“It is the stories that connect us.” #kad Tara Footner about adoptee voices. Excellent list of stories to follow up with.
Now Is The Time For International Asian Adoptees To Share Their Stories
“It is the stories that connect us.” #kad Tara Footner about adoptee voices. Excellent list of stories to follow up with.
Now Is The Time For International Asian Adoptees To Share Their Stories
Adoptees who represented Korea in Olympics are sticking around to search for their birth families. Marissa Brandt named honorary ambassador for post-adoption services. Jackie Kling’s statements show a lot of patience and maturity about others’ perspectives.
Still, hoping that search support becomes more robust, and more rights are given to adoptees. Participating in the Olympics shouldn’t be one of the main springboards to a search.
New occasional Korean adoptee portrait series by photographer Matthew Lavere.
http://www.mattlavere.com/blog2/
First entry with Tara Revyn.
KAS announced official financial, housing, language, and other support for adoptees deported back to Korea. It is a necessary bandaid on a crappy situation, so this is good news.
At least one government is taking steps to doing the right thing, though there is a long way to go.
https://www.kadoption.or.kr/en/board/board_view.jsp?bcode=41_7&no=86
Adoption Museum Project reports 25 international adoptees deported. First time i have seen any kind of statistic on this anywhere, and i am filled with rage. Even State Department had no idea. At least one has died, and I hope the rest are surviving well.
The Adoption Museum Project has produced great #infographics on Adoptee Citizen status in the USA. Very useful to… https://t.co/FZg02WIGRw
— AFFCNY (@AFFCNY) January 22, 2018
In honor of National Adoption Month, Hyphen Magazine’s november issue has only writings from Asian American adoptees. Many of the most well-known KAD writers are included, among them: Matt Salesses, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Lee Herrick, Sun Yung Shin, Leah Silvieus, Robert Yune, Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut!
https://hyphenmagazine.com/blog/2017/11/november-adoptee-literature-folio
One of my favorite personal reflections on adoption ever. It carries a sentiment that I tried to capture in the term “kad nation”, and yes there is also an “adoptee nation”.
Many times these days, I feel I belong to this nation more than even the US or Korea. It is a nation that transcends borders. It is a global territory, moving and forming when its inhabitants coalesce. To stand in its presence is to feel alive in the awareness of belonging to a people. And then, as that gathering ends, it disperses again, into solitary atoms – not unlike what we did as adoptees from our homeland many years ago.
There are no people on this planet of whom I feel more akin to than those who live within the skin of #adoption.https://t.co/PyZpySE1Tw
— MichelleMadridBranch (@LetHerBeGreater) October 14, 2017
As reported in Korea Times:
Of 111,148 ethnic Koreans legally adopted into American families, 14,189, or 12.8 percent, have failed to obtain American citizenship and are left vulnerable to deportation, said Rep. Shim Jae-kwon of the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK).
As someone else recently said, adoption without citizenship is human trafficking. Leaving adoptees hanging in the wind due to the failures of those who adopted, oversaw, and administered it is a crime against humanity.
http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2017/10/113_237441.html
It is well-known that lack of support for single mothers was a major source of why many children in Korea were given up for adoption, but to this extent? From Hosu Kim’s Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea:
Single mothers constitute the great majority of all birth mothers involved in transnational adoption from South Korea. More than 120,000 children, or two out of three adoptees, were, or are, children of single mothers. Single mothers are referred to as mihonmo, which literally means “not-yet-married mothers.” Due to the high rate at which children of mihonmo are sent away for adoption, the term has become synonymous with birth mother. The conflation of these two categories in common parlance, however, misrepresents the population of South Korean birth mothers as comprised entirely of single mothers. 2 But more importantly, it introduces the expectation that a single mother should relinquish her baby to adoption. To examine how single mothers are rendered into birth mothers, I analyze a critical historical juncture during which single motherhood increasingly accounted for the children placed into transnational adoption. This period occurred between the 1980s and the mid-2000s, when children born of single mothers accounted for 80 to 90 % of all transnationally adopted children.
The fact that the same word is used for both single mothers and adoption birth mothers is also stunning to learn.
A case study in adoptees not knowing their own birth date – one of the many common knowledge details typically denied adoptees.
One attempt at contacting the adoption agency for confirmation of existing information and filling in of blank spots went along the lines of “We’re sorry, but we cannot disclose this information about you without written consent from your biological father.” But he is dead! “We know.” How the hell am I going to get written consent from my dead biological father who I don’t even know who is because you won’t tell me? “That is not our problem.”
Sadly, it turns out that
Had Khara’s true birth date been given in the information that came with her from the adoption agency, many aspects of her life would most likely have played out far better.
https://inshadowz.wordpress.com/2017/07/20/on-adoption-birth-date-revised/amp/