Tara Fickle

10/2/05

In the last few decades, the adoption of Asian infants by Caucasian couples has become increasingly commonplace. Though South Korea has been recently surpassed by China in the number of children being sent out, it has been the impetus for one of the largest adult populations of Asian adoptees in the US. With South Korea having sent out an average of 1% of all live births (approximately 8,000 in 1993), there exists approximately 100,000 Korean adoptees of all ages currently in the US. The size of this population, then, gives one an idea of the massive scope of this global trend.

The research that I completed this summer with the Freeman Asian/Asian American Initiative Summer Research Grant sought to put faces to this growing population, and to seek out and record their experiences. Though several studies have recently been completed on the racial identities of Asian adoptees, including one also funded by the Freeman Grant, I sought to focus my research not simply on the narratives that these adoptees could offer, but also on the entrenched racial environment which their experiences reflected. The communities in which they grew up in, their interactions with White or Asian peers, and their assimilation into their family and their perceived cultures were all foci of this project. I hope to add to the already growing body of literature on Asian adoption with the integration of these oral histories into theoretical frameworks already established by Asian Americanists, sociologists, and adoptee communities themselves.

I contacted a number of agencies and organizations affiliated specifically with Korean adoption, in order to recruit subjects for the study. The largest number of responses came from those adoptees who were part of KAAN (Korean-American Adoptee, Adoptive Family Network), a large internet-circulated newsletter which informs adoptees and parents of pertinent Korean American and adoptee issues. In total, I received responses from thirty-eight potential subjects, approximately three-quarters of them being adoptees.

I developed a series of interview questions tailored to adoptees and parents, which can be found in the Appendices. For adoptive parents, the questions sought to trace their experiences in a number of ways: Their motivations for adoption (particularly Asian adoption), their desire/lack of desire to acknowledge their child’s Korean heritage or birth family, the significance of their child’s racial difference in family interactions, and the treatment of the adoptive family by the larger society.

For adoptees, the interview questions explored different aspects of their experiences; namely, methods of coping with and realizing racial difference, the implications of their Korean heritage and their interest in it, their treatment by society as a whole, and their comfort level in various communities.

Though I hoped to interview all of those who had initially contacted me, I had determined a set of criteria for the subjects, including only those above age 18, who were adopted under the age of five, and with at least one white adoptive parent. I chose these restrictions in order to give me the most consistent and relevant data, and as a result had to eliminate several potential subjects who did not fit into those criteria. In addition, there were several subjects who failed to contact me when I attempted to set up an interview time, and were unreachable for the rest of the summer. The final pool of candidates, then, included seven adoptive parents and thirteen adoptees, for a total representation of twenty families. The average age of parents was forty-three years old, and the average age of interviewed adoptees twenty-four.

There are several biases at work in this study that are worth noting. First of all, seventeen out of the twenty subjects in the study are female. With the exception of one adoptive father, all of the adoptive parents who contacted me, and that I ended up interviewing, were female. For adoptees, all but two of the subjects were female, though at least four more males had contacted me in the beginning. Thus, though the gender skewing of the study reflects the national bias towards adoption of Korean females, this study does contain a majority of female experiences which may or may not be entirely comparable to male adoptee or adoptive father experiences.

Discussion with adoptive parents yielded surprisingly consistent responses. The overwhelming reason given for considering adoption was infertility, or sub-infertility. One adoptive parent’s response to the question of why she became interested in adoption was, "My husband I tried to have children the traditional way, but we found out we both had problems. We were talking about in vitro [fertilization], but we didn’t want to go through all that."

Once couples had agreed upon adoption, they usually turned to a consideration of domestic adoption, but were almost immediately frightened off by "horror stories" which they had heard: "I didn’t want to have to keep looking over my shoulder, with American adoption", said one mother, referring to the possibility of a birth mother interfering in the post-adoptive family. In addition, the most important factors which adoptive parents identified in potential adoption programs were health and speed of the process: "Ultimately, we didn’t care whether the baby looked like us, we just wanted it to be healthy," said one mother. International adoption is often considered more expedited than domestic, with a larger possibility of getting a non-disabled infant. Though this is not necessarily the case (several adoptive parents lamented the year-long wait for their Korean child), it has become a well-entrenched belief and thus increased the appeal of international adoption.

The parents’ ultimate choice of South Korea as the country to adopt from was based primarily on several different reasons: ease of assimilation, excellent health care, and past experience with Asia. Adoptive parents seemed to believe that Asian children, as compared to other minorities, are more easily integrated into White American culture. Some made explicit references to the fact that they did not choose to adopt African American or other minority children based on the perceived severity of the racial disparity of black or Hispanic children: "We decided we didn’t want to adopt a black child because we couldn’t handle the racial divide", commented one mother. She added, "We just thought that a Korean child would be more accepted. And the stereotypes are more positive, easier to handle." The prevalence of model minority discourse, which typecasts Asians (particularly females) as hard-working, non-threatening, and assimilable, appears to be a significant factor in these adoptive parents’ choice to adopt from South Korea.

Adoptive parents, usually fathers, often had some experience with Asia previous to the adoption. Several had spent time in Vietnam or South Korea during the war, and often encountered poverty and destruction:

This prior experience with Asia, often connoting a sentimentalist or somewhat colonialist mentality which emphasizes the responsibility of the first-world to "save" third-world children, appears to have been a common motivating factor for choosing to adopt from Asia.

Once parents had adopted their Korean child, they often felt the desire to incorporate parts of the child’s Korean heritage into the family’s life. When questioned as to the reason for this emphasis, one mother responded, "We thought it was important that he learns about Korea. Society will look at him as Korean, and he needs to learn how to be Korean". The expression of this "Koreanness" most commonly emerged through enrolling the child in language school, the preparing and serving of Korean food, or the celebratory donning of the hanbok (a traditional Korean robe). Some parents, however, were adamant about instilling only certain topical aspects of Korean culture: "We’re not going to instill in him the Korean values—like how women serve men; rather, the heritage. And the food…we’re definitely not going to send him to Korean school." The parents’ responses reflected an ambivalence as to the extent to which Korean cultural knowledge needed to be a part of their child’s life.

All of the adoptive parents recounted experiences in which strangers had asked questions or passed judgment on the visible racial difference between parent and adoptee. Most parents described the interactions as "upsetting" or "disturbing", often expressing confusion as to why they were the source of so much speculation. The most common question asked of them was "Where is he/she from?" or "Is he/she yours?" Most parents tailored their response to reflect the birth country of their child, or encouraged their child to do so: "We were at the supermarket, and someone said, ‘Where is he from?’ And he answered, ‘I was born in South Korea.’" This set of queries and responses appears to be extremely common for adoptive Asian families, as it is also commented upon by the adoptees themselves.

The responses to interview questions by the Korean adoptees, unlike the adoptive parents, were often quite varied. This possibly reflects the larger population of adoptee subjects interviewed, but also, I would argue, reveals the range of possibilities of racial identity formation attributable to adoptees. Most of the responses appeared to be influenced by the diversity of the area the adoptee grew up in, their choice of college, and their treatment by others.

The recognition of racial difference on the part of adoptees ranged from immediate to extremely delayed. Some adoptees argued that, "I always knew I was different. I knew, intellectually, that I was not racially white", while others often forgot about it in their daily life: "I remember looking in the mirror and thinking, ‘Oh my God.’ I would be surprised at the way I looked, that I was Korean." The majority of the responses fell somewhere between these two extremes of realization, such that most adoptees acknowledged their physical difference from their parents, but still argued for their cultural similarity: "Since my parents are white, I tend to feel more like I am white than Korean".

With the exception of one adoptee, who engaged in Korean dance troupes, did fan dancing and Korean drumming, the overwhelming majority of adoptees had experienced little of Korean culture. Oftentimes, it appears, the adoptive parents had introduced the possibility of attending Korean culture camp or language school to the child, but did not push the issue, to the eventual regret of the adoptee. A common response was,

Their Korean heritage, for many adoptees, became a painful reminder of their inability to integrate into their families and their communities, which were predominately white. Thus, many of them chose not to emphasize that difference, since most of them had already encountered incidents of racism at a young age: "I started getting made fun of [in elementary school]: people pulling their eyes back, making up some sort of mangled version of what they thought Chinese sounded like, doing kung fu kicks." Often, these incidents of racism were brushed off as "good fun" by adoptees, though I would argue that the racism they endured as children significantly affected their present lack of comfort with their own Asian heritage, or other Asians.

All thirteen adoptees expressed a feeling of rejection or abandonment by other Asians, particularly Koreans. Most cited a perceived "difference" from other Asians, based on their disparate upbringings and the adoptees’ white parents:

This response captures the most prevalent experiences of adoptees with Asians or Asian Americans: feelings of rejection, assumption of extreme cultural differences, and perceived inferiority. Often, this inferiority stems from an inability to speak Korean, which all adoptees touched upon. One man relates an experience that resonates with many other responses: "I met someone in the dorms, and he spoke Korean to me. I told him that I didn’t speak it, and he looked kind of disappointed. It makes me feel kind of ashamed that I never learned." This self-reflexive shame, incurred by the interaction with Korean-speaking people, is a common source of resentment for many adoptees surveyed.

It becomes clear that adoptive Caucasian parents and their Korean children have significantly different experiences and concerns about the adoption experience. While adoptive parents’ focus is on the creation of a family (which was the initial purpose of the adoption anyhow), adoptees must concentrate on negotiating the disparity between their physical Asian appearance and their white American experience. Adoptive parents perceive the inculcation of Korean culture through culture camp or Korean food as enough to give their child a sense of Korean identity, but these methods fail to prove their efficacy. Adoptive children experience extreme difficulty in incorporating themselves into either Asian or White communities, due to exclusion from the former and racism by the latter. The disjunct between the perceptions of parents and adoptees uncovers a narrative of a racial topography in the US which is mostly invisible to white parents, but overwhelmingly opaque to their Korean children.

These oral histories can be treated as the lived, individual realities of the larger social picture of race relations in the United States. By using these interviews to anchor my thesis as it explores the implications of these experiences, I plan to evaluate the conceptualizations and theories within a limited but growing body of scholarly literature on Asian adoption. While much of this scholarly literature focuses on the efforts of adoptive parents to redefine the traditional American notion of "family", it often ignores the role that adoptees’ racial difference can play in unraveling the cohesiveness of that very family.

A large part of my thesis will be devoted to an analysis of children’s literature devoted exclusively to Asian adoption. These interviews allow me to contextualize this literature review, for these book are the same ones that the adoptive parents gave to their children, and that adoptees themselves read growing up. Seen as artifacts of an Asian culture which Caucasians and Americans do not necessarily have access to, this literature has the potential to significantly shape the racial identities of young adoptees.

Though these interviews in themselves already cover a wide range of experiences and emotions, my work on this topic also seeks to include productions by non-adoptees, such as those who produce work that comments on the adoption experience. My hope is that, through such an exhaustive study, the racial, social, and global implications of Asian adoption can be further illuminated.

What was your initial reason for adopting? How did you come to consider transnational adoption?

How much emphasis did you and others put on adopting a child from a different culture? How did you prepare for this experience (location, etc)?

What was the initial post-adoption experience like? How did your child adapt to their surroundings?

Can you remember a time when your child began to notice/express their difference from you and their peers? How did you deal with this situation?

Describe your relationship with your child. How did you broach the topic of adoption with them?

Please describe your pre-adoption experience with Korean or Asian culture. This may include language proficiency, customs, folklore, music, movies, food, or festivals like Lunar New Year parades. Did you have any connections within Asian communities (ie, Asian America or East Asia)?

How important was it to you to expose your child to Korean culture? Why? What sort of steps did you take to make this culture available to your child (books, Korean culture camp, movies, festivals, food)? How do you feel this has influenced your child’s cultural perceptions?

How do you feel that your relationship with Korean culture has developed since your child’s adoption? Has it become stronger?

Has your child expressed interest in Korea or finding his/her birth parents? How do you feel about this, or, if they are younger, would you cultivate this interest? How do you think it would affect your child in terms of how they see themselves?

What type of community do you see yourself as part of? What about your child? (location, religion, culture, etc.)

What advice would you give people who are interested in transnational adoption? Are there any obstacles or considerations that you would tell them about?

So tell me a bit about your adoption. Do you have any recollection of it, or of Korea, or coming over to the States?

Did your parents used to tell you stories about your adoption? How did you adjust to your new family?

How was your relationship with your siblings? (if adopted:) did them being adopted help your adjustment? How did they adjust to you?

What sort of town did you grow up in? (demographics)

In school, did your being Korean ever come up? How did you respond to people’s questions?

Did you ever experience racism, or people discriminating against you because you were Korean?

When you were growing up, was there, or is there, a time when you wanted to explore your identity more deeply, or it was on the forefront of your mind?

Did you feel that it was being Korean, or being adopted, that made you more distinct from your peers and your family?

Do you think your life would have been easier if you had been adopted into a Korean family? In the States, or Korea? Why?

Tell me a little more about your parents. Do you know why they chose to adopt from Korea?

Had they ever had any interest in Asian culture, or been to Asia?

When you were growing up, did they try to expose you to Korean culture? Did you read children’s books/go to lunar parades/eat Korean food?

Did your parents participate also in this (learn Korean, cook food)?

How important is it to you now to be in touch with Korean culture, or know about it? What steps have you taken to increase your knowledge? Has it changed your relationship with your parents?

What does it mean to "be" Korean? Do you think it’s possible to be "more" Korean or "less" Korean than somebody else?

How "Korean" do you consider yourself?

Do you have many Asian friends?

Have you dated many Asians before?

Do you feel comfortable around "Asian Asians" in large groups; ie, Korean Church, or Chinatown?

Do you think you act differently around your parents, or your white friends, than your Asian friends, or Asian people in general?

Have you ever been back to Korea? If you went back, would you feel that it was going back, or simply going to visit?

Are you interested in finding your birth parents? What would that mean to you?

Overall, and from having seen the experiences of other adoptees, what are your personal views on international adoption?

Are you interested in adopting, yourself?