“I think, maybe, we should talk about starting a family,” my husband said one day, as we sat on the back porch of a winery north of our home. Just a few days prior, we had received news of the passing of Aunt Nancy, a woman with an outsized personality, big laugh, and gravelly voice. She was our favorite of his extended family, and, personally, the only one who never made me feel like a Korean Jewish interloper in a white Christian family. Her death was unexpected, one at odds with her age, the kind that accelerates the normal steady crumble of childhood invincibility, our own mortality becoming prematurely salient. It is in this context that my husband and I sat, sipping our favorite red, pondering the question that could change our lives. When I was a child, I played a lot by myself. My adoptive sister, six years older, left me behind as soon as she became a teenager. I often crept into her room and took an artifact of our time together, a doll named Becca. My aunt made the doll for my sister as a gift to commemorate my adoption from Korea. Recalling that doll now, I remember her porcelain-colored face, black yarn hair, and true blue eyes, a seemingly impossible representation of a Korean child. Then again, memory is funny and it would be as likely that my aunt would make a Korean doll with blue eyes as my mind would conjure that image, a reflection of how I saw myself in my Jewish family. In any case, Becca joined Kira, a floppy doll with peach skin and very pink hair, and a more plausible Korean baby named Jae, as my children. In every situation the dolls would start out as friends, but then Kira would start excluding Becca and stuffing Jae in the closet. The white doll was the last one left standing every time, the play ending with her superiority, and, me, the mother, helpless even in her own imagination. “You want to start a family?” I asked, pouring myself another glass. My husband and I never spoke about having a family before marrying. We just kind of left it open, like a window cracked on the first nice day of spring, remembering it occasionally as we walked by but never bothering to close it. “Yeah. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, and with Aunt Nancy…I just realized our kids will never get to know her. How will she be remembered?” My mind reels back to my ninth grade history teacher, Mr. Torrence. One day, at the start of class, we found him sitting on his desk with a framed picture of his father and a CD player. He told us about his dad, a soldier who lost his life in the Vietnam War, an example of the real costs of war. Then he played his father’s favorite song, Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” As Louis’s voice warbled with rich, joyful truths, my teacher wept in front of a room full of high school freshmen. When the song ended, he looked up at us, eyes red, tears reflecting the fluorescent lights of the classroom, and walked out. I had never seen a man cry before that day. The vulnerability he showed demonstrated a type of self-assuredness that inspired me. It burrowed beneath the armor I had wrapped around myself, seeding the possibility of living an awesomely authentic life, something I had never considered before. In the years after, I thought of Mr. Torrence often. I thought about how he demonstrated how to endure loss honestly and without shame. I thought about how he inspired me to pursue teaching in college, but also inspired me to abandon the idea, the bar he set out of my reach at the time. I thought about him, now, as he breezed through the window we had left open. “How will she be remembered?” I echoed, remembering Mr. Torrence’s fluorescent tears. “By the generations that follow,” I concluded. Parenthood is complicated for adoptees, severed from our first family; and for international adoptees, our first language and first country. We are handed an entirely new life like a gift, but when unwrapped, we realize it is more like a witness protection program alias where our birthrights are smothered under expectations of gratitude and silence. Becoming a parent would require the deconstruction of the immersive theater production called my life, risking my emotional safety to travel backwards, back to my adoptive family, to Korea, and to my birth family. It would require vulnerability and bravery, two things I had avoided until this moment. But then, overtaken by the soul-stirring sunlit vineyard and the unexpected wave of urgency to live after Aunt Nancy’s death, I said, “Yes, let’s do it.” Immediately, I felt like I had pushed a button that catapulted me into the hands of the future, byway of the past, a circuitous explosion of a route that I am still riding now. As I think about the path we have taken, four times across the world to Korea to adopt our sons, and one time across town to birth our daughter during a pandemic, I smile. I smile at the fact that I have three kids, much like those dolls, two Korean sons and one biracial daughter who, though she does not have pink hair, looks a lot like her white father, life imitating play. I smile at my dreams of being a teacher as I pack away the homeschool books we used this morning. I am a teacher after all. I smile about the cracked window that now is flung wide open, with all its beauty, pain, and unpredictability. Out of loss erupted hope.

Reposted from The Korea Times This is the 29th article of the series. It is time to turn our attention to the least discussed, but the most powerful and decisive actors involved in the flow of children for inter-country adoption—the receiving countries. — E.D. The Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH), an intergovernmental organization facilitating cross-border cooperation in private legal matters, has been collecting the statistics of children adopted transnationally from the immigration authorities of 23 receiving countries, mainly in Western Europe, North America and Australia. In the case of Korea, the main receiving countries (in the order of the largest number of children received) consist of the United States, France, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Italy, and Luxembourg. Historically, this group of receiving countries has remained stable while the number of sending countries expanded from 20 in the early 1980s to more than 80 in the ensuing decade. The expansion of global adoption coincided with geographical shifts in major sending regions, which included Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Although the HCCH collects data from receiving countries, greater attention is dedicated to the statistics provided by the sending countries. The disproportionate scrutiny given to the latter group is understandable in light of the established narrative that many adoption-related problems rest with the sending countries. However, these countries evade responsibility in international forums by deflecting the blame onto “single mothers” or parents “too poor to raise their children.” They cite data, most of which comes from private adoption agencies, to attribute responsibility to an unseen marginalized group while simultaneously evoking emotive images of young unwed mothers. While an overwhelming majority of adopted children came from single mothers, this had not always been the case. Instead, governments found an ideal scapegoat and unloaded an undue amount of culpability onto certain groups of parents, thereby promoting a deficit perspective that individualized structural problems. Instead of addressing systematic failures that compel family separation, failings were placed squarely on the shoulders of parents for their lack of resources, marriage, or some other socially constructed standard. Even in high-level meetings, foreign delegates engaged in the same stale discussions that targeted “young unwed mothers” as the source of inter-country adoption. Why is the role of receiving countries important? Claiming that one party represents the impetus for transnational adoption obscures a constellation of factors and the elaborate network of actors involved. We must bear in mind that the receiving countries forged the rules to move children across national borders, then legitimized the procedures by erecting a complex bureaucracy of paperwork and administration. Moreover, we must also remember that while adoption is about a change in family relations, inter-country adoption constitutes a set of immigration procedures that sends a child from the global south to the more affluent global north. Normally, in cases where a child must be sent alone for immigration, the conditions, criteria and scrutiny must meet a certain threshold for safety. But in the case of inter-country adoption, this form of immigration was characterized by procedures and standards so loose that it bordered on negligence. Eventually, bad practices and poor oversight culminated in a series of inter-country adoption scandals in the 1980s and 1990s and impelled governments to argue that they hadn’t been engaged in baby buying and selling. Consequently, those countries involved in inter-country adoption set regulatory measures to prevent further tragedies. The most significant development was the Hague Convention on Inter-country Adoption, established in 1993 at the HCCH. Although most of the sending countries were not members of HCCH, they were invited to sign and ratify the convention, as excluding them would diminish the effectiveness and the purpose of this legal instrument. As one of the main sending countries, Korea was invited to the drafting meeting of the convention and eventually became a signatory. However, although nearly 100 states have become contracting parties, Korea has done little in this regard. Despite the scale and influence of the country’s inter-country adoption program, Korea still cannot commit itself to the obligations of the convention, which guarantee the safety, welfare and rights of children in procedures and matters related to such adoption. Rethinking the principle of shared responsibility of sending and receiving countries A pillar of the convention is the shared responsibility of both the sending and receiving countries, and the drafters attempted to operationalize this by delegating specific duties to designated competent authorities and setting out safeguards. After nearly 30 years of operation, the fundamental flaws of this approach have emerged. Where irreconcilable discrepancies exist between family law, child protection systems, and child adoption programs, questions about achieving mutual responsibility remain unanswered. Moreover, in welfare policy, the size of the national budget plays a critical role, but the scope of the convention never extends to such matters. Adoptees are citizens of receiving countries In 2020, while leading a workshop on how to make changes to rectify the current situation and realize adoptees’ right to access their identity and origins, I proposed, “Use your nationalities and move your governments’ to put pressure on the Korean government to make the necessary changes.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I instantly felt the atmosphere of the room cool. Some of the adoptee participants seemed to feel uncomfortable, perhaps even slightly unsettled, by my suggestion. Until now, the discussion on inter-country adoption has focused on the issues of sending countries—their poverty, unwillingness, incapability, and incapacity to protect their own children. And for these same reasons, they have managed to elude blame and responsibility. In the course of this series, the guest writers and I have tried to illustrate that the dominant narrative of adoption—a portrayal that paints sending countries as saving their children through adoption—is an inaccurate and incomplete picture, but we must remember that adoption entails the mutual responsibility of both countries. This also means that the receiving countries should act to protect and realize the rights of their own nationals to know their true identity. Because after all, adoptees are the citizens of receiving countries. Click here to read the 22nd article of this series, "Rewriting my adoption story truthfully" by Kate Powers. Cover photo: This picture was taken right before Korea officially signed the convention on May 24, 2013, Chin Young, then-minister of health and welfare, visited the Hague to sign the document with a promise to ratify it within five years. However, as of today, nearly a decade later, the Korean government has yet to fulfill its promise.

Time Time flies by In the blink of an eye How should I spend my day So many things that I could do But in my bed i just lay Being productive would surely do I bet you’d agree too Oh to do something different today But in my bed I just lay A poem for you Dear reader please listen close I appreciate you the most I can’t put it into words My heart soars with the birds Sharing my art with you So thank you dear friend My love I do send And my heart it fills with joy Knowing you took the time to read Something you didn’t need So I thank you once again Lauren is a regular contributor for The Universal Asian. To learn more about her, check out her Contributor’s Page here.

I was adopted into a small farming community with one blinking stop light. For all my life, I was surrounded by people who did not look like me. Once Facebook became a thing, I joined a lot of Korean adoptee groups. It filled the need I had inside to belong somewhere, to fit in. My feed was filled with families who looked like mine, white parents, Asian kids. It was a great way to meet others who have similar experiences being Korean and adopted. I follow issues such as the Adoptee Citizen Act. I learned how to start a bio-family search. So many relevant topics are discussed and shared in these groups. They can be extremely informative, but they can also become drama-filled, turning slightly Real Housewife-ish. But overall, the camaraderie is nice, and the conversation is cathartic. Recently Jia Sun Lee, author of "Everyone Was Falling," posted a very thought provoking article titled “What White Men Say in our Absence” by Elaine Hsieh Chou in one of the Facebook groups. The essay begins with a disclaimer that it contains graphic descriptions of murder, sexual violence, and racist language. With an intro like this, I can already gather the nature of what white men say in our (the Asian-American female) absence. She starts by recounting an incident on the bus when she was teaching ESL in Taipei. Two white men were discussing dating Taiwanese women very candidly as they assumed no one around them could understand English. Before I even read the details, I knew what this conversation was all about. How could I not? I’ve spent a lifetime hearing about/being a part of Asian female stereotypes. The article was not shocking or surprising. The author laments not standing up for herself and other Asian women and exposing these men for their offensive conversation. Even eight years later she was still troubled by the experience, troubled that she didn’t face her oppressors and tell them off. How many times had I been in that same position? Not the exact details, but a situation where I wish I had said my mind, told someone off, or even reacted at all. I remember the time after a bar night I was standing in line at Taco Bell and some guy thought he could grab my tit. I was visibly pissed, but I didn’t do anything. I stood there. Got my Mexican Pizza and brushed it off. I remember the time a woman, co-worker of my high school boyfriend, had asked him how I could use tampons…since my vagina was slanted. I remember guys hitting on me with the line, “I’ve never been with an Asian woman before.” By the grace of God, I was never a victim of a sexual crime or sexual violence. But, it’s not hard to point to countless examples of Asian women being attacked, violated, and killed throughout time. I experienced enough looks, comments and situations to be wary of certain men. To this day, I will tell my husband if I get a strange vibe off a guy when we are at social events and let him know when I don’t want him to leave my side. Doing an online search in areas like Reddit, one can spiral down a rabbit hole of disgusting content regarding Asian women’s “sexual-ness” and the unending stereotypes of the submissive Asian female. Online anonymity is a double-edged sword that allows people to speak their minds, but then say horribly offensive things they’d never say out loud. After reading article after article online, Chou stated, “I wanted these men identified. I wanted their thoughts broadcasted above their heads. Because how can I move through the world knowing that the men who think these thoughts are real? They’re subway riders, salesmen, police officers, teachers, bosses, friends. They’re someone’s father. They’re someone’s husband. They’re someone’s lover.” I get this. There’s no way of knowing who the “bad” men are. You must rely on your instincts and have faith that most people are good people. You hope. As a 49-year-old woman, this knowledge disgusts me. The fact that my ethnically ambiguous daughter must navigate this world frightens me. Just the other day her Uber driver asked her if she had Chinese blood in her family. I’d love for this to be an innocent question, but because of such offensive and violent stereotypes, innocuous statements like this scare me. Yet, at the same time I’m scared for young Asian women, I also realize there is a benefit to these outdated tropes. When I was a young woman, I know there was a side of this disgusting obsession that was beneficial to me. There is a power dynamic between white men and Asian women where the Asian woman wields a certain power that she may not have experienced in her young life. She has that “pussy power” that gets men to buy her drinks, gifts, and to give her attention. To a young confident girl, this means nothing. To young girls who are never looked at in high school, who lack attention, who lack confidence…this can be exhilarating. Chou recounts a time in her life she dated an older white male who showed her a box of photos of his past conquests…all Asian. Instead of being repulsed and seeing the red flags flying in her face, she became, “…dreamy, even wistful. I wanted my photo in that box. I wanted him to choose me.” So as f****d up as that thought process is, having the power to be chosen, to be special is not lost on me. Another fabulous writer Chou quotes is Jenny Zhang from her article “Far Away From Me: I was never the girl in the Weezer song.” In her essay, she discusses the song by Weezer, “Across the Sea,” and how it affected her. She noted, “My only choices, I thought, were to be invisible and ugly or to be exoticized into worthiness.” Sometimes it’s better to be wanted for the wrong reasons, then to never be wanted at all. At this stage in my life this sounds ridiculous. But, I try to put myself back into that melodramatic, starry-eyed teenager mindset and realize logic and reason are not something we all have, they sometimes must develop. The need to feel wanted and belong may overpower the desire to think logically. Even now, I sit in a place of comfort and safety I was not afforded at age 23. I believe this younger generation will do better. They demand to be seen and occupy space much better than we ever did. Their identities are validated more in film and theater and their stories are being told. But these hopeful thoughts are soon forgotten if I read the headlines in the news. It’s so easy to find Asian women being targeted, attacked, and killed. As women, we exist with caution. As hyper-sexualized Asian women, we exist with extreme caution, fear, and realize we bear the burden of our own safety. Chou ends her article finally stating what she wanted to say to the two white men on the train: “Be careful what you say. I’m listening. And I’m not going anywhere.” And this gives me hope.

Reposted from The Korea Times This article is the 25th in a series about Koreans adopted abroad. Apparently, many Koreans never expected that the children it had sent away via adoption would return as adults with questions demanding to be answered. However, thousands of adoptees visit Korea each year. Once they rediscover this country, it becomes a turning point in their lives. We should embrace the dialogue with adoptees to discover the path to recovering our collective humanity. — E.D. “Vincenzo,” a Korean TV drama starring Song Joong-ki, centers on the story of a Korean adoptee who becomes a mob lawyer after being raised by an Italian mafia family. Despite being adopted to Italy at a very young age and spending most of his life there, he arrives in Incheon International Airport speaking perfect Korean and manages to integrate seamlessly into Korean society without experiencing any culture shock, awkward social exchanges, or misunderstandings. The main character’s adoption experience enables the drama not only to create a background that would have otherwise been impossible, but it also sets up a typical emotional plot device related to adoptees: a reunion with the birth mother. The implausibility of this plot was not lost on one Korean-American journalist who asked to interview me about the fantastical portrayals of adoptees in K-dramas. Having been raised using Korean in her family, she said that she still struggled to speak Korean fluently, and this experience led her to question why Korean entertainment writers and consumers failed to question improbable stories, such as that of “Vincenzo.” She added that Koreans seem to presume that language is engraved in Korean people’s DNA, regardless of their social upbringing. I have also had to ask myself this, “Do we Koreans truly believe in such fantasies, or are we desperately averting our eyes and covering our ears to the truth?” Dramas such as “Vincenzo” are less about accurate adoptee representation in Korean society and more about catering to society’s indulgence in romanticized adoption myths. In fact, the depictions of adoptees in Korean films and dramas have become so stereotyped that they border on constituting tropes. In most of these stories, the adoptee is sent to the United States, which serves as a symbol of wealthy western countries, at a very young age. Eventually, the adoptee returns to Korea and encounters some form of adversity. But owing to the adoptee’s enormous wealth or some extraordinary ability, he or she prevails. While there are variations to this plot, with some films having the adoptee rescue his or her birth family or even the nation itself, the overall plot remains the same. The 2009 Korean hit “Gukgadaepyo” or “Take Off” in English (although the direct translation of the original Korean title would be “A Member of the National Team”), is an example of this stereotypical Korean adoption fantasy. In this film, Korea’s winter sports team lacks enough skiers to participate in the Winter Olympic Games, especially in sporting events such as the ski jump. Like a deus ex machina, an American adoptee appears to save the team and enhance the international prestige of the country. The ending scene shows everyone celebrating under the Korean national flag. Sometimes film mirrors reality. In 2018, Korea hosted the PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games, and several intercountry adoptees restored their Korean nationality to participate as members of the Korean national team. Seizing on this occasion, the minister of health and welfare designated some of them as promotional ambassadors of the search for origins. Ironically, this ministry was the same one that has kept adoption in the private realm, while permitting private agencies to receive fees from overseas adoptive parents under the guise of child protection. Despite publicly supporting adoptees’ search for origins, the ministry failed to carry out any meaningful changes that would secure adoptees’ rights to accessing their true identity and origins. While one may ask how we can interpret the state’s demonstration of shameless ignorance and lack of accountability. Indeed, this country has a long history of committing such acts. Korea’s media has played a decisive role in reinforcing this adoption myth by continuously reproducing the discourse and further embedding it in social consciousness. Heavily dramatized stories about adoptees, whether in the form of dramas, documentaries, or news reports, capture the public’s interest, yet this attention wanes as easily as it aroused. What is left is a superficial understanding of the true history of adoption in this country. This adoption myth functions as a source of entertainment for the public, and these stories remain sufficiently shallow to avoid any critical reflection that could bring on a collective sense of shame or blame. Screenwriters and producers will continue using these types of stories as long as they serve as effective vehicles to reap financial gain. Consequently, the reproduction of the adoptee myth in Korean entertainment silences the voices of adoptees. Instead of representing the complexity of their experiences, adoptees’ lives are reduced to cliches. This treatment is not only deplorable for adoptees, but in the context of human rights discourse, it functions as a form of objectification: adoptees are no longer subjects with their own voices but caricatures for movie plots. They exist in the public eye because people find entertainment in the emotional drama surrounding adoptee characters, but this interest fails to extend to the very real injustices inflicted on actual adoptees. While we may level criticism against writers, producers, and reporters for perpetuating stereotypes, we must ask ourselves whether these people are the manufacturers of these misrepresentations or if they are merely reproducing what they have already learned. South Korea has been sending its children overseas for the past seven decades. Its laws and system, which have been designed to facilitate this process, are a testament to its long history of adoption. Thus, when injustice becomes the norm, one can violate another’s human rights without realizing it. By portraying the adoptee as the savior and including an element of the birth family reunion on screen, Korean dramas and movies distort and manipulate the truth of adoptees’ lives to assuage the collective guilt society feels for what it has done to its most vulnerable members. Unfortunately, most adoptees reside outside of Korea and may not realize that Korean entertainment companies continually appropriate adoptee stories to satisfy their viewers. As long as this practice prevails, the adoption myth will remain the predominant adoption narrative in Korean society’s consciousness. Click here to read the 21st article of this series, "Imagining equality between Koreans and overseas adoptees" by Han Boon-Young. Cover photo: Vincenzo, not a typical Korean adoptee — Courtesy of tvN

I loved my shirt With three pockets of color Gym shoes Blue shorts And black hair That flopped over My gold-rimmed glasses I was ready for lessons Who wants to play tennis? I’ve got plenty of time to spare. But imagine my surprise When I saw my reflection Already hitting some balls on the court That’s weird Is she me Who is she And why is she wearing My outfit? Why does she have the Same haircut? And the gold glasses What’s up? Is this a joke or I’m nuts? I figured it must Be just a coincidence That the one Asian girl that shows up Basically looks like my twin It made me uneasy A little bit queasy So I stayed clear away Of the girl who seemed to be mocking me Cause I thought there was just one of me But maybe the universe made copies. The following week I arrived for lessons Bracing myself Feeling leery Would ‘ya look at that I was horrified to see That girl again She was wearing an eerily similar red t-shirt And yellow shorts just like me! What’s going on? I say in my head Who told her what I was going to wear? This is so creepy Should I go back to bed Am I sleepy? I rub my eyes But she’s still there Practicing serving balls She hits so high in the air And listening to the teacher Just like me Who relishes being so good. But there’s more I hear the teacher call her Wilomena Which is odd Because my name is Wendy How many names start like these two Both using the same letter double-u? This girl reminds me of me She looks an awful lot like me too So I finally asked her Are you Chinese? And she says yes I was amused And got more curious. But when I asked her Do you have a big family? Go to banquets in Chinatown Serving big, nine-course meals Eat loquats, char siu, and ginger steamed fish Sesame balls with sweet lotus paste Winter melon soup Or steamed, sticky rice, wrapped in leaves? She said No. I asked Do you give gold peaches to your grandparents When they turn seventy or eighty Belong to a family association Or say gong hay fat choy for the new year? She also flatly said No. She said no And I was disappointed Cause I thought we could relate Maybe be friends after all But how could it be That we were both Chinese? When nothing I said was familiar. That girl invited me over to her house And when I entered She gave me new slippers to wear And slipped her blue velvet ones on So we wouldn’t scuff The intricate, handcrafted floors. Her mother called on the phone through the speaker It didn’t sound like Chinese Even though she said it was too It sounded completely different. This girl Wilomena Offered me something out of a plastic container Something dried, red, and spicy Her chopsticks poked pieces into her mouth She said it was her favorite And gave me the Chinese name for it Which I had never heard of in my whole life. Wilomena told me that They didn’t have any extended family here Just her nuclear family Just Mom Dad and brother Her grandparents didn’t approve of the marriage So her parents ran away to America. Sometimes it felt lonely Being different at school Coming home To the echoes in the house She explained. Here With these drippy, cold trees Barren outside under overcast skies Sheltered we sat on a hard, slippery staircase Polished so clean Vented heat on our faces We talked about mean Mr. Smolten Classmates and math class Funny kids and the one with his seat by the window We looked at each other And let out a giggle So cute was this boy Liam So. We nibbled on Sara Lee pound cake Which we found in the commercial-sized freezer Thawed fast in those new microwaves She showed me shelves of long, red, dried peppers And containers holding yellow and white, strings of dried noodles Lined up aplenty in the bright, walk-in pantry. Noodles more noodles There sure were a lot of noodles So many kinds Long live the noodles! Noodles for long life!! We shouted at the same time And burst into laughter Our eyes shining smiles As we shared Our dreams of flying And magical powers Hushes of wishes And warm, misty visions Of what we wanted to be Hopes for a beautiful crystalline future A secret of immortality. Dancing on otherworld timelines Recollections of real-world lifelines Tied by halos of memories Me and my old-time, childhood friend Wilomena and me Reuniting to play some tennis. Cover photo: Pexels

Yalian Li is a filmmaker currently located in Los Angeles. She completed her Bachelor of Arts degree at Baylor University when she was 19 years old. She has also just graduated from USC Cinematic Arts recently. During her years at USC, she was awarded the James Bridges and Jack Larson scholarship, the Fox Fellowship Endowment, and the Irving Lerner Endowment Fund—three of the most prestigious scholarships for students at USC. Her films have been selected for more than 30 international film festivals. She has also served as an assistant director for the movie "The Day We Lit up the Sky," which scored over 20 million at the box office in China in 2021. Furthermore, her short film "Mantis Club" is currently on the film circuit. It was in the official selection in Annapolis Film Festival and RiverRun International Film Festival. The film also screened at Hanesbrands Theater in North Carolina on April 23rd. "Mantis Club" is all about gender. The story of "Mantis Club" is set in a gender-flipped world. The log line is “In a world where females devour males during sex, Zack, a 17-year-old virgin is asked on his first date.” The idea first struck Li after seeing a documentary back in 2017 during a road trip. She was in a crowded train station watching a documentary about praying mantises, and was particularly captivated by the sequence about female mantises devouring males after sex. She wondered, “What if women ate men after sex? How would that affect our society?” “Women eating males” is a metaphor. The film is a dark comedy that functions as social commentary. She hopes the story simultaneously serves as an open window for the audiences to rethink the patriarchal and heteronormative elements we experience today. What is gender, and how does gender divide power? Is it based on our society, our history, or our biology? As a storyteller, Li is very passionate about making films about women’s empowerment and the Asian community in the United States. She is currently developing a story about an Asian boy who’s trying to be the flute-playing leader of a local orchestra after he immigrated to the States.

Reposted from The Korea Times This article is the 18th in a series about Koreans adopted abroad. Apparently, many Koreans never expected that the children it had sent away via adoption would return as adults with questions demanding to be answered. However, thousands of adoptees visit Korea each year. Once they rediscover this country, it becomes a turning point in their lives. We should embrace the dialogue with adoptees to discover the path to recovering our collective humanity. — E.D. I’m often asked by Western diplomats, “I know Korea had a problem with that issue in the past but is it still relevant these days?” Korean civil society and human rights groups have demonstrated a similar depth of understanding, “Wasn’t that the legacy of the military dictatorship? With democratization, hasn’t that already changed?” Rather than addressing the fundamental flaws and injustices of the legal system and legislation, these problems have been swept under the rug to be forgotten or ignored. Korea’s political landscape has changed since 1992 and now resembles a “democratic” presidential system. This progress has been complemented by economic growth that has elevated the level of social and cultural development of the country. Unlike in many other countries, a 1987 revision of the Constitution banned consecutive or multiple executive terms, limiting the president to a single five-year term. Critics have expressed frustration over the short term limits that encourage presidents to prioritize short-term gains to secure their legacies. However, considering the times in which the revision was passed, the primary aim of the term limit was to prevent the re-emergence of prolonged dictatorial rule, which remained fresh in the minds of the people. The democratization of Korea did not mark the end of tyranny but rather ushered in a new stage of struggle for human rights. We only need to look at world history to see that democratization does not guarantee an actual “democracy.” Moreover, “democracy” does not automatically equate to the protection of human rights. After the series of regimes led by military leaders ended in 1992, Korea has had six civilian presidents, and among them, former President Kim Dae-Jung (1998–2002) may be the most well remembered by adoptees. Over the years, he has come to symbolize and embody the democratic movement to such an extent that he’s been compared to Nelson Mandela of South Africa. Similar to Mandela, throughout the military regimes of the 1970s and 1980s, Kim suffered torture, imprisonment and a death sentence. Despite enduring such oppression, he survived to oversee the democratization of the country in his 70s and led efforts towards peace with North Korea, which eventually earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. While the death penalty remains legal in the country, Korea maintains an “abolitionist in practice” position, which can be traced to Kim. Throughout his administration, he never approved an execution, and his successors have maintained this tradition to this day. Some presidential candidates have campaigned on resuming executions, and opinion polls reveal that a majority of Koreans approve of the death penalty. However, despite 60 inmates currently sitting on death row, their sentences have never been carried out. This lack of death penalty enforcement illustrates how Korean society tends to respond to human rights issues. Although laws and the official system remain unchanged, Korea pretends to abide by those universal norms endorsed by the U.N. However, this stance does not represent a genuine gesture to honor life but rather reflects the means by which politicians and policymakers hide behind opinion polls and evade what should be their responsibility, to initiate dramatic reforms. Ironically, such a strategy seems implicitly endorsed by the international community, which has conveniently overlooked Korea’s legal death penalty provisions. Instead of condemning the country, like other countries that impose the death penalty, the global community seems to overlook Korea’s lack of legislative reforms in this area. We must bear this paradoxical situation in mind when understanding Kim’s action toward transnational adoption. While this story has never been officially recorded, I heard from a former Korean ambassador to a certain European country that Kim had visited that country before becoming president. During a meeting in which he gave a speech, an adoptee stood up and asked why Korea sent away their children like commodities. Kim began to cry with the young adoptee and immediately apologized, saying that he hopes that the adoptee thrives despite what Korea had done to this person and all other adoptees. Once Kim became president, he invited a group of Korean adoptees to the presidential office, Cheong Wa Dae, to issue an official apology, and promised that the government would provide support for birth families and birth family search programs. Although he pledged many policy reforms, the actual implementation of those promises fell to the same government bodies and private agencies that had a history of maintaining the practice of exporting children. In the end, adoption remained a private decision without public intervention or child protection measures. The policy tools his administration provided for reform were little different than those exploited by the previous authoritarian governments, in which they aimed to control the number of child exports. In other words, while the policies’ titles changed, the reality remained the same. Consequently, from 1990 to 2010, the number of children sent abroad hovered first in the 2000s, and then the 1000s, annually. Throughout those two decades, basic national systems and measures for child protection, such as mandatory universal birth registration, intervention, and limitations over parental rights and court-appointed guardianship, failed to develop properly. Instead, private adoption agencies continued to expand, which gave them greater leverage in dealing with the government. Perhaps more significantly, along with the president’s policy, promoting the stories of so-called “successful” adoptees obscured the systematic injustices and harm done to the children through the process of intercountry adoption. Whether Kim had good intentions and sympathy toward adoptees is not in question. However, human rights issues are not matters of charity, and such issues demand a rights-based approach. As it has been said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but protecting people’s human rights requires fundamental reforms in the laws, policies and systems of a country. Mere charity and benevolent rhetoric without any commitment to confront uncomfortable truths only disguise human rights violations and delay the achievement of justice. Click here to read the 19th article of this series, "What does Korean law say about adoptees’ right to information disclosure" by Kang Te-ri. Image: In this Feb. 25, 1998 file photo, President Kim Dae-jung, right, puts his hand on his heart during his inauguration ceremony. Kim tried to reform Korea’s overseas adoption system. Despite policy changes, however, the reality remained much the same. — Korea Times

I sit at my desk, laptop open, staring at a blank screen. I am supposed to be writing a letter to my 9-year-old son’s birth mother in Korea. I have written to each of my sons’ birth mothers several times, each time painting their lives like watercolor pictures with broad strokes and vibrant colors. This time, though, I sit frozen, my fingers heavy, my thoughts like lead weighing them down. The adoptive parent in me could write the letter, but the adoptee in me is refusing. Looking for distraction, I scroll through YouTube and come upon a video featuring a family taking custody of their adopted Korean son. I have experienced three Korean adoptions in my life, one as an adoptee and two as an adoptive parent, so I am intimately familiar with the story unfolding before me. I watch as images of an adoptee’s loss are set to a soundtrack of hope, adoptee pain obscured by parental gain, two sides of this firmly entrenched dichotomy fighting to tell the story, fighting in me. In the early months after we adopted our oldest son at 3 years old, we would tie long pieces of yarn to our waists and walk around the house, mimicking the push and pull connection that parents and children are supposed to feel, trying to weave the tangled ends of severed attachment into a solid rope. The tangible yarn no longer needed, we still pull each other around on this stiff, braided line, the narrative of our experiences dancing in pieces before us, the rope tightening and slackening depending on how hard we pull towards our version of the truth, always at risk of breaking. The next time I try to write, I am quickly distracted by a box labeled “donations” that has been sitting below my bookshelf for a few days. I walk over and trace my fingers along the books on the shelf when I reach the sky blue spine of a book I had forgotten I had. It is a memoir by Melissa Fay Greene, a parent of nine children, including five internationally adopted children, called "No Riding Your Bike in the House Without a Helmet." Funny, heartfelt, and honest, my husband and I read it before we adopted our first son, and it has sat on our bookshelf as a talisman-proof that it would be okay. I flip through the book and realize the supernatural powers it once held are no longer there. The stories that once delighted me of her biological and adopted children, stories treated with an equanimity that I used to admire, fail to recognize the fundamental differences between adoptee and non-adoptee needs. The vivid descriptions of the personalities of her children feel too intimate now, a cage of words defining each child and pinning them in print for eternity. I realize that as adoptees, people who have already had so much agency stolen from them, we have just one currency to even the scales of power: defining our own narrative. I understand why adoptive parents want these stories, but adoptees need them. I hold the book up to my non-adoptee husband. “Do you want to keep this?” “I loved that book,” he says. “I did too,” I reply as I toss the book into the donation box. A week later, ready to give up on the letter entirely, my adoptive mom calls and I actually answer, the desperation to avoid writing at dangerous levels now. My mother’s calls and texts are usually met with perfunctory responses, the strings tying us together long gone, the continued contact an act of peacemaking for others in my family who are still tied to me. As my mom prattles on about a movie she recently watched, I remember a letter she wrote after I excluded her from my wedding. She addressed it to my birth mother, a woman neither of us know, and gave it to me. An act intended to induce guilt or to try to connect? I still do not know. The letter portrayed my birth mother as a martyr, and her as a hero, the two of them combining to create the perfect jewel of a daughter, all my grit, determination, and bravery erased. It reminded me a bit of the letters I had written to my sons’ birth mothers. It is now cold outside and I’m wrapped in a blanket next to a space heater with a warm cup of tea determined to write this letter. I think about the two parts of myself, about my mother and me, and I know what to do. The adoptive parent in me stops pulling and walks to the adoptee, who tells me what to write. “Dear Birth Mother, We hope you are well. We are all safe and healthy. We have attached some pictures from the last year that our son felt especially proud to share. We think of you often.” The mostly blank page shines brightly back at me. I leave the space empty for my son to write his own story, his own way, whenever he is ready. We come closer together, the tension released between the parts of me, and between me and my son, now that the story rests with its rightful owner.

Reposted from The Korea Times This article is the 17th in a series about Koreans adopted abroad. Apparently, many Koreans never expected that the children it had sent away via adoption would return as adults with questions demanding to be answered. However, thousands of adoptees visit Korea each year. Once they rediscover this country, it becomes a turning point in their lives. We should embrace the dialogue with adoptees to discover the path to recovering our collective humanity. — E.D. Over a seven-year span (1985-92), the number of transnational adoptions from Korea fell by 1,000 annually, dropping to a level not seen since 1970. Despite the absence of any meaningful reforms in child welfare or legislation, this decline represented a dramatic shift that satisfied many, including Western policymakers, who assumed that the root problems of transnational adoptions had been addressed, as the country’s economy and democracy progressed. On the contrary, the plunge in intercountry adoptions represented a campaign orchestrated by the 1980-88 Chun Doo-hwan military regime to appease its critics while outwardly portraying Korea as a prosperous nation. To understand the context that led the regime to reach this reversal of its 1980 policy aims, we need to examine two of the largest sports events of the decade: the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. As discussed in my previous article, “The unrestrained expansion of child exports during 1980s authoritarian period,” published Sept. 26, the leaders of the 1980 military coup lacked governing experience, and therefore employed “child exports” as an opportunity to engage Western countries diplomatically to fulfill the military regime’s needs and to stem any condemnation over the dictatorship. The need to mollify international and domestic demands for Korea’s democratization intensified over the years. Thus, a primary concern that occupied the Chun regime was to bolster domestic support and legitimacy for military rule through economic growth and efforts to “enhance national prestige.” Consequently, it aimed to achieve these goals by hosting two enormous international sporting events that would erase any lingering memories of Korea being an isolated, war-torn nation and cement its image as a vibrant, modern country. Considering the stakes, Korea pursued its public diplomacy drive with an aggressive determination that entailed fully leveraging domestic and international propaganda to promote its suitability as a host country for the Olympics. Ironically, its efforts betrayed its expectations. By capturing international attention, any acts of repression or brutality that had come to characterize the regime would be on full display. In response, the regime exercised some restraint in dealing with pro-democracy protests. Since its attention centered on curbing ever growing calls for political change, it was unprepared when Western media unleashed a slew of articles criticizing the country for exporting its babies. The president and his administration scrambled to reduce the number of transnational adoptions, but could not resort to their usual coercive tactics without jeopardizing the country’s hosting of the Olympics. As the Chun regime wanted to preserve the image it had cultivated with the world, it employed an administrative tool that the government had long used to control the number of intercountry adoptions—permission to exit the country. Tucked inside the 1962 Emigration Act, legislated under the previous military junta of Park Chung-hee, was a provision that prohibited Korean nationals from emigrating overseas without government permission. While the government justified this measure as a means to prevent male citizens from evading conscription and to ban “inappropriate” Koreans from moving overseas and degrading the country’s image, these reasons hid the act’s true purpose, which was to control and oppress Korean citizens. The severe human rights violation that this travel restriction imposed eventually led to its revision in 1983. Under the revised permit procedures, people underwent screenings of their qualifications to emigrate. Eventually, in 1991, the entire process, except the reporting procedure, was abolished. What does this act have to do with intercountry adoptions? The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which oversaw this policy, was charged with issuing “permits to exit to a foreign country” to those wanting to emigrate to other countries. However, in 1977, the Ministry of Health and Welfare assumed this role from the foreign ministry for children sent for intercountry adoption. To this day, the welfare ministry maintains this practice of issuing permits, despite the original permit system being eliminated for violating people’s human rights. To be clear, I am not arguing against state intervention in the cross-border movement of children; on the contrary, such intervention is necessary for the protection and safety of children. However, the permit procedures employed by Korea were never designed for protective purposes. Instead, this system served primarily as a type of “quota” system, or a means to control the numbers of children that agencies could send abroad, without the need to satisfy any public authority’s requirements to ensure protective measures. In other words, the permit system revolved around the permit, which served as an essential document needed to apply for an immigration visa from a receiving country. No Korean permit meant no visa for a Western receiving country. Thus, these permits served as the strongest, most effective form of leverage to control adoption agencies, whose revenues relied primarily on fees paid by adoptive parents. Until the 1990s, the government welfare budget excluded support for adoption agencies. Instead, the government granted them exclusive authorization to engage in intercountry adoptions, including setting their own fee levels. As explained in my previous article, “Korean adoption system must not be allowed to be profit-driven,” published June 27, adoption agencies operated and continue to operate as private entities. Consequently, there is little knowledge of their internal operations, and most critically, the conditions and status of children under their protection or influence remain relatively unknown. The extent of this independent nature is evident in the methods employed by the government to exercise control. Rather than assuming direct management of adoption agencies, the government has relied on a web of incentives and punishments, even going so far as to appoint a regime associate to a leadership post within an agency. The tragedy surrounding the 1988 Olympics is the momentum squandered by the nation. With the world watching closely in the lead-up to the Olympics and the foreign media denouncing its wide-scale export of babies, the country had an opportunity to genuinely reflect on and address its failures in child protection. Instead, the military government used its administrative measures to set an arbitrary number of intercountry adoptions, so as to provide a superficial response that would quiet the criticisms from abroad. This choice excluded more children from mainstream welfare policies, leaving their fate at the discretion of a global cartel, which eventually treated them as commodities to transfer overseas. Nelson Mandela once said, “The true character of a society is revealed in how it treats its children.” Because childhood represents the most vulnerable period of a human being’s life, the treatment of these children shows the shallow depths of human rights protections that this country afforded to those who needed it the most. Image: The number of children sent overseas for adoption — Courtesy of Lee Kyung-eun

The Universal Asian had the privilege of speaking with Anthony Sayo, an award-winning actor from the Philippines who is making his dreams come true in Hollywood. Despite his parents’ preference for him to become a lawyer, Anthony Sayo found himself challenging the norms of his small Philippines’ provincial town. Growing up as one of six children in the family, Sayo was called at an early age to the world of movies and storytelling brought by the influence of his older brother, a big fan of fantasy films and wrestling entertainment. With his father a pharmacy owner and his mother a doctor, it was not a common dream for kids to want to be in the movies nor pursue a career in acting, let alone a career in Hollywood. However, Sayo says, “Even when I was a child, I was already very optimistic, I believe that if you have the drive and the willpower—you will be able to create an opportunity for yourself to make anything possible.” Sayo followed this belief while holding on to his motto that we only have one life to live and we should pursue a career path that truly brings us fulfillment. He says, “When I realised that acting was the career that I wanted to pursue, I told myself that I will go for what I want. That is non-negotiable. My life is so precious to me, and I want to be doing what makes me happy.” Therefore, pushing aside his mother’s persistent wish that he pursue a medical or law career, Sayo focused his efforts on how to get to the U.S. to fulfill his dream of being in the movies. After making sure he did his best academically, graduating with a Political Science degree from the University of the Philippines, Sayo found an acting school in the Philippines and enrolled in a one-year diploma program. For that year, Sayo studied under the wing of an American acting coach who trained mostly in New York, but has performed in both American and European TV/films. Sayo is very appreciative of this formal introduction into the world of acting and credits his solid foundation to his mentor. During his year of study, his teacher told him that “Hollywood is a white man’s world” to keep him grounded about his expectations of finding work in Hollywood. Even with this dose of reality thrown at him, Sayo simply pushed on with the belief that talent will always find a way to be recognized, regardless of ethnicity or race. While waiting for the right timing and opportunity to go the U.S. to pursue acting in Hollywood, Sayo decided to become a certified fitness trainer, and trained clients in Manila. He is also very passionate about fitness, and for six years he enjoyed imparting his knowledge and guiding his clients on a journey to a healthier lifestyle. During this time, he also took advantage of social media to build up a support network that he could use if he ever made it to Los Angeles. Then, in 2019, one of Sayo’s sisters moved to Chicago to work as a nurse. He saw this as opportune timing to take bolder steps to fulfill his acting aspirations. During a family trip to visit his sister in Chicago, he booked a one-way ticket to L.A. and told his mom that he was returning to the Philippines, as he was now ready to embark on his acting journey. As one might expect, Sayo had very little money when he arrived, but through his social media contacts and support network, he was able to meet people who kindly provided him with a place to stay and helped to get him started. He went from audition to audition, and managed to get his first major role in “The Withered Ghoul’s Ceremony,” an independent film director’s debut. Sayo booked the leading role and won Best Actor at the Hollywood Blood Horror Film Festival for his performance. He has also played leading roles in films slated for release like the romantic drama “Tears at the Edge of the World,” and the crime drama “Daughter.” Sayo is also a part of the cast of the ”Mantis Club,” a horror comedy which is currently having success in the film festival circuit. Despite this, Sayo always keeps his eyes on the bigger projects. His next big target is to land a role in the mainstream TV or book a role in a studio film. Thanks to growing advocacies for equal representation on the screen nowadays, there are more opportunities for people of color, and previously underrepresented ethnic groups in the movie industry, including Asians. He acknowledges that there are other Asian actors and Asian leading men who are leading the way, and he wants to join this wave of bringing more Asian faces to the screen. In the meantime, he says, “I am enjoying the process, to be honest, but there’s no way that I will say that it’s easy. So, I’m enjoying it because I realize that I belong here, because I can stand the ups and downs. I can stand the hits. I can stand the blows because there are also so many blows. It’s like being in a boxing match. There’s no way that you enter without being punched. I’m okay with taking punches and I’m also getting out my punches. So, I’m happy with the game.” For those who aspire to be like Sayo, he advises, “Don’t listen to the noise. Don’t let anyone tell you that it is impossible. You have to follow your heart in whatever you do. So, if you’re already somewhere and you think your heart is not there, if you’re thinking you don’t love it, you only have one life and you can change the menu, you can change the channel.” Cover photo: Still from “Daughter” directed by Yiwei Yao

The meaningful and meaningless documents that make up the story of my adoption inspired this set of digital composites. The first step in any search for one’s origin begins with the application for one’s adoption files. Used as source material my file represents a story created wholly by my adoption agency, Holt International.

Full title: Dialogues With Adoptees: The unrestrained expansion of ‘child exports’ during 1980s authoritarian period Reposted from The Korea Times This article is the 16th in a series about Koreans adopted abroad. Apparently, many Koreans never expected that the children it had sent away via adoption would return as adults with questions demanding to be answered. However, thousands of adoptees visit Korea each year. Once they rediscover this country, it becomes a turning point in their lives. We should embrace the dialogue with adoptees to discover the path to recovering our collective humanity. — E.D. Shortly after the assassination of Park Chung-hee in 1979, Chun Doo-hwan led a successful military coup that would see Korea’s authoritarian leadership period continue until 1992. The tumultuous political change that has come to define this period also influenced the politics of intercountry adoption. Throughout Chun’s rule, the number of children sent for adoption experienced dramatic annual fluctuations, as seen in the graph. Since the dominant narrative of adoption has been populated by stereotypes and myths about so-called “outcast” children, little attention has been paid to fully contemplating the sheer number of children these statistics represent. When these figures shift by the thousands, it’s easy to forget the human lives behind the data. Moreover, we should not forget that transferring a single child across a national border requires navigating a complex set of administrative immigration procedures. In the 1980s, these travel processes were further complicated by the restrictions that the authoritarian government placed on people’s overseas travel. Before 1989, few Koreans were granted passports to travel abroad. Those who were among the limited number of Koreans who were granted a passport stand in stark contrast to the outflow of Korean children for adoption. In 1985, when the rate of intercountry adoption peaked, more than 8,800 children were sent abroad. This figure represents 1.3 percent of the total births, which was around 650,000, in Korea that year. Thus, despite the difficulty that Koreans had in traveling internationally, the rate of children transnationally adopted during the Chun Regime exceeded 74,000, which comprises nearly half (45 percent) of the total number of Korean intercountry adoptions. This expansion was part of a larger trend in the 1980s, which witnessed a global surge in intercountry adoption. As much as 73 percent of the total intercountry adoptions involved children from Asian countries, and Korea played a central role constituting the largest majority of Asian intercountry adoptions at 75-77 percent. Globally, Korean intercountry adoptions accounted for 60 percent of the world total throughout the 1980s. The graph reflects Korea’s intercountry adoption rates. In spite of the popular belief that these adoptions were guided by welfare measures, political decisions dictated the steep rise. The Chun regime on the one hand pursued repressive policies against civil liberties and democracy, while on the other hand maintained a highly liberalized approach toward its economic and foreign policies. Although eager to portray itself as open and democratic to the international community, the government exploited Western countries’ desire for adoptable babies by “liberating” the export of Korean children through the deregulation and further privatization of intercountry adoption agencies. Rather than serving as a child protection measure, the country’s intercountry adoption policies aligned and functioned as an extension of the government’s national policies at the time. Consequently, the government pursued an open-door foreign policy that exported adoptable babies as a form of diplomacy with Western countries. As the legislative foundation and legal infrastructure of intercountry adoption had already been established during the 1970s, increasing the rate of children sent abroad was relatively easy once the government had made the political decision to do so. The proportion of intercountry adoption within the total emigration figure from Korea represented a significant portion. In 1985, the peak year of intercountry adoption, the total emigration figure was 27,793, and 8,837 of that was comprised of intercountry adoptions. In other words, intercountry adoption accounted for over 30 percent of Korea’s total emigration that year. Most of the general emigration, which one can also refer to as non-intercountry adoption emigration, was to the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The destinations for the remaining 6,021 Korean emigrants were classified as “other regions,” which presumably pertained to countries in Latin America and Europe. Seeing as European countries received 2,413 Korean children for adoption, one can safely assume that a large proportion of the Korean emigration population to Europe consisted of Korean intercountry adoptees. These high rates did not go unnoticed. A U.S. Embassy consular officer in Seoul charged with issuing visas for intercountry adoption commented to the media that 500 kids per month represented an incredibly high number that could not be explained by humanitarian needs. He added that the institutionalization of intercountry adoption in Korea permitted the attainment of such numbers. Why hadn’t these numbers been achieved earlier? In the late 1970s, poor management and internal conflicts marked the operations of the adoption agencies. Corruption prevailed to such an extent that law enforcement arrested the head of an agency for embezzlement. In line with its national economic and foreign policy agenda, the Chun Regime may have intervened to promote the performance of the agencies. Such intervention is evidenced in a 1981 adoption agency yearbook that mentions the newly established government appointed a new executive director for the agency “with a mission to lead welfare reform.” Trained by the military, this new director eventually expanded the agency’s business by securing government support to promote intercountry adoption. He would later serve as a member of the 1988 Olympic Committee and the National Assembly, as well as a Minister of Government Administration. The prominent positions occupied by this figure and his role in the adoption agency demonstrate how terms such as “privatized” and “quasi-government,” while contradictory, simultaneously characterize the status of adoption agencies. Unlike in the 1970s, the new adoption agency came to operate with efficiency and discipline. Under its new leadership, the agency underwent a restructuring that affected all elements of its operations, from personnel to resource allocation. These reforms enhanced the agency’s capacity to gather adoptable children from a variety of sources nationwide, including orphanages, birth clinics, hospitals and unwed mothers. Each of these sources was overseen by specially dedicated divisions inside the agency. The agency established a special processing division to expedite immigration administration and recruited specialized staff. For instance, a former staff member of the processing division said that those proficient in English received better treatment, since such language skills were rare at the time but highly sought after. Despite the better conditions for these staff members, the fee for a single intercountry adoption could cover their entire annual salary, which gives perspective to the amount of money involved at the time. This inflow of money cannot be overlooked, as it reveals the true motivations behind the upsurge in adoptions. In the 1980s, the level of fees collected from adoptive parents by Korean adoption agencies was known to be twice the per capita GDP of Korea. In sum, contrary to the belief that the high rates of intercountry adoption out of Korea in the 1980s were due to poverty or a growing orphan population, the swift upsurge may be attributed to the regime’s political will and the reforms it undertook to realize this will by improving the efficiency through which the agencies performed. This article is the first of two that covers the rise and decline of intercountry adoptions in the 1980s. The next article will discuss the reasons behind the downturn in intercountry adoptions in 1986 as featured in the graph. Image: The number of children sent overseas for adoption — Courtesy of Lee Kyung-eun

As I walked the streets in the Asian part of Rome near Termini Station, the Asian stores were mostly empty, perhaps as a result of COVID but I cannot say as I’ve not seen the streets in normal times. Still, what was striking was the gradual demographic change and mixture of skin tones darkening the further away I walked from the popular city center. Most paid little to no attention to me since I hoped I didn’t have a tourist air about me. Probably, though, it helped that I was not white. There have been a handful of times in my life when I have felt thankful that my Asian face is what it is. That day was another time to add to my list. As I walked with a smile on my face, I wondered at the recent comments and questions I had read posted on social media about racism in Italy. While I am aware that certain social media platforms are predominantly white, I am still amazed when I read people’s denial of race struggles in the world. For example, the U.S. is facing a massive increase in crimes against Asian people yet no one wants to call them hate crimes. Instead, many want to blame it on mental illness for those who are committing these crimes, which obviously does need to be addressed as another social and systemic issue, but the fact is that Asians are being targeted more than ever for whatever reason—though I think there is no question as to who or where it started in 2020. However, as I walked the streets of Rome, in a part of town mostly void of white Italians, I found myself feeling safe. I found myself comfortable. I found myself a part of the community of people of color walking about, and I felt proud to acknowledge it. I also felt thankful that I was not living in a place where I would have to worry about my safety walking around. More importantly, though, I was thankful that I was not white; that I did not carry myself as I imagined a white person would walking past Asian restaurants, supermarkets, clothing stores, etc. I did not view the space as them being less-than or worse-off than my privileged way of life. Instead, I felt connected and as if I could hear my heritage finally speaking out to me to own what is mine and to accept that I belong in these spaces just as much as someone who speaks or knows the culture as their own. For DNA carries more than just our genetic makeup but also the whispers of our ancestors. As I sat to eat a Korean meal on my own, an act I rarely do since I hate eating alone, I decided not to distract myself with my phone or pretend as if I had something to do to try to lessen a discomfort for dining as one. Instead, I chose to focus on the flavors, the bitefuls of sour and spicy mixing in my mouth. I imagined myself as a child in Korea first eating a bowl of rice or tasting the complexity of kimchi. I imagined I could hear the smile in my omma's voice as she encouraged me to take another bite. It was in this mindful space that I could appreciate that somehow against all odds, I had come to love the food of my motherland. I sat eating as if I had always known Korean food, as if it was something I had always eaten and was just missing while living abroad. The cook, and probably owner, of the restaurant asked me if I was Korean in Korean. I replied in English, “I am, but American.” She nodded with a smile and accepted my admittance. Food always serves as a way of bonding. The “breaking of bread” has long been used as a way of uniting people. In that restaurant there were people of all skin tones enjoying the same kind of food. In that space, we all had something in common. Isn’t it strange then, once we go back outside we are again defined by the color of our skin? When we go our separate ways, once again I will be seen as Asian, and they by whatever nationality they seem to look; yet, none of us will know that on the inside, we may be of all different colors. But, in that space, in that city, in that moment, I felt as if my outside and my inside were the same—even if it was brief. Image: Cathy Lu

Nothing What can you do when there’s nothing to do The sun shines bright and the sky so blue Yet sitting inside thinking of you It seems as so lately it’s all I can do When everything fails and nothing is new I sit and I wait until I can see you Far How many more moons until this feeling lifts Longing and yearning and still nothing fits It’s just like a puzzle and you’re the last piece What should I do to make this pain cease I look and I ponder of what I do miss It’s the feeling of whole, the feeling of bliss I write this here poem to remind you dear friend That even though we’re apart I’m with you ‘til the end Friend I just met you I know and you seem so shy What happened to you, I wonder why Soon enough though, we’ll be best of friends I help you as you do me and we’ll make amends I’m not here to harm you, just here to say I’m with you and I’ll love you every single day See Open my eyes so that I may see What exactly do you want of me What do I want is better to inquire Because as of yet nothing inspires What should I do to relieve this feeling Nothing to me feels appealing I do what I can to pass the time Get me to a point I’m feeling fine But I sit here alone feeling no purpose Give me something so I’m not feeling worthless Lauren is a regular contributor for The Universal Asian. To learn more about her, check out her Contributor’s Page here.