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A total of more than 200,000 Korean adoptees have been adopted worldwide.
Korean adoptees who long for their homeland are spread out in the United States and Europe.
Established in 2004 to strengthen the cultural exchanges among international Korean adoptees, IKAA has now grown to become the largest Korean adoptees network.
IKAA President Tim Holm was also born in Korea as a half-Korean and adopted to another country.
His love for his homeland Korea helped him overcome five strokes in the past.
Korean adoptees who have returned to Korea as adults with one thing in common: Korean roots!
This week on Heart to Heart, we will talk about the various activities of IKAA and learn more about Korean adoptees who have grown to become proud supporters of their homeland as global talents.
international korean adoptee associations 주제에 대한 자세한 내용은 여기를 참조하세요.
Top 37 International Korean Adoptee Associations The 94 Top …
In recent years, adult adoptees have started to return to Korea in increasingly large numbers to search for their Korean birth families, seek …
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Date Published: 2/1/2022
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International Korean Adoptee Associations | UIA Yearbook …
profile of International Korean Adoptee Associations from the Yearbook of International Organizations, a service of the UIA.
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Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link – Korean adoptee run NGO
Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (G.O.A.’L.) was founded in 1998 by overseas Korean adoptees who returned to Korea. It soon became, and remains today, …
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Date Published: 5/18/2022
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International Korean Adoptee Associations’ Gathering 2019
About the International Korean Adoptee Associations … An international network of volunteers who are committed to serving the global adoption …
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Date Published: 12/6/2021
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International adoption of South Korean children – Wikipedia
The number of children given for adoption is lower than in comparable OECD countries of a similar size, the majority of adoptees are …
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Date Published: 9/14/2021
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IKAA: A global family reunion – Korean Quarterly
This summer I attended The Gathering 2019 in Seoul, a conference of the International Korean Adoptee Associations (IKAA), which hosts and …
Source: www.koreanquarterly.org
Date Published: 11/10/2021
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주제와 관련된 더 많은 사진을 참조하십시오 Heart to Heart – International Korean Adoptee Associations. 댓글에서 더 많은 관련 이미지를 보거나 필요한 경우 더 많은 관련 기사를 볼 수 있습니다.
주제에 대한 기사 평가 international korean adoptee associations
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Top 37 International Korean Adoptee Associations The 94 Top Answers
Heart to Heart – International Korean Adoptee Associations
Heart to Heart – International Korean Adoptee Associations
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Contents
Korean War and Holt[edit]
Media coverage of adoption[edit]
Korean patrilineal blood culture[edit]
Economics[edit]
Birth mothers and orphans[edit]
Korea’s domestic adoptions[edit]
Countries adopting Koreans[edit]
Psychological effects[edit]
Discrimination[edit]
Korean adoptee camps[edit]
Adoptees returning to South Korea[edit]
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Statistics[edit]
Individual Korean adoptees[edit]
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Your donations allow us to achieve our mission of being an adoptee-centric hub that connects adoptees around the world.
Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (G.O.A.’L.) was founded in 1998 by overseas Korean adoptees who returned to Korea. It soon became, and remains today, the only adoptee-led non-profit and NGO in Korea.
Since the 1950s, over 200,000 Korean children have been sent overseas for adoption. In recent years, adult adoptees have started to return to Korea in increasingly large numbers to search for their Korean birth families, seek connection to Korean identity, and learn about the language and culture.
International adoption of South Korean children
Adoptions from South Korea Timeline 1940 — – 1950 — – 1960 — – 1970 — – 1980 — – 1990 — – 2000 — – 2010 — – 2020 — ← [3] 1988 Summer Olympics in South Korea ← 1955 the Holt Family Adopts 8 South Korean children ← [4] 2011 new law for adoptees to be dual citizens with South Korea ← [2] 1976 South Korea’s Special Adoption Law Korean War
South Korea color-coded by amount
where the darker color means more[1] number of adoptions out ofSouth Korea color-coded by amountwhere the darker color means more
for Adoption and Foster Care[2] South Korea’s Five Year Planfor Adoption and Foster Care
The international adoption of South Korean children was at first started as a result of a large number of orphaned mixed children from the Korean War after 1953, but later included orphaned Korean children. Religious organizations in the United States, Australia, and many Western European nations slowly developed into the apparatus that sustained international adoption as a socially integrated system. This system, however, is essentially gone as of 2020. The number of children given for adoption is lower than in comparable OECD countries of a similar size, the majority of adoptees are adopted by South Korean families, and the number of international adoptees is at a historical low.[5]
Korean War and Holt [ edit ]
Korean War [ edit ]
A 1988 article which was originally in The Progressive and reprinted in Pound Pup Legacy said that less than one percent of Korean adoptees adopted now are Amerasian, but most of the Korean adoptees for the decade after the Korean War were Amerasians who were fathered by American soldiers.[6]
Albert C. Gaw (1993) said that 6,293 Koreans were adopted in the United States between 1955 and 1966, of whom about 46% were white and Korean mixed, 41% were fully Korean, and the rest were African-American and Korean mixed.[7] The first wave of adopted people from Korea came from usually mixed-race children whose families lived in poverty; the children’s parents were often American military men and Korean women.[8]
A 2015 article in Public Radio International said that Arissa Oh who wrote a book about the beginnings of international adoption said that, “Koreans have this myth of racial purity; they wanted to get rid of these children. Originally international adoption was supposed to be this race-based evacuation.”[9]
Holt [ edit ]
The start of adoption in South Korea is usually credited to Harry Holt in 1955.[10][8] Harry Holt wanted to help the children of South Korea, so Holt adopted eight children from South Korea and brought them home. In part due to the response that Holt got after adopting these eight children from the nationwide press coverage, Holt started Holt International Children’s Services which is an adoption agency based in the United States which specialized in finding families for Korean children.[8]
Touched by the fate of the orphans, Western religious groups as well as other associations started the process of placing children in homes in the United States and Europe. Adoption from South Korea began in 1955 when Bertha and Harry Holt went to Korea and adopted eight war orphans after passing a law through Congress.[6] Their work resulted in the founding of Holt International Children’s Services. The first Korean babies sent to Europe went to Sweden via the Social Welfare Society in the mid-1960s. By the end of that decade, the Holt International Children’s Services began sending Korean orphans to Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland and Germany.
Media coverage of adoption [ edit ]
South Korean media coverage [ edit ]
In 1988, when South Korea hosted the 1988 Summer Olympics, the international adoption of South Korean children became the focus of global attention, and the issue became a source of national humiliation for South Korea. Politicians claimed that they would try to stop “child exports”, so they set an intended end date and a quota for international adoptions. However, the quota has been exceeded several times, and the intended end date has been extended several times.[3]
Not until the 1980s and early 1990s did the South Korean government and South Koreans, both in South Korea and in the diaspora, pay any significant attention to the fates of Korean adoptees. The nation was not prepared for the return of their ‘lost children.’ But the numerous adult Korean adoptees who visited Korea as tourists every year, in addition to raising public awareness of the Korean adoptee diaspora, forced Korea to face a shameful and largely unknown part of their history. South Korean president Kim Dae-jung invited 29 adult Korean adoptees from 8 countries to a personal meeting in the Blue House in October 1998. During this meeting he publicly apologized for South Korea’s inability to raise them.[11]
— Kim Dae-jung, Kim Dae-jung’s Apology to 29 Korean Adoptees in 1998, Yngvesson (2010)[12] It’s been eight months since I became President. During this period, I’ve met countless people. But today’s meeting with all of you is personally the most meaningful and moving encounter for me. Looking at you, I am proud of such accomplished adults, but I am also overwhelmed with an enormous sense of regret at all the pain that you must have been subjected to. Some 200,000 Korean children have been adopted to the United States, Canada, and many European countries over the years. I am pained to think that we could not raise you ourselves, and had to give you away for foreign adoption.
Since then, South Korean media rather frequently reports on the issues regarding international adoption. Most Korean adoptees have taken on the citizenship of their adoptive country and no longer have Korean passports. Earlier they had to get a visa like any other foreigner if they wanted to visit or live in South Korea. This only added to the feeling that they were ‘not really South Korean’. In May 1999, a group of Korean adoptees living in Korea started a signature-collection in order to achieve legal recognition and acceptance (Schuhmacher, 1999). At present (2009) the number of Korean adoptees long-term residents in South Korea (mainly Seoul) is estimated at approximately 500. It is not unlikely that this number will increase in the following decade (International adoption from South Korea peaked in the mid-1980s). A report from Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (G.O.A.’L) indicates that the long term returnees (more than one year) are predominantly in their early twenties or early thirties.
One factor that helped make the subject of Korean adoptees part of the South Korean discourse was a 1991 film called Susanne Brink’s Arirang which was a film about the life story of a Korean adoptee who grew up in Sweden. This film made the subject of the international adoptions of Korean children a hot topic in South Korea, and it made South Koreans feel shame and guilt regarding the issue.[3]
A 1997 article in The Christian Science Monitor said that Koreans in South Korea often believed that adoptive families in other countries had ulterior motives for adopting Korean orphans due to the Korean belief that parents can not love a child who is not their biological child.[13]
North Korean media coverage [ edit ]
A 1988 article which was originally in The Progressive and reprinted in Pound Pup Legacy said that the director general of South Korea’s Bureau of Family Affairs in the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs said that the large number of international adoptions out of South Korea had been an issue used as part of North Korea’s propaganda against South Korea in the 1970s. As part of North Korea’s propaganda against South Korea in the 1970s, North Korea decried the large numbers of international adoptions of South Korean children, and North Korea decried what it considered to be South Korea’s practice of selling South Korean children. The South Korean director general wanted to decrease the numbers of South Korean children being adopted internationally, so North Korea would no longer have the issue to use for its propaganda against South Korea. The news article also said that North Korea did not allow couples in other countries to adopt North Korean children.[6]
The 1988 article was serialized by The People’s Korea, a pro-North Korea magazine, and the resulting publicity caused South Korea to have the image in the North as the number one child-exporting country of the world:[14] The Pyongyang Times, a North Korean newspaper, printed: “The traitors of South Korea, old hands at treacheries, are selling thousands, tens of thousands of children going ragged and hungry to foreign marauders under the name of ‘adopted children’.”[14]
Korean patrilineal blood culture [ edit ]
A 1988 article which was originally in The Progressive and reprinted in Pound Pup Legacy said that South Korean culture is a patrilineal culture that places importance on families related by blood. The importance of bloodline families is the reason why Koreans do not want to adopt Korean orphans, because the Korean adoptee would not be the blood relative of the adoptive parents. Korean patrilineal culture is the reason Korean society stigmatizes and discriminates against unwed Korean mothers and their kids, making it so the unwed mother might not be able to get a job or get a husband.[6]
A 2007 submission by Sue-Je Lee Gage for the partial fulfillment of a Ph.D. in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University said that, in Korean patrilineal blood culture, Koreanness is passed from parent to child as long as the parents have “pure” Korean blood, and this transference of Koreanness is especially notable when the Korean father gives his “pure” Korean blood to his Korean child, making lineage along the father’s line especially important in the Korean concept of race and identity. Gage said that a Korean family’s lineage history represents the official recording of their blood purity. Due to this conception of identity along blood lines and race, Gage said that Koreans in South Korea consider Korean adoptees who return to South Korea to still be Korean even if they cannot speak Korean. Gage said that, for Koreans, a Korean physical appearance is the most important consideration when identifying other people as being Koreans, although a Korean physical appearance is not the only consideration Koreans use in their consideration for group membership as a fellow Korean. For example, Gage said that Korean women who had sex with non-Korean men were often not considered to be “Korean” in the “full-fledged” sense by Koreans.[15]
The Fall 2012 journal of The Journal of Korean Studies said that anthropologist Elise Prebin said that Korean adoptee reunions can be more secure and are easier maintained along the birth father’s line (patrilineal) than along the birth mother’s line (matrilineal) in her study of Korean adoptee reunions with birth families. The journal said that “Korean patrilineal kinship ideologies” still have a strong societal influence in South Korea.[16]
A 2014 article in NPR said that unwed mothers suffer a social stigma in South Korea, because having a child out of wedlock is an act that goes against Korean patrilineal bloodline culture. The 2014 news article also said that Korean adoptees suffer a social stigma in South Korea, because Korean adoptees have been “cut loose from their bloodlines”.[17]
A 2015 news article said that there is still a strong social stigma against unwed mothers and illegitimate children in South Korea. The 2015 news article said that this social stigma applies to the unwed mother and even her illegitimate children and her whole extended family, causing a child who was born out of wedlock to suffer lowered marital, job and educational prospects in South Korea.[18]
A 2015 article in The Economist said that Koreans in South Korea mostly adopt female Korean children to avoid issues involving ancestral family rites which are usually done by bloodline sons and to avoid issues involving inheritance.[19]
Economics [ edit ]
Costs saved by South Korea [ edit ]
A 1988 article which was originally in The Progressive and reprinted in Pound Pup Legacy said that the South Korean government made fifteen to twenty million dollars per year by the adoption of Korean orphans by families in other countries. The 1988 news article also said that the adoption of Korean orphans out of South Korea had three more effects: it saved the South Korean government the costs of caring for the Korean orphans, it relieved the South Korean government of the need to figure out what to do with the orphans and it lowered the population.[6]
Some academics and researchers claim that the system for orphans Korean adoption agencies have established guarantee a steady supply of healthy children (Dobbs 2009). Supporters of the system claim that adoption agencies are only caring for infants who would otherwise go homeless or be institutionalized.
Korean adoption agencies support pregnant-women’s homes; three of the four agencies run their own. One of the agencies has its own maternity hospital and does its own delivery. All four provide and subsidize child care. All pay foster mothers a monthly stipend to care for the infants, and the agencies provide all food, clothing and other supplies free of charge. They also support both independent-orphanages, and or self-run ones. The agencies will cover the costs of delivery and the medical care for any woman who gives up her baby for adoption. (Rothschild, The Progressive, 1988; Schwekendiek, 2012).
A 2011 article in the Institute for Policy Studies estimated each adoption cost US$15k, paid primarily by the adopting parents. This generated an estimated US$35M/yr to cover foster-care, medical care, and other costs for the ~2,300 Korean international adoptions. [20]
Social welfare of South Korea [ edit ]
In a 2010 book, Kim Rasmussen said that the “root cause” of the number of adoptions out of South Korea in 2010 was South Korea’s lack of spending on its social welfare system. Rasmussen said that the other OECD-30 countries spent an average of 20.6% of their GDP on social welfare benefits while South Korea only spent 6.9% of its GDP on social welfare benefits. Rasmussen said that South Korea promoting domestic adoption would not address the heart of the problem and that South Korea should raise its spending for social welfare benefits.[21]
Birth mothers and orphans [ edit ]
Birth mothers [ edit ]
In the 1988 article which was originally in The Progressive and reprinted in Pound Pup Legacy, a South Korean orphanage director said that according to his orphanage’s questionnaire data 90% of Korean birth mothers indicated that wanted to keep their biological child and not give it up for adoption, but the South Korean orphanage director said that only maybe 10% of birth mothers eventually decided to keep their biological child after his orphanage suggested to the birth mothers that unwed mothers and poor couples should give their child up for adoption. The 1988 news article said that the Korean birth mothers felt guilty after giving their child up for adoption, and it said that most of the Korean birth mothers who gave their child up for adoption were poor and worked at factory or clerical jobs in South Korea.[6]
In a same 1988 article, an INS officer at the Embassy of the United States, Seoul, said that social workers were hired by adoption agencies to perform the role of “heavies” to convince South Korean mothers to give their children up for adoption. Although the officer said that he felt that the adoption business was probably a good thing for birth mothers, adoptive parents and adoptees, he said that the adoption business troubled him due to the large number of children who were being adopted out of South Korea every month. The INS officer said that these numbers should make people question how much of the international adoption of South Korean children was a humanitarian cause and how much it was a business.[6]
Orphans [ edit ]
A 2014 article in NPR said that it was “effectively” “impossible” for Korean orphans who aged out of institutions at 18 years old to attend a university in South Korea due to lacking the money to pay for all of the associated costs, so most Korean orphans ended up getting low-paying jobs in South Korean factories after aging out of the institutions. The 2014 news article said that many Korean parents in South Korea refuse to allow their children to marry Korean orphans.[17]
A 2015 article said that the majority of South Korean orphans become orphans at a young age, and the 2015 article said that the majority of South Korean orphans eventually age out of the orphanages’ care when they turn 18 years old never being adopted.[22]
A 2015 article in The Economist said that in the past 60 years two million or about 85% of the total orphans in South Korea have grown up in South Korean orphanages never being adopted. The 2015 article said that from the 1950s to 2015 only 4% of the total number of orphans in South Korea had been adopted domestically by other Koreans in South Korea.[19]
A 2015 video by BBC News said that orphanages in South Korea had become full as a result of the South Korean government making it more difficult for Korean orphans to be adopted overseas.[23]
Baby box [ edit ]
In a video which was published on March 27, 2014, on the France 24 YouTube channel, Ross Oke who is the international coordinator of Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK) said that baby boxes like the one in South Korea encourage abandonment of children and they deny the abandoned child the right to an identity.[24]
A 2015 article in Special Broadcasting Service said that in 2009 South Korean pastor Lee Jong-rak put a “baby box” on his church in Seoul, South Korea, to allow people to anonymously abandon children. The article said that since the abandoned children have not been formally relinquished, they cannot be adopted internationally. The article said that the children will most likely stay in orphanages until they become 18 or 19 years old.[25]
Korean Adoption Services database [ edit ]
A 2014 article in The Korea Herald said that the Korea Adoption Services was digitizing 35,000 documents regarding international adoptions that took place in South Korea since the 1950s to further the efforts of Korean adoptees locating their birth parents.[26]
A 2017 article in The Hankyoreh said that Seo Jae-song and his wife who used to run the Seonggajeong orphanage in Deokjeokdo and later the St. Vincent Home in Bupyeong District had 1,073 Korean adoption records. In 2016, these 1,073 Korean adoption records were scanned by Korean Adoption Services (KAS) and the Ministry of Health and Welfare. In 2016, KAS had 39,000 records from 21 institutions.[27]
Korea’s domestic adoptions [ edit ]
A 2015 article, said that the South Korean government is trying to have more domestic adoptions due, in part, to people around the world becoming aware of the large number of Korean adoptees who were adopted by families outside of South Korea since the mid 1950s. Because the South Korean government doesn’t want to have the reputation of a “baby-exporting country”, and due to the belief that Koreans should be raised with Korean culture, the South Korean government has been trying to increase domestic adoptions.[22] However, this has been less than successful over the decades. The numbers only picked up after 2007.[28]
However, the numbers of domestic adoption fell in 2013 due to tighter restrictions on eligibility for Adoptive Parents. However, the number in babies has also gone up with the forced registration of babies, also a new law, leading to more abandonment.[29]
The primary reason as of 2015 for the majority of surrenders within South Korea is single mothers are still publicly shamed within Korea,[30][31] and the South Korean mothers who give their kids up for adoption have been mostly middle or working-class women since the 1990s.[1] The amount of money single mothers can receive within the country is 70,000 won per month, only after proving poverty versus the tax break from adopting domestically is 150,000 won per month, which is unconditional, whereas it’s conditional in the case of single mothers.[30] 33 facilities for single and divorced mothers, but the majority of them are run by orphanages and adoption agencies.
In a 2009 article, Stephen C. Morrison, a Korean adoptee, said that he wanted more Koreans to be willing to adopt Korean children. Morrison said that he felt the practice of Koreans adopting Korean children in secret was the greatest obstacle for Korean acceptance of domestic adoption. Morrison also said that in order for domestic Korean adoption to be accepted by Koreans he felt that Korean people’s attitudes must change, so that Koreans show respect for Korean adoptees, not speak of Korean adoptees as “exported items” and not refer to Korean adoptees using unpleasant expressions of which Morrison gave the example, “a thing picked up from under a bridge”. Morrison said that he felt that the South Korean government should raise the allowable age at which Korean parents could adopt Korean orphans and raise the allowable age at which Korean orphans could be adopted by Korean parents, since both of these changes would allow for more domestic adoptions.[32]
Even in its capacity as a global economy and OECD nation, Korea still sends children abroad for international adoption. The proportion of children leaving Korea for adoption amounted to about 1% of its live births for several years during the 1980s (Kane, 1993); currently, even with a large drop in the Korean birth rate to below 1.2 children per woman and an increasingly wealthy economy, about 0.5% (1 in 200) of Korean children are still sent to other countries every year.[citation needed]
A 2005 opinion piece in The Chosun Ilbo said that South Korean actress Shin Ae-ra and South Korean actor Cha In-Pyo publicly adopted a Korean daughter after already having a biological son together, and the article said that by publicly adopting a Korean orphan this the couple could cause other Koreans to change their views about domestic adoptions in South Korea.[33]
Quota for overseas adoptions [ edit ]
To stem the number of overseas adoptions, the South Korean government introduced a quota system for foreign adoptions in 1987. And under the system, the nation reduced the number of children permitted for overseas adoption by 3 to 5% each year, from about 8,000 in 1987 to 2,057 in 1997. The goal of the plan was to totally eliminate foreign adoptions by 2015. But in 1998 the government temporarily lifted the restrictions, after the number of abandoned children sharply increased in the wake of growing economic hardships.
Notable is a focused effort of the 2009 South Korean government to seize international adoption out of South Korea, with the establishment of KCare and the domestic Adoption Promotion Law.
Incentivizing domestic adoptions [ edit ]
A 1997 article in The Christian Science Monitor said that South Korea was giving incentives in the form of housing, medical and educational subsidies to Korean couples who adopted Korean orphans to help encourage domestic adoption, but the Korean couples in South Korea who did adopt tended to not use these subsidies, because they did not want other Koreans knowing that their children were not their biological children.[13]
Special Adoption Law [ edit ]
A 2013 article in CNN said that Jane Jeong Trenka who is a Korean adoptee along with others came up with the Special Adoption Law. The article said that the Special Adoption Law would make it so birth mothers have to stay with their child for seven days before giving it up for adoption. The article said that the Special Adoption Law would make it so the birth mothers’ consent has to be verified before relinquishment of their child, and the article said that Special Adoption Law would make it so the birth of the child is registered. The article said that the Special Adoption Law would also make it so the birth mother could retract her relinquishment for up to six months following her application. The article said that Steve Choi Morrison who is a Korean adoptee and founder of Mission to Promote Adoption in Korea (MPAK) fought against the Special Adoption Law. The article said that Morrison was against the Special Adoption Law because Morrison said that Korean culture is a culture where saving face is important. The article said that Morrison said that Korean birth mothers would fear the record of the birth becoming known, and men will not marry them afterwards. The article said that Morrison predicted that forcing Korean birth mothers to register the births would lead to abandonments.[34]
A 2015 article in the Washington International Law Journal suggested that the Special Adoption Act may have been a factor in more babies being abandoned after the enactment of the Special Adoption Act on August 5, 2012.[35]
Revised Special Adoption Act [ edit ]
The Revised Special Adoption Act which was enacted in South Korea in 2012 made domestic adoptions in South Korea recorded as the biological children of the Korean adoptive parents.[36]
A 2014 article in NPR said that the Revised Special Adoption Law did not make adopting Korean children equal to adding a blood relative in the minds of Koreans regardless of how domestic Korean adoptions would now be considered for legal purposes.[17]
Countries adopting Koreans [ edit ]
A 2010 book about Korean adoption said that there are Korean adoptee groups in metropolises that are in areas with a lot of Korean adoptees residents such as in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Boston, and Seoul.[1]
Adoptees in the United States [ edit ]
An archived web page of the Bureau of Consular Affairs website that said that it was last updated in 2009 said that US couples who wanted to adopt Korean children needed to meet certain requirements. The web page said that the couples needed to be between 25 and 44 years old with an age difference between spouses of no more than 15 years, the couples needed to be married for three years, the couples needed to have an income higher than the US national average, and the couples could not already have more than five children. The web page said that US couples had to pay a fee between $9,500 and $10,000 to adopt a Korean child, and the web page said that it took one to four years after applying for the adopted Korean child to arrive in the United States. The web page said that the wait time after applying for US couples who wanted to adopt was about three years for a healthy Korean child and one year for a Korean child with special needs.[37]
A 1988 article which was originally in The Progressive and reprinted in Pound Pup Legacy said that there were 2,000,000 couples who wanted to adopt children in the United States, but only 20,000 healthy children were available for domestic adoption in the United States. The 1988 news article said that the lack of children for domestic adoption caused couples in the United States to look to other countries to adopt children, and the fastest increase of American couples’ adoptions from other countries at this time was from South Korea.[6]
A 2010 book about Korean adoption said that Korean adoptees comprise about ten percent of the total Korean American population according to an estimate in a 2010 book about South Korean adoption. The book said that, in the United States, the majority of Korean adoptees were adopted close to adoption agencies, so they were mostly adopted in the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, Michigan, Montana, South Dakota, Oregon, Washington, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, Utah or Idaho.[1]
Adoptees in Sweden [ edit ]
A 2002 article in the Embassy of Sweden, Seoul, said that due to the Swedish welfare state of the 1960s more Swedish families started adopting Korean children. The article said that the Swedish welfare system allowed for unwed Swedish mothers to better support themselves and not feel the need to give up their children for adoption. The article said that, as a consequence, there were fewer Swedish orphans in Sweden for domestic adoptions, so Swedish families who wanted to adopt children had to adopt from other countries. The article said that the reason for Korean adoptions, specifically, was that some Swedish families had already adopted Koreans in the 1950s, so later families continued this trend.[38]
Psychological effects [ edit ]
Perception of who the adoptees’ “real” parents are [ edit ]
In a 2016 study of 16 Korean American transnational adult adoptees, some of the Korean adoptees viewed their adoptive parents as their “real” parents and some viewed their biological parents as their “real” parents.[39]
Pronunciation of Korean [ edit ]
A 2017 article in BBC News said that an article published in Royal Society Open Science said that Dutch-speaking Korean adoptees who were retrained in the Korean language were able to pronounce Korean better than expectations. Korean adoptees who were about 30 years old and who were adopted as babies to Dutch-speaking families were used in the study. The Korean adoptees were compared to a group of adults who had not been exposed to Korean as children. Following a short training course, the Korean adoptees were asked to pronounce Korean consonants for the study. The Korean adoptees did better than expectations after training.[40]
Sex Work [ edit ]
In her dissertation for her Ph.D., Sarah Y. Park cited Kendall (2005) and Kim (2007) when Park said that female Korean adoptees are commonly told that they may have become a prostitute if they were not adopted out of Korea.[41]
Social problems [ edit ]
A 2002 study in The Lancet of intercountry adoptees in Sweden of various ethnic backgrounds, most of whom were of Korean, Colombian or Indian (from India) extraction, who were adopted by two parents who were born in Sweden found that intercountry adoptees had the following increased likelihoods relative to the rest of the children who were born in Sweden to two parents who were themselves also born in Sweden: intercountry adoptees were 3.6 times more likely to die from suicide, 3.6 times more likely to attempt suicide, 3.2 times more likely to be admitted for a psychological disorder, 5.2 times more likely to abuse drugs, 2.6 times more likely to abuse alcohol and 1.6 times more likely to commit a crime.[42]
Abandonment [ edit ]
A 2006 article in New America Media said that an increasing number of South Korean parents were paying elderly American couples to adopt their children for the purpose of having their child receive US education and US citizenship. However, the article said that according to Peter Chang, who led the Korean Family Center in Los Angeles, Korean children who were put up for adoption for the purpose of receiving US education and US citizenship frequently felt betrayed by their biological parents. The article said that getting US citizenship this way required the adopted child to be adopted before their sixteenth birthday and stay with their adoptive family for at least two years.[43]
In a 1999 study of 167 adult Korean adoptees by The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, the majority of the adult Korean adoptees struggled with the thought of how their birth mother could have given them up for adoption.[44]
Korean culture socialization [ edit ]
A 2012 study in the Journal of Adolescent Research of Korean adoptees in the United States found that white parents of Korean adoptees whose average age was 17.8 years old tended to try to socialize their adopted Korean children to Korean culture by doing overt actions such as going to Korean restaurants or having them attend Korean culture camp rather than having conversations with them about Korean ethnic identity or being a racial minority in the United States. The study said that for many families doing these overt actions was easier and more comfortable for them than discussing the personal issues of ethnic identity or being a racial minority in the United States.[45]
In a 2005 article, a 38-year-old Korean adoptee who was adopted in the United States said that social workers told her adoptive parents to not raise her with ties to South Korea, because the social workers said that doing that would confuse her. The 2005 article said that adoptive parents were no longer trying to cut ties with the culture of their adopted child’s birth country as of 2005, and adoptive parents were instead trying to introduce their adopted kid to the culture of their birth country. In 2005, one popular way for adoptive parents to expose their adopted child to the traditions and food of their birth country was for them to attend “culture camps” which would last for one day.[46]
Cross-race effect [ edit ]
A 2005 study in American Psychological Society of the cross-race effect used Korean adoptees whose average age was 27.8 years old who were adopted when they were between 3 and 9 years old by French families and the study also used recent Korean immigrants to France. The study had the participants briefly see a photograph of a Caucasian or Japanese face, then the participants had to try to recognize the same Caucasian or Japanese face which they had just seen from a pair of either Caucasian or Japanese faces. The Korean adoptees and French people could recognize the Caucasian faces better than they could recognize the Japanese faces, but the recent Korean immigrants could recognize the Japanese faces better than they could recognize the Caucasian faces, suggesting that the cross-race effect can be modified based on familiarity with certain types of faces due to experiences starting after three years of age.[47]
Implicitly raised as white [ edit ]
C.N. Le, a lecturer at the sociology department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst,[48] said that Korean adoptees and non-white adoptees in general who are raised by white families are raised to implicitly think that they are white, but since they are not white, there is a disconnect between the way they are socialized at home and the way the rest of society sees them. Le further said that most white families of non-white adoptees are not comfortable talking with their adopted children about the issues that racial minorities face in the United States, and Le further advised white families who adopt transracially that just introducing their kids to Asian culture, telling them that race is not important and/or telling them that people should get equal treatment in society is insufficient. Le said that the social disconnection between how they were raised and the reality of American society causes “confusion, resentment about their situation, and anger” for adoptees who were transracially adopted by white families.[49]
Many of the South Korean children adopted internationally, grew up in white, upper or middle-class homes. In the beginning adoptive families were often told by agencies and social workers to assimilate their children and make them as much as possible a part of the new culture, thinking that this would override concerns about ethnic identity and origin. Many Korean adoptees grew up not knowing about other children like themselves.[50] This has changed in recent years with social services now encouraging parents and using home studies to encourage prospective adoptive parents to learn about the cultural influences of the country. With such works as “Beyond Culture Camp” [51] which encourage the teaching of culture, there has been a large shift. Though, these materials may be given, not everyone may take advantage of them. Also, adoption agencies started to allow the adoption of South Koreans by people of color in the late 1990s to early 2000, and not just white people, including Korean-Americans. Such an example of this is the rapper GOWE, who was adopted by a Chinese-American family.
As a result of many internationally adopted Korean adoptees growing up in white areas, many of these adoptees avoided other Asians in childhood and adolescence out of an unfamiliarity and/or discomfort with Asian cultures.[52] These adoptees sometimes express a desire to be white like their families and peers, and strongly identify with white society. As a result, meeting South Koreans and Korean culture might have been a traumatic experience for some.[50] However, other Korean adoptees, often those raised in racially or culturally diverse communities, grew up with ties to the Korean community and identify more strongly with the Korean aspect of their identities.[52]
Adoptees’ feelings about South Korea [ edit ]
In a 1999 study of 167 adult Korean adoptees by The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, group discussions about the topic of how they felt about South Korea led to many feelings. There was anger about the negative way Koreans view adopted Koreans. There was concern over Korean orphans in South Korean orphanages, and there was a feeling of obligation to help the Korean orphans who remained in the South Korean orphanages. There was a feeling of responsibility to change Koreans’ views of domestic adoption, so that adopting an orphan in South Korea would not be something that Koreans in South Korea would be ashamed of doing.[44]
Adoptees’ memories of orphanages and initial adoption [ edit ]
In a 1999 study of 167 adult Korean adoptees by The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, there were adoptees who mainly remembered experiencing poverty as orphans such as one adoptee who remembered eating much oatmeal with flies in it as an orphan in South Korea. Some adoptees remembered feeling a sense of loss of the relationships that they had with people when they left their South Korean orphanages. Some of the adoptees remembered being scared of their new living situation with adoptive parents in a new country when they had just been adopted out of South Korea.[44]
Discrimination [ edit ]
Discrimination for being adopted [ edit ]
A 2014 article in NPR said that Koreans in South Korea were prejudiced against Korean adoptees, and the 2014 news article said that Korean adoptees who were adopted domestically by other Koreans in South Korea often became outcast and bullied by other Koreans at their South Korean school.[17]
Discrimination for race and appearance [ edit ]
In a 1999 study of 167 adult Korean adoptees by The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, the majority of respondents (70%) reported their race being the reason they were discriminated against while growing up, and a minority of respondents (28%) reported their adoptee status as being the reason they were discriminated against while growing up. One of the study’s respondents said that growing up in a small town of white people made him an oddity that few people wanted to associated with, and he said that he had wanted to be like other people instead of being different. Other respondents said that the discrimination they received growing up caused them to deny their Korean heritage.[44]
In a 2010 book, Kim Rasmussen gave an example of a Korean adoptee from the United States who returned to South Korea and tried to apply for the job of an English teacher in South Korea only to be denied the job due to her race. The Korean adoptee was told that she was rejected for the job, because the mothers of the students wanted their children to be taught English from a white person.[21]
In a 2015 article in The Straits Times, Korean adoptee Simone Huits who was adopted to a Dutch family in the Netherlands made the following remark about growing up in a small Dutch town, “All the children wanted to touch me because I looked different. It was scary and overwhelming.”[53]
Discrimination for not speaking Korean [ edit ]
In a 1999 study of 167 adult Korean adoptees by The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, the majority of respondents (72%) reported that they had no ability with the Korean language, and only a minority of respondents (25%) reported that they had any ability with the Korean language. Of the study’s respondents who visited South Korea, 22% described their visit as a negative experience, and about 20% described their visit as a both negative and positive experience. Inability to speak Korean was mentioned as being a cause of their visit being a negative experience by more than one respondent, and inability to speak Korean was generally the cause of the negative parts of the visit for the respondents who reported both a positive and negative experience. One respondent said that they felt that Koreans in South Korea looked down on them for their inability to speak Korean. Another respondent said that the Koreans in South Korea were initially nice to them, but the respondent said that Koreans in South Korea became rude to them after finding out that they could not speak Korean. Many of the adoptees felt like they were foreigners while visiting South Korea.[44]
A 2007 book about Korean adoption said that it was uncomfortable for Korean adoptees who do not speak Korean and who do not have Korean last names to associate with Korean-speaking children of Korean immigrants in school districts with children of Korean immigrant families.[54]
Korean adoptee camps [ edit ]
Holt International Adoptee Camp Locations Oregon Camp Wisconsin Camp Nebraska Camp East Coast Camp [55][56][57][58] Source: Holt International Website Korean Adoptee Camp Locations Camp Moo Gung Hwa Korean Adoption Means Pride [59]
Korean Adoption Means Pride Website[60] Sources: Camp Moo Gung Hwa WebsiteKorean Adoption Means Pride Website
Holt adoptee camps [ edit ]
Holt adoptee camps are places where transracial and/or international adoptees can talk about feelings of not fitting in and isolation in a safe space. Each day there are group discussions about issues of identity, adoption and questions regarding race that last about an hour.[61] The locations of the camps are Corbett, Oregon; Williams Bay, Wisconsin; Ashland, Nebraska and Sussex, New Jersey.[55][56][57][58]
Camp Moo Gung Hwa [ edit ]
Camp Moo Gung Hwa is a Korean culture camp for Korean adoptees in Raleigh, North Carolina. The camp first started in 1995 with the name Camp Hodori, and the camp changed its name to Camp Moo Gung Hwa in 1996. The purpose of the camp is to improve the Korean adoptees’ knowledge of Korean culture and improve their self-esteem.[62]
Korean Adoption Means Pride [ edit ]
Korean Adoption Means Pride (KAMP) is a camp in Dayton, Iowa for Korean adoptees and their families. The camp exposes camp attendees to Korean culture. Korean culture classes cover Korean cuisine, Korean dance, Korean language, taekwondo and Korean arts and crafts.[60]
Heritage Camps for Adoptive Families [ edit ]
Heritage Camps for Adoptive Families (HCAF) was founded in 1991 and consists of nine different camps for varying adoptee groups, one of which is Korean Heritage Camp.[63] KHC is held annually at Snow Mountain Ranch in Fraser, Colorado. It brings adoptees and their families together each year to learn about adoption and Korean culture.[64]
Adoptees returning to South Korea [ edit ]
Adoptees returning to visit South Korea [ edit ]
In a 1999 study of 167 adult Korean adoptees by The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, most of the adult Korean adoptees felt that younger Korean adoptees should visit South Korea, 57% of the 167 adult Korean adoptees reported that they have visited South Korea and 38% of the 167 adult Korean adoptees reported visiting South Korea as a means with which they explored their Korean heritage.[44]
Eleana J. Kim, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester, said that South Korea developed programs for adult Korean adoptees to return to South Korea and learn about what it means to be Korean; these programs included wearing hanboks and learning to make kimchi.[65]
Adoptees returning to live in South Korea [ edit ]
When International Korean Adoptees turned into adults, many of them chose to return.[66] These countries include Sweden, United States of America, the Netherlands, France, Belgium etc. In this respect the so-called re-Koreanization of the Korean adoptees is often reproduced in South Korean popular media (e.g. the blockbuster ‘Kuk’ka Taep’yo/National Representative/Take Off). The ‘re-Koreanization can be reflected in Korean ethnic based nationalism (both North and South of the 38th parallel).
A 2005 article in Hyphen: Asian America Unabridged said that an increasing number adoptees were moving back to live in South Korea to try to help other Korean adoptees, and it said that many of these returning Korean adoptees were critical of South Korea’s adoption system. The article said that one returning Korean adoptee, for example, made a confrontational exhibition where he posted photos of 3,000 Korean adoptees in South Korea’s three largest cities with the hope that South Koreans would see these photos and question why South Korea was still sending many Korean children abroad as adoptees. The article said that another returning Korean adoptee created an organization based in South Korea called Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK) to end the international adoption of South Korean orphans, and the article said that ASK intended to accomplish this goal by “preventing teenage pregnancy through sex education, monitoring orphanages and foster care, increasing domestic adoption and expanding welfare programs for single mothers.” The article said that other Korean adoptees who returned to live in South Korea did volunteer work in orphanages.[67]
The article went on to say Korean adoptees who return to live in South Korea choose to use a Korean name, their adopted name or a combination of both while living in South Korea. The article said that one returning adoptee said that they chose to use a combination of both names to indicate their status as a Korean adoptee. The article said that another returning Korean adoptee chose to use a Korean name, but the name they decided to go by was one that they chose for themselves and not the Korean name which was originally assigned to them by their orphanage when they were an orphan. The article said that another returning Korean adoptee decided to go by their original Korean name over their adopted Belgian name, because their Belgian name was difficult for other people to pronounce.[67]
The article also claimed that Korean adoptees who return to live in South Korea from the United States generally hold higher paying jobs in South Korea that involve speaking English and teaching while Korean adoptees who return to live in South Korea from European countries that use other languages generally get involved with lower paying jobs in restaurants, bars and stores while living in South Korea.[67]
In 2010 the South Korean Government legalized dual citizenship for Korean adoptees, and this law that went into effect in 2011.[4]
Adoptees deported to South Korea [ edit ]
A 2016 article in The Guardian said that the South Korean government had record of 10 Korean adoptees who were deported from the United States to South Korea.[68]
A 2016 article in The Nation described the story of a Korean adoptee who did not have U.S. Citizenship who was deported to South Korea from the United States for committing a crime in the United States.[69]
A 2017 article in the New York Times about a Korean adoptee who was deported and is looking to make a life in South Korea, the article does an overview of the lives of returning Korean adoptees and the difficulties they face.[70]
Adoptee Associations [ edit ]
The first association to be created for adult Korean adoptees was Adopterade Koreaners Förening which as founded on November 19, 1986, in Sweden.[71] In 1995, the first Korean adoptee conference was held in Germany, and, in 1999, Korean adoptee conferences were arranged in both the US and South Korea.[3]
A 2010 book about South Korean adoption estimated that ten percent of Korean adoptees who are over the age of eighteen are part of adult Korean adoptee associations.[1]
Against international adoptions [ edit ]
A 2015 article in The Economist said that the Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK) was a lobby group of Korean adoptees that lobbied against the adoption of South Koreans by other countries.[29]
A 2016 book about South Korean adoption said that Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK) was an association of Korean adoptees that was committed to ending international adoption.[84]
Statistics [ edit ]
Reasons Koreans do not Want to Adopt in South Korea Reason Given Percent difficulty raising and loving adopted child like a birth child 32.1% families should be based on blood 29.5% financial burden 11.9% prejudice against adoption 11.4% Source: Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs[85]
Receiving Australian Territories of South Korean Adoptees From 2001 to 2009 Receiving State/Territory 2001–2002 2002–2003 2003–2004 2004–2005 2005–2006 2006–2007 2007–2008 2008–2009 Total Australian Capital Territory 4 5 5 3 3 2 0 1 23 New South Wales 25 28 27 26 18 16 7 14 161 Northern Territory 3 1 2 3 1 0 3 1 14 Queensland 15 16 18 19 15 9 9 7 108 South Australia 20 24 19 12 9 4 4 1 93 Tasmania 1 4 3 3 2 3 0 1 17 Victoria 12 20 20 23 16 10 12 8 121 Western Australia 12 10 14 10 5 4 5 2 62 Total 92 108 108 99 69 48 40 35 599 Source: Australian InterCountry Adoption Network[86]
Receiving Countries of South Korean Adoptees From 1953 to 2008 Primary Countries (1953–2008) Other Countries (1960–1995) Country Period Adoptees Country Period Adoptees United States 1953–2008 109,242 New Zealand 1964–1984 559 France 1968–2008 11,165 Japan 1962–1982 226 Sweden 1957–2005 9,051 Okinawa 1970–1972 94 Denmark 1965–2008 9,297 Ireland 1968–1975 12 Norway 1955–2008 6,295 Poland 1970 7 Netherlands 1969–2003 4,099 Spain 1968 5 Belgium 1969–1995 3,697 China 1967–1968 4 Australia 1969–2008 3,359 Guam 1971–1972 3 Germany 1965–1996 2,352 India 1960–1964 3 Canada 1967–2008 2,181 Paraguay 1969 2 Switzerland 1968–1997 1,111 Ethiopia 1961 1 Luxembourg 1984–2008 561 Finland 1984 1 Italy 1965–2008 383 Hong Kong 1973 1 England 1958–1981 72 Tunisia 1969 1 Turkey 1969 1 Other 1956–1995 113 There were 163,898 total adoptees for primary and other countries.
South Korean [1] Sources: Hübinette (2005) andSouth Korean Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs (2009)
Intercountry Adoptions Out of South Korea From 1953 to 2008 Year Total Year Total Year Total Year Total Year Total Year Total 1960 638 1970 1,932 1980 4,144 1990 2,962 2000 2,360 1961 660 1971 2,725 1981 4,628 1991 2,197 2001 2,436 1962 254 1972 3,490 1982 6,434 1992 2,045 2002 2,365 1953 4 1963 442 1973 4,688 1983 7,263 1993 2,290 2003 2,287 1954 8 1964 462 1974 5,302 1984 7,924 1994 2,262 2004 2,258 1955 59 1965 451 1975 5,077 1985 8,837 1995 2,180 2005 2,010 1956 671 1966 494 1976 6,597 1986 8,680 1996 2,080 2006 1,899 1957 486 1967 626 1977 6,159 1987 7,947 1997 2,057 2007 1,264 1958 930 1968 949 1978 5,917 1988 6,463 1998 2,443 2008 1,250 1959 741 1969 1,190 1979 4,148 1989 4,191 1999 2,409 1953–1959
Total
2,899 1960–1969
Total
6,166 1970–1979
Total
46,035 1980–1989
Total
66,511 1990–1999
Total
22,925 2000–2008
Total
18,129 There was a total of 162,665 overseas adoptions out of South Korea from 1953 to 2008. Title Decade Intercountry Adoptions Out of South Korea From 1953 to 2008 2000–2008 18,129 1990–1999 22,925 1980–1989 66,511 1970–1979 46,035 1960–1969 6,166 1953–1959 2,899
South Korean [1] Sources: Hübinette (2005) andSouth Korean Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs (2009)
Intercountry Adoptions Out of South Korea by Country From 2007 to 2011.6 Year Total US Sweden Canada Norway Australia Luxemburg Denmark France Italy 2007 1,264 1,013 80 68 20 44 3 22 14 – 2008 1,250 988 76 78 45 18 16 20 8 1 2009 1,125 850 84 67 40 34 17 21 8 4 2010 1,013 775 74 60 43 18 12 21 6 4 2011.6 607 495 26 27 20 17 9 8 3 2 [87] Source: Ministry of Health and Welfare
Disabled South Korean Children Adoptions By Year Total Before
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011.6 Total 39,540 33,812 757 843 669 712 764 725 540 153 133 252 180 Home 476 197 14 16 20 7 27 12 40 29 36 47 31 Abroad 39,064 33,615 743 827 649 705 737 713 500 124 97 205 149 [87] Source: Ministry of Health and Welfare
Yearly South Korean Children Adoptions Category Total Before
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011.6 Total Total 239,493 221,190 3,562 3,231 2,652 2,556 2,439 2,475 1,388 Home 75,190 66,146 1,461 1,332 1,388 1,306 1,314 1,462 781 Abroad 164,303 155,044 2,101 1,899 1,264 1,250 1,125 1,013 607 [87] Source: Ministry of Health and Welfare
Types of Adoptees (Causes for Adoption) in South Korea Year Domestic Adoption International Adoption Total Single
mom’s
child Child
under
facility
care Child
from
broken
family
etc. Total Single
mom’s
child Starvation
etc. Child
from
broken
family 2007 1,388 1,045 118 225 1,264 1,251 11 2 2008 1,306 1,056 86 164 1,250 1,114 10 126 2009 1,314 1,116 70 128 1,125 1,005 8 112 2010 1,462 1,290 46 126 1,013 876 4 133 2011.6 781 733 22 26 607 537 8 62 [87] Source: Ministry of Health and Welfare
Adoption Circumstances in South Korea from 1958 to 2008 Year Abandoned Broken Home Single Mother Total 1958–1960 1,675 630 227 2,532 1961–1970 4,013 1,958 1,304 7,275 1971–1980 17,260 13,360 17,627 48,247 1981–1990 6,769 11,399 47,153 65,321 1991–2000 255 1,444 20,460 22,129 2001 1 1 2,434 2,436 2002 1 0 2,364 2,365 2003 2 2 2,283 2,287 2004 0 1 2,257 2,258 2005 4 28 2,069 2,101 2006 4 5 1,890 1,899 2007 11 2 1,251 1,264 2008 10 126 1,114 1,250 Total 29,975 28,956 102,433 161,364 [1] Source: South Korean Ministry of Health, Welfare and Family Affairs 2009
Foster Care Status in South Korea Year Total Substitute family
care Foster care by
relatives General foster care No. of
households No. of
children No. of
households No. of
children No. of
households No. of
children No. of
households No. of
children 2006 10,253 14,465 6,152 9,062 3,097 4,160 1,004 1,243 2007 11,622 16,200 6,975 10,112 3,651 4,850 996 1,238 2008 11,914 16,454 7,488 10,709 3,436 4,519 990 1,226 2009 12,170 16,608 7,809 10,947 3,438 4,503 923 1,158 2010 12,120 16,359 7,849 10,865 3,365 4,371 906 1,123 [87] Source: Ministry of Health and Welfare
Community Home Status in South Korea Year No. of
facilities No. of children No. of
employees Total Male Female 2006 1,030 2007 276 1,368 745 623 623 2008 348 1,664 884 780 754 2009 397 1,993 1,076 917 849 2010 416 2,127 1,125 1,002 894 [87] Source: Ministry of Health and Welfare
Child Welfare Facilities in South Korea Year Gender Total Male Female 2006 18,817 10,789 8,028 2007 18,426 10,563 7,863 2008 17,992 10,229 7,763 2009 17,586 10,105 7,481 2010 17,119 9,790 7,329 [87] Source: Ministry of Health and Welfare
U.S. adoption of Korean children by year
U.S. adoption of Korean children by age group
USA Adoptions of Koreans 1999-2015 Year Adopted
Koreans Year Adopted
Koreans Year Adopted
Koreans 1999 1,994 2007 938 2015 318 2000 1,784 2008 1,064 2001 1,862 2009 1,079 2002 1,776 2010 865 2003 1,793 2011 736 2004 1,713 2012 627 2005 1,628 2013 138 2006 1,373 2014 370 [88] Source: Bureau of Consular Affairs
Statistics of 167 Adult Korean Adoptees in 1999 Adoptive Parents Adoptive Caucasian Mother 98% Adoptive Caucasian Father 97% Neighborhood Growing Up Neighborhood Was Only Caucasian 70% Neighborhood Included Other Asians 15% Neighborhood Included Non-Asian-Non-Caucasians 13% Friends Growing Up Friends Were Only Caucasian 55% Had Asian Friends 24% Had Non-Asian-Non-Caucasian Friends 19% Siblings Other Korean Adopted Siblings 52% Biological Children of Adoptive Parent 26% Respondent Was The Only Child 13% Domestically Adopted Siblings 7% Internationally Adopted, non-Korean Siblings 3% Race of Spouse Spouse Korean Men Korean Women Caucasian 50% 80% Asian 50% 13% African-American 0% 3% Latino 0% 3% View of Own Ethnicity During Childhood and Adolescence Caucasian 36% Korean-American or Korean-European 28% American or European 22% Asian or Korean 14% View of Own Ethnicity as Adults Korean-American or Korean-European 64% Asian or Korean 14% Caucasian 11% American or European 10% Korean Heritage Exploration Method Activity Growing Up As Adults Korean and/or Adoptee Events & Organizations 72% 46% Book/Study 22% 40% Korean Friends or Contacts 12% 34% Korean Food 12% 4% Travel to South Korea 9% 38% Korean Language Study 5% 19% Status of Search for Birth Family Interested in Searching 34% Not Interested in Searching 29% Have Searched or Are Searching 22% Uncertain If Interested in Searching 15% Reason for Search for Birth Family Obtain Medical Histories 40% Curiosity 30% Meet People Who Look Like Them 18% Learn Reason They Were Given Up for Adoption 18% Learn If They Have Relatives, Especially Siblings 16% Fill Void or Find Closure 16% Send Message to Birth Parents 10% [44] Source: The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute
Statistics of 179 Adult Korean Adoptees in 2010 Placement Before Adoption Orphanage 40.9% Foster Care 40.3% Did Not Know 9.1% Birth Family 8% Other Living Arrangement
Than Ones Listed 1.7% Reason for Separation from Biological Family Did Not Know 46% Did Know
(39%) Single-Parent Household 21% Poverty 18% Lost Child Accidentally Separated
From Family Who Were Not Found 4% Death in the Family 4% Placed for Adoption by
Non-Parent Family Member
Possibly Indicating Birth Parent(s)
Did Not Decide to Relinquish 4% Abuse in Birth Family 1% Did Not Respond to the Question 15% [89] Source: IKAA Gathering 2010 Report
1999 to 2016 US adoptees [ edit ]
From 1999 to 2015, there have been 20,058 Koreans adopted by US families. Of these 20,058 children, 12,038 (about 60%) have been male and 8,019 (about 40%) have been female. Of these 20,058 children, 16,474 were adopted when they were less than one year old, 3,164 were adopted when they were between one and two years old and 310 were adopted when they were between three and four years old. Of these 20,058 children, 19,222 of them immigrated to the United States using the IR-4 Immediate Relative Immigrant Visa, and 836 of them immigrated to the United States using the IR-3 Immediate Relative Immigrant Visa.[88]
Individual Korean adoptees [ edit ]
Works of Korean adoptees have become known both in art, literature and film-making. Other Korean adoptees have received celebrity status for other reasons, like Soon-Yi Previn who is married to Woody Allen, actresses Nicole Bilderback, and Jenna Ushkowitz, model and actress Beckitta Fruit, Washington State Senator Paull Shin, former Slovak rap-artist Daniel Hwan Oostra, Kristen Kish of Top Chef – Season 10, make-up artist turned content creator Claire Marshall,[90] former French minister Fleur Pellerin and professional baseball player Rob Refsnyder. The 2015 movie Twinsters which covers the life of real life Korean Adoptees Samantha Futerman and Anaïs Bordier who were separated at birth and reconnected online and meeting in real life.
Alessi, Joy [ edit ]
A 2016 article in The Hankyoreh covered the story of Korean adoptee Joy Alessi. Alessi was put in a South Korean orphanage in Munsan on July 20, 1966, a day or two after being born, and she was adopted in the United States through Holt Children’s Welfare Association when she was seven months old. Alessi found out that she was not a US citizen when she was 25 years old after trying to apply for a US passport and being unable to obtain one due to not being a US citizen. Alessi was ultimately able to get a South Korean passport after some difficulties. Alessi needed to present her South Korean passport, adoption documents and describe her situation in order to get a job, and she obtained a job as a flight attendant. Alessi returned to South Korea when she was 49 years old, and she tried to find her birth parents in South Korea, but she was not able to find them.[91]
Almoz, Sivan [ edit ]
Born in South Korea in the 1960s, Sivan Almoz was found abandoned by an orphanage soon after her birth. She spent three years at an orphanage before being adopted by an Israeli couple.
Almoz went on to become a social worker, and co-founded the “First Hug” association which trains and dispatched volunteers that care for babies abandoned at Israeli hospitals.
In an interview, she has stated that when she turned 18, the age at which she is entitled to access information and documentation related to her adoption according to law, she has decided instead to “adopt my non-biological parents”. She has never searched for her birth parents. [92]
Audenaerde, Hojung [ edit ]
A 2017 article in Yonhap covered the story of Korean adoptee Hojung Audenaerde. The article said that Audenaerde was twenty-seven months old when her birth father gave her up for adoption. Audenaerde was adopted by a Belgian couple who moved to the United States. Audenaerde’s adoption agency found her birth father, because Audenaerde’s documentation was intact and correct. Audenaerde communicated with her birth father by exchanging letters which led to Audenaerde finding her partially paralyzed birth mother with whom she had her first meeting in 2014.[93]
Brandt, Marissa [ edit ]
A 2017 article in The New York Times said that Korean adoptee Marissa Brandt who was adopted by an American family was a defenceman on South Korea women’s national ice hockey team, and the article said that she wore her Korean name, Park Yoon-jung, on her hockey jersey.[94]
Boyer, Pierre Sang [ edit ]
A 2016 video on the Arirang YouTube channel covered the story of Pierre Sang Boyer. The narrator of the video said that Boyer was a Korean adoptee who arrived in France when he was seven years old. The narrator said that Boyer started cooking French cuisine when he was sixteen years old. The narrator said that Boyer experienced Korean cuisine on his trip back to Korea to find his heritage. The narrator said that Boyer opened a Korean-style, French cuisine restaurant in 2012, and the narrator said that Boyer was encouraged to open another restaurant in 2014. The narrator said that Boyer wanted to introduce French-style, Korean cuisine in Korea.[95]
Burns, Cyndy [ edit ]
A 2016 article in CBS News covered the story of Korean adoptee Cyndy Burns who was left at an adoption agency when she was ten months old. Burns had grown up in Connecticut. Burns used a DNA sample to find her birth mother, Sun Cha, who had been living in the United States, and Burns went to Tacoma, Washington to meet her birth mother.[96]
Clay, Phillip [ edit ]
A 2017 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer covered the story of Korean adoptee Phillip Clay who was adopted in 1983 to a couple in Philadelphia when he was 8 years old. Not having US citizenship and having a long criminal record, Clay was deported in 2012 to South Korea. For the next five years, Clay struggled to speak Korean and form connections with other Korean adoptees. On May 21, 2017, Clay committed suicide by jumping from the 14th floor of a building in Ilsan.[97]
Clement, Thomas Park [ edit ]
A 2015 article in The Washington Times said that mixed-race Korean adoptee Thomas Park Clement who was born during the middle of the Korean War remembered being abandoned by his birth mother when he was four and half years old after Clement’s birth mother told him to walk down a street and not turn around. Clement lived on the streets before being put in an orphanage. Two years after, Clement was adopted by a family in North Carolina. Clement later received a degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University, and Clement founded Mectra Labs, a medical device company, in 1988. Clement was not planning on looking for his birth mother.[98]
A 2013 article in The Berkshire Eagle said that Clement’s 2012 biography was called Dust of the Streets: The Journey of a Biracial Orphan of the Korean War.[99]
A 2016 article in The Seattle Times said that Korean adoptee Thomas Park Clement founded Mectra Labs which is a medical-manufacturing company, and it said that Clement has pledged $1,000,000 worth of DNA testing kits for donation. Clement has given 2,550 DNA testing kits to Korean adoptees and Korean War veterans, and he has given 450 DNA testing kits to 325Kamra which is a volunteer organization to give to people in South Korea. Clement said, “I have throughout the years experienced so many of my fellow Korean adoptees’ frustrations with birth-relative searches”, and Clement said, “DNA is shortcutting the search process and bringing all parties in direct communication with each other.”[100]
A 2015 article in PRI said that Clement was paying for the DNA kits from 23andMe.[101]
Crapser, Adam [ edit ]
A 2016 article in Q13 Fox said that Immigration Judge John O’Dell chose to deport Adam Crapser, a Korean adoptee who was not a US citizen, due to Crapser’s criminal record.[102]
Davidson, Kyung Eun [ edit ]
A 2016 article in The Korea Herald covered the story of Korean adoptee Kyung Eun Davidson. The article said that Davidson was a Korean adoptee who was given up for adoption when she was three years old by her birth father. Davidson grew up in Oregon after being adopted. Davidson was in Korea from 2005 to 2007 to find her birth mother. Davidson reunited with her birth father in 2007, but after their first reunion he disappeared. Davidson went back to the United States from Korea in 2007. Davidson’s birth father had lied to her birth mother that he had been raising her for more than twenty years when in reality he had put her up for adoption. Davidson’s birth mother went to Holt in 2008 after Davidson’s birth mother found out about her biological daughter being put up for adoption by Davidson’s birth father. Davidson became aware that her birth mother did not relinquish her for adoption in 2016. Davidson found her birth mother through a DNA match, and Davidson and her birth mother were going to meet each other in person.[103]
Davis, Amy [ edit ]
A 2017 article in the Duluth News Tribune covered the story of Korean adoptee Amy Davis. Davis was adopted in the seventies, and Davis grew up in Cloquet, Minnesota, in a community of mostly white people. Davis’s adoptive parents were told that Davis had been abandoned, so there was no way to contact Davis’s birth parents. In 2016, Davis went to Korea to search for her birth parents, and Davis’s case manager told Davis that her biological aunt had been looking for her seven years ago. Davis’s case manager originally did not tell Davis the name of her biological aunt, because it was against Korea’s privacy laws for the case manager to tell Davis this information, but the case manager eventually broke the law and told Davis the information. Davis found her biological aunt, and Davis found her birth father who was proven to be her birth father through DNA testing. Davis’s birth parents had split up when Davis was one year old, and Davis’s birth father had been leaving Davis with his mother (Davis’s biological grandmother) while Davis’s birth father went to work. Davis had long thought that she was abandoned in a police station, but, in reality, it was her biological grandmother who had put her up for adoption without her birth parents’ consent or awareness, and this act had caused her birth family to become estranged. Davis’s 97-year-old biological grandmother asked for forgiveness for what she had done to Davis, and Davis forgave her.[104]
Eckert, Karen Hae Soon [ edit ]
A 2000 article in PBS covered the story of Korean adoptee Karen Hae Soon Eckert. Eckert was discovered at a police station in Seoul on February 21, 1971, with no accompanying written information left with her. Because she had no written information left with her, she was given the name Park Hae-soon. Officials estimated Eckert’s birthday to be February 12, 1971, because they said that she looked about 10 days old. Eckert was in a hospital for four months after she was born before being put in Holt International’s foster care. When Eckert was 9 months old, she was adopted, and she grew up in Danville, California. Eckert’s brothers and parents were white people. Five years after she was eighteen years old, Eckert joined a group of adult adoptees. Eckert liked encountering other adoptees, she liked sharing experiences and she liked being able to empathize.[105]
Fostervold, Layne [ edit ]
A 2017 article in PRI covered the story of Korean adoptee Layne Fostervold. Fostervold’s birth mother, Kim Sook-nyeon, was unwed when she became pregnant with Fostervold in 1971, and Kim Sook-nyeon’s family would have encountered a lot of stigma and prejudice if she had kept Fostervold. Fostervold was adopted when he was 2 years old, and Fostervold grew up in Willmar, Minnesota. Fostervold said that he had the feeling for almost all of his life that his birth mother did not want to give him up for adoption. Kim Sook-nyeon said that she had to promise not to go looking for Fostervold in the future. Kim Sook-nyeon said that she had prayed for Fostervold, worried about Fostervold and wanted Fostervold to have a good life. Fostervold went to Korea in 2012, and he talked to Korea Social Service (KSS) which was the agency which had done his adoption. A social worker for KSS told Fostervold that a person who claimed to be his birth mother looked for him in 1991 and 1998, but nobody from KSS had told his adoptive family this information. Fostervold reunited with his birth mother. Fostervold moved to South Korea in 2016, and Fostervold was living with his birth mother in 2017. Fostervold was trying to learn the Korean language in order to obtain a professional job, and Fostervold changed his last name from Fostervold back to Kim on social media.[106]
Haruch, Steven [ edit ]
A 2000 article in PBS covered the story of Korean adoptee Steven Haruch. The story was that Haruch was born in Seoul in 1974, and Haruch was given the name Oh Young-chan by the strangers who took care for him until Haruch went to the United States in 1976. Haruch was adopted to a white family and most of the people around him were white too. In high school and college, Haruch wrote self-pitying poems about being adopted. In 2000, Haruch was the Acting Instructor in the Department of English in University of Washington. Haruch wrote film criticism for the Seattle Weekly, and Haruch was a part-time teacher at a Korean-American after-school program.[107]
Heit, Shannon [ edit ]
A 2014 article in MinnPost covered the story of Korean adoptee Shannon Heit. Heit was on K-pop Star in 2008 for the purpose of trying to find her birth mother who she believed had given her up for adoption more than twenty years ago. Heit’s appearance on TV and Heit’s singing ability led to her being reunited with her birth mother. Heit learned that she had been put up for adoption by her biological grandmother when her birth mother was away working which was contrary to the story her adoptive family had been told. Heit was supportive of the Special Adoption Law which went into effect in August 2012. In 2014, Heit was living in South Korea, was married and was working as an editor and translator. Also in 2014, Heit was working with civic groups to help unwed mothers and she was counseling adopted children. Heit remained in contact with her adoptive parents in the United States, and Heit said, “my case shows how traumatic adoption can be, even when the adoptive parents are loving and have the best intentions.”[108]
Jones, Sara [ edit ]
Born in South Korea in the 1970s, Sara’s father made the tough decision to place her in an orphanage in order to ensure she received the care she deserved. Prior to placing her in the orphanage, her father gave each member of his family a special tattoo.
At the age of 3, Sara was adopted by a white family from Utah, USA. Her new parents relocated her to Utah, gave her a new name, and had her mysterious tattoo removed. She was then raised as the only minority in a predominantly white community. As a result of her upbringing, Sara identified more with being a White female than an Asian female. Sara went on to graduate with honors from The University of Utah with a B.S. in chemical engineering, graduate cum laude from Brigham Young University, become a female CEO, and co-founded the Women’s Tech Council.
Despite her success, Sara yearned to find her birth family and embrace her Asian heritage. She used modern resources and her mysterious tattoo to begin the search for her birth family. 42 years after she was adopted, Sara was reunited with her birth family. She now uses her unique experience of being a Korean adoptee, growing up a minority in a predominately white community, reuniting with her birth family, and being a female leader working in a field dominated by white males to help others. Most recently, she was featured by Ted.com for her 2019 TedxSaltLakeCity talk entitled ‘My Story of Love and Loss as a Transracial Adoptee.’
Sara is currently the CEO of InclusionPro, a consulting firm specializing in helping organizations create inclusive work environments. She has keynoted the Silicone Slopes Tech Summit as well as being featured in numerous articles, publications, and podcasts. As a result of her work, Sara received a Distinguished Alumna award from the University of Utah College of Engineering. Other awards she has received include CEO of the year, being honored as a Women to Watch, and receiving the Utah Innovation award.[109][110][111][112][113]
A 2017 article in Korea JoongAng Daily covered the story of Korean adoptee Kim Dong-hwa. The article said that Kim and his birth sister were abandoned by their birth mother when they were both infants. Kim and his birth sister flew out of South Korea in 1979. The two were adopted to a family in Portland, Oregon, and Kim said that it lasted for about a year. Kim and his sister were then sent to a foster family in Denver, Colorado, for about five years, and that family was busted for physical abuse of children. Kim and his sister were then put in foster care. In 1986, Kim and his sister were put into a foster family with foster parents of Mexican descent who were undocumented immigrants in East Los Angeles, California. Kim said that this new foster family beat him and his sister, and Kim said that they beat him with big sticks. Kim said that he had a feeling that his sister was being sexually abused, because Kim said that “She started doing weird things, so … you know”. Kim got two years in juvenile detention after hitting his foster father in the head with a hammer after Kim heard neighbors praising the foster father. Kim was later convicted of assault, gang affiliation and possession of a firearm which got Kim five years in jail, and Kim was charged with assault with a deadly weapon three years into this five-year jail term. Kim’s lawyer suggested to Kim that he could avoid jail time by accepting lifetime deportation, since the paper work was never completed for Kim to become a US citizen. Kim said, “I just didn’t want to sit in jail.”, and Kim went to South Korea. In South Korea, Kim taught English before starting a Mexican restaurant with another person with the help of loans.[114]
Matthews, Dan [ edit ]
A 2016 documentary on NBC News covered the story of Korean adoptee Dan Matthews who is an alternative rapper. In 2013, Matthews was in the documentary “aka Dan” where he reconnected with his biological family and twin brother. In 2016, four other Korean adoptees and Matthews visited Korea in the documentary “aka SEOUL” which was produced by NBC Asian America and International Secret Agents (ISAtv), and the five Korean adoptees threw light on adoptee identity in this documentary.[115]
O’Callaghan, Madoc Hyunsu [ edit ]
A 2016 article in WUSA 9 covered the story of Korean adoptee Madoc Hyunsu O’Callaghan. The article said that O’Callaghan who was three years old was killed by his adoptive father, Brian O’Callaghan, after only having been adopted for three months when his adoptive father threw him against the wall. The lawyer for the adoptive father argued that his Marine Corps veteran client had PTSD which caused him to go into a rage and lose control. Korean adoptee Annalie Yi felt that the adoptive father’s prison sentence which made it so he could be released from prison after only four years was a “slap on the wrist”. The Korean adoptee community was upset that O’Callaghan’s grave had just a marker with his name over it rather than a headstone over it, and the Korean adoptee community offered to buy a headstone for O’Callaghan’s grave, but the Korean adoptee community has now accepted the adoptive mother’s statement that she was going to move the body.[116]
A 2016 article in DCW 50 said that Brian O’Callaghan got 12 years in prison with eligibility for parole in around 5 years.[117]
A 2016 article in The Washington Post said that Circuit Judge John Debelius was in agreement that the adoptive father’s PTSD was a factor in the death of O’Callaghan, and Debelius said that he did not believe that O’Callaghan’s death was a premeditated killing by his adoptive father.[118]
Schildkraut, Nicky Sa-eun [ edit ]
A 2015 article in 89.3KPCC covered the story of Korean adoptee Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut. Schildkraut’s precise age at adoption was not known, and she grew up near Boston in the United States. Schildkraut went to South Korea two times to try to find information about her birth family. Schildkraut said, “The fact that I’ll never be able to find my biological family and relatives. I feel like that kind of loss is interminable, it’s just ongoing loss.” Schildkraut said, “I have all these privileges growing up in my westernized family, all my education and degrees I would not be able to have if I had still been in Korea, so I feel fortunate in that sense.”[119]
Thiele, Brooke [ edit ]
A 2017 article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel covered the story of Korean adoptee Brooke Thiele. Thiele was born in Daegu, and she was adopted when she was 9 months old to a white family in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Thiele was awarded a Mary L. Nohl Fellowship grant of $10,000 to work on her project about interracial adoption. Thiele plans to make a hanbok that animates images at the bottom while spinning like a zoetrope to tell her adoption story for the Nohl Fellowship show.[120]
Thompson, Veronica [ edit ]
A 2017 article in The Guardian covered the story of Korean adoptee Veronica Thompson. In 1974, Thompson was discovered all by herself in a bag outside of a South Korean police station. Thompson has twice tried to find out about her origins and both of these attempts were unsuccessful. Thompson was going to perform a solo show called Flights of Fancy at the Soho Theatre. Flights of Fancy was about imaginary talks with Thompson’s birth mother, and Flights of Fancy was about Thompson’s journey from the police station, continuing to adoption and a childhood in a town near Seattle with a white family and coming to the United Kingdom in the early 2000s. Flights of Fancy delved into identity politics, migration and belongingness.[121]
Trenka, Jane Jeong [ edit ]
A 2010 article in the MinnPost said that Korean adoptee Jane Jeong Trenka was concerned that children adopted from Haiti, only a month after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, could be trafficked, misidentified or removed from adults who could care for them.[122]
In popular culture [ edit ]
Blue Bayou, a film written and directed by Justin Chon, depicts a Korean-American man who was adopted by a white family and is at risk for deportation because his parents did not file for his citizenship. The movie is based on true stories about interracial adoption, which is related to the Child Citizenship Act of 2000.[123][124]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]
International Korean Adoptee Associations
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Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link – 해외입양인연대
Since the 1950s, over 200,000 Korean children have been sent overseas for adoption. In recent years, adult adoptees have started to return to Korea in increasingly large numbers to search for their Korean birth families, seek connection to Korean identity, and learn about the language and culture.
Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (G.O.A.’L.) was founded in 1998 by overseas Korean adoptees who returned to Korea. It soon became, and remains today, the only adoptee-led non-profit and NGO in Korea.
Your donations allow us to achieve our mission of being an adoptee-centric hub that connects adoptees around the world.
International adoption of South Korean children
International adoption of South Korean children
Adoptions from South Korea Timeline 1940 — – 1950 — – 1960 — – 1970 — – 1980 — – 1990 — – 2000 — – 2010 — – 2020 — ← [3] 1988 Summer Olympics in South Korea ← 1955 the Holt Family Adopts 8 South Korean children ← [4] 2011 new law for adoptees to be dual citizens with South Korea ← [2] 1976 South Korea’s Special Adoption Law Korean War
South Korea color-coded by amount
where the darker color means more[1] number of adoptions out ofSouth Korea color-coded by amountwhere the darker color means more
for Adoption and Foster Care[2] South Korea’s Five Year Planfor Adoption and Foster Care
The international adoption of South Korean children was at first started as a result of a large number of orphaned mixed children from the Korean War after 1953, but later included orphaned Korean children. Religious organizations in the United States, Australia, and many Western European nations slowly developed into the apparatus that sustained international adoption as a socially integrated system. This system, however, is essentially gone as of 2020. The number of children given for adoption is lower than in comparable OECD countries of a similar size, the majority of adoptees are adopted by South Korean families, and the number of international adoptees is at a historical low.[5]
Korean War and Holt [ edit ]
Korean War [ edit ]
A 1988 article which was originally in The Progressive and reprinted in Pound Pup Legacy said that less than one percent of Korean adoptees adopted now are Amerasian, but most of the Korean adoptees for the decade after the Korean War were Amerasians who were fathered by American soldiers.[6]
Albert C. Gaw (1993) said that 6,293 Koreans were adopted in the United States between 1955 and 1966, of whom about 46% were white and Korean mixed, 41% were fully Korean, and the rest were African-American and Korean mixed.[7] The first wave of adopted people from Korea came from usually mixed-race children whose families lived in poverty; the children’s parents were often American military men and Korean women.[8]
A 2015 article in Public Radio International said that Arissa Oh who wrote a book about the beginnings of international adoption said that, “Koreans have this myth of racial purity; they wanted to get rid of these children. Originally international adoption was supposed to be this race-based evacuation.”[9]
Holt [ edit ]
The start of adoption in South Korea is usually credited to Harry Holt in 1955.[10][8] Harry Holt wanted to help the children of South Korea, so Holt adopted eight children from South Korea and brought them home. In part due to the response that Holt got after adopting these eight children from the nationwide press coverage, Holt started Holt International Children’s Services which is an adoption agency based in the United States which specialized in finding families for Korean children.[8]
Touched by the fate of the orphans, Western religious groups as well as other associations started the process of placing children in homes in the United States and Europe. Adoption from South Korea began in 1955 when Bertha and Harry Holt went to Korea and adopted eight war orphans after passing a law through Congress.[6] Their work resulted in the founding of Holt International Children’s Services. The first Korean babies sent to Europe went to Sweden via the Social Welfare Society in the mid-1960s. By the end of that decade, the Holt International Children’s Services began sending Korean orphans to Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland and Germany.
Media coverage of adoption [ edit ]
South Korean media coverage [ edit ]
In 1988, when South Korea hosted the 1988 Summer Olympics, the international adoption of South Korean children became the focus of global attention, and the issue became a source of national humiliation for South Korea. Politicians claimed that they would try to stop “child exports”, so they set an intended end date and a quota for international adoptions. However, the quota has been exceeded several times, and the intended end date has been extended several times.[3]
Not until the 1980s and early 1990s did the South Korean government and South Koreans, both in South Korea and in the diaspora, pay any significant attention to the fates of Korean adoptees. The nation was not prepared for the return of their ‘lost children.’ But the numerous adult Korean adoptees who visited Korea as tourists every year, in addition to raising public awareness of the Korean adoptee diaspora, forced Korea to face a shameful and largely unknown part of their history. South Korean president Kim Dae-jung invited 29 adult Korean adoptees from 8 countries to a personal meeting in the Blue House in October 1998. During this meeting he publicly apologized for South Korea’s inability to raise them.[11]
— Kim Dae-jung, Kim Dae-jung’s Apology to 29 Korean Adoptees in 1998, Yngvesson (2010)[12] It’s been eight months since I became President. During this period, I’ve met countless people. But today’s meeting with all of you is personally the most meaningful and moving encounter for me. Looking at you, I am proud of such accomplished adults, but I am also overwhelmed with an enormous sense of regret at all the pain that you must have been subjected to. Some 200,000 Korean children have been adopted to the United States, Canada, and many European countries over the years. I am pained to think that we could not raise you ourselves, and had to give you away for foreign adoption.
Since then, South Korean media rather frequently reports on the issues regarding international adoption. Most Korean adoptees have taken on the citizenship of their adoptive country and no longer have Korean passports. Earlier they had to get a visa like any other foreigner if they wanted to visit or live in South Korea. This only added to the feeling that they were ‘not really South Korean’. In May 1999, a group of Korean adoptees living in Korea started a signature-collection in order to achieve legal recognition and acceptance (Schuhmacher, 1999). At present (2009) the number of Korean adoptees long-term residents in South Korea (mainly Seoul) is estimated at approximately 500. It is not unlikely that this number will increase in the following decade (International adoption from South Korea peaked in the mid-1980s). A report from Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (G.O.A.’L) indicates that the long term returnees (more than one year) are predominantly in their early twenties or early thirties.
One factor that helped make the subject of Korean adoptees part of the South Korean discourse was a 1991 film called Susanne Brink’s Arirang which was a film about the life story of a Korean adoptee who grew up in Sweden. This film made the subject of the international adoptions of Korean children a hot topic in South Korea, and it made South Koreans feel shame and guilt regarding the issue.[3]
A 1997 article in The Christian Science Monitor said that Koreans in South Korea often believed that adoptive families in other countries had ulterior motives for adopting Korean orphans due to the Korean belief that parents can not love a child who is not their biological child.[13]
North Korean media coverage [ edit ]
A 1988 article which was originally in The Progressive and reprinted in Pound Pup Legacy said that the director general of South Korea’s Bureau of Family Affairs in the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs said that the large number of international adoptions out of South Korea had been an issue used as part of North Korea’s propaganda against South Korea in the 1970s. As part of North Korea’s propaganda against South Korea in the 1970s, North Korea decried the large numbers of international adoptions of South Korean children, and North Korea decried what it considered to be South Korea’s practice of selling South Korean children. The South Korean director general wanted to decrease the numbers of South Korean children being adopted internationally, so North Korea would no longer have the issue to use for its propaganda against South Korea. The news article also said that North Korea did not allow couples in other countries to adopt North Korean children.[6]
The 1988 article was serialized by The People’s Korea, a pro-North Korea magazine, and the resulting publicity caused South Korea to have the image in the North as the number one child-exporting country of the world:[14] The Pyongyang Times, a North Korean newspaper, printed: “The traitors of South Korea, old hands at treacheries, are selling thousands, tens of thousands of children going ragged and hungry to foreign marauders under the name of ‘adopted children’.”[14]
Korean patrilineal blood culture [ edit ]
A 1988 article which was originally in The Progressive and reprinted in Pound Pup Legacy said that South Korean culture is a patrilineal culture that places importance on families related by blood. The importance of bloodline families is the reason why Koreans do not want to adopt Korean orphans, because the Korean adoptee would not be the blood relative of the adoptive parents. Korean patrilineal culture is the reason Korean society stigmatizes and discriminates against unwed Korean mothers and their kids, making it so the unwed mother might not be able to get a job or get a husband.[6]
A 2007 submission by Sue-Je Lee Gage for the partial fulfillment of a Ph.D. in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University said that, in Korean patrilineal blood culture, Koreanness is passed from parent to child as long as the parents have “pure” Korean blood, and this transference of Koreanness is especially notable when the Korean father gives his “pure” Korean blood to his Korean child, making lineage along the father’s line especially important in the Korean concept of race and identity. Gage said that a Korean family’s lineage history represents the official recording of their blood purity. Due to this conception of identity along blood lines and race, Gage said that Koreans in South Korea consider Korean adoptees who return to South Korea to still be Korean even if they cannot speak Korean. Gage said that, for Koreans, a Korean physical appearance is the most important consideration when identifying other people as being Koreans, although a Korean physical appearance is not the only consideration Koreans use in their consideration for group membership as a fellow Korean. For example, Gage said that Korean women who had sex with non-Korean men were often not considered to be “Korean” in the “full-fledged” sense by Koreans.[15]
The Fall 2012 journal of The Journal of Korean Studies said that anthropologist Elise Prebin said that Korean adoptee reunions can be more secure and are easier maintained along the birth father’s line (patrilineal) than along the birth mother’s line (matrilineal) in her study of Korean adoptee reunions with birth families. The journal said that “Korean patrilineal kinship ideologies” still have a strong societal influence in South Korea.[16]
A 2014 article in NPR said that unwed mothers suffer a social stigma in South Korea, because having a child out of wedlock is an act that goes against Korean patrilineal bloodline culture. The 2014 news article also said that Korean adoptees suffer a social stigma in South Korea, because Korean adoptees have been “cut loose from their bloodlines”.[17]
A 2015 news article said that there is still a strong social stigma against unwed mothers and illegitimate children in South Korea. The 2015 news article said that this social stigma applies to the unwed mother and even her illegitimate children and her whole extended family, causing a child who was born out of wedlock to suffer lowered marital, job and educational prospects in South Korea.[18]
A 2015 article in The Economist said that Koreans in South Korea mostly adopt female Korean children to avoid issues involving ancestral family rites which are usually done by bloodline sons and to avoid issues involving inheritance.[19]
Economics [ edit ]
Costs saved by South Korea [ edit ]
A 1988 article which was originally in The Progressive and reprinted in Pound Pup Legacy said that the South Korean government made fifteen to twenty million dollars per year by the adoption of Korean orphans by families in other countries. The 1988 news article also said that the adoption of Korean orphans out of South Korea had three more effects: it saved the South Korean government the costs of caring for the Korean orphans, it relieved the South Korean government of the need to figure out what to do with the orphans and it lowered the population.[6]
Some academics and researchers claim that the system for orphans Korean adoption agencies have established guarantee a steady supply of healthy children (Dobbs 2009). Supporters of the system claim that adoption agencies are only caring for infants who would otherwise go homeless or be institutionalized.
Korean adoption agencies support pregnant-women’s homes; three of the four agencies run their own. One of the agencies has its own maternity hospital and does its own delivery. All four provide and subsidize child care. All pay foster mothers a monthly stipend to care for the infants, and the agencies provide all food, clothing and other supplies free of charge. They also support both independent-orphanages, and or self-run ones. The agencies will cover the costs of delivery and the medical care for any woman who gives up her baby for adoption. (Rothschild, The Progressive, 1988; Schwekendiek, 2012).
A 2011 article in the Institute for Policy Studies estimated each adoption cost US$15k, paid primarily by the adopting parents. This generated an estimated US$35M/yr to cover foster-care, medical care, and other costs for the ~2,300 Korean international adoptions. [20]
Social welfare of South Korea [ edit ]
In a 2010 book, Kim Rasmussen said that the “root cause” of the number of adoptions out of South Korea in 2010 was South Korea’s lack of spending on its social welfare system. Rasmussen said that the other OECD-30 countries spent an average of 20.6% of their GDP on social welfare benefits while South Korea only spent 6.9% of its GDP on social welfare benefits. Rasmussen said that South Korea promoting domestic adoption would not address the heart of the problem and that South Korea should raise its spending for social welfare benefits.[21]
Birth mothers and orphans [ edit ]
Birth mothers [ edit ]
In the 1988 article which was originally in The Progressive and reprinted in Pound Pup Legacy, a South Korean orphanage director said that according to his orphanage’s questionnaire data 90% of Korean birth mothers indicated that wanted to keep their biological child and not give it up for adoption, but the South Korean orphanage director said that only maybe 10% of birth mothers eventually decided to keep their biological child after his orphanage suggested to the birth mothers that unwed mothers and poor couples should give their child up for adoption. The 1988 news article said that the Korean birth mothers felt guilty after giving their child up for adoption, and it said that most of the Korean birth mothers who gave their child up for adoption were poor and worked at factory or clerical jobs in South Korea.[6]
In a same 1988 article, an INS officer at the Embassy of the United States, Seoul, said that social workers were hired by adoption agencies to perform the role of “heavies” to convince South Korean mothers to give their children up for adoption. Although the officer said that he felt that the adoption business was probably a good thing for birth mothers, adoptive parents and adoptees, he said that the adoption business troubled him due to the large number of children who were being adopted out of South Korea every month. The INS officer said that these numbers should make people question how much of the international adoption of South Korean children was a humanitarian cause and how much it was a business.[6]
Orphans [ edit ]
A 2014 article in NPR said that it was “effectively” “impossible” for Korean orphans who aged out of institutions at 18 years old to attend a university in South Korea due to lacking the money to pay for all of the associated costs, so most Korean orphans ended up getting low-paying jobs in South Korean factories after aging out of the institutions. The 2014 news article said that many Korean parents in South Korea refuse to allow their children to marry Korean orphans.[17]
A 2015 article said that the majority of South Korean orphans become orphans at a young age, and the 2015 article said that the majority of South Korean orphans eventually age out of the orphanages’ care when they turn 18 years old never being adopted.[22]
A 2015 article in The Economist said that in the past 60 years two million or about 85% of the total orphans in South Korea have grown up in South Korean orphanages never being adopted. The 2015 article said that from the 1950s to 2015 only 4% of the total number of orphans in South Korea had been adopted domestically by other Koreans in South Korea.[19]
A 2015 video by BBC News said that orphanages in South Korea had become full as a result of the South Korean government making it more difficult for Korean orphans to be adopted overseas.[23]
Baby box [ edit ]
In a video which was published on March 27, 2014, on the France 24 YouTube channel, Ross Oke who is the international coordinator of Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK) said that baby boxes like the one in South Korea encourage abandonment of children and they deny the abandoned child the right to an identity.[24]
A 2015 article in Special Broadcasting Service said that in 2009 South Korean pastor Lee Jong-rak put a “baby box” on his church in Seoul, South Korea, to allow people to anonymously abandon children. The article said that since the abandoned children have not been formally relinquished, they cannot be adopted internationally. The article said that the children will most likely stay in orphanages until they become 18 or 19 years old.[25]
Korean Adoption Services database [ edit ]
A 2014 article in The Korea Herald said that the Korea Adoption Services was digitizing 35,000 documents regarding international adoptions that took place in South Korea since the 1950s to further the efforts of Korean adoptees locating their birth parents.[26]
A 2017 article in The Hankyoreh said that Seo Jae-song and his wife who used to run the Seonggajeong orphanage in Deokjeokdo and later the St. Vincent Home in Bupyeong District had 1,073 Korean adoption records. In 2016, these 1,073 Korean adoption records were scanned by Korean Adoption Services (KAS) and the Ministry of Health and Welfare. In 2016, KAS had 39,000 records from 21 institutions.[27]
Korea’s domestic adoptions [ edit ]
A 2015 article, said that the South Korean government is trying to have more domestic adoptions due, in part, to people around the world becoming aware of the large number of Korean adoptees who were adopted by families outside of South Korea since the mid 1950s. Because the South Korean government doesn’t want to have the reputation of a “baby-exporting country”, and due to the belief that Koreans should be raised with Korean culture, the South Korean government has been trying to increase domestic adoptions.[22] However, this has been less than successful over the decades. The numbers only picked up after 2007.[28]
However, the numbers of domestic adoption fell in 2013 due to tighter restrictions on eligibility for Adoptive Parents. However, the number in babies has also gone up with the forced registration of babies, also a new law, leading to more abandonment.[29]
The primary reason as of 2015 for the majority of surrenders within South Korea is single mothers are still publicly shamed within Korea,[30][31] and the South Korean mothers who give their kids up for adoption have been mostly middle or working-class women since the 1990s.[1] The amount of money single mothers can receive within the country is 70,000 won per month, only after proving poverty versus the tax break from adopting domestically is 150,000 won per month, which is unconditional, whereas it’s conditional in the case of single mothers.[30] 33 facilities for single and divorced mothers, but the majority of them are run by orphanages and adoption agencies.
In a 2009 article, Stephen C. Morrison, a Korean adoptee, said that he wanted more Koreans to be willing to adopt Korean children. Morrison said that he felt the practice of Koreans adopting Korean children in secret was the greatest obstacle for Korean acceptance of domestic adoption. Morrison also said that in order for domestic Korean adoption to be accepted by Koreans he felt that Korean people’s attitudes must change, so that Koreans show respect for Korean adoptees, not speak of Korean adoptees as “exported items” and not refer to Korean adoptees using unpleasant expressions of which Morrison gave the example, “a thing picked up from under a bridge”. Morrison said that he felt that the South Korean government should raise the allowable age at which Korean parents could adopt Korean orphans and raise the allowable age at which Korean orphans could be adopted by Korean parents, since both of these changes would allow for more domestic adoptions.[32]
Even in its capacity as a global economy and OECD nation, Korea still sends children abroad for international adoption. The proportion of children leaving Korea for adoption amounted to about 1% of its live births for several years during the 1980s (Kane, 1993); currently, even with a large drop in the Korean birth rate to below 1.2 children per woman and an increasingly wealthy economy, about 0.5% (1 in 200) of Korean children are still sent to other countries every year.[citation needed]
A 2005 opinion piece in The Chosun Ilbo said that South Korean actress Shin Ae-ra and South Korean actor Cha In-Pyo publicly adopted a Korean daughter after already having a biological son together, and the article said that by publicly adopting a Korean orphan this the couple could cause other Koreans to change their views about domestic adoptions in South Korea.[33]
Quota for overseas adoptions [ edit ]
To stem the number of overseas adoptions, the South Korean government introduced a quota system for foreign adoptions in 1987. And under the system, the nation reduced the number of children permitted for overseas adoption by 3 to 5% each year, from about 8,000 in 1987 to 2,057 in 1997. The goal of the plan was to totally eliminate foreign adoptions by 2015. But in 1998 the government temporarily lifted the restrictions, after the number of abandoned children sharply increased in the wake of growing economic hardships.
Notable is a focused effort of the 2009 South Korean government to seize international adoption out of South Korea, with the establishment of KCare and the domestic Adoption Promotion Law.
Incentivizing domestic adoptions [ edit ]
A 1997 article in The Christian Science Monitor said that South Korea was giving incentives in the form of housing, medical and educational subsidies to Korean couples who adopted Korean orphans to help encourage domestic adoption, but the Korean couples in South Korea who did adopt tended to not use these subsidies, because they did not want other Koreans knowing that their children were not their biological children.[13]
Special Adoption Law [ edit ]
A 2013 article in CNN said that Jane Jeong Trenka who is a Korean adoptee along with others came up with the Special Adoption Law. The article said that the Special Adoption Law would make it so birth mothers have to stay with their child for seven days before giving it up for adoption. The article said that the Special Adoption Law would make it so the birth mothers’ consent has to be verified before relinquishment of their child, and the article said that Special Adoption Law would make it so the birth of the child is registered. The article said that the Special Adoption Law would also make it so the birth mother could retract her relinquishment for up to six months following her application. The article said that Steve Choi Morrison who is a Korean adoptee and founder of Mission to Promote Adoption in Korea (MPAK) fought against the Special Adoption Law. The article said that Morrison was against the Special Adoption Law because Morrison said that Korean culture is a culture where saving face is important. The article said that Morrison said that Korean birth mothers would fear the record of the birth becoming known, and men will not marry them afterwards. The article said that Morrison predicted that forcing Korean birth mothers to register the births would lead to abandonments.[34]
A 2015 article in the Washington International Law Journal suggested that the Special Adoption Act may have been a factor in more babies being abandoned after the enactment of the Special Adoption Act on August 5, 2012.[35]
Revised Special Adoption Act [ edit ]
The Revised Special Adoption Act which was enacted in South Korea in 2012 made domestic adoptions in South Korea recorded as the biological children of the Korean adoptive parents.[36]
A 2014 article in NPR said that the Revised Special Adoption Law did not make adopting Korean children equal to adding a blood relative in the minds of Koreans regardless of how domestic Korean adoptions would now be considered for legal purposes.[17]
Countries adopting Koreans [ edit ]
A 2010 book about Korean adoption said that there are Korean adoptee groups in metropolises that are in areas with a lot of Korean adoptees residents such as in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Boston, and Seoul.[1]
Adoptees in the United States [ edit ]
An archived web page of the Bureau of Consular Affairs website that said that it was last updated in 2009 said that US couples who wanted to adopt Korean children needed to meet certain requirements. The web page said that the couples needed to be between 25 and 44 years old with an age difference between spouses of no more than 15 years, the couples needed to be married for three years, the couples needed to have an income higher than the US national average, and the couples could not already have more than five children. The web page said that US couples had to pay a fee between $9,500 and $10,000 to adopt a Korean child, and the web page said that it took one to four years after applying for the adopted Korean child to arrive in the United States. The web page said that the wait time after applying for US couples who wanted to adopt was about three years for a healthy Korean child and one year for a Korean child with special needs.[37]
A 1988 article which was originally in The Progressive and reprinted in Pound Pup Legacy said that there were 2,000,000 couples who wanted to adopt children in the United States, but only 20,000 healthy children were available for domestic adoption in the United States. The 1988 news article said that the lack of children for domestic adoption caused couples in the United States to look to other countries to adopt children, and the fastest increase of American couples’ adoptions from other countries at this time was from South Korea.[6]
A 2010 book about Korean adoption said that Korean adoptees comprise about ten percent of the total Korean American population according to an estimate in a 2010 book about South Korean adoption. The book said that, in the United States, the majority of Korean adoptees were adopted close to adoption agencies, so they were mostly adopted in the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, Michigan, Montana, South Dakota, Oregon, Washington, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, Utah or Idaho.[1]
Adoptees in Sweden [ edit ]
A 2002 article in the Embassy of Sweden, Seoul, said that due to the Swedish welfare state of the 1960s more Swedish families started adopting Korean children. The article said that the Swedish welfare system allowed for unwed Swedish mothers to better support themselves and not feel the need to give up their children for adoption. The article said that, as a consequence, there were fewer Swedish orphans in Sweden for domestic adoptions, so Swedish families who wanted to adopt children had to adopt from other countries. The article said that the reason for Korean adoptions, specifically, was that some Swedish families had already adopted Koreans in the 1950s, so later families continued this trend.[38]
Psychological effects [ edit ]
Perception of who the adoptees’ “real” parents are [ edit ]
In a 2016 study of 16 Korean American transnational adult adoptees, some of the Korean adoptees viewed their adoptive parents as their “real” parents and some viewed their biological parents as their “real” parents.[39]
Pronunciation of Korean [ edit ]
A 2017 article in BBC News said that an article published in Royal Society Open Science said that Dutch-speaking Korean adoptees who were retrained in the Korean language were able to pronounce Korean better than expectations. Korean adoptees who were about 30 years old and who were adopted as babies to Dutch-speaking families were used in the study. The Korean adoptees were compared to a group of adults who had not been exposed to Korean as children. Following a short training course, the Korean adoptees were asked to pronounce Korean consonants for the study. The Korean adoptees did better than expectations after training.[40]
Sex Work [ edit ]
In her dissertation for her Ph.D., Sarah Y. Park cited Kendall (2005) and Kim (2007) when Park said that female Korean adoptees are commonly told that they may have become a prostitute if they were not adopted out of Korea.[41]
Social problems [ edit ]
A 2002 study in The Lancet of intercountry adoptees in Sweden of various ethnic backgrounds, most of whom were of Korean, Colombian or Indian (from India) extraction, who were adopted by two parents who were born in Sweden found that intercountry adoptees had the following increased likelihoods relative to the rest of the children who were born in Sweden to two parents who were themselves also born in Sweden: intercountry adoptees were 3.6 times more likely to die from suicide, 3.6 times more likely to attempt suicide, 3.2 times more likely to be admitted for a psychological disorder, 5.2 times more likely to abuse drugs, 2.6 times more likely to abuse alcohol and 1.6 times more likely to commit a crime.[42]
Abandonment [ edit ]
A 2006 article in New America Media said that an increasing number of South Korean parents were paying elderly American couples to adopt their children for the purpose of having their child receive US education and US citizenship. However, the article said that according to Peter Chang, who led the Korean Family Center in Los Angeles, Korean children who were put up for adoption for the purpose of receiving US education and US citizenship frequently felt betrayed by their biological parents. The article said that getting US citizenship this way required the adopted child to be adopted before their sixteenth birthday and stay with their adoptive family for at least two years.[43]
In a 1999 study of 167 adult Korean adoptees by The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, the majority of the adult Korean adoptees struggled with the thought of how their birth mother could have given them up for adoption.[44]
Korean culture socialization [ edit ]
A 2012 study in the Journal of Adolescent Research of Korean adoptees in the United States found that white parents of Korean adoptees whose average age was 17.8 years old tended to try to socialize their adopted Korean children to Korean culture by doing overt actions such as going to Korean restaurants or having them attend Korean culture camp rather than having conversations with them about Korean ethnic identity or being a racial minority in the United States. The study said that for many families doing these overt actions was easier and more comfortable for them than discussing the personal issues of ethnic identity or being a racial minority in the United States.[45]
In a 2005 article, a 38-year-old Korean adoptee who was adopted in the United States said that social workers told her adoptive parents to not raise her with ties to South Korea, because the social workers said that doing that would confuse her. The 2005 article said that adoptive parents were no longer trying to cut ties with the culture of their adopted child’s birth country as of 2005, and adoptive parents were instead trying to introduce their adopted kid to the culture of their birth country. In 2005, one popular way for adoptive parents to expose their adopted child to the traditions and food of their birth country was for them to attend “culture camps” which would last for one day.[46]
Cross-race effect [ edit ]
A 2005 study in American Psychological Society of the cross-race effect used Korean adoptees whose average age was 27.8 years old who were adopted when they were between 3 and 9 years old by French families and the study also used recent Korean immigrants to France. The study had the participants briefly see a photograph of a Caucasian or Japanese face, then the participants had to try to recognize the same Caucasian or Japanese face which they had just seen from a pair of either Caucasian or Japanese faces. The Korean adoptees and French people could recognize the Caucasian faces better than they could recognize the Japanese faces, but the recent Korean immigrants could recognize the Japanese faces better than they could recognize the Caucasian faces, suggesting that the cross-race effect can be modified based on familiarity with certain types of faces due to experiences starting after three years of age.[47]
Implicitly raised as white [ edit ]
C.N. Le, a lecturer at the sociology department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst,[48] said that Korean adoptees and non-white adoptees in general who are raised by white families are raised to implicitly think that they are white, but since they are not white, there is a disconnect between the way they are socialized at home and the way the rest of society sees them. Le further said that most white families of non-white adoptees are not comfortable talking with their adopted children about the issues that racial minorities face in the United States, and Le further advised white families who adopt transracially that just introducing their kids to Asian culture, telling them that race is not important and/or telling them that people should get equal treatment in society is insufficient. Le said that the social disconnection between how they were raised and the reality of American society causes “confusion, resentment about their situation, and anger” for adoptees who were transracially adopted by white families.[49]
Many of the South Korean children adopted internationally, grew up in white, upper or middle-class homes. In the beginning adoptive families were often told by agencies and social workers to assimilate their children and make them as much as possible a part of the new culture, thinking that this would override concerns about ethnic identity and origin. Many Korean adoptees grew up not knowing about other children like themselves.[50] This has changed in recent years with social services now encouraging parents and using home studies to encourage prospective adoptive parents to learn about the cultural influences of the country. With such works as “Beyond Culture Camp” [51] which encourage the teaching of culture, there has been a large shift. Though, these materials may be given, not everyone may take advantage of them. Also, adoption agencies started to allow the adoption of South Koreans by people of color in the late 1990s to early 2000, and not just white people, including Korean-Americans. Such an example of this is the rapper GOWE, who was adopted by a Chinese-American family.
As a result of many internationally adopted Korean adoptees growing up in white areas, many of these adoptees avoided other Asians in childhood and adolescence out of an unfamiliarity and/or discomfort with Asian cultures.[52] These adoptees sometimes express a desire to be white like their families and peers, and strongly identify with white society. As a result, meeting South Koreans and Korean culture might have been a traumatic experience for some.[50] However, other Korean adoptees, often those raised in racially or culturally diverse communities, grew up with ties to the Korean community and identify more strongly with the Korean aspect of their identities.[52]
Adoptees’ feelings about South Korea [ edit ]
In a 1999 study of 167 adult Korean adoptees by The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, group discussions about the topic of how they felt about South Korea led to many feelings. There was anger about the negative way Koreans view adopted Koreans. There was concern over Korean orphans in South Korean orphanages, and there was a feeling of obligation to help the Korean orphans who remained in the South Korean orphanages. There was a feeling of responsibility to change Koreans’ views of domestic adoption, so that adopting an orphan in South Korea would not be something that Koreans in South Korea would be ashamed of doing.[44]
Adoptees’ memories of orphanages and initial adoption [ edit ]
In a 1999 study of 167 adult Korean adoptees by The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, there were adoptees who mainly remembered experiencing poverty as orphans such as one adoptee who remembered eating much oatmeal with flies in it as an orphan in South Korea. Some adoptees remembered feeling a sense of loss of the relationships that they had with people when they left their South Korean orphanages. Some of the adoptees remembered being scared of their new living situation with adoptive parents in a new country when they had just been adopted out of South Korea.[44]
Discrimination [ edit ]
Discrimination for being adopted [ edit ]
A 2014 article in NPR said that Koreans in South Korea were prejudiced against Korean adoptees, and the 2014 news article said that Korean adoptees who were adopted domestically by other Koreans in South Korea often became outcast and bullied by other Koreans at their South Korean school.[17]
Discrimination for race and appearance [ edit ]
In a 1999 study of 167 adult Korean adoptees by The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, the majority of respondents (70%) reported their race being the reason they were discriminated against while growing up, and a minority of respondents (28%) reported their adoptee status as being the reason they were discriminated against while growing up. One of the study’s respondents said that growing up in a small town of white people made him an oddity that few people wanted to associated with, and he said that he had wanted to be like other people instead of being different. Other respondents said that the discrimination they received growing up caused them to deny their Korean heritage.[44]
In a 2010 book, Kim Rasmussen gave an example of a Korean adoptee from the United States who returned to South Korea and tried to apply for the job of an English teacher in South Korea only to be denied the job due to her race. The Korean adoptee was told that she was rejected for the job, because the mothers of the students wanted their children to be taught English from a white person.[21]
In a 2015 article in The Straits Times, Korean adoptee Simone Huits who was adopted to a Dutch family in the Netherlands made the following remark about growing up in a small Dutch town, “All the children wanted to touch me because I looked different. It was scary and overwhelming.”[53]
Discrimination for not speaking Korean [ edit ]
In a 1999 study of 167 adult Korean adoptees by The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, the majority of respondents (72%) reported that they had no ability with the Korean language, and only a minority of respondents (25%) reported that they had any ability with the Korean language. Of the study’s respondents who visited South Korea, 22% described their visit as a negative experience, and about 20% described their visit as a both negative and positive experience. Inability to speak Korean was mentioned as being a cause of their visit being a negative experience by more than one respondent, and inability to speak Korean was generally the cause of the negative parts of the visit for the respondents who reported both a positive and negative experience. One respondent said that they felt that Koreans in South Korea looked down on them for their inability to speak Korean. Another respondent said that the Koreans in South Korea were initially nice to them, but the respondent said that Koreans in South Korea became rude to them after finding out that they could not speak Korean. Many of the adoptees felt like they were foreigners while visiting South Korea.[44]
A 2007 book about Korean adoption said that it was uncomfortable for Korean adoptees who do not speak Korean and who do not have Korean last names to associate with Korean-speaking children of Korean immigrants in school districts with children of Korean immigrant families.[54]
Korean adoptee camps [ edit ]
Holt International Adoptee Camp Locations Oregon Camp Wisconsin Camp Nebraska Camp East Coast Camp [55][56][57][58] Source: Holt International Website Korean Adoptee Camp Locations Camp Moo Gung Hwa Korean Adoption Means Pride [59]
Korean Adoption Means Pride Website[60] Sources: Camp Moo Gung Hwa WebsiteKorean Adoption Means Pride Website
Holt adoptee camps [ edit ]
Holt adoptee camps are places where transracial and/or international adoptees can talk about feelings of not fitting in and isolation in a safe space. Each day there are group discussions about issues of identity, adoption and questions regarding race that last about an hour.[61] The locations of the camps are Corbett, Oregon; Williams Bay, Wisconsin; Ashland, Nebraska and Sussex, New Jersey.[55][56][57][58]
Camp Moo Gung Hwa [ edit ]
Camp Moo Gung Hwa is a Korean culture camp for Korean adoptees in Raleigh, North Carolina. The camp first started in 1995 with the name Camp Hodori, and the camp changed its name to Camp Moo Gung Hwa in 1996. The purpose of the camp is to improve the Korean adoptees’ knowledge of Korean culture and improve their self-esteem.[62]
Korean Adoption Means Pride [ edit ]
Korean Adoption Means Pride (KAMP) is a camp in Dayton, Iowa for Korean adoptees and their families. The camp exposes camp attendees to Korean culture. Korean culture classes cover Korean cuisine, Korean dance, Korean language, taekwondo and Korean arts and crafts.[60]
Heritage Camps for Adoptive Families [ edit ]
Heritage Camps for Adoptive Families (HCAF) was founded in 1991 and consists of nine different camps for varying adoptee groups, one of which is Korean Heritage Camp.[63] KHC is held annually at Snow Mountain Ranch in Fraser, Colorado. It brings adoptees and their families together each year to learn about adoption and Korean culture.[64]
Adoptees returning to South Korea [ edit ]
Adoptees returning to visit South Korea [ edit ]
In a 1999 study of 167 adult Korean adoptees by The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, most of the adult Korean adoptees felt that younger Korean adoptees should visit South Korea, 57% of the 167 adult Korean adoptees reported that they have visited South Korea and 38% of the 167 adult Korean adoptees reported visiting South Korea as a means with which they explored their Korean heritage.[44]
Eleana J. Kim, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester, said that South Korea developed programs for adult Korean adoptees to return to South Korea and learn about what it means to be Korean; these programs included wearing hanboks and learning to make kimchi.[65]
Adoptees returning to live in South Korea [ edit ]
When International Korean Adoptees turned into adults, many of them chose to return.[66] These countries include Sweden, United States of America, the Netherlands, France, Belgium etc. In this respect the so-called re-Koreanization of the Korean adoptees is often reproduced in South Korean popular media (e.g. the blockbuster ‘Kuk’ka Taep’yo/National Representative/Take Off). The ‘re-Koreanization can be reflected in Korean ethnic based nationalism (both North and South of the 38th parallel).
A 2005 article in Hyphen: Asian America Unabridged said that an increasing number adoptees were moving back to live in South Korea to try to help other Korean adoptees, and it said that many of these returning Korean adoptees were critical of South Korea’s adoption system. The article said that one returning Korean adoptee, for example, made a confrontational exhibition where he posted photos of 3,000 Korean adoptees in South Korea’s three largest cities with the hope that South Koreans would see these photos and question why South Korea was still sending many Korean children abroad as adoptees. The article said that another returning Korean adoptee created an organization based in South Korea called Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK) to end the international adoption of South Korean orphans, and the article said that ASK intended to accomplish this goal by “preventing teenage pregnancy through sex education, monitoring orphanages and foster care, increasing domestic adoption and expanding welfare programs for single mothers.” The article said that other Korean adoptees who returned to live in South Korea did volunteer work in orphanages.[67]
The article went on to say Korean adoptees who return to live in South Korea choose to use a Korean name, their adopted name or a combination of both while living in South Korea. The article said that one returning adoptee said that they chose to use a combination of both names to indicate their status as a Korean adoptee. The article said that another returning Korean adoptee chose to use a Korean name, but the name they decided to go by was one that they chose for themselves and not the Korean name which was originally assigned to them by their orphanage when they were an orphan. The article said that another returning Korean adoptee decided to go by their original Korean name over their adopted Belgian name, because their Belgian name was difficult for other people to pronounce.[67]
The article also claimed that Korean adoptees who return to live in South Korea from the United States generally hold higher paying jobs in South Korea that involve speaking English and teaching while Korean adoptees who return to live in South Korea from European countries that use other languages generally get involved with lower paying jobs in restaurants, bars and stores while living in South Korea.[67]
In 2010 the South Korean Government legalized dual citizenship for Korean adoptees, and this law that went into effect in 2011.[4]
Adoptees deported to South Korea [ edit ]
A 2016 article in The Guardian said that the South Korean government had record of 10 Korean adoptees who were deported from the United States to South Korea.[68]
A 2016 article in The Nation described the story of a Korean adoptee who did not have U.S. Citizenship who was deported to South Korea from the United States for committing a crime in the United States.[69]
A 2017 article in the New York Times about a Korean adoptee who was deported and is looking to make a life in South Korea, the article does an overview of the lives of returning Korean adoptees and the difficulties they face.[70]
Adoptee Associations [ edit ]
The first association to be created for adult Korean adoptees was Adopterade Koreaners Förening which as founded on November 19, 1986, in Sweden.[71] In 1995, the first Korean adoptee conference was held in Germany, and, in 1999, Korean adoptee conferences were arranged in both the US and South Korea.[3]
A 2010 book about South Korean adoption estimated that ten percent of Korean adoptees who are over the age of eighteen are part of adult Korean adoptee associations.[1]
Against international adoptions [ edit ]
A 2015 article in The Economist said that the Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK) was a lobby group of Korean adoptees that lobbied against the adoption of South Koreans by other countries.[29]
A 2016 book about South Korean adoption said that Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK) was an association of Korean adoptees that was committed to ending international adoption.[84]
Statistics [ edit ]
Reasons Koreans do not Want to Adopt in South Korea Reason Given Percent difficulty raising and loving adopted child like a birth child 32.1% families should be based on blood 29.5% financial burden 11.9% prejudice against adoption 11.4% Source: Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs[85]
Receiving Australian Territories of South Korean Adoptees From 2001 to 2009 Receiving State/Territory 2001–2002 2002–2003 2003–2004 2004–2005 2005–2006 2006–2007 2007–2008 2008–2009 Total Australian Capital Territory 4 5 5 3 3 2 0 1 23 New South Wales 25 28 27 26 18 16 7 14 161 Northern Territory 3 1 2 3 1 0 3 1 14 Queensland 15 16 18 19 15 9 9 7 108 South Australia 20 24 19 12 9 4 4 1 93 Tasmania 1 4 3 3 2 3 0 1 17 Victoria 12 20 20 23 16 10 12 8 121 Western Australia 12 10 14 10 5 4 5 2 62 Total 92 108 108 99 69 48 40 35 599 Source: Australian InterCountry Adoption Network[86]
Receiving Countries of South Korean Adoptees From 1953 to 2008 Primary Countries (1953–2008) Other Countries (1960–1995) Country Period Adoptees Country Period Adoptees United States 1953–2008 109,242 New Zealand 1964–1984 559 France 1968–2008 11,165 Japan 1962–1982 226 Sweden 1957–2005 9,051 Okinawa 1970–1972 94 Denmark 1965–2008 9,297 Ireland 1968–1975 12 Norway 1955–2008 6,295 Poland 1970 7 Netherlands 1969–2003 4,099 Spain 1968 5 Belgium 1969–1995 3,697 China 1967–1968 4 Australia 1969–2008 3,359 Guam 1971–1972 3 Germany 1965–1996 2,352 India 1960–1964 3 Canada 1967–2008 2,181 Paraguay 1969 2 Switzerland 1968–1997 1,111 Ethiopia 1961 1 Luxembourg 1984–2008 561 Finland 1984 1 Italy 1965–2008 383 Hong Kong 1973 1 England 1958–1981 72 Tunisia 1969 1 Turkey 1969 1 Other 1956–1995 113 There were 163,898 total adoptees for primary and other countries.
South Korean [1] Sources: Hübinette (2005) andSouth Korean Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs (2009)
Intercountry Adoptions Out of South Korea From 1953 to 2008 Year Total Year Total Year Total Year Total Year Total Year Total 1960 638 1970 1,932 1980 4,144 1990 2,962 2000 2,360 1961 660 1971 2,725 1981 4,628 1991 2,197 2001 2,436 1962 254 1972 3,490 1982 6,434 1992 2,045 2002 2,365 1953 4 1963 442 1973 4,688 1983 7,263 1993 2,290 2003 2,287 1954 8 1964 462 1974 5,302 1984 7,924 1994 2,262 2004 2,258 1955 59 1965 451 1975 5,077 1985 8,837 1995 2,180 2005 2,010 1956 671 1966 494 1976 6,597 1986 8,680 1996 2,080 2006 1,899 1957 486 1967 626 1977 6,159 1987 7,947 1997 2,057 2007 1,264 1958 930 1968 949 1978 5,917 1988 6,463 1998 2,443 2008 1,250 1959 741 1969 1,190 1979 4,148 1989 4,191 1999 2,409 1953–1959
Total
2,899 1960–1969
Total
6,166 1970–1979
Total
46,035 1980–1989
Total
66,511 1990–1999
Total
22,925 2000–2008
Total
18,129 There was a total of 162,665 overseas adoptions out of South Korea from 1953 to 2008. Title Decade Intercountry Adoptions Out of South Korea From 1953 to 2008 2000–2008 18,129 1990–1999 22,925 1980–1989 66,511 1970–1979 46,035 1960–1969 6,166 1953–1959 2,899
South Korean [1] Sources: Hübinette (2005) andSouth Korean Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs (2009)
Intercountry Adoptions Out of South Korea by Country From 2007 to 2011.6 Year Total US Sweden Canada Norway Australia Luxemburg Denmark France Italy 2007 1,264 1,013 80 68 20 44 3 22 14 – 2008 1,250 988 76 78 45 18 16 20 8 1 2009 1,125 850 84 67 40 34 17 21 8 4 2010 1,013 775 74 60 43 18 12 21 6 4 2011.6 607 495 26 27 20 17 9 8 3 2 [87] Source: Ministry of Health and Welfare
Disabled South Korean Children Adoptions By Year Total Before
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011.6 Total 39,540 33,812 757 843 669 712 764 725 540 153 133 252 180 Home 476 197 14 16 20 7 27 12 40 29 36 47 31 Abroad 39,064 33,615 743 827 649 705 737 713 500 124 97 205 149 [87] Source: Ministry of Health and Welfare
Yearly South Korean Children Adoptions Category Total Before
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011.6 Total Total 239,493 221,190 3,562 3,231 2,652 2,556 2,439 2,475 1,388 Home 75,190 66,146 1,461 1,332 1,388 1,306 1,314 1,462 781 Abroad 164,303 155,044 2,101 1,899 1,264 1,250 1,125 1,013 607 [87] Source: Ministry of Health and Welfare
Types of Adoptees (Causes for Adoption) in South Korea Year Domestic Adoption International Adoption Total Single
mom’s
child Child
under
facility
care Child
from
broken
family
etc. Total Single
mom’s
child Starvation
etc. Child
from
broken
family 2007 1,388 1,045 118 225 1,264 1,251 11 2 2008 1,306 1,056 86 164 1,250 1,114 10 126 2009 1,314 1,116 70 128 1,125 1,005 8 112 2010 1,462 1,290 46 126 1,013 876 4 133 2011.6 781 733 22 26 607 537 8 62 [87] Source: Ministry of Health and Welfare
Adoption Circumstances in South Korea from 1958 to 2008 Year Abandoned Broken Home Single Mother Total 1958–1960 1,675 630 227 2,532 1961–1970 4,013 1,958 1,304 7,275 1971–1980 17,260 13,360 17,627 48,247 1981–1990 6,769 11,399 47,153 65,321 1991–2000 255 1,444 20,460 22,129 2001 1 1 2,434 2,436 2002 1 0 2,364 2,365 2003 2 2 2,283 2,287 2004 0 1 2,257 2,258 2005 4 28 2,069 2,101 2006 4 5 1,890 1,899 2007 11 2 1,251 1,264 2008 10 126 1,114 1,250 Total 29,975 28,956 102,433 161,364 [1] Source: South Korean Ministry of Health, Welfare and Family Affairs 2009
Foster Care Status in South Korea Year Total Substitute family
care Foster care by
relatives General foster care No. of
households No. of
children No. of
households No. of
children No. of
households No. of
children No. of
households No. of
children 2006 10,253 14,465 6,152 9,062 3,097 4,160 1,004 1,243 2007 11,622 16,200 6,975 10,112 3,651 4,850 996 1,238 2008 11,914 16,454 7,488 10,709 3,436 4,519 990 1,226 2009 12,170 16,608 7,809 10,947 3,438 4,503 923 1,158 2010 12,120 16,359 7,849 10,865 3,365 4,371 906 1,123 [87] Source: Ministry of Health and Welfare
Community Home Status in South Korea Year No. of
facilities No. of children No. of
employees Total Male Female 2006 1,030 2007 276 1,368 745 623 623 2008 348 1,664 884 780 754 2009 397 1,993 1,076 917 849 2010 416 2,127 1,125 1,002 894 [87] Source: Ministry of Health and Welfare
Child Welfare Facilities in South Korea Year Gender Total Male Female 2006 18,817 10,789 8,028 2007 18,426 10,563 7,863 2008 17,992 10,229 7,763 2009 17,586 10,105 7,481 2010 17,119 9,790 7,329 [87] Source: Ministry of Health and Welfare
U.S. adoption of Korean children by year
U.S. adoption of Korean children by age group
USA Adoptions of Koreans 1999-2015 Year Adopted
Koreans Year Adopted
Koreans Year Adopted
Koreans 1999 1,994 2007 938 2015 318 2000 1,784 2008 1,064 2001 1,862 2009 1,079 2002 1,776 2010 865 2003 1,793 2011 736 2004 1,713 2012 627 2005 1,628 2013 138 2006 1,373 2014 370 [88] Source: Bureau of Consular Affairs
Statistics of 167 Adult Korean Adoptees in 1999 Adoptive Parents Adoptive Caucasian Mother 98% Adoptive Caucasian Father 97% Neighborhood Growing Up Neighborhood Was Only Caucasian 70% Neighborhood Included Other Asians 15% Neighborhood Included Non-Asian-Non-Caucasians 13% Friends Growing Up Friends Were Only Caucasian 55% Had Asian Friends 24% Had Non-Asian-Non-Caucasian Friends 19% Siblings Other Korean Adopted Siblings 52% Biological Children of Adoptive Parent 26% Respondent Was The Only Child 13% Domestically Adopted Siblings 7% Internationally Adopted, non-Korean Siblings 3% Race of Spouse Spouse Korean Men Korean Women Caucasian 50% 80% Asian 50% 13% African-American 0% 3% Latino 0% 3% View of Own Ethnicity During Childhood and Adolescence Caucasian 36% Korean-American or Korean-European 28% American or European 22% Asian or Korean 14% View of Own Ethnicity as Adults Korean-American or Korean-European 64% Asian or Korean 14% Caucasian 11% American or European 10% Korean Heritage Exploration Method Activity Growing Up As Adults Korean and/or Adoptee Events & Organizations 72% 46% Book/Study 22% 40% Korean Friends or Contacts 12% 34% Korean Food 12% 4% Travel to South Korea 9% 38% Korean Language Study 5% 19% Status of Search for Birth Family Interested in Searching 34% Not Interested in Searching 29% Have Searched or Are Searching 22% Uncertain If Interested in Searching 15% Reason for Search for Birth Family Obtain Medical Histories 40% Curiosity 30% Meet People Who Look Like Them 18% Learn Reason They Were Given Up for Adoption 18% Learn If They Have Relatives, Especially Siblings 16% Fill Void or Find Closure 16% Send Message to Birth Parents 10% [44] Source: The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute
Statistics of 179 Adult Korean Adoptees in 2010 Placement Before Adoption Orphanage 40.9% Foster Care 40.3% Did Not Know 9.1% Birth Family 8% Other Living Arrangement
Than Ones Listed 1.7% Reason for Separation from Biological Family Did Not Know 46% Did Know
(39%) Single-Parent Household 21% Poverty 18% Lost Child Accidentally Separated
From Family Who Were Not Found 4% Death in the Family 4% Placed for Adoption by
Non-Parent Family Member
Possibly Indicating Birth Parent(s)
Did Not Decide to Relinquish 4% Abuse in Birth Family 1% Did Not Respond to the Question 15% [89] Source: IKAA Gathering 2010 Report
1999 to 2016 US adoptees [ edit ]
From 1999 to 2015, there have been 20,058 Koreans adopted by US families. Of these 20,058 children, 12,038 (about 60%) have been male and 8,019 (about 40%) have been female. Of these 20,058 children, 16,474 were adopted when they were less than one year old, 3,164 were adopted when they were between one and two years old and 310 were adopted when they were between three and four years old. Of these 20,058 children, 19,222 of them immigrated to the United States using the IR-4 Immediate Relative Immigrant Visa, and 836 of them immigrated to the United States using the IR-3 Immediate Relative Immigrant Visa.[88]
Individual Korean adoptees [ edit ]
Works of Korean adoptees have become known both in art, literature and film-making. Other Korean adoptees have received celebrity status for other reasons, like Soon-Yi Previn who is married to Woody Allen, actresses Nicole Bilderback, and Jenna Ushkowitz, model and actress Beckitta Fruit, Washington State Senator Paull Shin, former Slovak rap-artist Daniel Hwan Oostra, Kristen Kish of Top Chef – Season 10, make-up artist turned content creator Claire Marshall,[90] former French minister Fleur Pellerin and professional baseball player Rob Refsnyder. The 2015 movie Twinsters which covers the life of real life Korean Adoptees Samantha Futerman and Anaïs Bordier who were separated at birth and reconnected online and meeting in real life.
Alessi, Joy [ edit ]
A 2016 article in The Hankyoreh covered the story of Korean adoptee Joy Alessi. Alessi was put in a South Korean orphanage in Munsan on July 20, 1966, a day or two after being born, and she was adopted in the United States through Holt Children’s Welfare Association when she was seven months old. Alessi found out that she was not a US citizen when she was 25 years old after trying to apply for a US passport and being unable to obtain one due to not being a US citizen. Alessi was ultimately able to get a South Korean passport after some difficulties. Alessi needed to present her South Korean passport, adoption documents and describe her situation in order to get a job, and she obtained a job as a flight attendant. Alessi returned to South Korea when she was 49 years old, and she tried to find her birth parents in South Korea, but she was not able to find them.[91]
Almoz, Sivan [ edit ]
Born in South Korea in the 1960s, Sivan Almoz was found abandoned by an orphanage soon after her birth. She spent three years at an orphanage before being adopted by an Israeli couple.
Almoz went on to become a social worker, and co-founded the “First Hug” association which trains and dispatched volunteers that care for babies abandoned at Israeli hospitals.
In an interview, she has stated that when she turned 18, the age at which she is entitled to access information and documentation related to her adoption according to law, she has decided instead to “adopt my non-biological parents”. She has never searched for her birth parents. [92]
Audenaerde, Hojung [ edit ]
A 2017 article in Yonhap covered the story of Korean adoptee Hojung Audenaerde. The article said that Audenaerde was twenty-seven months old when her birth father gave her up for adoption. Audenaerde was adopted by a Belgian couple who moved to the United States. Audenaerde’s adoption agency found her birth father, because Audenaerde’s documentation was intact and correct. Audenaerde communicated with her birth father by exchanging letters which led to Audenaerde finding her partially paralyzed birth mother with whom she had her first meeting in 2014.[93]
Brandt, Marissa [ edit ]
A 2017 article in The New York Times said that Korean adoptee Marissa Brandt who was adopted by an American family was a defenceman on South Korea women’s national ice hockey team, and the article said that she wore her Korean name, Park Yoon-jung, on her hockey jersey.[94]
Boyer, Pierre Sang [ edit ]
A 2016 video on the Arirang YouTube channel covered the story of Pierre Sang Boyer. The narrator of the video said that Boyer was a Korean adoptee who arrived in France when he was seven years old. The narrator said that Boyer started cooking French cuisine when he was sixteen years old. The narrator said that Boyer experienced Korean cuisine on his trip back to Korea to find his heritage. The narrator said that Boyer opened a Korean-style, French cuisine restaurant in 2012, and the narrator said that Boyer was encouraged to open another restaurant in 2014. The narrator said that Boyer wanted to introduce French-style, Korean cuisine in Korea.[95]
Burns, Cyndy [ edit ]
A 2016 article in CBS News covered the story of Korean adoptee Cyndy Burns who was left at an adoption agency when she was ten months old. Burns had grown up in Connecticut. Burns used a DNA sample to find her birth mother, Sun Cha, who had been living in the United States, and Burns went to Tacoma, Washington to meet her birth mother.[96]
Clay, Phillip [ edit ]
A 2017 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer covered the story of Korean adoptee Phillip Clay who was adopted in 1983 to a couple in Philadelphia when he was 8 years old. Not having US citizenship and having a long criminal record, Clay was deported in 2012 to South Korea. For the next five years, Clay struggled to speak Korean and form connections with other Korean adoptees. On May 21, 2017, Clay committed suicide by jumping from the 14th floor of a building in Ilsan.[97]
Clement, Thomas Park [ edit ]
A 2015 article in The Washington Times said that mixed-race Korean adoptee Thomas Park Clement who was born during the middle of the Korean War remembered being abandoned by his birth mother when he was four and half years old after Clement’s birth mother told him to walk down a street and not turn around. Clement lived on the streets before being put in an orphanage. Two years after, Clement was adopted by a family in North Carolina. Clement later received a degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University, and Clement founded Mectra Labs, a medical device company, in 1988. Clement was not planning on looking for his birth mother.[98]
A 2013 article in The Berkshire Eagle said that Clement’s 2012 biography was called Dust of the Streets: The Journey of a Biracial Orphan of the Korean War.[99]
A 2016 article in The Seattle Times said that Korean adoptee Thomas Park Clement founded Mectra Labs which is a medical-manufacturing company, and it said that Clement has pledged $1,000,000 worth of DNA testing kits for donation. Clement has given 2,550 DNA testing kits to Korean adoptees and Korean War veterans, and he has given 450 DNA testing kits to 325Kamra which is a volunteer organization to give to people in South Korea. Clement said, “I have throughout the years experienced so many of my fellow Korean adoptees’ frustrations with birth-relative searches”, and Clement said, “DNA is shortcutting the search process and bringing all parties in direct communication with each other.”[100]
A 2015 article in PRI said that Clement was paying for the DNA kits from 23andMe.[101]
Crapser, Adam [ edit ]
A 2016 article in Q13 Fox said that Immigration Judge John O’Dell chose to deport Adam Crapser, a Korean adoptee who was not a US citizen, due to Crapser’s criminal record.[102]
Davidson, Kyung Eun [ edit ]
A 2016 article in The Korea Herald covered the story of Korean adoptee Kyung Eun Davidson. The article said that Davidson was a Korean adoptee who was given up for adoption when she was three years old by her birth father. Davidson grew up in Oregon after being adopted. Davidson was in Korea from 2005 to 2007 to find her birth mother. Davidson reunited with her birth father in 2007, but after their first reunion he disappeared. Davidson went back to the United States from Korea in 2007. Davidson’s birth father had lied to her birth mother that he had been raising her for more than twenty years when in reality he had put her up for adoption. Davidson’s birth mother went to Holt in 2008 after Davidson’s birth mother found out about her biological daughter being put up for adoption by Davidson’s birth father. Davidson became aware that her birth mother did not relinquish her for adoption in 2016. Davidson found her birth mother through a DNA match, and Davidson and her birth mother were going to meet each other in person.[103]
Davis, Amy [ edit ]
A 2017 article in the Duluth News Tribune covered the story of Korean adoptee Amy Davis. Davis was adopted in the seventies, and Davis grew up in Cloquet, Minnesota, in a community of mostly white people. Davis’s adoptive parents were told that Davis had been abandoned, so there was no way to contact Davis’s birth parents. In 2016, Davis went to Korea to search for her birth parents, and Davis’s case manager told Davis that her biological aunt had been looking for her seven years ago. Davis’s case manager originally did not tell Davis the name of her biological aunt, because it was against Korea’s privacy laws for the case manager to tell Davis this information, but the case manager eventually broke the law and told Davis the information. Davis found her biological aunt, and Davis found her birth father who was proven to be her birth father through DNA testing. Davis’s birth parents had split up when Davis was one year old, and Davis’s birth father had been leaving Davis with his mother (Davis’s biological grandmother) while Davis’s birth father went to work. Davis had long thought that she was abandoned in a police station, but, in reality, it was her biological grandmother who had put her up for adoption without her birth parents’ consent or awareness, and this act had caused her birth family to become estranged. Davis’s 97-year-old biological grandmother asked for forgiveness for what she had done to Davis, and Davis forgave her.[104]
Eckert, Karen Hae Soon [ edit ]
A 2000 article in PBS covered the story of Korean adoptee Karen Hae Soon Eckert. Eckert was discovered at a police station in Seoul on February 21, 1971, with no accompanying written information left with her. Because she had no written information left with her, she was given the name Park Hae-soon. Officials estimated Eckert’s birthday to be February 12, 1971, because they said that she looked about 10 days old. Eckert was in a hospital for four months after she was born before being put in Holt International’s foster care. When Eckert was 9 months old, she was adopted, and she grew up in Danville, California. Eckert’s brothers and parents were white people. Five years after she was eighteen years old, Eckert joined a group of adult adoptees. Eckert liked encountering other adoptees, she liked sharing experiences and she liked being able to empathize.[105]
Fostervold, Layne [ edit ]
A 2017 article in PRI covered the story of Korean adoptee Layne Fostervold. Fostervold’s birth mother, Kim Sook-nyeon, was unwed when she became pregnant with Fostervold in 1971, and Kim Sook-nyeon’s family would have encountered a lot of stigma and prejudice if she had kept Fostervold. Fostervold was adopted when he was 2 years old, and Fostervold grew up in Willmar, Minnesota. Fostervold said that he had the feeling for almost all of his life that his birth mother did not want to give him up for adoption. Kim Sook-nyeon said that she had to promise not to go looking for Fostervold in the future. Kim Sook-nyeon said that she had prayed for Fostervold, worried about Fostervold and wanted Fostervold to have a good life. Fostervold went to Korea in 2012, and he talked to Korea Social Service (KSS) which was the agency which had done his adoption. A social worker for KSS told Fostervold that a person who claimed to be his birth mother looked for him in 1991 and 1998, but nobody from KSS had told his adoptive family this information. Fostervold reunited with his birth mother. Fostervold moved to South Korea in 2016, and Fostervold was living with his birth mother in 2017. Fostervold was trying to learn the Korean language in order to obtain a professional job, and Fostervold changed his last name from Fostervold back to Kim on social media.[106]
Haruch, Steven [ edit ]
A 2000 article in PBS covered the story of Korean adoptee Steven Haruch. The story was that Haruch was born in Seoul in 1974, and Haruch was given the name Oh Young-chan by the strangers who took care for him until Haruch went to the United States in 1976. Haruch was adopted to a white family and most of the people around him were white too. In high school and college, Haruch wrote self-pitying poems about being adopted. In 2000, Haruch was the Acting Instructor in the Department of English in University of Washington. Haruch wrote film criticism for the Seattle Weekly, and Haruch was a part-time teacher at a Korean-American after-school program.[107]
Heit, Shannon [ edit ]
A 2014 article in MinnPost covered the story of Korean adoptee Shannon Heit. Heit was on K-pop Star in 2008 for the purpose of trying to find her birth mother who she believed had given her up for adoption more than twenty years ago. Heit’s appearance on TV and Heit’s singing ability led to her being reunited with her birth mother. Heit learned that she had been put up for adoption by her biological grandmother when her birth mother was away working which was contrary to the story her adoptive family had been told. Heit was supportive of the Special Adoption Law which went into effect in August 2012. In 2014, Heit was living in South Korea, was married and was working as an editor and translator. Also in 2014, Heit was working with civic groups to help unwed mothers and she was counseling adopted children. Heit remained in contact with her adoptive parents in the United States, and Heit said, “my case shows how traumatic adoption can be, even when the adoptive parents are loving and have the best intentions.”[108]
Jones, Sara [ edit ]
Born in South Korea in the 1970s, Sara’s father made the tough decision to place her in an orphanage in order to ensure she received the care she deserved. Prior to placing her in the orphanage, her father gave each member of his family a special tattoo.
At the age of 3, Sara was adopted by a white family from Utah, USA. Her new parents relocated her to Utah, gave her a new name, and had her mysterious tattoo removed. She was then raised as the only minority in a predominantly white community. As a result of her upbringing, Sara identified more with being a White female than an Asian female. Sara went on to graduate with honors from The University of Utah with a B.S. in chemical engineering, graduate cum laude from Brigham Young University, become a female CEO, and co-founded the Women’s Tech Council.
Despite her success, Sara yearned to find her birth family and embrace her Asian heritage. She used modern resources and her mysterious tattoo to begin the search for her birth family. 42 years after she was adopted, Sara was reunited with her birth family. She now uses her unique experience of being a Korean adoptee, growing up a minority in a predominately white community, reuniting with her birth family, and being a female leader working in a field dominated by white males to help others. Most recently, she was featured by Ted.com for her 2019 TedxSaltLakeCity talk entitled ‘My Story of Love and Loss as a Transracial Adoptee.’
Sara is currently the CEO of InclusionPro, a consulting firm specializing in helping organizations create inclusive work environments. She has keynoted the Silicone Slopes Tech Summit as well as being featured in numerous articles, publications, and podcasts. As a result of her work, Sara received a Distinguished Alumna award from the University of Utah College of Engineering. Other awards she has received include CEO of the year, being honored as a Women to Watch, and receiving the Utah Innovation award.[109][110][111][112][113]
A 2017 article in Korea JoongAng Daily covered the story of Korean adoptee Kim Dong-hwa. The article said that Kim and his birth sister were abandoned by their birth mother when they were both infants. Kim and his birth sister flew out of South Korea in 1979. The two were adopted to a family in Portland, Oregon, and Kim said that it lasted for about a year. Kim and his sister were then sent to a foster family in Denver, Colorado, for about five years, and that family was busted for physical abuse of children. Kim and his sister were then put in foster care. In 1986, Kim and his sister were put into a foster family with foster parents of Mexican descent who were undocumented immigrants in East Los Angeles, California. Kim said that this new foster family beat him and his sister, and Kim said that they beat him with big sticks. Kim said that he had a feeling that his sister was being sexually abused, because Kim said that “She started doing weird things, so … you know”. Kim got two years in juvenile detention after hitting his foster father in the head with a hammer after Kim heard neighbors praising the foster father. Kim was later convicted of assault, gang affiliation and possession of a firearm which got Kim five years in jail, and Kim was charged with assault with a deadly weapon three years into this five-year jail term. Kim’s lawyer suggested to Kim that he could avoid jail time by accepting lifetime deportation, since the paper work was never completed for Kim to become a US citizen. Kim said, “I just didn’t want to sit in jail.”, and Kim went to South Korea. In South Korea, Kim taught English before starting a Mexican restaurant with another person with the help of loans.[114]
Matthews, Dan [ edit ]
A 2016 documentary on NBC News covered the story of Korean adoptee Dan Matthews who is an alternative rapper. In 2013, Matthews was in the documentary “aka Dan” where he reconnected with his biological family and twin brother. In 2016, four other Korean adoptees and Matthews visited Korea in the documentary “aka SEOUL” which was produced by NBC Asian America and International Secret Agents (ISAtv), and the five Korean adoptees threw light on adoptee identity in this documentary.[115]
O’Callaghan, Madoc Hyunsu [ edit ]
A 2016 article in WUSA 9 covered the story of Korean adoptee Madoc Hyunsu O’Callaghan. The article said that O’Callaghan who was three years old was killed by his adoptive father, Brian O’Callaghan, after only having been adopted for three months when his adoptive father threw him against the wall. The lawyer for the adoptive father argued that his Marine Corps veteran client had PTSD which caused him to go into a rage and lose control. Korean adoptee Annalie Yi felt that the adoptive father’s prison sentence which made it so he could be released from prison after only four years was a “slap on the wrist”. The Korean adoptee community was upset that O’Callaghan’s grave had just a marker with his name over it rather than a headstone over it, and the Korean adoptee community offered to buy a headstone for O’Callaghan’s grave, but the Korean adoptee community has now accepted the adoptive mother’s statement that she was going to move the body.[116]
A 2016 article in DCW 50 said that Brian O’Callaghan got 12 years in prison with eligibility for parole in around 5 years.[117]
A 2016 article in The Washington Post said that Circuit Judge John Debelius was in agreement that the adoptive father’s PTSD was a factor in the death of O’Callaghan, and Debelius said that he did not believe that O’Callaghan’s death was a premeditated killing by his adoptive father.[118]
Schildkraut, Nicky Sa-eun [ edit ]
A 2015 article in 89.3KPCC covered the story of Korean adoptee Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut. Schildkraut’s precise age at adoption was not known, and she grew up near Boston in the United States. Schildkraut went to South Korea two times to try to find information about her birth family. Schildkraut said, “The fact that I’ll never be able to find my biological family and relatives. I feel like that kind of loss is interminable, it’s just ongoing loss.” Schildkraut said, “I have all these privileges growing up in my westernized family, all my education and degrees I would not be able to have if I had still been in Korea, so I feel fortunate in that sense.”[119]
Thiele, Brooke [ edit ]
A 2017 article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel covered the story of Korean adoptee Brooke Thiele. Thiele was born in Daegu, and she was adopted when she was 9 months old to a white family in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Thiele was awarded a Mary L. Nohl Fellowship grant of $10,000 to work on her project about interracial adoption. Thiele plans to make a hanbok that animates images at the bottom while spinning like a zoetrope to tell her adoption story for the Nohl Fellowship show.[120]
Thompson, Veronica [ edit ]
A 2017 article in The Guardian covered the story of Korean adoptee Veronica Thompson. In 1974, Thompson was discovered all by herself in a bag outside of a South Korean police station. Thompson has twice tried to find out about her origins and both of these attempts were unsuccessful. Thompson was going to perform a solo show called Flights of Fancy at the Soho Theatre. Flights of Fancy was about imaginary talks with Thompson’s birth mother, and Flights of Fancy was about Thompson’s journey from the police station, continuing to adoption and a childhood in a town near Seattle with a white family and coming to the United Kingdom in the early 2000s. Flights of Fancy delved into identity politics, migration and belongingness.[121]
Trenka, Jane Jeong [ edit ]
A 2010 article in the MinnPost said that Korean adoptee Jane Jeong Trenka was concerned that children adopted from Haiti, only a month after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, could be trafficked, misidentified or removed from adults who could care for them.[122]
In popular culture [ edit ]
Blue Bayou, a film written and directed by Justin Chon, depicts a Korean-American man who was adopted by a white family and is at risk for deportation because his parents did not file for his citizenship. The movie is based on true stories about interracial adoption, which is related to the Child Citizenship Act of 2000.[123][124]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]
IKAA: A global family reunion
Gathering tells Korean adoptee stories through many cultures and languages | By Lee Middleton, Melissa Brown and Michelle Piper (Fall 2019 issue)
International Korean Adoptee Association( IKAA) Gathering 2019 in Seoul. Photo by Jordan Nicholson
By Lee Middleton
The chandeliers in the Lotte Hotel’s Crystal Ballroom emanate a golden light that burnishes the faces of the roughly 500 people turned towards the podium in front of a banner emblazoned with a huge “G19.” It is the opening night of the International Korean Adoptee Association (IKAA) Gathering 2019.
Held in Seoul roughly every three years, this mid-summer conference is the world’s largest coming-together of Korean adoptees. And while the majority of the expectant faces are unmistakably those of adoptees, a fair proportion belong to family members, including a surprising number of children, many of whom look like they could be cousins to my own mixed-race son.
This year’s theme —- “Spanning the Generations: communities, families and leadership” —- feels fitting. Speaking 15 years after the first Gathering held in South Korea, co-founders, Timothy Holm and Liselotte Hae-Jin Birkmose, highlight this shift in their opening ceremony speeches.
“As more adoptees start families of their own or simply move into new life stages, our needs and priorities change, and so does our community,” says Birkmose. Holm adds to this, pointing out that the community is not just made of adoptees, but that “everyone’s spouse, partner, child, or family member is part of this adoptee community.”
While specifically addressing the crowd before them, they are also referring to the larger diaspora of some 200,000 Koreans adopted internationally since the 1950s, mostly to Europe, North America, and Australia. Of those 200,000, some 15,000 have links to the 14 adoptee associations that form IKAA, the organization responsible for the Gathering.
After the speeches and the photo ops, the crowd lines up for a dinner buffet. There is an array of choice —- smoked salmon to couscous salad, bulgogi to petite fours —- that mirrors the cultural diversity of the 15 countries and 31 U.S. states that the G19’s participants call home.
A true “first-timer” to this conference (I arrived alone knowing no one), I take a deep breath as I scan the room for an empty seat where I will have to introduce myself to a table of strangers. But within 20 minutes, I find myself sharing details of my life that many of my closest friends have never heard. This weirdly instant intimacy is a theme that will develop over the next week. I also quickly discover that the two Dutch adoptees I befriend on this first night are facilitating the “parenting as an adoptee” workshop that conflicts with the “immigration and citizenship” workshop I am also keen to attend. That will become another major theme of the week: Too much choice and not enough time.
Walking into the darkened room where the film A Letter for Sang-Ah is screening, I hear sniffles from all corners. Directed by Chicago-based filmmaker, Mina Fitzpatrick, this short but devastating film examines the challenges and triumphs of two Korean single mothers: One who succumbed to pressures to give her daughter up for adoption, and one who chose to raise her son alone. One of 18 workshops offered over the course of a single day, the film is followed by a Q and A, in which participants discuss the stigma still attached to single motherhood in Korea.
Outside the workshop spaces, the four adoption agencies that collectively played a part in most adoptees’ departures from Korea have set up tables where staff offer to send us our files (many of us have never seen our complete documents), schedule orphanage visits, or initiate birth family searches.
325KAMRA, the adoptee-led foundation that seeks to reunite Korean families through free DNA tests, is also present, giving advice to those curious about the South Korean police DNA test that is scheduled the next day. Unlike commercially-available test results, the DNA collected for this program will be entered into Korea’s national missing persons database.
As with everything at the conference, participants can either engage with or ignore this mind boggling one-stop-shopping opportunity that massively facilitates a plunge into the unknown that is exploring our Korean past.
This question of why so many of us have taken so long to come around to looking at who we are —- whether this means visiting Korea, doing a birth search or DNA test, or just acknowledging that being adopted is not nothing —- is a big topic of conversation in the “age breakout” session I attend. Split by half-decades, groups meet for two hours to discuss various topics. In my group —- the 45 to 49-year-olds —- we delve into what it meant to start our own families, and whether or not it’s “too late” to look into our pasts. Facilitated by a fellow adoptee, this session is a highlight that I wish would last twice as long.
IKKeynote speaker, JaeRan Kim. Photo by Stephen Wunrow
For those who enjoy a more academic approach, there is also an all-day symposium in which researchers present papers on everything from adoptee naming practices, to portrayals of birth mothers, to Scandinavian adoption narratives. Keynote speaker, JaeRan Kim, shares fascinating reflections on the “intergenerationality of ethnic, racial, and adoption socialization” —- that is, the unique challenges we experience as adoptees grappling with what it means to be Asian, to be Korean, and to be adopted.
The Gathering is not all workshops and soul searching, however. In fact, going purely by the number of itinerary hours, the social far outweighs the soulful.
Standing at the bar at Brix Pizza in Itaewon, Seoul’s historically “foreign” neighborhood, I mentally gawk at the crowd, still struggling to get over the reality that basically everyone in the bar is an adoptee (the conference badges that secure the bar discount help confirm this). I am grateful for the drink that makes the mingling easier.
And while drinking and dancing are supremely popular pastimes for adoptees enjoying this city that truly never sleeps —- 24-hour noraebang (karaoke) is a gamechanger for those with the stamina —- partying is not the only option for conference-goers who need a break from self-examination.
“We are more than 180,000 individuals with more than 180,000 different stories,” Holm says, when I ask him why the itinerary includes such a range of activities, including a baseball game, poker matches, soccer game, food tours, a DMZ excursion, and an Amazing Race.
While some adoptees feel the abundance of social stuff comes at the expense of additional deeper sessions, the truth that emerges by week’s end is that the act of coming together from all our different backgrounds and with all our diverging interests, hopes, and expectations, is its own minor miracle.
“Experiencing this community is something very unique,” says Birkmose, with admirable Scandinavian understatement.
Having experienced the unique value of this event for myself, I am all the more aware of the Gathering’s one incontestable flaw —- its cost. Whether in terms of finances, time, or emotional wear and tear, the Gathering’s significant price is prohibitive for many adoptees, assuming they even know about it.
It is especially for this reason that works like Side by Side are so important. A video oral history project by Glenn Morey (a Korean adoptee) and his wife Julie Morey, the project debuts nine of its 10 video autobiographies at the G19
* * *
Six days zoom by and, back in the Crystal Ballroom, Tim Holm’s daughter Jackie Holm (who, with her mother Kim, are the event’s logistical and fundraising force) is bestowing closing ceremony awards over brunch. Notably, 11-year-old Karoline Folz receives a medal for her role in the Amazing Race, which, if the slideshow images are to be believed, looks, well, amazing.
Winding her way between the tables to receive her award, this bubbly sprite does not falter, which comes as no surprise, given the chutzpah she showed the previous night, joining the B-Boy breakdancers when they requested a volunteer at the very glitzy Gala dinner (which also included a performance from “the next BTS” K-pop sensation, S9). Observing this child’s sense of ease, and imagining how my son could make better sense of our family by spending a week in this community, I again wish he was here.
The Gathering’s final words came from the presidents of the 14 IKAA associations. Included in the various updates is an announcement of the June 2020 mini-gathering hosted by Racines Coréennes in Paris, followed by the Korea Klubben’s 30th anniversary celebration in Denmark. These invitations for upcoming get-togethers make the goodbyes feel more like “see you next time,” which is a huge relief. In other words, there is comfort simply in knowing this community exists.
As if reading my mind, AKA-New York President Mike Mullen begins his short speech: “I want to welcome you to the homeland, not the one out there, but the one in here,” he says, gesturing to the crowd.
For the umpteenth time this week, my eyes burn with tears that are some combination of gratitude, sadness, and joy; a recognition of loss, but also of feelings found.
During the last days of the Gathering, I repeatedly wonder if the time will come when our own families will be far enough removed from the past that we will no longer need special gatherings to know where we are from or who we are. But in a way, I’m glad we’re not there yet.
This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists
Side by Side Project video documentary premieres at IKAA
Walking into a darkened room where the video installation of the Side by Side Project begins, an enormous black-and-white image of a face meets you. Eight additional screens ring the first screen, and there is a hush about the place, despite the low hum of voices coming from each screen.
Among its many offerings, the G19 hosted the international premiere of this video installation documentary project. Created by filmmakers Glenn and Julie Morey, Side by Side gives Korean adoptees and orphans the opportunity to tell their stories in their own words. The G19 installation includes 10 channels, featuring nine documentary short films and 100 portrait photographs.
“I’ve been attending these sorts of events since the early 2000s, and I know what a difference it’s made in my life as an adoptee,” said Glenn, referring to the IKAA Gathering. “But I also know that probably only 10 percent or maybe 15 percent at the most, of all Korean adoptees, have attended an event that’s for Korean adoptees, or are involved in an association in their town. The rest of them are just out there: They don’t know other adoptees, they don’t know that they’re not the only ones who have experienced the kinds of experiences we talk about all the time at events like this.”
Seeking to address this gap, but also to create a historical record of the 60-plus years of intercountry adoption from South Korea, the husband and wife team spent six years capturing adoptee stories from across the globe, traveling to Melbourne, Amsterdam, Minneapolis, Paris, and Denver, among other cities. A small subset of the interviews come from adult Korean nationals who were orphaned or abandoned but never adopted, and therefore raised in orphanages until legal adulthood; however, due to strict privacy laws in Korea, their stories were not part of the G19 exhibit.
The nine short films that are part of the installation each address a critical theme that emerged from the adoptee interviews: Memories of time with birth families and in orphanages; experiences of growing up in adoptive families of a different race, often in communities with few other Asians; dealing with the alienation and loss that is part of being a transracial adoptee; visiting South Korea as an adult; deciding whether to search for birth families, and the complexities that come with finding those families.
The 100 stories that comprise Side By Side have been edited to fit several formats in addition to the video installation, including an online video archive of 100 individual videos, a short film, and an upcoming book. The project’s website can be found at: https://sidebysideproject.com
The Minnesota contingent at the IKAA conference, (Melissa Brown far left). Photo by Alan Majors
Visiting the global village: International conference explores challenges of a maturing Korean adoptee community
By Melissa Brown
This summer I attended The Gathering 2019 in Seoul, a conference of the International Korean Adoptee Associations (IKAA), which hosts and supports gatherings around the world. Every third year the conference, dubbed simply The Gathering, has its location in South Korea. This year, there were about 525 attendees, with an opening ceremony drawing over 700 people.
IKAA is a collaboration of Korean adoptee organizations from all over the U.S. and from many countries where Korean adoptees live. In addition to bringing member organizations together, IKAA also provides leadership opportunities, and does advocacy on behalf of Korean adoptees globally, by advocating for better post-adoption services. Additionally, IKAA representatives have attended the Special Commission of the Hague Convention, a group of member countries that confers and agrees upon safeguards to protect children who are international adopted.
I attended this conference for the first time in 2007, then again in 2010 and 2013 as well. I am familiar with Seoul, since I taught English in Korea after college. Back then, my life in Korea was one of intense exploration and nightlife. These days, my experiences in Korea can only be characterized as a visit for the purpose of renewing my energy and a sense of calm and peace. My social relationships with other adoptees always become deeper during these events. I flowed from tables of Korean Swedes (and others), into deep discussions with strangers, then on to having late night chats with dear friends. We ask many questions of each other, yet we also share common experiences, both said and unsaid, good and bad, complex and beautifully simple.
Home base for The Gathering is the Lotte Seoul Hotel, in the Myeong-dong neighborhood. This hotel is connected to a large Lotte department store which leads out into a network of hip shopping streets. At night, meeting locations were also in the Itaewon neighborhood, a cosmopolitan dining and nightlife area. Some late-nighters went on to nightclubs in Hongdae, another well-known retail and entertainment district. Others went to places near the hotel, or explored the night on their own, since Seoul is safe for all-night shopping, eating, and drinking.
Beyond social activities, The Gathering is full of interesting events. At the start of the week, first-timers got a chance to meet and greet. Tuesday evening kicked off with an opening ceremony and reception. Wednesday was an all-day research symposium, and on Thursday there were group sessions on a wide variety of topics. The gala dinner was held Saturday night, and on Sunday there was the closing ceremony and private evening club after-party.
Between these main activities, participants also attended a baseball game, poker tournament, soccer match, an Amazing Race (a scavenger hunt event with clues around the city), and various teen and family events.
The Gala Dinner is a formal dress or cocktail attire affair, highlighted by Korean entertainment. This year did not disappoint. Entertainment included boy band SF9 and B boys (breakdancing) Jinjo Crew. Sue Son, a Korean violinist who was on the TV show Britain’s Got Talent, also made an appearance.
My favorite activities included the researchers’ symposium and group sessions. This year, I attended the presentation of a group of Scandinavian researchers, and found it thoughtful and refreshing. I realized how accustomed I have become to viewing adoption from an Minnesota American perspective. When asked how they got their grant research funding in these countries, known to support international adoption, the answers were (paraphrased) “I didn’t. I moved first.” It sounded as though, in some cases, discussing adoptees as adult persons is still challenging; any narrative that is outside the boundaries of adoptees as children, and adoption as a means to create happy families, may not be fully accepted.
A group session on deportation also broadened my perspective. I became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. in second grade, and at the time, I understood what it meant. Yet, I didn’t feel any less American before that. It wasn’t until my mid-30s when I really started to question my status in the U.S. pre-citizenship. It is disheartening that some children were welcomed to their new home in the U.S., and later disowned by the U.S. for reasons related to a lack of paperwork. In a few cases, the U.S. government has forced adoptees to permanently return to Korea.
The age group discussion sessions are always eye opening. In my age group, topics range from our adult relationships, to our kids (often the first birth family we have ever known), to managing life transitions such as having aging parents or dealing with parents’ deaths. Separately, we talked about meeting birth family, staying in contact with them and accepting when not to, and starting a birth search, closing one, or choosing not to do one at all. Questions like, “Do you want to meet your birth family?” do not have simple answers, even when they appear simple at first. There are many choices which can be complicated by both positive and negative possible outcomes, issues of self-respect, and having to face and relive past sorrow and loss.
After The Gathering, I stayed in Korea an extra week. I have met birth family, and these days, I am able to visit cousins, aunts, and other family members in Paju and Uijeongbu right outside of Seoul. Additionally, via friends, I had a great morning doing an art project painting on figurines made from oyster shells, and on another day, I visited a school for North Korean refugees.
After returning to Minnesota, I have thought about and missed South Korea often. My way to continue that connection is to be an active participant in the community organizations for Korean adoptees in Minnesota. Specifically, I attend the Korean Institute of Minnesota (KIM), where I learn Korean language, and I take classes in Korean drumming and gayageum (a Korean stringed instrument) with the local JangMi Korean Dance and Drum studio, which reaches out to Korean adoptees. I also go to events held by AK Connection, our local organization of adult Korean adoptees, and support other organizations such as Korean Quarterly.
I know that for many participants in The Gathering 2019, attending an event, discussion or lecture entirely by and for Korean adoptees is a novel experience. For me though, because of the Korean adoptees who were here before, having a Korean adoptee community does not need to be a choice or decision. Instead, it is a normal part of my life that will continue to remain important in the future.
IKAA co-founders Liselotte Hae-jin Birkmose of Korea Klubben in Denmark and Tim Holm, president of Asian Adult Adoptees of Washington speak at the opening ceremonies. Photo by Alan Majors
Connecting with fellow adoptees at IKAA tempers shock of re-entry
By Michelle Piper
This year marked the 15th anniversary of the International Korean Adoption Association (IKAA) conference. Annual gatherings are held in both Europe and the U.S., and every third year, the conference is held in Seoul. I was able to attend this summer for the Seoul conference.
I decided to take this first trip back to my birth country for reasons that had been accumulating over many years. However, the IKAA conference and its unique offerings was one of the primary forces that drew me there this past summer.
After initiating an official search for my biological family a year ago, the start of this new year brought me news that my biological mother had passed; I heard she had died nearly 10 years ago.
As a mother of a seven-year-old, I have had many questions about my history on behalf of my child; medical and general history that I have never known. After a lifelong battle with endless disorders and illnesses, the news of my mother’s death triggered me to attempt to end my own life. I found myself in the ICU on life support for the umpteenth time. It wasn’t until I learned of her death that I realized just how badly I had wanted answers, how much I needed them.
The search for information was the other reason for my return to Korea.
The three-week journey would be the most unbearably painful, confronting, frustrating, and most heartbreaking endeavour of my life. On my first day in Seoul, I took a trip to the Mapo Police Department to record my DNA in the national data base. I could have never been prepared for the information I would learn.
I talked to officers at the police department about my case and my reasons for recording my DNA, explaining that my mother had passed and I was searching for anyone I could find whom I was biologically related to. They looked through my paperwork, and asked me how I knew my mother had died. I told them that ESWS had informed me. They then told me that there was no record of my mother’s death anywhere.
I had an appointment to meet with a caseworker from Eastern Social Welfare Society (ESWS), set up days before receiving this news. When I arrived at ESWS, my head was spinning. We went through the polite, conventional greetings. My case file, which was faded and discolored by time, worn, and many inches thick, containing the history of my early life, was sitting on the table right in front of me.
The caseworker had no response to the police information that there was no record of my mother’s death. We talked in a frustrated circle, “How can you tell me my mother is dead when there is no government record of it?”
“How do you know there is no record?” she replied.
I explained my appointment at the police and the information they had passed onto me. She became increasingly flustered and defensive.
I left the appointment enraged, with few answers and only a weak agreement from her to pass on some extra paperwork to the police later that day. I later contacted my caseworker in Australia after sending ESWS endless emails to confirm that the paperwork was sent. I got no confirmation in the end. Instead, I was begrudgingly given the address of the building I was born in.
I had always known I was born in Busan, and a few days later found myself standing outside the place of my birth. It is now community center in Haeundae, just one street back from the ocean. I stood there, unable to process the magnitude of what it really meant. It was powerful to be there, standing in what was the very last place I was ever with my mother before we disappeared from each other’s lives forever.
The IKAA gathering came at the end of my last week in Korea. Had it not been for the goal of getting to the conference, I would not have had the strength nor courage to complete my trip.
The events of my first few days left me stunned by what Korea has become —- a land of contradictions, of hypocrisy and vanity. On the outside, Korea projects the image of a economic powerhouse, the land of K-Pop, flawless plastic surgery, incomparable technology, freedom and prosperity.
Yet not far beneath the surface, I had experienced a hint of the deep-seated roots of misogyny, inequality, proud, unquestioning, unfailing loyalty to family lineage and honor. Everyone must follow the rules of family, gender and class. In that structure, everyone must know their place and act accordingly. It is this cold, unforgiving Korea that many adoptees face in the course of birth family searches.
I made this trip trying to hold no expectations of what I would find. However, I still felt deeply shattered at how little connection I felt towards my country of birth. I felt just as unwanted, abandoned and forgotten by my so-called motherland as I did by my own mother.
It was a solace after this experience to arrive a few days before the conference and go to an informal get-together of all the Aussie adoptees, just arrived in Seoul to go to IKAA. I had met some of them at a lunch in Sydney a week prior to my departure.
In comparison to the number Korean adoptees scattered across the world, we Korean Australian adoptees are very few. We have a Facebook group run by our president, Tim Kim, and vice-president, Kiri Glover. Our group is called KAIAN (Korean Adoptees In Australia Network). There is no official organization or support available to us at present. Tim, Kiri and a number of others are working hard to change this. Like IKAA, every aspect of the organization relies on volunteers and donations. Gatherings like IKAA provide a vital source of support, especially for those in remote areas or in countries where the number of adoptees are few.
The conference itself, held at Seoul’s Lotte Hotel, was a unique experience and one I will never forget. My first impression was that it was overwhelming to be in a room surrounded by over 550 adoptees, and reflect that we represented but a speck of the nearly quarter of a million Korean adoptees worldwide.
The conference was a non-stop event, with every day and evening full of opportunities. There were social events such as an All-Star Soccer Match (IKAA v. Ministry of Health and Welfare), a tour called Adoptees Loose In Seoul (an IKAA take on The Amazing Race), and other family-friendly activities.
There were also serious topics presented in the research panels, age-group breakout sessions and assortment of workshops. This was where we learned some of the hard, ugly truths about adoption in an informed and supportive setting. Within adoption is a hard truth of loss; loss of a child, loss of one’s parents and family, of language, of culture, and country. Exploring aspects of that loss with support is what these sessions do best.
The age breakout sessions (for me 30-34) were sessions where people freely voiced stories from their lives, some of intense sadness, vulnerability, horror, and unimaginable experiences, but also many stories of courage, strength, overcoming adversity and defying the odds. Though most of us were strangers, and all different and unique, at the same time we shared the connection of common experiences.
The workshops covered a wide range of topics: Benefits and obstacles as an adoptee parent, birth family search, coming full circle (leaving as an adoptee, and returning to Korea as an adult), sessions on aspects of adoptee physical and mental health, and points of views from all those involved in the adoption triad.
Although there were many topics, one main theme recurred for me throughout the conference; the anger, frustration, abandonment and trust issues present in adoption. Among many adoptees there is the need to discuss these issues, and the desire to be recognized as oneself, a whole person with a past, family, and roots in Korea
In addition to all the usual issues of growing up, adoptees face racism from peers, and even from the families we were adopted into. Returning to Korea exacerbates that racism, because to the majority white cultures in which we grew up, we are unwanted invaders, but when we return to our native land, we are Korean looking non-Koreans, people who do not know their ways, culture, language and traditions.
It has only been since the huge influx of adoptees returning to Korea that we have begun to be recognized, for how can one ignore such a vast number of displaced children returning as adults for answers?
As I painfully learned in Korea, returning adoptees still face prejudice, false promises, blanket apologies and a country that wishes we could be silenced, for to Korean nationals, we are a constant reminder of the shame of so many children who do not fit into the culture’s exacting family structure.
So many returning adoptees have faced situations like the one I experienced. I have heard many stories of adoption papers with false background stories, and incomplete, inconsistent information. Returning with many questions, adoptees have had to deal with uncooperative adoption agencies who will not admit any culpability in placing children in adoptive families about which they had no information, or that international adoption was driven by money.
Being at the conference brought home to me how adoptees are a part of what has helped Korea to rise to an economic powerhouse. We are an export; we are the result of legal child trafficking, a money maker so successful that it is still going on today, despite an aging population and birth rates so low that in future years there will could be no population to sustain our race.
Life as an adoptee, especially an Australian-Korean from a city where there are only a handful of my own people, IKAA gave me one week to surround myself with a community who not only look like me, but understood me in a way non-adoptees never could. The conference-goers were all infinitely kind, compassionate, supportive and understanding. This conference came after a lifetime of depression, racism, prejudice, self-harm, attempts on my life, abuse and isolation. For the first time, I felt I was given the opportunity to truly be free, to share, to cry, to not have to think and filter every word and every action.
For now, my search for my birth mother is at a standstill; I got no factual information from ESWS to confirm her death. I only know there seems to be no official record of it. This was a difficult issue to leave with no resolution.
However, because of the conference, the people I met, the friends I have now made both from Australia and worldwide has given me an important lifeline and introduced me to a network that will support me and other adoptees in the future.
Two victorious teams after the soccer game at the IKAA conference. Photo by Alan Majors
Soccer match was highlight of conference activities
During the August conference of Korean adoptees in Seoul called The Gathering 2019, there was a much-anticipated soccer game at Dongguk University on an intensely hot and humid Seoul summer day. Two “all-star” teams faced off. In this case, the “all-stars” consisted of anyone who wanted to play on the two teams. One team was from the International Korean Adoptee Association (IKAA), the sponsor of the international conference. The other was from the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MHW), the government department that administers South Korea’s international adoption program. It was quite a face-off, and had even those with little to no interest in sports screaming and cheering on the sidelines.
The IKAA All-Stars, led by coaches Henrik Burheim and Jesper Liebing, was a team of adoptees, and their partners and family members from around the world. This international team, with members from the U.S., Canada, Australia and northern Europe, had only one short practice to get it together prior to the match. The team made an impressive and challenging opponent to the Korean MHW.
Both teams put up a tough and aggressive defense, while executing impressive attack strategies, creating an exciting and high-energy atmosphere, despite the exhausting heat.
The first 20 minutes saw MHW score the first two goals, but many more attempts were thwarted by IKAA’s most valuable player, a determined and relentless goalkeeper from Australia, and the only player to stay on field enduring the entire 90 minutes. The IKAA All-Stars set up a perfect shot and made the goal, but the end of the first half, the score was 3 to 1 in MHW’s favour.
IKAA All-Stars came back fighting in the second half, and scored two goals in quick succession to bring the score even at 3 to 3. With one more impressive shot, IKAA took the lead. The last 20 minutes had spectators, team mates and coaches tense and on edge with apprehension and excitement as MHW scored another goal bringing the teams back to a tie.
With only minutes to go before the end of the match, both teams exhausted, aching and bruised, the MHW managed to set up one last shot, scoring a goal taking the lead and ultimately winning the game.
Both teams displayed great sportsmanship and respect. Some players even exchanged shirts with the opposition at game’s end. There were handshakes and happy group photos. The teams shared a well-deserved lunch, along with the teams’ supporters, coaches, families and volunteers. Overall, the game was one of the highlights of the conference activities, and exhibited talent, skill, and most importantly, unity.
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