Adoptees sent to the West often grew up racially isolated but found themselves, and one another, in the multicultural climate of higher education. Then, beginning in the 1990s, something unlikely happened: many of them settled permanently in South Korea. Adoptees like Jane Jeong Trenka worked across barriers of language and culture to study the fundamental reasons for their adoptions. Were it not for the mistreatment of unwed mothers and discrimination against mixed-race Koreans, they reasoned, perhaps they would not have been sent away.
Adoptees also raised questions of material distribution: What if the resources put toward adoption had gone instead to the birth family? The point is as relevant to Korean adoptees as to indigenous children sent to Canadian residential schools and the African American and Latino kids disproportionately placed in foster care.In subsequent years, returning Korean adoptees fought successfully for welfare reforms and their right to due process in South Korea. In 1999 a coalition led by the group Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link won a campaign to expand the Korean F-4 visa: adoptees now had the right of other ethnic Koreans to reside long-term in the country. In 2011 activist adoptees further secured the right to dual citizenship and helped enact dramatic changes to the adoption laws: the government now requires robust notice and consent procedures to protect birth parents’ rights. (Partly as a result, only 259 children were adopted out of South Korea in 2019.)
Last year, Kara Bos, who was adopted by a Michigan couple in 1984 after being left in a parking lot at the age of two, successfully sued in Korean court to be legally recognized as the daughter of her birth father, even though he refused to meet her. (Some adoptees worry that her lawsuit will discourage other birth parents from coming forward.) As Kristin Pak, an adoptee organizer in Korea, told me, the right to know one’s family, one’s history, and one’s birth nation is a basic human right. Pak believes that transnational adoption is intrinsically flawed. “It’s not about having a good adoption or bad adoption,” she said. “This whole system is demand-driven. It’s very unequal.”
While the adoptee memoirs anthologized in the 1990s were works of confession and communion, the books emerging now are full of confidence and rage. They are wider in scope, critical of the choices made by the US and Korean governments, and sharpened by scholarship on global adoption.