plenty of other kids just like me,” he says. “A lot of people I know have stayed connected to our birth culture. Korea is a part of me.”
Martig’s decision to study in Korea was also prompted by a desire to spend more time with his Korean father, stepmother, and two half-brothers, with whom he was united in 2002. Martig’s birth mother died right after he was born; in his grief and fear that his sickly infant wouldn’t survive in his care, his father placed Martig for adoption. Part of Martig’s drive to become fluent in Korean is rooted in his wish to have the kind of conversations about love and loss that shouldn’t be left to a translator.
Martig also wants to be able to tell his Korean father that he made a good decision. “I love my life here,” he says, sitting with his American mother and father in a dining room decorated with mementos of the family’s trips to Korea. “When I met my Korean father, I had this moment when I thought I could have lived this parallel life in Korea, but I don’t really dwell on it because it’s not my life,” he says.
What Martig is living today is a new definition of family—an experience that’s becoming more and more common as adopted Koreans searching for their birth families share their stories with each other. “I think of both my families as one unit,” he says. “When I tell people that I’m going to see my family, it kind of confuses them because I don’t distinguish between my Korean dad and my American dad. But that’s because I see them both as my dad.”
Alongside a new definition of family are new definitions of self. “At a certain point in my career I struggled with questions about what my voice is and what I was trying to say,” says Amy Anderson, a Los Angeles comedian who was raised in Excelsior. “I realized that I can’t represent Asian people. Or adopted people. Or Koreans. Or women. But I can represent myself. I know, as a transracial adoptee who grew up in a white atmosphere in a white family—but looked a certain way—that people see you and make judgments about you. And 95 percent of those judgments are wrong. I spent a lot of time in my youth being angry about that. Then I realized that’s part of what my art is: you can’t judge a book by its cover.”
For Hollee McGinnis, that same realization was made easier by having a community. “It’s not just you that’s different, but this entire group of people who are also border-crossers,” she says. “I realized that this complex identity—am I a white American or a Korean person?—was really creative. I am kind of European American. And I’m also in many ways like a fourth- or fifth-generation Korean American. In our American society you are supposed to choose. When I realized that there was a third choice—that I could choose to be both—that’s when I gained a lot of freedom.”
Elizabeth Larsen, a writer living in Minneapolis, adopted her youngest child from Guatemala.
For more information about transnational adoption, listen to American RadioWorks’ Finding Home: Fifty Years of International Adoption, http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/adoption.
