In March 2023, I met a delegation from the Swedish government at my office. They were an investigation committee on inter-country adoption abuses, and we had met a year earlier in Europe for an intensive consultation shortly after they began their work.
What everyone has been led to believe about international adoption is fundamentally wrong. On the surface, my life followed the Korean adoption script as it was written. I had an adoptive family, health and an identity in the United States thanks to benevolent intervention that saved me from a fate that was certain to be worse.
For many adoptees, Korea is a vexing site of return. It’s simultaneously home and not home. We’re too loud. Too foreign. Our mannerisms signal our lack of cultural capital, even as the “han” (internalized sorrow or grief) of adoption and separation courses through our veins.
In an interview with poet and translator Don Mee Choi, Korean poet Kim Hye-soon spoke about the language of death. Feminine writing, she says, unlike masculine language, “begins from a place of emptiness/nothingness, a place that’s full with the presence of absence.”
My research focuses on the movement of children across borders, specifically migration matters related to intercountry adoption laws and policies. During my exploration of these issues, a question that has always lingered in the depths of my mind is whether Korea can ever reckon with its history of sending over 200,000 children overseas for adoption and confront its legacy of children's rights violations.
An adoptee once told me that the journey of an adoptee to their homeland, Korea, is like a pilgrimage. We may interpret this comment in several ways because a pilgrimage has different meanings. Common definitions refer to it as a spiritual journey to a special spiritual site or an exploratory journey to a foreign place in search of inner meaning.
When I was first pregnant, someone told me that I was once a tiny egg in my mother’s ovaries when my grandmother was carrying my mother inside her womb. I remember imagining it like a Russian nesting doll, and I was inside my mother who was inside her mother, and now my child is inside of me. This physical connection of women felt particularly significant because though I imagined my mother during my whole life, I had never once thought about my grandmother. In that moment, my grandmother carried us all.
A scene from 2018 film “Crazy Rich Asians” / Courtesy of Warner Bros. KoreaThis article is the fifth in a series about intercountry adoptions. While over 160,000 Korean children have been adopted abroad since the 1950-53 Korean War, it is believed that many cases have infringed on relevant laws or violated children's right to know the truth about their filiation. The series will review such violations in transnational adoptions of Korean children and elsewhere, and discuss receiving countries' moves for their own investigations. This series is co-organized with Human Rights Beyond Borders. ― ED.By Ella WuElla Wu / Courtesy of Ella WuI discovered my passion for film and television at a fortunate time, in 2018, the year of “Crazy Rich Asians.” Like many of us, I fixated on the feeling of “Finally! It's our turn now.” After decades of being pushed to the sidelines, Asians were stepping into the spotlight and onto the big screen. Each new Asian-led or Asian-created release after the breathless success of “Crazy Rich Asians” felt like a ches
gettyimagesbankThis article is the fourth in a series about intercountry adoptions. While over 160,000 Korean children have been adopted abroad since the 1950-53 Korean War, it is believed that many cases have infringed on relevant laws or violated children's right to know the truth about their filiation. The series will review such violations in transnational adoptions of Korean children and elsewhere, and discuss receiving countries' moves for their own investigations. This series is co-organized with Human Rights Beyond Borders. ― ED.Adoptees' identity confusion passed down to their childrenBy Jiri MoonenJiri Moonen / Courtesy of Jiri Moonen"Just tell them you are South Korean." That was the advice my mother gave me when, as a five-year-old child, I came home after being bullied at school by two Belgian boys. Born to a white Belgian father and a mother who was born in Korea and adopted at the age of three in 1975 to a Belgian family, I vividly remember how the schoolmates repeatedly called me "Chinese" and made harassing faces. In addition to such events, slit-eye pulling, the wor
Anna Blades' “Floating with the River,” which is part of her “Power of Life” painting series that was on display at the exhibition “Motherland” at the KADU Daedong Art Festival in Insa-dong, Seoul, from April to May. The exhibition featured artists born in Korea and adopted overseas and was also shown at the National Assembly. Courtesy of Anna BladesAdoptees' group in Sweden provides sense of family to membersThis article is the third in a series about intercountry adoptions. While over 160,000 Korean children have been adopted abroad since the 1950-53 Korean War, it is believed that many cases have infringed on relevant laws or violated children's right to know the truth about their filiation. The series will review such violations in transnational adoptions of Korean children and elsewhere, and discuss receiving countries' moves for their own investigations. This series is co-organized with Human Rights Beyond Borders. ― ED.By Anna BladesAnna Blades / Courtesy of Anna BladesI was born in 1966 in the district of Gwangsan in Gwangju, and adopted to
