Reposted from Tiger Lily Stories I was raised with the understanding that I was lucky to have parents who loved me enough to let me go. To allow me the opportunity for a better life. It was preferable to think in terms of what I had gained rather than what I had lost. But loss implicates something that I had recognized as mine. I once had a dream that was almost like a memory. I was sitting on a metal staircase outside of a grey building, the tips of my fingers smudged with black rust. It was cold yet I was only wearing a pale pink shirt with a faded daisy right in the middle. This girl that was me, and yet not me, was 2 years old and alone. The grey building was my orphanage. The surrounding area was blurred, almost as if that building existed outside of any city, any country, any sense of reality. In the years of telling my adoptive parents about this “memory,” I would recall how there was a part of me that knew they were coming. Though I sat unattended on those stairs and unconnected to anyone in China, there was a certainty in me that my state of solitude was only temporary. That I would soon belong somewhere. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized I was not remembering, but dreaming. Internalizing and reproducing what my parents would come to tell me over the years. That I was always meant to be found by them. That I was always meant to be a part of this family. I was born in the Hunan Province of China in 1997. The year of the Fire Ox. Seventeen years after the One Child Policy was first introduced by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. Wrapped in a blanket outside of a post office with only Youlan, February 11, 1997 written on a piece of paper. At 3 months old, those few characters were my only possession. One strong breath of wind and my sole piece of identity could have easily peeled away, the paper holding the history of my life in a few thin strokes travelling without me. This is the story that was told to me about how my life began. I still do not know if it is true. China’s One Child Policy was an attempt at reducing population growth. A chain reaction from years of population control, one catalyst being Mao Zedong’s initial encouragement to increase China’s populace in the '60s. More people meant a stronger country. This ideology led to propaganda that denounced contraceptives and the population grew at an unsupportable rate. The economy and living standards were threatened and reverse actions took effect. Forced sterilization. Fines. Abortion. Women had no more say in the way their country handled their bodies than a flower petal has in the direction the wind blows it. I remember learning about China’s history from its dynasties to Mao’s Cultural Revolution in high school. Big events. China’s strong leaders and notable laws written in bold in my textbooks. I never thought about it on a microscopic scale. Never considered how these events would lead to the policy that ultimately determined the beginning of my life. We weren’t tested on the mothers who were taken from their homes and forced to abort their children. Never considered the cultural preference for boys and the subsequent acts of infanticide and abandonement when families had one girl too many. Never understood the hand that supposedly wrote my name. As much as my adoptive parents wanted to fill me with love, I couldn’t shake the belief that I started my life unwanted. Perhaps not unwanted in the personal sense of being uncared for or unloved. I will never know if I was given up because of a preference for a brother, because of poverty, because I was too sick. But I believed I was unwanted in some way and at times it used to make me feel quite alone. I was raised with the understanding that I was lucky to have parents who loved me enough to let me go. To allow me the opportunity for a better life. It was preferable to think in terms of what I had gained rather than what I had lost. But loss implicates something that I had recognized as mine. From the very beginning, I cannot even claim if the city I was found in is the city I am from. I cannot claim if my name was truly my name. If I had one living parent or two. A brother. A sister. Growing up, I didn’t know about the politics in China or the reasons why my birth parents could leave no information for me. All I knew was that I had been left with nothing but a name and a birth date. I recently learned that the story my parents were given about how I was found could have been a lie. In the early '90s, China began allowing international adoption and so there were more people eligible to adopt. There were people who initially wanted to help abandoned children that became traffickers, bringing them to orphanages for a price. Some families that violated the One Child Policy and hid their children were fined and government officials would abduct the child. When people from other countries came to China, the orphanages would often fabricate how the children were found. They would say, "she was found in a box at a park. A school. A police station." And so, the time before I was brought to my orphanage was as blank as a watered down stone. The little information my family was given about me was perhaps no information at all. When I was younger, sometimes not knowing didn’t concern me. I didn’t think of myself in terms of being Chinese or even American. I was just a girl learning fractions, going on playdates, and living with my family. Yet every time someone pointed out a small difference between my parents and me, I felt a tangible divide. It is easy to forget there is any difference at all until it is noticed by others. One summer when I was six years old, my camp counselor asked me if I was Asian. I knew I was Chinese, but I had never heard of this blanket term. It did not occur to me that if I was from China, I could also be considered to be part of a larger racial category. I did not associate with being labeled as anything, so I told him I wasn’t. When I was six, my camp counselor asked if I was Asian / I said no and could not understand why he started laughing / Wanting to appear grown up, as if I too was in on the joke, I laughed with him / Each hiccup a breath closer to this word I did not recognize / He ruffled his hand through my hair, the way my dad would to our neighbor’s dog / you’re Asian / I asked him how he knew and / because your face looks Asian / His chest swelled / melon sized / when he said this, as if proud / For the rest of that summer I told people / I’m Asian / before I said my own name. When I was in kindergarten, my teacher told my mom how much I looked like her. Even then I knew how ridiculous that sounded as my mom is an Irish American redhead and I am anything but. It was almost as if she was trying to compensate for any difference by asserting we were the same. On the opposite end, there were those who assumed no correlation. In middle school, I worked at an equestrian camp with a friend who had red hair and freckled skin, akin to my mom. Once when my mom was picking us up, a counselor nudged my friend and told her her mom was here to get her. Notably confused, we looked around and saw my mom waving at us from her car. It was an understandable mistake and amused us at the time, but I always remembered the quick assumption. I felt a twinge of isolation in the way she had paired us in her head, how she cut off the possibility that I was in fact my mother’s daughter. In my freshman year of high school, I had made friends with two girls from China. When I transitioned from a day student to a boarding student, I started to spend more time with them. They tried to include me with their group of friends, but in some ways I would feel like an intruder when I was with them. My friends would constantly have to remind the group to speak English when I was around and I could tell it was a source of annoyance for some of them. I couldn’t relate to the way they were raised, the food they preferred, or even the language spoken. Eventually I phased myself out of the group and lost touch with the two girls I had befriended. I felt ashamed that I had not taken Chinese classes when I was younger when my parents offered to enroll me, that I didn’t take more interest in Chinese culture, that I always stayed in my bubble of American friends. I convinced myself that I wasn’t “Asian” enough to connect with the Chinese students at my school and so I joined my friends in viewing them as inherently “other.” It wasn’t until I was older that I started to reflect on my own internalized racism. I never believed my friends were maliciously racist or actively excluded the Asian students at my school. It was just “normal” that the Asian kids usually socialized with the other Asian kids. Some of my peers referred to the boys’ dorm where most of the Asian students lived as “Chinatown.” We would joke about how they would always have bulk packs of ramen stacked in their rooms or how I was so bad at math unlike the other Chinese students. I didn’t understand that these stereotypes, as “harmless” as they seemed, were a form of microaggressive racism. It never meant much to me because I didn’t necessarily identify with the things we joked about. It was easier to convince myself that I didn’t belong with that group of Chinese girls if I disassociated with everything that might have connected me to them. If I told myself that their culture, their history, their lives were not relevant to mine and my group of friends. With virtually no connection to my culture or definite information about where I came from, I transitioned from resenting my biological parents to feeling nothing towards them. They were as abstract a concept to me as a distant relative who passed before I was born. Any curiosity I had about my parents or what it meant to be Chinese disappeared throughout high school and most of college. Replaced by worries about drama between friends, how I would do on my next test, where I should go to school, and finding a part time job. Up until I was about 20, I hardly knew myself or what my real interests were, never mind having the capacity to truly understand or reflect on my adoption or the history that led to it. I had no desire to learn and was not mature enough to introspect on the components of my life that made me me. It wasn’t until recently that I realized how much I’ve grown (not physically unfortunately, I’m still the same 5' 0" I was in seventh grade) and will continue to grow. My interests have expanded; I still love to write, but I find fulfillment in anything that will allow me to be creative or evolve. Photography. Shooting and editing videos. Fashion. Sewing. Learning. Without school, I must now take the initiative to educate myself in other ways. Reading. Watching documentaries. Going to poetry slams or listening to panel discussions. And with this growth, I’ve had to return to the beginning. To where I was born. To where I spent the first few years of my life where I was nobody’s daughter. I still struggle to find my place within the “transracial adoptee” and “Asian American” identities. It would be easy to resent my adoptive parents for not providing me with Asian role models or trying to actively immerse me in un-whitewashed aspects of Chinese culture when I was growing up, but I just didn’t want to explore my Chinese identity. For a long time, I rejected anything that would associate me with being “typically” Asian. My face already made me different enough and equated me with negative microaggressions I wanted to distance myself from. I didn’t think there was room for me to be both Asian and American. It seemed to me that identifying with one would conflict with the other. As I try to become more involved in Asian communities and connect with other adoptees, I’m starting to learn that one can be both. Natalie Pappas graduated from The New School in 2019 with a degree in Literary Studies and is currently living in New York City. She was adopted from the Hunan Province of China when she was 2 years old and continues to explore her adoptee and Asian American identity. She’s passionate about fashion, photography, and writing and hopes to pursue these interests in her creative and professional work.

Reposted from The Korea Times This article is the 11th in a series about Koreans adopted abroad. Among the first wave of transracial adoptees from Korea to the United States, Alice Stephens shares her journey to the truth of the origin of her life. Her story enlightens us to the fact that adoptees’ lives are closely intertwined with the political turmoil of Korean’s modern history beyond our imagination. Born in 1967 to a Korean mother and an American soldier father, I was one of the first generation of inter-country adoptees. Indeed, inter-country adoption began because of mixed-race children like me. We were considered as [sic] a blight upon the bloodline, unworthy of being Korean. According to the system of census taking that existed then, in order to be entered into the family registry, the child had to be fathered by a Korean man. Those of us with foreign fathers were unable to be registered; and therefore, ineligible for essential government services, such as education and medical care. From the beginning, the bureaucracy conspired to erase us from existence. Ironically, women like my mother were crucial to Korea’s struggling economy, bringing in desperately needed U.S. dollars. Though prostitution was ostensibly illegal, the government not only tolerated but abetted it. U.S. military and Korean local and national government officials coordinated efforts to regulate prostitution and monitor sex workers for sexually transmitted diseases. Both countries saw the sex trade as vital to keeping the massive contingent of U.S. troops in the country, their presence essential to the national economy. But the government’s profit-taking of these women’s bodies did not stop there. When the women had babies, another business opportunity presented itself. Americans, like Henry Holt and Pearl S. Buck, offered to take these unwanted children away. It turned out that white couples in wealthy nations would pay money for them. But how to make the export of children morally palatable, both for the sending and receiving nations? By reframing the narrative from that of poverty, prostitution, and military colonialism into one of rescue and redemption. By extirpating the past, doctoring documents, and rebranding the children as orphans. With this influx of Oriental orphans, adoption in the Global North went from shameful secret to inspirational story of the human capacity to love even across racial lines (the vast majority of inter-country adoptions have been into white families). I was part of that changing narrative when my adoption story was featured in a national magazine under the headline “Instead of Their Own: The heartwarming story of one young couple’s ingenious answer to the population explosion.” But, I was not an orphan. I had a mother, and a father, too, who had returned to America three months before I was born. My mother sent him my baby photos, but she must have known it was futile because shortly after I was born, she relinquished me to Korean Social Services, Inc. (KSS). For the first 51 years of my life, all that I knew of my origins was to be found in my KSS, case study. A mere three pages, this sacred text revealed my Korean name, description (eyes are Caucasian shaped), and date and location of birth; as well as was my mother’s name, physical description, city of birth, brief biography (ran away from abusive school teacher husband), and her summary of my birth father (“SP/4 in the U.S. Army…sturdy built…common law husband”). His nationality is noted as “Caucasian-American.” It wasn’t until I received the results of a DNA kit in 2018 that I began to question the details of the KSS case study. Turns out, my birth father was not Caucasian but Mexican American. I was simultaneously thrilled to discover Native American and Latino roots and devastated to know that part of my heritage has been taken from me forever. The following year, I visited KSS and was shocked to discover that my mother’s name was an alias, the Korean equivalent of Jane Doe. I knew then I could believe none of the information in the study, not my Korean name (the first name distinctive for being monosyllabic), not my birth date (suspiciously, the same date the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed), not the location of my birth. The more closely I inspected my adoption documents, the more discrepancies I noticed. The date of my relinquishment varies from document to document. My birth place is described as Uijeongbu, Seoul and Andong. My health document is a single piece of paper with no medical statistics. Most damning of all, though, is the state-issued “orphan hojuk,” falsely declaring my parents as unknown. My mother was known. She relinquished me. At KSS, I saw a document bearing her fingerprint in the same vermilion ink used for official seals. Decades after the first children were adopted out, the Korean court system is being forced to confront the many legal issues that have arisen due to dubious adoption practices. The country is forced to accept back adoptees who have been deported from their home countries because their adoptive parents neglected to naturalize them. Last year, when I inquired at the Korean Consulate in Washington, D.C., about regaining Korean citizenship, I was told that the first step in applying for Korean citizenship was to renounce my Korean citizenship. From the accumulating evidence of my own search, as well as anecdotes from other adoptees, it’s clear that Korean adoption policies were made on an ad hoc basis, driven by private adoption agencies, with mixed-race babies like me the test cases for an industry that would eventually flourish to include full-blooded Koreans born to married couples. Because of the opacity of the adoption system, we will never know how many babies died in the care of orphanages, how many children were relinquished without the agreement of their parents, or even how many children were sent away for adoption. Unlike Korea’s other major exports, adoptees are human beings. Cars, phones, and refrigerators do not wonder about their origins, but human beings have a deep, innate need to know from whence they come. The narrative of adoption is being rewritten once again as adoptees return to Korea to search for family, culture and identity in ever increasing numbers. We are demanding answers, reform, legal equality, and our basic human right to know our origins. There are now three generations of us. We will not stop coming back. By declaring us orphans, the Korean government sought to erase us from their national history. By searching for our roots, we are taking the truth back. Alice Stephens was adopted by an American couple in 1968. She is the author of the novel, “Famous Adopted People,” essayist, editor of Bloom, and writes book reviews for the Washington Independent Review of Books. A follow-up about her novel is also available this month. Cover photo: Courtesy of Alice Stephens.

Reposted from Pauline Park’s blog I was born in Korea in 1960 but left the country of my birth seven and a half months later, only "returning" for the first time over half a century later in the summer of 2015. At the time of my birth, Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world and had only begun its recovery from the devastation of the Korean War that ended in 1953; but the country I returned to at the age of 54 was the eleventh largest economy in the world, with large parts of its capital unrecognizable to those who knew it before the startling industrialization that transformed the southern half of the peninsula in the 1970s and 1980s. My adoptive parents were told that my birth mother died giving birth to my brother and me and that our birth father died before we were born. It was not until 1994, when I was reading a history of Korea, that the thought occurred to me that my birth father might have been among the thousands who died in a massive popular uprising led by students and workers in April 1960 that ousted Syngman Rhee (the dictator/president-for-life installed by the United States) from power and ushered in the short-lived Second Republic, so perhaps I was born to make revolution… The Republic of Korea’s brief experience of democracy ended abruptly when Park Chung-hee came to power in a military coup in May 1961. Of course, as an infant in an orphanage in Seoul, I was completely unaware of the tumultuous political drama that was the backdrop for my birth in 1960 and adoption in 1961, only a few weeks after Park Chung-hee’s coup d’état. In Korea, familial blood lines are of paramount importance and orphans rarely have the opportunities for advancement that those raised in families do. And as difficult as it still is to be openly lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered in contemporary South Korea, in the 1960s and 1970s, it would have been all the more difficult to be LGBT/queer; the prospects for a queer Korean growing up in an orphanage in Seoul in that area would have been dim indeed. For that reason and for many others, the flight in 1961 from Seoul to Tokyo on Northwest "Orient" Airlines and then onto Anchorage before landing at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago was the most consequential of my life; but it was only the first of many migrations—some across national borders, some state lines, and others across boundaries of sexuality, gender, religion and spirituality; that long trip from Korea in 1961 would begin a long process of self-discovery as well as exploration of the wider world. It is extremely unlikely that I would have survived infancy in that orphanage in Seoul, but had I lived, instead of growing up in a Korean orphanage, my brother and I grew up with a tall and balding Norwegian American father and a stout and devoutly Lutheran German American mother and her mother, who lived in the house until my senior year in high school. My parents were already well into middle age when they adopted my brother and me: my mother was born in 1916 and my father was born in 1912; my grandmother—as significant a figure in my childhood as my father—was born in 1888 and had grown up working the family farm in northern Wisconsin with her father after her mother’s untimely death. I had known no "homeland" other than the United States, but to strangers, I was a foreigner because I was Asian. Though I had never learned to speak Korean and had never lived in Korea since my adoption at the age of eight months, my Asian features defined my status as the "other," the foreigner, the outsider. When we went out in public, the striking physical differences between my adoptive parents and my brother and me made it impossible for others not to notice and our parents were constantly asked, “Whose children are they?” But that was life in an all-white neighborhood on the south side of Milwaukee in the 1960s and 1970s; in fact, my brother and I were the only non-white children in our elementary school. Every December 7th, my brother and I were verbally harassed by the white kids at school. This happened more than twenty years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. "Chink" and "Jap" were hurled at us, and it made me feel ambivalent about my adoptive country. Because of this, I had a hard time thinking of myself as American; but without any opportunity to learn Korean and with none of the infrastructure of Korean culture camps like those now available to young Korean adoptees, I had no direct way of connecting to my birth culture, though I tried to do so through books; but there were none in our house on Korea—beyond encyclopedias with brief entries—and only one in the local branch library in our neighborhood; it was not until many years later that I would find books on Korea written for adults with much information about the country of my birth. My childhood was a relatively happy one but security abruptly turned to insecurity when our father died just before my brother and I turned 13, plunging the family into financial insecurity as well as mourning; and the inevitable emotional insecurity that most adolescents feel when puberty hits was multiplied exponentially in its effect by the sudden surge of masculinizing hormones which forced me to confront not only the increasingly obvious maleness of my body but the heavy imposition of the sex/gender binary on me. My first encounter with the sex/gender binary actually came on my very first day of school when I went off to kindergarten and came home to ask my mother if she would buy me a pair of stretch pants with stirrups that many of the girls were wearing. “But those are for girls,” she exclaimed, surprised at the request; it was at that moment that I realized that there were apparently two kinds of people in the world and that I had been assigned to the category "boy" without even being consulted. Nonetheless, however gendered I was in grade school, junior high and then high school enormously intensified the oppression of the gender assignment. And puberty brought the realization that I was attracted to other male bodies. In junior high and high school, English class and orchestra and chamber orchestra provided refuge from the generally oppressive school environment, gym class above all. My brother and I were placed in the advance placement classes, and we had some of the best teachers in our public schools because of that. My high school English teacher Miss Riley was the teacher I remember with the most fondness; in her class, we read English and American literature from William Shakespeare to Richard Brinsley Sheridan to Henry David Thoreau and it opened up a whole new world to me. Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” inspired the Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—both of them lifelong sources of inspiration for me. In “Walden,” Thoreau wrote, “The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now…” That passage became a kind of literary and philosophical North Star for me, all the more so as I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod in which I was raised, especially after the synod (the largest conservative Lutheran sub-denomination in the United States) was taken over by its fundamentalist wing around the time of my confirmation. I had never known any other home other than the house I grew up in, but just before turning 18, I left that house, never again to live there. Including the orphanage in Seoul from which I was adopted and the house in Milwaukee, I have lived in 25 different places in 13 different cities (Seoul, Milwaukee, Madison, London, Chicago, Champaign-Urbana, Berlin, Regensburg, Brussels, Paris, Lake Forest, and New York—Staten Island and then Queens) in six different countries (Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, and France) on three different continents (Asia, North America, and Europe). With each move came a subtle shift in my understanding of home and homeland. Milwaukee, my childhood home, was a working-class city of beer, bratwurst and bowling with a small town feel, despite its one and a half million residents. For the first three years of my adulthood, Madison would be home. Madison, the "Berkeley of the Midwest" and the center of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era, had a small but growing gay community when I first arrived in 1978. The Gay Center in the basement of a church on campus would be the site of my first coming out, as a gay male in my first semester at the University of Wisconsin. London represented the next shift in venue and identity and during my two years there, I first went out publicly dressed as a woman; it was the most liberating experience of my life. For the first time in my life, I was presenting myself as I saw myself to be. Despite my nervousness and to my surprise, I encountered few problems. At the same time that I was exploring my gender identity in public for the first time, my two years in London provided the opportunity to reconsider my national identity. I moved to Chicago in October 1983 and entered a career in public relations, but helping large corporations enhance their public image did not give me a sense of fulfillment, and so I decided to go back to graduate school to pursue a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. When I finished my dissertation in December 1993, I discovered Foucault while taking a graduate seminar in political theory. Reading the work of this radical gay French theorist helped me rethink my lifelong identity complex. I had labored for years under the feeling that I was a "fake Korean," unable to live up to the expectations of others. In light of my reading of Foucault and other theorists, I came to understand that the pursuit of—or flight from—"Korean-ness" was doomed to failure from the start, since there was no "essence" of "Korean-ness" to pursue. I came to see myself as having a distinct identity as a Korean adoptee, neither ethnically Korean in the way that Koreans or recent Korean immigrants were nor even Korean American in the way that U.S.-born, English-speaking Korean Americans were. I have come to understand that I am not a "fake Korean" but rather a real Korean adoptee; above all, I am the real "me." And I no longer feel any need to apologize for my personal history or for a lack of Korean language proficiency. I can now locate "homeland" in a way that does not diminish my own sense of wholeness or authenticity. Becoming involved with the growing community of adult Korean adoptees has also been helpful in coming to terms with my identity as a transracial intercountry adoptee. Just as I came to reject the self-imposed label of "fake Korean" in favor of an accepting myself as Korean adoptee, I also came to understand transgender as distinct form of gender identity that challenged the sex/gender binary of "man/woman." I would eventually come to call myself a "male-bodied woman," a concept radical even within the transgender community, because I reject the assumption that the presence or absence of the penis determines my gender or gender identity. Addressing multiple oppressions has been challenging, of course; but being nested in multiple communities has also enabled me to engage in intersectional analysis not only through academic discourse and writing but also through lived experience and through a process of thinking through what it means to be an openly transgendered woman of Korean birth and American adoption in daily life. Ironically enough, being a member of multiple marginal communities has helped me see the striking parallels as well as the significant differences between oppression based on race, ethnicity and national origin on the one hand and sexual orientation and gender identity and expression on the other. At the same time, I have seen the pitfalls of projecting one’s own identity and experiences onto others as is so common in both the transgender community and the Korean adoptee community; to be an effective activist and advocate, it is important to be able to understand one’s own lived experience and speak from it while at the same time understanding and articulating the diversity of identity and experience in the marginalized communities of which one is a member. In fact, my move to Queens, New York in 1997 corresponded with the end of my academic career and the beginning of my activism and advocacy work in New York as well as my coming out as an openly transgendered woman. In January 1997, I worked with other Queens activists to co-found Queens Pride House, a small LGBT community center in the borough. In February 1997, I joined with other queer Koreans to co-found Iban/Queer Koreans of New York. And in June 1998, I worked with other transgender activists to co-found the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA). I now see myself as a transgendered Asian-American woman with a distinct identity as a Korean adoptee. I have gone from growing up in an all-white neighborhood on the south side of Milwaukee to living up in Jackson Heights, which one demographer determined to be the most demographically diverse spot on earth; I am now truly at home living at the epicenter of global migration. While I am not a conventional "immigrant," having come to the United States as an infant, I have in an important sense experienced multiple migrations across race, sexuality and gender as well as across multiple national boundaries and linguistic communities. And I am still inspired by the wisdom of Henry David Thoreau, nowhere more so than by the great New England Transcendentalist’s conclusion to “Walden”: “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings…” I have abjured a cabin passage below and have instead gone before the mast upon the deck of the world; I can now see the moonlight amid the mountains. Pauline Park is the chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) and president of the board of directors of Queens Pride House. She led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in 2012. Park has written and spoken widely on issues of race and nationality as well as LGBT identity.

Reposted from The Korea Times This is the 13th article in an adoption series. Some adoptees have echoed the previous article’s question, “What is the real reason this country cannot protect its own children?” To elaborate on this inquiry requires that the series broach another question: Is this country incapable of offering such protection, or is it resisting efforts to do so and refusing to take responsibility? Shifting away from the individual experiences of adoptees and beginning to address the state’s accountability is an important step in moving forward to rectify the “right of origin” for adoptees. — E.D. If, as the dominant narrative claims, transnational adoption is about rescuing war orphans, then the surge in inter-country adoption in the 1960s unravels such assertions. So let us drop the pretext of war orphans as an impetus. What about “economic” or “social” orphans? Then we must ask how poor is poor enough to warrant casting children from their own country on a massive scale with such persistence. As this series explored earlier, the immigration laws of the receiving countries spurred the trend of adopting foreign babies by employing an array of weak regulations that facilitated inter-country adoptions. Concurrently, Korea (later followed by other sending countries) responded by initiating corresponding measures to move children abroad. The “pulling” effect from the receiving countries’ legislation, coupled with the favorable “pushing” effect from Korea’s laws and inter-country adoption system, explains the reason for the sharp increase in the graph. Moreover, relevant global statistics and evidence reveal that transnational adoption stemmed from deliberate policy decisions of political leaders rather than from the consequences of external factors. This phenomenon is evident in the development of the Korean transnational adoption program that originated in the aftermath of the Korean War (1950-53). Although the government barely functioned enough to perform even the most basic tasks, it still managed to institute a program that targeted mixed-race children to send abroad for adoption. It began by issuing a presidential emergency order to permit transnational adoption, then established a government affiliated agency specifically dedicated to fulfilling the aims of this order. Mixed-race children fathered by foreign soldiers of the allied forces were tracked down, and their families solicited to place the children for overseas adoption. Unlike what many may assume, the majority of these children were living with their families not residing in orphanages. From 1955 to 1966, the number of children sent away reached 5,000, which attests to the priority this order occupied on the country’s policy agenda. The period of 1961-1979 served as a particularly crucial period for the systemization and entrenchment of inter-country adoption in Korea. During these two decades, the government enacted a legal framework exclusive to such adoptions, instituted specialized agencies to facilitate and perform adoptions, and devised a revenue scheme. It was not coincidental that the government took these measures after Korea’s first military coup d’etat in 1961. Legislative measure In 1961, General Park Chung-hee led a successful coup and founded a provisional body called the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, which he led as the chairman. The council wielded overarching power over the legislative, administrative and judicial bodies of Korea. While unconstitutional and autocratic, it enacted many of the fundamental laws that remain to this day. Until that point, most of the modern legal system remained underdeveloped and fragmented under Korea’s first government, which began in 1948. This council passed many basic laws without any parliamentary discussions or democratic procedures. The Orphan Adoption Special Procedure Act is a notable example. The Act derives neither from Korea’s traditional laws nor from any other country’s legislation. Instead, it was a product designed with primary economic aims. This intention is evident with the government mentioning that “sending orphans overseas is killing two birds with one stone since it brings 130 dollars per person [which was also the per capita income of that time] and saves welfare costs on the housing of orphans at the same time” (1965 National Assembly minutes). In other words, Korea’s inter-country adoption policy had a dual purpose—to simultaneously generate revenue while relieving the national budget of child welfare expenses. Infrastructure building With these aims in mind, the government introduced the necessary statutes and infrastructure to systematize the placement of children for overseas adoption. It authorized four agencies to carry out these tasks. Each of them signed deals with partner agencies in the receiving countries. This configuration set a clear division of labor with the agencies in the receiving countries overseeing duties related to prospective adoptive parents while the agencies in Korea managed those tasks related to adoptable babies. To ensure they had sufficient capacity, the Korean agencies secured control of a wide variety of childcare options, including orphanages, foster homes, and in-house facilities. Ironically, these arrangements would prove to be a major obstacle for the Korean government when it attempted to redirect its policy direction decades later. The provision of alternative forms of care for newborn babies has historically been concentrated under the control of the adoption agencies. Thus, the country never developed any substantial policies or programs to protect its own children by competent authorities. Consequently, the basic infrastructure of protecting and caring for babies remains in the hands of private bodies. Revenue scheme of private adoption agencies Though the adoption agencies proclaim themselves as child welfare organizations, the business of inter-country adoption is not connected to the public welfare system. Instead, it relies solely on the fees received from foreign adoptive parents. From the very beginning, this scheme was guaranteed by the laws and regulations on orphan adoption. To this day, it remains to be seen whether any competent authority of the Korean government has ever undertaken a comprehensive audit into the finances of the inter-country adoption business of any of the agencies. Essentially, the 1960s marks the dawn of the worldwide spread of global orphan adoption. During this early era, eleven countries (the U.S., France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, and Italy) received nearly 60,000 Korean children. While the number of sending countries was less than 20, Korea constituted 50% to 70% of the total number of transnational adoptions. Returning to the original question posed in this article, what is the real reason for the current situation? The lack of capacity or the resistance to take responsibility? I would suggest both. These two factors reinforced each other as history developed, and as we shall see, this series will continue to examine other historical events to learn lessons and devise better solutions for the future. Cover photo: gettyimagesbank

Reposted from The Korea Times This article is the seventh in a series about Koreans adopted abroad. Apparently, many Koreans never expected that the children they 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. From early 2000, Korea witnessed the permanent return of children it had once sent to the U.S. for adoption. Unlike adoptees visiting on motherland tours, these individuals had been deported by the U.S. after committing petty crimes. Despite having grown up in the U.S., they had never acquired American citizenship and therefore were regarded as foreign criminals since their Korean nationality remained intact. These cases have had tragic consequences. In 2011, Philip Clay, born Kim Sang-pil in the 1970s, suffered such a fate. Like the other deportees, his adoption was never finalized, and he failed to acquire U.S. citizenship. After a long struggle to adjust to Korea, he committed suicide in 2017. While Clay had Korean citizenship, his adoption should have guaranteed him U.S. nationality. Adoption is meant to serve as a permanent and secure solution for children deprived of parental care, and becoming a national of the receiving country represents a fundamental basis for achieving such security. While notions of nationality had once been regarded as the rights of a country to secure resources for conscription, mobilization, and taxation, they eventually shifted after World War II. With the development of human rights norms under the United Nations, states had a duty to protect the rights of their citizens; thus, the right to nationality entitles a person to rights. In other words, citizenship represents the right to have rights. When children are born, they must be registered immediately after birth and acquire the nationality of a country so that they may be treated as people before the law and receive equal protection. The failure of some Korean adoptees to obtain the citizenship of their receiving country raises a fundamental question—what happens to the nationality of children when they are adopted to other countries? Transnational adoption illustrates the phenomenon of middle-class parents from the Global North adopting babies from the Global South. It involves an immigration procedure solely for the adoptee. By severing the child’s ties with the birth family, with the country of origin, and with the original nationality, the immigration procedures of the receiving country permit that child to enter for the purpose of becoming a citizen. The significance of acquiring the receiving country’s nationality is further reinforced in international legal frameworks on adoption and child protection. As the safety and welfare of a child remain most vulnerable to harm while crossing national borders, the receiving country bears the responsibility for protection of that child. The European Convention on the Adoption of Children, established in 1967, explicitly prescribes that “[if] the adopted child does not have […] the same nationality as the adopter […], the [country] of which the adopter(s) are nationals shall facilitate the acquisition of its nationality by the child.” Accordingly, transnational adoption procedures call for the child to obtain the citizenship of the receiving country. Failing to do so at the time of adoption leaves the child exposed to harm and instability. One of the worst consequences of this is deportation to the state of origin, as was Philip Clay’s case. Under the U.S. federal system, state courts deal with adoption decree matters while the federal government has authority over immigration and naturalization procedures. Due to these separated systems, acquisition of citizenship was not automatic upon the finalization of the adoption. It was possible for children entering the U.S. for adoption by U.S. citizens to have either one or both of these procedures uncompleted. One may ask, “What happens to the child’s South Korean nationality?” Children adopted from South Korea crossed the border with Korean nationality while bearing a Korean passport. Until the child acquired the nationality of the receiving country, that child maintained Korean nationality. International legal frameworks do not require that transnational adoption cancels the person’s original nationality. Some countries permit dual nationality, and matters of citizenship vary across countries. However, in the adoption arrangements between the U.S. and Korea, priority should have been placed on ensuring that the child acquired the nationality of the receiving country as this is a basic safeguard for adoptees. In addition to the separate systems handling naturalization and adoption matters in the U.S., South Korea’s Nationality Act adds a further complication. It prohibits dual citizenship, except in special cases. The voluntary acquisition of another country’s citizenship by a Korean citizen automatically cancels that person’s Korean nationality. This legal measure has been applied since the beginning of Korea’s transnational adoption program. Korean law imposed a duty on adoption agencies to report to the Ministry of Justice the child’s acquisition of the adoptive country’s nationality. Once the ministry receives this notice, it publishes the name of the child in the official gazette to ensure the automatic cancellation of that child’s nationality. Despite having such procedures to verify whether a child has become a citizen of the adoptive country, there remains a lack of evidence that those involved—the government, adoption agencies, and public organizations—whether in South Korea or in the U.S., gave due attention to monitoring and confirming the naturalization of adopted children. As of 2018, it’s been reported that the acquisition of American citizenship for over 18,000 people adopted by families in the U.S. cannot be verified. This negligence testifies to six decades of illicit and unethical adoption practices between Korea and the U.S. Transnational adoption should not be considered an act of charity determined by private organizations. It has a lifelong impact on the human rights of adoptees, as well as their families. When such rights are violated at the earliest stages of people’s lives, the impact reverberates throughout the rest of their lives. Click here to read the sixth article of this series, "How falsified adoption papers make it even more difficult to search for my origin" by Rebecca Kimmel. Cover photo: gettyimagesbank

Reposted from The Korea Times This is the 12th article in an adoption series. So far, this series has covered the right to origin of adoptees from Korea. The second phase of the series will discuss the historical development of the politics surrounding inter-country adoption with an aim to move beyond those sad stories of the past often depicted in the media. Instead, the next set of articles will illustrate how the system of inter-country adoption that led to such stories remains to this day and continues to govern the politics of adoption. — E.D. History is the sum of the choices that we, as a nation, have made thus far. This graph shows the number of children who were born in this country but left shortly after birth (more than 90 percent were under the age of 1) to become the sons and daughters of families in Western countries. Each dot on the graph represents human beings cast out of the protection of this nation. While more than 80 countries throughout the world have sent their children overseas for adoption, Korea’s experience remains noteworthy. It began as the birthplace of inter-country “orphan” adoption in 1953 and has persisted in engaging in the practice. This nearly seven decade–long history of exporting children is not found anywhere else in the world and has led people both inside and outside the country to ask, “Why can’t this country stop this practice despite its economic achievements and progress?” The most frequent reply is that Korean inter-country adoption is a product of the Korean War and the stigmatization of unwed mothers. However, when we look at the graph, the period in which Korea sent the most children abroad was not in the aftermath of the Korean War, but during a time of prosperity when it recorded two-digit annual economic growth. This leaves the excuse of discrimination against unwed mothers, which allows Korea to hide behind vulnerable women while simultaneously using society’s disapproval as justification for sending children away. Instead of confronting such intolerance, blame continues to be cast on these mothers as the “shame of the family and the nation.” Taking a closer look at the graph, the small boxes containing different years capture major regime changes throughout Korean history, while the shaded areas from 1960 to 1993 depict periods of military authoritarian regimes. The unshaded section after democratization in 1993 represents the current system in which presidents serve five-year terms. A noticeable pattern in the shaded areas is that the curve dramatically shifts while making smaller incremental changes in the '90s. One may surmise from this trend that the graph reveals that the dictators were the villains of adoption politics; however, the truth is that every leader has participated in the systematic movement of children for inter-country adoption by making choices based on their interests. In other words, each turn of the curve represents a political decision based on each regimes’ economic interests rather than a determination of special protection for children. Research by British scholar Peter Selman helps provide an objective understanding. His work has demonstrated that in 2003, the global number of inter-country adoptions peaked. At the time, Korea ranked fourth in the top five states of origin, alongside China, Russia and Guatemala, with an adoption rate of 7.9 per 10,000 head of population under the age of 5. Additionally, when examining Korea’s per 1,000 live births, we can find that babies at a rate of 4.1 were sent out of the country. While these figures may not have drawn much attention within Korea, the country’s practices have been conspicuous enough to attract international scholars’ scrutiny. Turning our attention to the U.S. State Department’s annual inter-country adoption statistics, we can see that in 2016, families in the U.S. adopted 5,372 children from 91 countries. Among those countries, only 12 sent more than 100 children to the U.S. Six of these countries have ratified the Hague Inter-country Adoption Convention, which provides a minimum set of international standards for the safety and protection of children. Of the six that haven’t ratified it, Korea ranked third in terms of inter-country adoptions, having sent 260 children to the U.S. that year. Scholars tend to attribute poverty and high birthrates as prominent factors in whether a country chooses to practice inter-country adoption. However, closer examination of the actual data does not support such claims. Major sending countries are not as poor as often portrayed. South Korea is perhaps the most evident example with a GDP that rivals some of the European receiving countries. In terms of birthrate, the rates of the top five sending countries do not exceed those of the top five receiving countries. In particular, Korea continues to record the world’s lowest birthrate. Today, matters surrounding inter-country adoption extend beyond the practices of sending children abroad and underpin core issues around the safety and protection of all children born in this country. Moreover, the threats and vulnerability that force families to give up their children to private agencies also harm the soil of society in which we raise our children. Therefore, it is time to begin asking the right question: What is the real reason this country cannot protect its own children? The heart of the answer lies within our own history, and we must confront this to reconcile our present and future for the coming generations. Accordingly, this series aims to explore the past with adoptees and readers. The former may find the truth in this journey to explore their origins, while the latter may gain a better understanding of this global phenomenon of inter-country adoption that spans across 100 countries. Click here to read the tenth article of this series, "I’ve been searching since I was lost" by Christine Pennell. Cover photo: gettyimagesbank

Reposted from The Korea Times This article is the ninth 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. The scale and persistence with which Korea has historically exported its children remain unmatched by any other country in the world to this day. Over nearly seven decades, this country has sent away over 200,000 children. One major means that enabled such a large-scale phenomenon was the use of “proxy adoption.” “Proxy” is a general term that refers to the authority a person can grant to another party to execute legal activities on his or her behalf. While such a delegation of power serves a valuable function, its use should not be so limitless that it extends to the adoption of children. Instead, adoption must constitute careful legal processes that establish ties between the adoptive parents and the child, while protecting the best interests of that child. However, proxy adoptions have historically undermined such interests and violated children’s rights. When transnational adoption first emerged after World War II, American military personnel began returning to the U.S. with war orphans they had adopted while stationed in Europe. To leave with the child, the prospective adoptive parent first filed for and completed the adoption according to the court and legislation of that child’s country. Once in the U.S., the parents then re-adopted the child according to the relevant state court. As the U.S. military withdrew from Europe, this movement of European children to the U.S. decreased. The second wave of child migration emerged after the Korean War in 1953. At that time, Harry Holt devised a novel means of quickly transferring Korean children to American families. He referred to this method as “proxy adoption,” and argued that Americans willing to accept Korean orphans lacked the time and resources to visit Korea for adoption. Therefore, he acted as their proxy to bring those children to the U.S. U.S. legislation in the 1950s, specifically the Refugee Relief Act, temporarily granted the immigration of Korean War (1950-53) orphans via proxy adoption. While representing an unprecedented measure to facilitate adoption for U.S. citizens, it also created a serious loophole that threatened the safety of children. This danger did not escape the attention of U.S. social welfare professionals, who criticized Holt’s adoption practices as unprofessional and reckless. With the removal of the term “proxy adoption” from U.S. law, many scholars assumed that the practice had ceased. On the contrary, proxy adoptions were embedded and further reinforced by Korean law. Rather than serving as a temporary emergency measure to rescue war orphans, this practice became a permanent and recognized means of transferring Korean children overseas for adoption. In 1961, Korea enacted a new law to establish a specialized procedure for orphan adoption. One of the provisions provided that foreign nationals who sought to adopt Korean orphans could employ an agency to act as a representative for the adoption procedure in Korea. Since South Korean law did not prescribe any judicial or public procedure for child adoption, the first time foreign national adoptive parents met their child was at the local airport in the receiving country. The proxy adoptions performed by specialized agencies, which had been contracted out in Korea and in the receiving countries, benefitted both the adoptive parents abroad and the agencies. This arrangement allowed adoptive parents to avoid lengthy trips to Korea while dealing with only a few intermediaries that could handle all aspects of the adoption. These agencies did everything from locating a baby for adoption to handling the emigration and immigration procedures of both countries, to dealing with state court processes. As transnational adoption remained outside of Korea’s public child welfare system and operated as a private business, agencies wielded immense control, which enabled them to process such a large number of children for adoption. In the case of adoptions to the United States, the practice of proxy adoptions connects directly with the IR-4 visa of U.S. immigration law. Since a proxy adoption does not require adoptive parents to visit the state of origin, the child crosses national borders without having established family ties with the adoptive parents. The IR-4 visa stops short of granting citizenship and only guarantees the child’s entry into the U.S., his or her custody by the prospective adoptive parents, and permanent resident status. In other words, the IR-4 visa process means that the actual adoption procedure begins after the child arrives in the U.S. Once the child has become a member of the American family by the relevant state court’s decree, then that child may proceed to the naturalization process for U.S. citizenship. Whether these procedures are in actuality completed has relied entirely on the ‘goodwill’ of adoptive parents, rather than on any duty imposed by a public authority. Until 2012, nearly all Korean children were adopted to the U.S. through the IR-4 visa program, and thus, the acquisition of citizenship for more than 18,000 adoptees cannot be verified. While this situation does not mean they all lack citizenship, it does represent the vulnerability that adoptees have been exposed to through unethical practices. Adoptees’ vulnerability is evident in the cases of adoptees deported from the U.S. While some of them had their adoptions finalized, and for whatever reasons, never acquired nationality, others never had their adoption completed, let alone gained citizenship. The 2000 Child Citizenship Act (CCA) in the U.S. has been touted as a solution that grants automatic citizenship to transnationally adopted Americans. However, it does not apply to those who were over the age of 18 on Feb. 27, 2001, and consequently, falls short of helping those adopted during the ’70s and early ’80s, which accounts for the majority of Korean adoptees. The CCA also stipulates that family ties between the parents and the child must be established before the child enters the U.S. Before the introduction of court adoption orders in Korea in 2012, satisfying this requirement hadn’t been possible for Korean children, which is why Korean children received the IR-4 visa. To remedy the age limit of the CCA, a new bill, the Adoption Citizenship Act (ACA), is being pursued in the U.S. Congress. However, even if the ACA can amend any loopholes related to age limits, the inherent flaw and legacy of the IR-4 visa program remain unresolved. Click here to read the eighth article of this series, "The truth about our ‘abandonment’ and reclaiming our Korean identity" by Kara Bos. Cover photo: gettyimagesbank

Reposted from The Korea Times This article is the fifth in a series about Koreans adopted abroad. Apparently, many Koreans never expected that the children who were sent away via adoption would return as adults demanding answers to questions. However, thousands of adoptees visit Korea each year. Once they rediscover this country, it becomes a turning point in their lives. We should embrace dialogue with adoptees to discover the path to recovering our collective humanity. — E.D. Privatization has been one of the most powerful and worst legacies of the Korean adoption system, continuing to affect the lives of adoptees in the present. In general, “privatization” refers to the process of moving something from the public sector to the private sector, mainly for the supposed purposes of promoting efficiency and lowering bureaucratic costs. However, not everything can be privatized. Essential government functions, such as national security, the police, or firefighters are not considered to be within the realm of privatization. Child protection and adoption should also be considered in the same category as those essential public functions. In South Korea, adoption has remained in the private realm. Actually, it may be inappropriate to say that it was “privatized,” since it was a private business from the very beginning and has never been included in the public welfare system. Orphanages and transnational adoption emerged for the first time in Korean history in the aftermath of the Korean War, and were fueled by an influx of foreign aid. The concept of “child welfare” in Korea was brought to Korea by private organizations funded by foreign charities and has been left in their hands. “An adoption shall be valid only if it is granted by a judicial or administrative authority.” This statement is the first essential provision of the European Convention on the Adoption of Children, established in 1967. Thus, the fact that the concept of private adoption was prohibited was an international norm as early as the 1960s. What does the term “private adoption” mean? The term means an adoption that occurred without the intervention of public authorities, such as the courts. Parents should not be allowed to give up their own children for adoption to another person or to a private entity. People should not be able to give and take babies, no matter what the intention. Why? Because it is too dangerous for the life, security, and safety of the concerned child. However small they may be, they are entitled to human rights and it is the state’s obligation to protect them. By allowing adoption to remain in the private realm, Korea’s adoption laws have given private agencies absolute and comprehensive power over a child once he or she is given up to the adoption agency. In my previous article, I explained the procedure of how children have become legally orphaned. Private entities have been endowed with the power to create new identities for people. Those identities can be fake or distorted. Adopted children’s identities have been switched with that of other children. Such corruption is possible because it occurred outside of the scrutiny of public authorities. If such acts were committed by individual brokers or by intermediaries in one of the countries notorious for exporting orphans, it would be criticized for laundering children or fall under suspicion of human trafficking. However, the governments of Western countries receiving the orphans, which should also bear co-responsibility in the process of transnational adoption, publicly acknowledge that they trust Korean adoption agencies’ practices as being transparent and ethical and keep on receiving babies through them. In South Korea, it is against the law to engage in the transnational adoption business without permission, and there have been only three or four agencies that acquired the authorization from the government. The same law granted the agencies to receive adoption fees from foreign adoptive parents. Their revenue structure depends on the fees. So the number of children adopted decides the amount of revenue of those agencies. Seeing the National Assembly’s Minutes of the Health and Welfare Committee in 1965, Korea decided to allow the adoption agencies to receive fees from foreign adoptive parents, by stating that “…in the process of carrying out orphan adoption to receiving countries, we can acquire about 130 dollars per person when we send them overseas and also save (welfare) costs on housing orphans at the same time. It is like killing two birds with one stone.” Some may argue that we could not help giving up children at the time, because we were war victims and poor. Thus, we overlooked the export of babies with the excuse that it was being done to save war orphans. However, what would these same people say to the fact that the philosophy and scheme of transnational adoption has not changed even in the present day? This country is still outsourcing child welfare to private entities and evading its responsibility to protect minors. In 2014, the government of Sweden, which has adopted almost 10,000 babies from Korea for decades, conducted an on-site assessment of adoption fees. According to their report, the official fee (not including other costs and donations) that Swedish parents pay to adopt a Korean child is 221,526 Krona (about 30,000,000 won). This amount is paid to the Swedish adoption agency. The portion that goes to the Korean adoption agency is 143,816 Krona. The report said that most of the amount paid to the Korean counterpart agency is accounted for as the “child protection cost.” The report shows that this country still relies on foreign adoptive parents for the protection cost of the Korean children. It is evident that both the adoption agencies and the Swedish government are well aware that these children were under the control of private businesses, and not under the public child protection system. Since adoption procedures were privatized, adoptees’ identities have been privatized too. Adoptees’ birth records are considered the private possessions of those organizations. In order to do a search into the birth family or verify their true identity, adoptees are subjected to the so-called “post-adoption services” of private organizations. In many cases, access to adoption documents is denied or restricted by the arbitrary and inconsistent decisions of these agencies. If an adoptee chooses to disagree with the non-disclosure decision or questions the truthfulness of the files, there is no appropriate method of appealing or seeking mediation. Justice delayed is justice denied. Since justice has been delayed for so long in adoption, the right to know one’s identity is being denied. The Korean adoption system must not be allowed to be driven by profit. People’s identities should not be privatized either. If human rights violations are caused by legislation, the government has an obligation to change the law. The receiving countries, too, must undertake their co-responsibility to restore their citizens’ rights to knowing their identities. Click here to read the fourth article of this series, "An Adoptee’s Missing Family" by Tanya Elisabeth Bley. Cover photo: gettyimagesbank

Reposted from The Korea Times “Dialogues with Adoptees,” a weekly column series originally published in The Korea Times, digs into the history and systemic injustice of intercountry adoption by South Korea through the sharing of adoptees’ voices. This series also resonates with those in the larger Asian diaspora, regardless of their countries of origin, since this issue of intercountry adoption encompasses the lives and rights of all adoptees as an important human rights area for all to understand. Over the next 15 weeks, we have the pleasure of being able to repost the writings of Dr. Kyung-eun Lee with links to the originally published pieces by various adoptees with The Korea Times. We hope that by sharing Dr. Lee’s and others stories, our TUA community may also be inspired to share their own voices in this dialogue. This article is the first 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. If you are from South Korea and have had the opportunity to live and work in either the U.S. or in a Western European country, you may have come across a situation where someone says to you, “Oh, I have a friend whose brother/sister was adopted from Korea,” or alternatively, “Do you know that our boss/friend has adopted a child from Korea?” Or you may have approached a person whom you thought was a native Korean, but after starting a conversation, discovered that this person has a very Western family name and has said to you, “Oh, I am adopted." In English-language literature, there are many books written on the subject of adoption, encompassing such diverse topics as: individual memoirs by adoptees or adoptive parents, investigative reports on unlawful and unethical adoption practices, birth family search stories, and so on. Many of the authors of such books are of Korean ethnicity. In Western countries, there are many stories that connect Korea to the narrative of transnational adoption. Why? Because Korea is the country that has sent the largest number of children out of the country for adoption. The length of the period in which Korea has been involved in transnational adoption is more than 68 years and the total number of adoptees is estimated to be over 200,000. It is a singular record in the world history of adoption. However, these facts are hardly known to ordinary people in Korea. It is partly because most adoptees do not physically live in Korea, and they are rendered invisible and inaudible within Korean society. It is also partly because Korean society turns a blind eye and deaf ear to the uncomfortable truths of its adoption history, for fear of being labeled a “baby exporting country.” Here’s a story about what occurred at an International Gathering of Korean Adoptees event held in Seoul in the early 2000s. The organizing committee invited Korean government officials to the gathering, and one of them attended, met with the participants who had flown thousands of miles to the meeting, then asked the assembled adoptees, “Why are you coming back? We sent you abroad wishing you well, so why are you coming back to this country?” This episode frankly revealed the mindset of Korean policymakers. Korea’s adoption system was set up to facilitate the sending of children out of the country. This goal has been deeply and long-embedded within the legal framework and government system. In short, Korea had been unable to anticipate that the children it sent out would return to this country when they became adults. Nothing was set up to meet the needs of adult adoptees as they returned to their country of origin. Why do adoptees return? Because it is human nature to seek the origin of their existence. Most human stories of minority groups in various parts of the world begin with the firm understanding of their own origins and identities. This grounding in their roots is necessary for diversity to flourish in their own lives. From the late 1990s, the Korean government began to provide adoptees with programs such as motherland tours, Korean culture camps, and Korean language programs. However, the government did not intend to begin the dialogue with adoptees for the purpose of mutual understanding, with a genuine heart and a serious mind. For more than six decades, Korea has been sacrificing the norms of essential human rights in order to facilitate the adoption business and to keep adoption within the private realm and outside of the provenance of government responsibility. It will not be an easy task to overcome such a legacy. If we are really determined to fix the issues at hand, we should confront the truth—however uncomfortable it may be. In many surveys regarding the policy needs of adoptees, the right to know one’s origin was selected as the highest priority. The origin of a human being encompasses one’s true family name, one’s own name, birthdate, and birth place, as well as one’s nationality, ethnic background, race, culture and language. There are of course other factors. The knowledge of one’s origin is the source of one’s sense of belonging and the foundation for establishing one’s identity. People build their life upon the fundamental foundation of this sense of belonging and upon knowing their identity. I had also been one of the people who, before I talked with adoptees, did not understand that this knowledge of one’s origin is a fundamental human right, nor why it is so important. Adoptees, especially from Korea, are deprived of the means of knowing their true identity. Through the systemic adoption procedures of this country, the government deliberately erased the biological family relationships and original names of the children, and issued false birth certificates classifying children as abandoned orphans, omitting any identity of their parents. Local government officials even signed papers that certified that the child was a “legal orphan,” so that he or she could be adopted abroad. These false papers were the essential visa documents for Korean children to facilitate their immigration to Western countries. Any human being has the right to know where they came from. One’s identity is not just a crisis that a person undergoes in adolescence, but is a lifelong desire that cannot be satisfied by anything else. Growing up with a happy adoptive family or establishing one’s own family are not replacements for an adoptee’s right to knowledge of their origin. In this series of the dialogues between adoptees and Korean society, we are going to discuss the elements of origin, for example: one’s birth parents and family, one’s name, nationality, birthplace, language, culture, food, etc. In searching for the meaning of one’s true identity and origin, we may be able to understand better why this right is so important for Korean adoptees. Why do we need such dialogues? Because we are human, after all. Lee Kyung-eun (Ph.D. in law) is director of Human Rights Beyond Borders and author of the Korean-language book “The Children-selling Country” and English book “The Global Orphan Adoption System; South Korea’s Impact on Its Origin and Development.” Cover photo: gettyimagesbank

Reposted from The Korea Times This article is the first 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. Sun Hee Engelstoft, a movie director who is a Korean Danish adoptee, recently released in Korea a documentary film called “Forget Me Not.” Engelstoft believes she knows her mother’s name, and the circumstances of her relinquishment. Despite the likely true story about her birth, her official Korean birth registration document indicates that she was an “orphan” who was found “abandoned.” Normally, Koreans can easily check their birth registration document through the website of the Supreme Court, which contains the name, birth date, address of the birth place, as well as the name and identification number of the parent(s). But almost all Korean adoptees were given a so-called “orphan hojuk” (until 2012), a one-person document which lists the orphan as the head of her/his own family, and contains only the name of the child and birth date, plus the address of the Korean adoption agency. The orphan hojuk does not contain the birth parents’ names or any biographical information. There are two myths which have sustained the system of transnational adoption for so long here. One is that certain parents (i.e., unwed mothers) are not fit to raise their own children, and the other is that orphans are “saved” by adoption. Even if the parents were unmarried, if at least one of the parents is known, the child still has a living parent and may not be considered a true “orphan.” Why were all children believed to be “orphans”? To explain and understand this discrepancy, people have devised concepts and terms such as “economic orphan” or “social orphan.” The truth is that children were legally orphaned for the purpose of transnational adoption through the official government processes of the state of origin (Korea) and of the Western adoptive countries (primarily the U.S., Australia, and West European countries). Surprisingly, “orphan” is a legal term. In the immigration law of the receiving country (I will take the U.S. as an example; however, other European receiving countries likely used the same system because Korean adoption agencies provided the same documents to those countries), the status of “orphan” was stipulated as an immigration qualification, such that Western citizens could bring orphan(s) into the country for the purpose of adoption starting in 1961. In response to this measure, in the same year, Korea enacted a new law called the “Orphan Adoption Special Procedure Act,” which lifted the restrictions of its traditional adoption, or “yang ja,” system to facilitate the process in cases where a foreigner wanted to adopt Korean orphans. This is the beginning of the modern adoption system for children in Korea. Transnational adoption is not only a matter of family relations—it also involves the immigration process of the Western countries. The immigration authorities require official documents for immigrants. U.S. law allows the definition of an “orphan” to include children not only whose parents have died, but also who have been abandoned and relinquished by single parents. Among these possible categories, Korea chose to use the definition of an “orphan” by abandonment, in order for the Korean government to provide the required documents for immigration. Why? I assume that it was because this was the easiest route from the perspective of the public officials at that time. They may not have desired to undertake the long and winding legislative reform to embrace the modern adoption system for protection of the child into its general Family Law. Instead, they may have chosen the easiest way to have children recognized as “orphans.” So, the relevant laws have been providing the legal framework and procedure by which a child could be recognized as abandoned by the public authority. However, even this procedure was just nominal, and if the heads of orphanages or adoption agencies reported to the relevant district offices of the local government that a child was found “abandoned,” then the issuance of an orphan hojuk was almost automatically processed. In short, the state has deliberately and systematically hidden and erased the real identities of children. As a direct consequence, for all Korean adoptees, it is fundamentally impossible to know their real origin through the official document which was provided by both the Korean and Western governments when they were born and subsequently moved across borders. Consequently, so many adoptees have to undergo a harsh and often futile birth family search process by relying on the “unofficial” and presumably “private” documents kept under lock and key inside the adoption agencies, or alternately through DNA testing. Only with great effort and sparse luck are adoptees ever able to trace their true origins. The Korean government officially acknowledged that more than 90 percent of the transnational adoptions involved children of unwed mothers. Official birth reports statistics, which began to be reported in 1976, show that until 2011 (for 35 years), the number of children reported as being found abandoned stood at 143,763. During the same period, the number of transnational adoption stood at 133,531. A whopping 92.8 percent of children reported as being “found abandoned” during this period were sent overseas. The correlation of these statistics is a chilling manifestation of the link between “abandonment” and transnational adoption. Are orphans adopted for better protection, or are they orphaned to be adopted? The prejudice against certain groups of people in society is one thing, but it is another that there existed a systemic and legal procedure which legitimized the discrimination and facilitated the social exclusion. In the latter case, the accountability of the state arises. The facts described above delineate the foundation of the argument that it is the state which has violated adoptees’ right to know their origin. What should we do to fix the current situation and to restore this right? There is no single solution. We should begin by figuring out the clearly discriminatory features. The birth records should be public information secured and governed by public authorities. In contrast to non-adopted Koreans, the true birth information of adoptees is still left in the private realm, which is considered the private possession of adoption agencies. Adoptees should be able to demand their right to access the information of identity to the government authorities. This authority must have the expertise and autonomous power to decide whether and how much of the information should be disclosed. In Korea, general birth registrations are under the control of the judicial body and the Ministry of Justice. Therefore, adoptees too should be able to knock on the doors of such authorities to request the disclosure of the information of their true identity, and to not have to deal with the private adoption agencies, which too often conceal such information by arbitrary and ungrounded decisions. Click here to read the second article of this series "Why Do Adoptees Learn Korean?" by Jonas Sang Shik Eberle. Cover photo: gettyimagesbank

Foundation 649 is a nonprofit focused on providing college scholarship opportunities to Asian American and Pacific Islander students across the nation. Scholarship applications for 2022 are now open! To apply: For more information visit their website or email team@foundation649.com.

It was an honor and privilege to get to know Linh-Dan Pham earlier last month. She is an esteemed and decorated French-Vietnamese actress, her career spanning from the Oscar-winning film "Indochine" (1992) to "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" (2005)—which earned her the César Award for Most Promising Actress—to her most recent release, "Blue Bayou" (2021) directed by Justin Chon. "Blue Bayou" (2021) follows the heart-wrenching story of Antonio, a Louisiana-raised Korean-American adoptee. His world is promptly torn apart when he finds himself facing deportation due to a legal loophole. In the midst of the chaos, he finds a grounding friendship in an enigmatic woman named Parker. “Parker is a Vietnamese refugee who arrived in America with her dad,” explains Linh-Dan Pham. “In the process of fleeing Vietnam, she lost her mom and her brother. She’s at a point, in the movie, where she’s got cancer and she doesn’t have much time to live. Meeting Antonio…somehow she has this feeling that she needs to transmit her roots and sense of family to him. So she pursues that relationship.” And pursue it she does. Parker is relentless in her presence. She shows up at just the right time in just the right place with profound words of well-earned wisdom resting on the tip of her tongue. Linh-Dan Pham’s performance is exquisitely layered, and her relationship with Antonio brings a much needed breath of fresh air from the convoluted bureaucratic struggle of his looming deportation. “I think when she meets Antonio, something kind of vibrates in her, you know?” Linh-Dan says on Antonio and Parker’s dynamic. “I think she had given up, and somehow he’s given her a last breath of life, some would say. I think that’s why she pursues the relationship. And the fact that he talks to her like a normal person. I think she feels like she’s living a little bit again, and she wants a piece of that.” Unlike Antonio, Parker has a very close relationship with her heritage. She fully embodies what it means to be a hyphenate, blending her Vietnamese and American sides seamlessly. When asked about her own French-Vietnamese background, Linh-Dan Pham said, “I was lucky enough to have parents who were always very keen on me keeping my Vietnamese roots. So as a result, we spoke Vietnamese at home, we gathered—actually what she does, what Parker does in the movie, we do. We meet up every weekend when I’m in town, we have long lunches, and someone somehow will always end up singing. If there’s a guitar, we bring out the guitar; and if there’s a karaoke machine, we’ll end up on the karaoke machine. All of this—what we have as a family, and extended family—is about transmitting your culture and who you are, and your identity. So I think, like Parker, I’m very much at peace with who I am, which is a woman with Vietnamese origins and French nationality. I think it’s a strength to know different languages and different cultures. It makes you who you are.” Now, after the movie’s release, Linh-Dan Pham reflects on what it felt like playing the role. “Because of Parker’s illness, she’s kind of accepted the unknown,” she says. “It’s really about not knowing, and I’m someone who likes to anticipate and know things. I just had to give in. It was really difficult for me. I felt super lost, you know? I was this French actress coming to Louisiana. I’d never been to New Orleans. I was dropped into that team and crew of all Americans and I was trying to find my marks, and so Justin [Chon] said to me one day, ‘Linh-Dan, just enjoy the uncertainty.’ I think that was the key to Parker, actually. And so sometimes when I’m worrying too much, I just think ‘Okay, think about Parker.’ That’s what I learned from her.” “I researched,” she continues, recalling her preparation for the role. “I read a lot of books. But also, unfortunately, I’ve had the experience of losing loved ones to cancer. For me, it was kind of a tribute to them. Everyone said, ‘Oh, but you shaved your head; what about your hair?’ But that was really the minimum I could do to honor them, the people that I loved that aren’t here and who have gone through that. That helped a lot. It changes you, the way people look at you, the way you look at people, the way you feel. Most of all, I was very worried about my American accent. I worked on that accent with a coach. It was very important for me that Parker had no ‘Asian’ accent.” With her extensive background in primarily French film, this is the first time some American viewers have heard of Linh-Dan Pham. The same can be said when the terms are reversed, when it comes to her exposure to American-based filmmakers. “First of all, I’m ashamed to say I had no clue who Justin Chon was,” Linh-Dan admits with a laugh. “He sent me this email saying, ‘I wrote this script, and I think you’d be perfect for Parker. Have a look at my two movies "Gook" and "Ms. Purple," and here’s the script.’ I was like, ‘Okay, why not.’ I watched the movies and I was like, ‘Oh my god, who is this guy? How do I not know of him?’ I didn’t have to read the script. I knew I wanted to work with him. When I did read the script, I was so moved, and I cried so much, and of course I wanted to be part of it. It was really a no-brainer. He has everything that I look for in an artist or a project. The talent, the heart. He wants to give visibility and representation to the Asian community and be inclusive. He wants to portray America. I thought that was a great endeavor and I just wanted to be part of it.” “He’s got so much energy,” she says about working with Justin Chon. “He’s amazing and talented in the sense that he wrote the script, he directs, and all of my scenes were with him. I got experience with the three facets of his talent and personality. He’s someone who’s very much in the moment. He gives so much; it was such a pleasure to be there.” "Blue Bayou" (2021) has made its way through the festival circuit to mixed reviews, and it continues to be that way in theaters. No matter what, though, Linh-Dan Pham has high hopes that the film will “shed light on what is happening in America—and around the world—for adoptees who are facing deportation, and support securing help for them.” “But also,” she continues, “I think it’s really about family. No matter where you are and who you’re with, you choose your family. I think that’s very important, to be surrounded by people you love and choose.” "Blue Bayou" (2021) is an official selection of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and is currently playing in theaters across the U.S. Cover image: Courtesy of Focus Features

On September 17, 2021, Justin Chon’s new film "Blue Bayou" was released in American theaters amidst a building tidal wave of controversy, particularly regarding Adam Crapser’s stance that the storyline was heavily based on his life without his consent. The Universal Asian stands as a balanced platform that highlights and shares the voices, work, and stories of both #importedAsians and #hyphenatedAsians without bias or prejudice toward one side or the other. This may or may not reflect the individual opinions of the team members of TUA; however, as a platform, we remain true to our mission and values. Therefore, we are—as neutrally as possible—sharing the information that has been publicly put onto social media or given directly to us by both parties to allow for each of you to reach your own conclusions. "Blue Bayou" tells the fictionalized story of a young, Asian-American man who was adopted as a child and grew up in New Orleans. After getting caught up in false police charges, he discovers through a paperwork technicality that he could be deported from the only country he has ever called home. The film is written/directed by and stars Justin Chon, and co-stars Oscar winner Alicia Vikander from "The Danish Girl." It was released in theaters in the U.S. on September 17, 2021. Official Public Statement from Adam Crapser via Facebook: Official Public Statement from Adoptees for Justice via Instagram and Facebook: Justin Chon’s Statement: “During the entire writing process I spent hundreds of hours doing research, including speaking and listening to 13 adoptees who shared their personal experiences with me. In order to respect their privacy, I agreed with their request to remain anonymous. However, nine of those adoptees believe in the film so much, they have now come forward to provide their names and issued a statement through Adoptee Advocacy in support of the film. This film is not about one person. From the onset, I did not want this film to solely reflect just one individual’s details. It’s an issue that affects thousands of adoptees in this country. My research also involved speaking with an immigration attorney who is a Korean American adoptee. It was very important for all of us to make sure the depiction of the deportation process was accurate and authentic. Every draft of the script was shared with the core adoptees and their input impacted the entire creative process. As with every film, there are always challenges and changes. I listened to the concerns raised from beginning to end, hopeful that my film could reflect the experiences that many adoptees face. The film is stronger because of everyone’s input, and I am grateful for that.I understand that much of many adoptees’ lives have been void of choice. The choice of where they would live, the choice of whom their adoptive parents were, even sometimes the choice of when or even IF they wanted to look for their birth parents. This is NOT my story nor do I claim to understand what it feels like to be an adoptee. I made this film because I became aware of an inhumane policy that needs attention. I hope that this film can continue to bring awareness to the impacted adoptees in this country.” Official Statement from members of Adoptee Advocacy: "Press Statement 9/27/2021 Statement from the Deported and Impacted Adoptee Community in Support of Blue Bayou September 27, 2021 – We the undersigned, all internationally-adopted to the US and personally impacted by the citizenship issue, would like to make this statement in support of the movie Blue Bayou and address the recent attacks against it. All of us have been deported or are living with the explicit threat of it. This movie isn’t about only one person, it is about the whole community of deported adoptees. The script is all of our stories — we see strong similarities to many of our histories: abusive families, getting in trouble with law, being deported while leaving behind small children. There are also details that resonate as belonging to several individuals among us, that help make it our personal story as well. No movie can represent all adoptees, or even all impacted adoptees, and this movie focuses on those of us who have been deported. To that end, it is a movie we all fully support. Which is why a boycott of this film by the adoptee community has been a devastating gut punch to us. We see Blue Bayou as a chance to shine a light on the injustice we have suffered, yet it is our own community that is now piling another injustice on us. We were abandoned by our country, and now we are being abandoned by people we thought were our brothers and sisters. Even worse than being abandoned, we feel we are being treated as the enemy. It is a terrible betrayal that Adoptees for Justice, which was specifically created to address the citizenship issue and support deported and impacted adoptees, would lead a campaign to boycott Blue Bayou and turn its back on us. Here are some facts to consider: No fewer than 8 deported adoptees have viewed this film and stand behind it as a meaningful and accurate representation of our stories, and request community support for this film. No fewer than 14 adoptees, including 5 of us who are deported or impacted, had the opportunity to read and provide feedback to the script. Major script changes were incorporated based on this feedback. Among these 14 were the entire board of Adoptees for Justice, who read the script and subsequently voted to have the organization’s name behind the film, with Kris Larsen as Adoptees for Justice Executive Director being the group’s main representative to the film. It was only after the film was shot and in post-production that anyone at Adoptees for Justice raise an issue about the film, even though it matched the script that was previously reviewed and agreed to. With the unexpected withdrawal of support from the Adoptees for Justice board, Anissa, who was the only remaining deported / impacted adoptee on the board, resigned and formed Adoptee Advocacy. Justin Chon came to us and promised to tell our story. We feel he has fulfilled that promise. While he added dramatic and plot flourishes to appeal to a mainstream audience, he gave many of us opportunities to consult and contribute, and made changes based on the feedback. We are incredibly grateful to him. Ernesto, who had chosen not to appear at the end of the movie, called us in tears after watching the screener: “If I would’ve watched this movie prior to saying I didn’t want to put my face at the end, I think I would’ve done it differently, because this thing has touched me at so many levels, that I think the rest of the world needs to hear. I don’t know if it was good that I watched it alone. I don’t know if it would have been good to watch it as a group, but I know that I felt alone, and I don’t wish this on anybody.” We hope those of you who have been fighting against this movie will see how much it means to us and involves all of us, and will instead support and advocate for this movie with as much excitement. We also hope that the words flooded all over social media trying to bring this movie down will be outnumbered by new words pushing for citizenship for all adoptees. Sincerely, Anissa Druesedow – Panama Crystal Moran – El Salvador Ernesto – Panama Frank – St. Kitts Kris Larsen – Vietnam Mauricio Cappelli – Costa Rica Mike Davies – Ethiopia Monte Haines – S. Korea Reny Javier – Spain Contact: anissa@adopteeadvocacy.org and kris@adopteeadvocacy.org" **ACTION ALERT** How YOU can support the Adoptee Citizenship Act 2021: Sign the petition Call/email your members of Congress Check out Alliance for Adoptee Citizenship — AAC and their NEW website Sign the petition in support of Adam Send a letter of support to your members of Congress to pass an inclusive Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2021 NOW!

It’s still dark out. I feel myself coming out of a slumber, by a pull that is often stronger than my first brain—my stomach. As I slowly squint my blurry eyes to look at my phone, I barely make out that it’s 3 a.m. If it’s 3 a.m. here, that means it’s dinnertime on the other side of the world, in my motherland of beautiful Korea. I lay in bed, debating whether I should give up all hope of sleep. My second brain grumbles its opinion. I pretend not to hear, as I close my eyes. My stomach has other plans. An image pops in my head. I can feel the warm heat of a stranger’s shoulder next to me. We sit, side by side, in a busy Gwangjang market stall in Seoul. In front of me, I can imagine a giant bowl of one my favorite dishes called bibimbap. If you grew up in Korea, it’s a dish you know well. But, I didn’t really grow up in Korea, and yet I am very much Korean. I was born in Korea and came to the United States like many other Koreans as an adoptee. Unlike many other adoptees, however, I was adopted as an older child at the age of seven. This means I came along with an invisible custom luggage set of memories. Many of the details have fallen to the wayside, as my memory seems to be catching up with my age, but my taste buds have not forgotten. Now, I really am hungry, so I move quietly out of bed so as to not wake up my husband, and I go sneak a bite of kimchi from the fridge. Ever since I came back from my first trip home to Korea (October 2019), I live in two time zones, or at least often my stomach does. And, just like my stomach, my heart is as hungry for it, too. The colors, the smells, the essence of Korea; it lies in its food, or at least it does for me. It magically connects me to my ancestors and to my biological family, who I recently became reconnected with in March. It connects me through space and time to my umma, my Korean mother. She was a highly-regarded cook and owner of a restaurant. Perhaps that’s why I chose the name Bibimbap (Mixed Meal) for my handcraft shop. Bibimbap translates to mixed rice, but for me it’s more than just a dish. It is a mixed meal that feeds far more than just my physical appetite. It also describes how I see myself—as a bit a mixed meal between my American and Korean influences. I was inspired to draw and paint from an early age. When I discovered silk painting, it spoke to me, in the very same way as a steaming heart-filled bowl of my beloved dish. Silk painting paved the road for many other creative mediums later in my life. I have always been creating something out of scraps and materials I have around me. If there was one positive word I can use to describe myself, “resourceful” comes to mind, but only when my creativity and heart drives it. It’s always been a fickle relationship between creation and motivation. Fast forward to my college days and I received my Bachelors in Industrial Arts, thinking it would be my gateway to being a paid artist—two words that admittedly seem often in opposition. I became a successful package designer for a high-end makeup company based out of San Francisco. Yet, despite having my dream job. I was severely depressed and unhappy. Ultimately, I left the graphics world when I realized all my creative hard work became beautiful trash to add to the landfills. I have slowly found my creative fire again by embracing myself as a fine artist and to create what is true to me. Now, I do my best to create with consciousness. Currently, I’m offering wire-sculpted jewelry inspired by the plants and flowers that I remember from my younger days in Korea. I’m digging deep into the recesses of my memories. By offering a little of my own mixed-up meal for the heart and soul, my wish, is that it brings moments of unexpected joy, peace, or happiness in this crazy mixed-up world for others. Kim Mee Seon was born in South Korea, adopted, and grew up in California, USA. She is an artist and owner of Bibimbap (Mixed Meal) online shop. She is also an activist and writer of the Tiny Lions Big World blog. As an artist, she works in multiple mediums but specializes in silk painting and wire jewelry. As an adoptee, she is committed to being an activist and advocate for other adoptees as well as children still in the system. Mee Seon is also a homeschooling mother to two awesome little people who remind her to laugh everyday.

The short essay below is by Kyla Mitsunaga's dad, Victor Mitsunaga, who is a third-generation Japanese-American whose parents were put in internment camps during WWII. Kyla’s dad, who was born in 1942, was 3 years old at the time, and her uncle was born in the camp. I never gave any thought to the emotional issues faced by #hyphenatedAsians. I guess it makes a lot of sense. I know for me there was a time I was embarrassed by how different my parents and I was compared to my Caucasian friends when I was in school. Whenever I visited them it was clear to me that there was a big difference in our families. I never invited any of my friends to my house because I was ashamed of how different we were. I don’t think it affected me except to become more withdrawn from my friends. I think relating to friends at Japanese school on Saturdays and at church on Sundays probably kept me sane because I always viewed myself as Japanese, more so than as a (white) American. It wasn’t until I started working, where I was surrounded by Caucasians, that I figured I should become more “American.” An acquaintance once asked me whether I saw myself as Japanese or American. I told her that it depended on whatever social situation I was in and would become one or the other—whatever was easiest. I don’t know whether that means I was very adaptable or just trying to blend in. In either case, it made things less stressful and, therefore, less harmful. I may have had problems handling certain emotional or social issues, but I think it was more because of the way I was raised rather than my Japanese/American confusion. I guess I was fortunate it didn’t cause me any mental or emotional damage; except once. I was transitioning from high school to college. Fortunately, it was Junior College because several of my closest friends (Mike, Terry, Marlene) also attended and we saw each other virtually every day. I wanted to be popular in college as I was in high school and tried really hard to do so but it didn’t happen. I started to worry myself sick, and developed a stomach ulcer. It lasted for a year or so when my mother told me it’s impossible to make friends with everyone and I should just live my own life.