Eleana Kim, author of Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging, describes of how humanitarian efforts became intertwined with international profit motives, and the very human cost to the thousands of children in South Korea's orphanages.
The year 1966, when Kang Ok Jin of Kunsan, South Korea became Cha Jung Hee in order then to become Deann Borshay of Fremont, California, was the same year that an observer from the International Social Service (ISS), the agency that facilitated the adoption, wrote with some concern, “In Korea today where there is strong need for foreign exchange, I am inclined to think that agencies are assessed by the Ministry [of Health and Social Affairs] in terms of dollars they bring into Korea. The quality of service or service rendered is only secondary.” Between the time of the first four international adoptions from Korea in 1953 and the moment in 1966 when 494 children left Korea, the humanitarian effort to rescue war orphans and Amerasian or “mixed-race” children had become tied to profit motives, economic development and nation building. On the ground in South Korea, an array of social workers, fortune seekers and religiously motivated good Samaritans were involved in a complex and competitive scene. The same ISS report quoted above also observed “quite a bit of rivalry and competition among the different agencies, and it is not beyond agencies to bribe or pressure the mothers for the release of these children.”
By 1966, the population of mixed-race children in South Korean orphanages had drastically declined, as their mothers were less likely to relinquish them than to raise them in kijich’on, or the camptown areas where military sex work was prevalent. As the ISS report noted, “Agencies including ISS have to go to find the Korean-Caucasian children by visiting prostitute areas, as it is not a common practice for the mothers to approach the agencies for the release of their children.” In these areas, the appearance of mixed-race children was becoming normalized, and many of the women held on to their children in hopes of being reunited with their fathers through international marriage. And at least some of these hopes were not in vain, as American servicemen stationed in Korea filed hundreds of marriage petitions in the 1960s alone. With fewer abandoned mixed-race children and fewer women volunteering them for adoption, agencies struggled to meet the continuous demand from Americans who wanted to adopt “Korean orphans.” Social workers were sent to the border zones and kijich’on to persuade the mothers that Korea’s monoracial culture held no future for their children, especially as they reached school age. The experiences of Amerasians who stayed in South Korea attest to the validity of those concerns –– the majority were relegated to an underclass status that condemned them and their children to social stigma and marginalization against which many of them have struggled to the present day. Nevertheless, as the1960s progressed, fewer mixed-race children were relinquished or abandoned and Americans, and later Europeans, hoping to adopt increasingly had their hopes fulfilled with adoption of fully Korean children. By 1965, 70 percent of children sent overseas for adoption were of full Korean parentage, and by the mid-1970s virtually none of the children adopted were of mixed race.
The children had ended up in orphanages for a variety of reasons, but the majority, like Kang Ok Jin and Cha Jung Hee, were not actual orphans. Some had been lost by their parents or adult caregivers and ferried to orphanages by police officers; others were sent to orphanages as a temporary form of daycare by working-class parents without other options for childcare services. Yet others were sent to orphanages when their parents divorced or remarried, with some of these retrieved later. Thus, even as government statistics reflected skyrocketing cases of abandonment (from 755 in 1955 to 11,000 in 1964), it is difficult to assess whether all of these children were legally “abandoned” and what placement in an orphanage meant in each case. What is known is that by 1966 there were an estimated 71,000 children in roughly 600 institutions. In an attempt to address the problem of child abandonment and overflowing orphanages, the government implemented a program to return children to their families. In the process, however, it found that many of the children on the rolls of these institutions were actually “ghost children” who were not even in residence at the orphanages claiming them. These “ghost children” served as conduits for overseas aid –– and one might wonder whether one of the girls identified as Cha Jung Hee was, in fact, one of those “ghost children.”
Immediately after the war, orphanages were the main beneficiaries in South Korea of overseas charitable donations, and as late as the 1960s they continued to receive the majority of their support from individual sponsorships through organizations such as Foster Parents Plan and World Vision. Donations from overseas funded the needs of children, from food to basic education, and for families in precarious economic circumstances the orphanages became crucial resources for family preservation. The sponsorship system that supported the orphanages also created fictive links of kinship between individual children and donors overseas. As we learn in Liem’s film, developing these fictive relations through written correspondence and the exchange of pictures and gifts was vital to the maintenance of the child welfare institutions. Ultimately, however, this sponsorship system was unsustainable over the long term, as it made orphanages dependent on monthly installments of foreign capital and thus required a steady population of children feeding into the system. In effect, long after the war had ended, orphanages and the foreign capital they attracted were producing a new generation of “orphans” that many Americans and Europeans, motivated by infertility, religious conviction or liberal humanitarianism, were eager to “rescue.”
Some at ISS were critical of sponsorships precisely because of the dependency they promoted, with one social worker suggesting that monetary aid be transferred to a child’s family after the child left the orphanage to return home, perhaps as seed money for the child’s parents to set up a small business. Yet sponsors preferred to send money to morally innocent “orphans” rather than to poor families in need. As the ISS social worker reported, “Can you believe it — one objection to the idea of letting money follow a child into his home was ‘There is something wrong when a parent has to be paid before he will take back his child.’ There may be in some instances, but such a sweeping indictment!”
With 2 percent of South Korea’s national budget spent on social welfare and more than 40 percent on national defense, welfare institutions were entirely dependent upon sponsorships, and directors of orphanages and baby hospitals held on to as many sponsored children as possible in order to ensure a continuous flow of money from foreign organizations. As overseas sponsorships began flagging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, adoption agencies faced greater pressure to expand their international adoption programs. In the case of the Child Placement Service (now called Social Welfare Society), the Korean agency affiliated with ISS, locating children, securing their welfare through foster care and waiting for families to be matched to them in the United States required time and money that it did not have. Without sponsorships to fund the care of these children, the only solution was to expand the adoption program to Scandinavia, where more lax social welfare policies meant a shorter waiting period for adoption placements and less money required for foster care in Korea. Adoptions to Sweden began in 1967 and extended to the rest of Scandinavia and Western Europe by the end of the decade. As the four government-approved agencies enlarged their operations throughout the 1970s, South Korean policies required them to implement programs for poor families and children, including homes for mothers, disabled children and abandoned children, effectively offsetting the state’s welfare budget with revenues earned through international adoptions. ISS eventually left Korea because it viewed its role in international adoption as compromising its commitment to promoting universal standards of child welfare. It believed that children in Korea were being abandoned for reasons of poverty and a lack of social welfare services, a situation that ISS considered to be counterproductive to the goal of creating indigenous solutions for children in need.
Indeed, as ISS feared, international adoptions persisted as a proxy child welfare system, becoming virtually unregulated in the 1980s, when an average of 20 to 25 children left the country each day. South Korea today has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, high rates of infertility and negative population growth, yet overseas adoptions, now of infants born to unmarried women, continue at a rate of approximately 1,000 per year. The Korean international adoption program, the largest and longest in the world, is often held up as a model for other nations. Rather than being considered a model to follow, however, it might instead be seen as a model to disarticulate, in order better to comprehend how a temporary response to postwar crisis was transformed into an enduring solution to a nation’s social welfare needs.
Toward that end, we can consider 1966 a pivotal year in the history of Korean adoption. That was the moment when full-Korean children began replacing mixed-race children, when sponsorships were on the decline and when organizations like ISS and even some government officials were questioning the appropriateness of international adoption as a solution to the problem of child welfare. It was a year, like so many that came afterwards, when adoptions from South Korea might have reversed course instead of increasing exponentially throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Indeed, it may be surprising for some of us today to realize that these issues, which seem so contemporary, were being explicitly argued more than four decades ago. Today, as war and natural disasters continue to put poor families and children in developing nations at risk, adoption often appears to be the best or even only solution for children’s immediate survival. As the case of South Korea demonstrates, however, humanitarian rescue can easily turn into a long-term social welfare policy, especially in contexts where welfare programs and basic infrastructures are weak or nonexistent. In South Korea, what Rosemary Sarri and her colleagues identified as “goal displacement” shifted the objectives of adoption agencies and the state away from addressing the social welfare issues at the heart of child abandonment and relinquishment and toward the maintenance and reproduction of the system for its own sake. Even if children were not literally being bought and sold, in the context of South Korea’s tumultuous modern history, it is hard not see how their lives, like those of their parents and many other South Koreans, were leveraged in the name of economic development, national security and foreign relations.
As Liem uncovers during the course of her investigation into her own past and that of Cha Jung Hee, which is intertwined with Liem’s, some Koreans believed then and believe now that despite the fact that Liem was severed from her original identity and lost her connections to her Korean family, she was the fortunate one –– lucky to have been switched with Cha Jung Hee and to have had the chance to pursue the American dream. Similarly, many adoptees have found that questions about their origins have forced them to weigh their privileged lives as American or Danish or French citizens in loving families against the prospects of abject lives in orphanages. With greater understanding of the broader political and economic conditions that produced adoptable “orphans” and the seemingly necessary solution of international adoption, many Korean adoptees, like Liem, are beginning to recontextualize their life histories as well as those of children being sent for adoption today.
Eleana Kim is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Rochester. Her book, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging, will be published by Duke University Press in November 2010. This article is based on archival research at the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota. For a full-length discussion of the early history of Korean adoptions, see “The Origins of Korean Adoption: Cold War Geopolitics and Intimate Diplomacy.” Working Paper Series (WP 09-09). U.S.-Korea Institute at SAIS, Johns Hopkins. 28 October 2009.
Stephen C. Morrison was orphaned at age 6 and lived in an orphanage for eight years before being adopted by the Morrison family at 14. He founded the Mission to Promote Adoption in Korea (MPAK) in 1999 to bring about positive changes in the adoption culture in Korea by promoting domestic adoption as well as adoption by Korean-Americans.
While watching In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, I was reminded of an incident that happened right before my eyes just a day before I was to leave for the airport to go to my family in the United States. The year was 1970, and I was a 14-year-old boy who was very excited and anxious to go to the United States to be with my new family. In the same orphanage there was a little boy about 5 years old whose name I cannot recall, and he was an Amerasian with blonde hair and Caucasian features. His mother was Korean, and she entrusted her son to the orphanage to be adopted, as she could not keep the boy because he looked different and also due to the fact that he had been born out of wedlock. This fact would have made it extremely difficult for her to raise the boy, as in Korean society there is a strong negative social stigma against children born out of wedlock and their mothers. While the boy was in the orphanage, the mother would periodically visit the boy and take him out of the orphanage to buy some treats for him from neighborhood stores, but she always returned him to the facility. The boy was scheduled to leave for the United States the same day I did. But just a day before we were to leave together, the boy’s mother came and took him away without telling anyone. I watched her take him away, and I thought she was going to the store with him as usual. But they never came back to the orphanage. A commotion followed as the orphanage director and others looked for him around the neighborhood, but they could not find him. So I was sent to the United States without him.
The story of In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee is strikingly similar, except that no substitution took place in my case. In both cases, I believe the birth parents made last-minute decisions to stop their children from being adopted rather than face permanent separation. Both parents found it difficult to tell the orphanage directors of their changes of heart after having committed to adoption, so they decided to take their children away quietly without telling anyone. In those days, many parents abandoned their children to orphanages because they had no means to take care for them, and many of those children were adopted abroad.
As for the reasons for the deception in In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, I do not believe financial motive was the cause — the orphanage director most likely made the decision not to disappoint the waiting family in the United States, and also he knew the unfavorable conditions that orphans faced in Korea and made a humanitarian decision to give a chance to another girl, an 8-year-old girl named Kang Ok Jin, who became Cha Jung Hee.
Orphans growing up in Korea face incredible challenges as they are subject to strong social stigma. Compared to ordinary children with families, orphans in Korea experience what I call “status discrimination,” as they are not given the same opportunities to get good educations and good jobs. In the old days, 3 to 5 percent of orphans were able to go to college. Although educational opportunities for orphans have increased in recent years, they still fall significantly short of those afforded ordinary Korean children with families. By contrast, approximately 70 percent of Korean adoptees in the United States and Europe receive education to the high school level or above.
The discrimination does not end with education. If a young man with background as an orphan wishes to date and marry a woman with a family, often the woman’s parents reject the man even though the woman loves him. If two men of equal ability apply for the same job, and one grew up in an orphanage and the other in a normal family, the man who grew up in the orphanage usually loses out. Although the social stigma against orphans has lessened greatly in Korea over the years, it still presents a big challenge for orphans growing up in orphanages. Not many orphans are adopted domestically in Korea, as they are mostly older, and Korean nationals tend to prefer adopting infants to keep the adoptions secret. For these reasons, I still believe that orphans should be given the opportunity to be adopted into families in the United States.
In In the Matter Cha Jung Hee, Deann Borshay Liem raises an honest question about how and why a humanitarian effort became an industry worth millions of dollars. However, it is a fact that year 2009 statistics from the Korean government show that approximately 10,000 children became homeless that year. Out of those, approximately 1,300 were adopted domestically within Korea, and approximately 1,100 were subject to intercountry adoptions. That leaves 7,600 children who are either in foster care or in institutions. Even with all the efforts to reunite biological families and promote domestic adoption in Korea, only 13 percent of homeless children have found homes domestically. Although the adoption industry started as a humanitarian effort, saying that it has become an industry seems to suggest that the focus of the adoption business is more on profit than on finding homes for children. Although I am not affiliated with any adoption agencies, I am keenly familiar with all the agencies and their work in Korea and in the United States, and I truly believe that even today the agencies are driven more by the humanitarian need to find homes for children than by a business motive. It doesn’t matter whether a child is a war orphan or the child of an unwed mother in modern times — that child still needs a home.
I believe domestic adoption should be promoted more, and when domestic adoption improves, the need for intercountry adoption will decrease. In the meantime, improvements should be made to the adoption process in order to prevent the irregularities that are portrayed in In The Matter of Cha Jung Hee from being repeated in the future.
Stephen C. Morrison, a senior project engineer at The Aerospace Corporation, is involved with the design and development of the GPS III satellite system. Morrison was orphaned at age 6 and lived in an orphanage for eight years before being adopted by the Morrison family at age 14. He founded the Mission to Promote Adoption in Korea (MPAK) in 1999 to bring about positive changes in the adoption culture in Korea by promoting domestic adoption as well as adoption by Korean-Americans. Morrison received the 2007 National Civilian Medal of Honor from the Korean government for his efforts to promote adoption in Korea and has spoken at many churches and organizations advocating the cause of homeless children. He and his wife adopted a child from Korea in 2000 and are in the process of adopting another child from Korea.
Kim Park Nelson's research explores the many identities of adult Korean adoptees, as well as the cultural, social, historical and political significance of more than 50 years of Korean adoption to the United States. She was adopted from Korea in 1971.
The release of Deann Borshay Liem’s film First Person Plural in 2000 came at a critical time in the history of Korean transnational adoption. Despite 50 years of adoption from Korea, the experiences of Korean adoptees remained largely absent from popular and academic discourse at the end of the 20th century. But as the children adopted during the peak years of Korean adoption reached adulthood, a wave of networking efforts by Korean adoptee organizations, many then recently established, was gaining momentum; at the same time, new culture-based approaches to researching Korean adoptee communities were achieving acceptance in academia.
In the decade since the release of this seminal film, the explosive growth in cultural and artistic production by Korean adoptees has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the amount of research on Korean adoptee experiences. A critical mass of adoptee artists, activists, authors and researchers has emerged and gained visibility — not only to the general public, but, just as significantly, to one another. I now wonder if the beginning of the 21st century will come to be regarded as a golden age for Korean adoptees, as it is poised to be a time when the largest generations of Korean adoptees reach adulthood, but the demise of transnational adoption from Korea, already predicted by many, has not yet occurred. In my ethnographic work on Korean adoptee communities, the theme of isolation has been almost ubiquitous, explained perhaps by the fact that my informants are usually the only (or among the few) adoptees, Koreans, Asian Americans and/or people of color in their families, schools and communities. Against this background, the synergy among members of this burgeoning community should not be underestimated, as one adoptee voice inspires, encourages and amplifies another.
The practical and emotional difficulties involved in searching for Korean family, and of making sense of the lost relationships that may be regained as a result of that search, are central themes for Liem in First Person Plural, as they are for the thousands of adoptees who have searched, found or even contemplated searching for Korean family members. This emotional turbulence makes First Person Plural a compelling drama, but through her films, Liem also occupies the position of adoptee-educator within the Korean adoptee community. By embedding her own experiences in the histories of war and social inequity that have created and sustained Korean adoption, she teaches adoptee viewers about the history of our community and about the procedural intricacies of adoption — including the practice of falsifying records. First Person Plural set off a sea change in Korean adoptee communities as adoptees who saw the film began to think about the possibility that the most basic information of our origins, including our Korean names, birth places and even birth dates, might well be false.
The consequences of this falsification are the subject of Liem’s recently released second feature documentary, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee. Born Kang Ok Jin, Liem was renamed Cha Jung Hee in a South Korean orphanage so that she could fulfill the plans made for the first Cha Jung Hee, who had been reclaimed by her Korean family after being promised to an American family. As Liem searches for the Cha Jung Hee whose identity she had been assigned, she explores the many lives of Korean women whose name she shared and whose lives she might have lived if she had not been adopted. This reflects the cycle of “what if” questioning that many adoptees experience as we contemplate the lives of the Koreans we could have been. Through its complex depiction of Korean women, the film also shines new light on the assumptions made about Korean adoptees — that we have been saved, through adoption, from lives of abject poverty, starvation and prostitution.
In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee takes place almost entirely in South Korea, and return migration to Korea has become more common among Korean adoptees. Liem chronicles her journeys to South Korea through the lens of her own complex and ambiguous identity: at once a native and a foreigner, a daughter and a tourist. Liem once again operates as historian and educator for adoptees. Since reuniting with her Korean family, Liem's relationship with Korea has deepened, and through the exploration of her alternate selves, other Cha Jung Hees of her generation, she gives us a window into the lives of other Korean women. By splintering the idea of a single, monolithic Korean identity into a diverse range of life experiences and perspectives, she also reminds Korean adoptees that we, too, are Koreans.
Relationships between Korean adoptee communities and the Korean nation have also deepened in recent years. Conferences organized by the International Korean Adoptee Associations in Seoul in 2004, 2007 and 2010 have brought hundreds of Korean adoptees from around the world back to their birth country. Beyond their programming for adoptees, the most important function of these gatherings may be the creation of spaces for Korean adoptees and adoptee discourse in South Korea. The severing of legal and social links to South Korea has made our current identities possible, but at the expense of our identities as Koreans. Liem’s documentary memoirs contain many examples of these paradoxes of identity. While her own identity is built on her experiences as a child of a white American family, she discovers biological roots in her Korean family and social ties in the fraught world of transnational adoption, where her birth story was constructed from the lives of others in order to facilitate her adoption.
While few organizations recognize the layered nature of Korean adoptee relationships to both birth and adoptive societies, there are a few adoptee-centered groups that have worked to establish space for adoptees in their adoptive countries and in South Korea. One of these organizations, the Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link, based in South Korea, recently worked within the South Korean political system to establish the possibility of dual citizenship for Korean adoptees, who lost Korean citizenship upon their transnational adoption out of the country. As Korean adoptees spend more time in South Korea, become politically active there and produce art, literature, film and research in, about and for Korea, the social, cultural and political relationships between adoptee communities and the government and people of South Korea deepen and become more complex. The dual citizenship effort and Liem’s films are just some of many Korean adoptee forays into South Korean politics and society, and there are sure to be more in the future. Adoptees are no longer war orphans, and our roles in Korean society are evolving and changing but remain paradoxical: We are objects of shame or of pride, carriers of Western culture or Korean blood, social critics or national advocates, activists for members of the Korean underclass or symbols of Western wealth, reminders of the lies that were used to create so many Korean adoptees or symbols of universal truths of human unity.
Kim Park Nelson’s research explores the many identities of adult Korean adoptees, as well as the cultural, social, historical and political significance of more than 50 years of Korean adoption to the United States. She was the lead organizer and proceedings editor for the First and Second International Symposia on Korean Adoption Studies in Seoul in 2007 and 2010. Park Nelson is department chair and an assistant professor of American Multicultural Studies at Minnesota State University at Moorhead. She was adopted from South Korea in 1971.
Julie Gilbert Rosicky is the executive director of the American branch of the International Social Service (ISS-USA). In 1966, the ISS in Korea handled Deann's adoption. She highlights some of the reforms that have been made to the international adoption process — and those that are still needed — to ensure that children with families are not wrongfully adopted.
Kim Stoker returned to Korea in 1995, where she works with Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK), an organization of Korean adoptees that advocates for alternatives to inter-country adoption.
Fifteen years ago I returned to live in the country where I was born. I truly had no idea that I was embarking on a journey that would lead me to where I am now. Like so many of my fellow Korean adoptees (KADs) from all over the world, I grew up in a white family in the white suburbs. I had white relatives, white friends, white teachers, and white role models. Encased in my own internalized whiteness upon returning – or rather, going — to Korea I had no agenda, no schedule to search for my birth family, no aim to discover my roots and no plans to stay beyond the one-year teaching contract that I had signed. Or so I thought.
It took the first three years of living in Korea, two more years of graduate school learning about Korea, and another two more years back before I felt comfortable and ready to discard the whiteness that had been years in slowly sloughing off. I found that safe comfortable space in ASK – Adoptee Solidarity Korea.
Founded in 2004 by a group of six American KADs living in Seoul, ASK began as a meeting of like-minded friends interested in examining the complex realities of inter-country adoption (ICA) from South Korea. Since that time, ASK has been a strong voice in advocating for alternatives to ICA, namely social welfare reform and support for single unwed mothers. Members of ASK have presented at conferences and symposiums, lectured at universities, given print, radio and television interviews, made movies and art — all in the name of increasing awareness about the need for change in the way Korea lets go thousands of its dispensable children.
So often among adoptees these days, the issue of ICA gets whittled down to the facile binary of being either “pro” or “against.” If you advocate for ICA you are “pro-child,” “pro-family,” even “progressive.” If you criticize ICA you are “ungrateful,” “angry” or even “racist.” Children need permanent homes, plenty of parents desire to give them those homes. I don’t know anyone who would argue against that. I only wish it were so simple.
International adoption is ethnocentrism at its essence. On a global level, ICA is about inequities of race, gender, class, money, religion and western hegemony; on a local level, it’s about a lack of women’s rights and reproductive rights, moving people across borders, poverty and Christian values. Children, as the lowest rung on any social strata, fall vulnerable to the vagaries of the times. Not to mention the problems with the business of adoption itself. At its worst, illegal methods of procuring children are still practiced. At the least, unethical practices of coercion, intimidation and misinformation are still commonly used.
The reality of South Korea today is that it is not overflowing with orphaned, unwanted children. The factors that were the impetus for Korean ICA 60 years ago – war, epidemic poverty and racism against Amerasian children – are no longer sustainable reasons to justify the continuation of the Korean overseas adoption industry. On the economic front, Korea has been a member the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) since 1996 and will host the G-20 this November. On the social end, over 90 percent of adopted Korean children are born to single unwed mothers, most of whom would choose to raise their children if they had a viable choice. Yes, it is true that single mothers and their children face very real social stigmatization and struggle with poverty that limit their prospects for survival. But in recent years, supporters, advocates and a small but growing number of brave women are speaking out and asserting their rights to raise their own children instead of giving them up for adoption.
By watching films such as Deann Borshay Liem’s first documentary, First Person Plural, and her current work, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, I hope that a wider audience can learn about some of the complexities of ICA and how this modern phenomenon affects the life and lives of individuals and families.
Kim Stoker is a full-time lecturer at Duksung Women’s University in Seoul. She has been living in Korea on and off since 1995. She is currently the Representative of Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK), an organization of Korean adoptees that advocates for alternatives to intercountry adoption.
Jane Jeong Trenka was sent for adoption to Minnesota in September 1972 and repatriated to Korea in 2004. She is the author of Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea and an activist among the adoptee community in Korea.
Cha Jung Hee was a “perfect orphan.” Her parents were dead, and she longed to live with the kind Americans who sent shoes and money to her orphanage. This template of a perfect orphan was then used by the Korean orphanage to deceive the Borshays into adopting Kang Ok Jin, who despite all odds would eventually reunite with a living Korean mother and family.
Despite similar cases of corruption that are reported anecdotally among adult adoptees, especially those who have reunited with their birth families, South Korea’s adoption program is still dubbed the world’s “Cadillac” of international adoption, in part because of its supposed transparency. The reputation of the world’s 15th largest economy and host of this November’s G20 summit is so sterling that it has perennially remained in the top three or four “sending” countries, even while refusing to comply with international law: It has yet to ratify the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, and it holds reservations to paragraph (a) of article 21 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
South Korea was urged to ratify the Hague Convention in May 2008 during a meeting of the members of the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child. At that time, the committee pointed out that South Korean adoption agencies do not keep sufficient documents on adopted children, and added that “a possibility of abuse . . . may have occurred in intercountry adoptions from South Korea,” according to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency.
Whether or not the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child was aware at the time that our organization, Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK), had already filed a complaint about abuses in adoption with the Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission of Korea in January of 2008 is unclear. However, one of the cases we had cited was Deann Borshay Liem’s, which we had learned about from her first movie, First Person Plural. TRACK also presented the cases of other Korean adoptees living in Korea and other countries. Those cases involved unclear relinquishments, intrafamilial kidnappings, misrepresentations of children’s social and medical histories to adoptive parents and various other forms of misinformation contained in adoption files.
In November 2009, TRACK brought these representative cases illustrating what appear to be industry-wide abuses to the South Korean parliament as we introduced revisions to the adoption law with our coalition, consisting of TRACK, KoRoot, ASK, the Gonggam Public Interest Lawyers, National Assembly Representative Choi Young-hee, and the Korean Unwed Mothers and Family Association (KUMFA). KUMFA represents some of the 80 percent of people who raise their children when they are able to access genuine support outside the intertwined web of unwed mothers’ shelters, adoption agencies and healthcare providers that harvest babies to send for adoption.
In short, the government knows very well what has happened within the country’s borders in the past and what is happening in the present, but it has yet systematically to hold the parties who have engaged in corruption accountable for their actions, nor has “dynamic” and “sparkling” Korea ever bothered to fund a creative campaign to help end institutionalized discrimination against unwed mothers, who give birth to 90 percent of internationally adopted Koreans today.
South Korea has continued to shirk its responsibility to keep original families together as the first internationally recommended priority; perform domestic and international adoptions ethically and transparently when absolutely necessary; and offer adequate post-adoption services to the very people that adoption is supposed to serve most: the adoptees. There is no law in Korea banning adoptees from accessing their birth information; the records are not sealed. It is only agency policy and practice — including mishandling, forgeries and omissions in records — that prevent adoptees and their Korean families from being reunited. This kind of negligence and tacit acceptance of negligence is clear in the movie, when the social worker insists that Liem’s record is 100 percent accurate — with the minor exception that the record belonged to a completely different person, as if that were some kind of common oversight of no significance.
Regarding the problems in the adoption program, both past and present, Koreans often tell me, “No one cares.” Yes, sometimes I do get the feeling that no one cares. We don’t even know exactly how many adoptees were sent away, because the Koreans did not care enough to document all of us properly. We can only guess that it may be up to 200,000 children over the past 60 years. The country that ranks first in the world in broadband Internet penetration while spending the least amount of money on social welfare out of all OECD countries, aside from Mexico, continues to send children away at the rate of over 1,000 a year. Ranking 115th in the world in terms of gender equality, between India and Bahrain, South Korea punishes single mothers for being sexually active while enabling paternal irresponsibility, all while simultaneously maintaining a neoliberal social welfare scheme that financially incentivizes adoption through private agencies. The country with one of the world’s lowest birthrates has turned to developing countries in Asia for mail-order brides to boost its population in order to avoid a demographic catastrophe, while it has disincentivized child-rearing by Korean unwed mothers by not providing sufficient support for them to raise their own children.
Many adoptees are reluctant to criticize the Korean international adoption system because they feel that they are no longer Korean, and as “foreigners,” they have no right to say anything. However, whether adoptees call themselves “Korean” or not, and whether there were abuses in their own adoptions or not, there are internationally recognized standards of ethics and transparency that Korea simply does not meet. Its refusal so far to ratify the Hague Convention and its reservations to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child are concrete proof of that. International pressure must be brought to bear on South Korea in order to stop the corrupt practices that lead to cases such as Liem’s. We all need to start caring.
In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee is especially welcome at a time when highly publicized cases of corruption have come to light in countries such as Cambodia, Vietnam, India and Guatemala, while South Korea has received nary a criticism about the unethical practices that have been cited frequently in the Korean media. As the South Korean government, the private companies on which Korea has become dependent to provide social welfare for its people and their scores of overseas adoption partners turn a blind eye to fraud and abuse, this movie testifies to the never-ending consequences paid by adoptees, adoptive families and original families when adoptions are mishandled, despite everyone’s best intentions, and despite everything that we adoptive families thought we knew.
Jane Jeong Trenka was sent for adoption to Minnesota in September 1972 and repatriated to Korea in 2004. Her latest book is Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea, and she volunteers as president of TRACK (Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea), an organization in Seoul advocating for the full knowledge of past and present Korean adoption practices to protect the human rights of adult adoptees, children and families.
Dae-won Wenger, former president of the Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (G.O.A.’L) in Korea, grew up in Switzerland. He has been active in adoptee groups since 1994. He has lived in Korea since 2003. English is his third language.
My name is Dae-won Wenger. At age 6 I was sent along with my older brother to Switzerland from Korea for adoption. As I was growing up, I was always interested in Korean culture and food. I joined the local Korean association and attended Korean classes.
In the early 1990s I met more and more Korean adoptees. After working in the United States for two years, I returned to Switzerland in 1993 and got involved with the local Korean adoptee community. In 1994 I became co-founder of Dongari Switzerland, a Swiss association for Korean adoptees that grew rapidly to almost 200 members within a few short years.
While I was involved with Dongari Switzerland I traveled to Korea several times, and spent half a year studying Korean language at Yonsei University in 1995. In 1999 I got involved in a nonprofit foundation in Zurich, and in 2003 I was working as its CEO when I decided to move to Korea, something I had been dreaming of since my previous trip in 1995. With only one suitcase, I made the trip with a stopover in the Netherlands, where I attended the famous Arierang Weekend one more time before leaving Europe.
In Korea I became involved with Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (G.O.A.’L). I started as a volunteer working on IT infrastructure. In early 2004, the then secretary general of G.O.A.’L, John Hamrin, decided to resign. I applied for the position and got it, so from February 2004 until recently I served as secretary general of G.O.A.’L.
G.O.A.’L is the only adoptee-run non-governmental/nonprofit organization registered in Korea and is the oldest of all the Korean support organizations. Back in the 1990s, the living situation for Korean adoptees who returned to their motherland was very difficult. That was the main reason G.O.A.’L was founded. G.O.A.’L was created to lobby for improvement in the situation of Korean adoptees. It began as a purely volunteer-based organization but has since grown into a service organization with a staff of eight people. Many services are being offered. These include birth family search assistance, translation/interpretation and counseling on settling in Korea, obtaining F4 visas, finding accommodations, finding jobs, obtaining scholarships and arranging Korean language tutoring, as well as social networking and sports activities, discussion forums, conferences and other annual activities, birth family search campaigns, public outreach and much more. Adoptees can also get involved in providing services, since G.O.A.’L is an adoptee organization.
During my time as secretary general, there were several important projects. The most important one to me personally was the dual citizenship campaign. Already back in 1998, former secretary general Ami Nafzger was lobbying for the inclusion of Korean adoptees in the Overseas Koreans Act, which was passed in 1999 by the Korean National Assembly. This act allowed Korean adoptees to receive F4 visas, residency visas similar to green cards in the United States. In spite of this improvement, living in Korea still presents problems. That’s why obtaining dual citizenship (having Korean citizenship restored without having to renounce an adoptive country’s citizenship) seemed to be a natural follow-up to the Overseas Koreans Act.
Launched in 2007, the dual citizenship campaign took only three years to reach fruition. In May 2010, the Korean government promulgated the revised nationality law, which allows all Korean adoptees to regain their Korean citizenship while keeping citizenship in their adoptive countries. This law revision is important not only to Korean adoptees but to the entire adoptee community worldwide. It sets a precedent for all international adoptees and is a triumph of the adoptee rights movement. The interest in it within the Korean adoptee community is huge.
Since April 2010 I have been on the board of directors of G.O.A.’L. Currently I am working on some other projects, but I will definitely stay in Korea, at least for the near future.
Dae-won Wenger was the secretary general of Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (G.O.A.’L) from 2004 until March 2010. He has actively worked with Korean adoptees since 1994, when he co-founded the adoptee organization Dongari Switzerland. He relocated to Seoul in 2003. He served on the board of the Euro-Korean Network and the Gathering 2007. In 2008, Wenger was appointed an honorary committee member of the Republic of Korea’s 60th anniversary celebrations by President Lee, and in 2009 he received the Prime Minister Award for his contributions to the Korean adoptee community and the Korean society.
Chris Winston, author of A Euro-American on a Korean Tour at a Thai Restaurant in China, is the founder and former president of the Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network (KAAN). She shares the importance of making sure adopted children are given the opportunity to become familiar with their ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
Raising children so that they reach their potential is something that all parents by birth or adoption hope to do well. However, as children move from childhood to adulthood, most parents realize that their children are not as malleable as their parents had originally supposed they would be. In addition to parenting, children are influenced by many factors, including their innate genetics, the communities in which they are raised, the friends they make and the resolution of unexpected experiences that arise in their lives. As children reach adolescence, they need to separate from parents and incorporate all of the above elements into their senses of identity. For some adoptees there is the additional layer of an unknown birth family. And for an interethnic adoptee, there is another culture and another ethnicity to add to the mix when forming a sense of self, while for an intercountry adoptee, there is also another country.
In the movie In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, we watch as Deann Borshay Liem incorporates the missing elements from her past into who she is today. She discovers that Cha Jung Hee’s shoes really are Liem’s own shoes. Some might be willing to write off Liem’s experience as an aberration. They might conclude that Liem’s past matters only because she had memories of her life in Korea. They may believe that it is unusual for an adoptee not to have access to all of her original history. However, even in the case of an infant placed in the best of circumstances, there are missing pieces. This is inherent to the adoption experience. What makes this movie meaningful is that the missing pieces and the identity puzzles that adoption causes are clear for all to see.
Twenty years ago when my husband and I adopted our children from Korea, it was suggested that if we loved them enough they would not crave missing identity elements from their past. We were told not to include Koreans or Korean Americans in our lives, as they might stigmatize our two Korean-born children for their orphan status. Somehow this advice didn’t seem right. We wanted to acknowledge our children’s experience of often being the only Asian faces among their peers. So, we decided to be the only Caucasian faces among many Asian ones in the Sacramento, California Korean-American community. We didn’t stay on the surface; we dove in deep to form friendships with first-, second- and third-generation Korean Americans, as well as Koreans living in Korea.
I made my first Korean-American friend by walking into her dry cleaning shop. I spent hours manning the front counter of her store while she took her children to the doctor and attended school conferences. She spent hours teaching me to cook Korean food at her house or simply talking to me while my children played with hers in the back of her store. I spent time helping another friend, a Korean-American oncology pharmacist, at healthcare fairs for Korean-American senior citizens. When I was diagnosed with cancer, she connected me with the best oncologist she knew and made me an honorary member of the Sacramento Korean American Cancer Support Group. Because a Korean-American psychologist friend helped me to make the right Korean connections, when I took my children to Korea we were able to stay with Korean families. We then helped those Korean families find host families in the United States. Can you see the reciprocity in these relationships?
The latest expert advice is to expose adoptees early and often to their cultures of origin. On the Internet, I see many discussions revolving around the question “How much culture is too much?” People ask, “Should children be forced to learn about their countries of origin?” To me, these don’t seem to be the relevant questions. This type of experience is different from having family friends to whom children can relate as little or as much as they like. Korean and Asian Americans are often in our homes and in our lives. They are not our “Korean friends.” They are our friends. As they grew, our children related to these family friends, asked them questions about Korea and got ideas about how to handle racial incidents.
But let us not suppose that even with many resources at an adoptee’s disposal, identity formation is easy. Not long ago I attended a discussion along with fellow parents of a young adult adoptee. They were clearly concerned about their daughter, who was having a difficult transition to adulthood. Some of the panelists were quite judgmental of these parents, suggesting all of the things that they could have done better. But as the discussion went on, it became clear that these parents had done many things to expose their daughter to Korea and to other Asian Americans. As I had done, they had made Korean friends. They were supportive of their daughter. Yet she was struggling to put together her identity. No one was pointing out that adoption and interethnic issues are inherent and normal to the development of an adoptee. No one was acknowledging that these issues might be challenging to resolve.
Liem’s film makes clear the resources needed for adoptees to integrate their pasts into their futures. Parents can help by having friends from their children’s ethnic backgrounds. We make things easier or harder depending on the tools we give our children and depending on the opportunities we give them to explore. But in the end, I think it is important that people not make judgments about the identities that adoptees choose. Adopted children grow up and become young adults of their own making. They continue to evolve. That evolution never stops. As human beings, all of us, adopted or not and regardless of age, are works in progress.
Chris Winston is founder and former president of the Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network (KAAN), which aims to support networking and build understanding among Korean-born adoptees, adoptive families, Koreans and Korean Americans. KAAN hosts an annual national conference in a different city each year. Winston has published articles and presented papers and workshops for numerous adoption- and Korea-related organizations and conferences. In 2006, KAAN published her book, A Euro-American on a Korean Tour at a Thai Restaurant in China. She lives in Sacramento, California with her husband, Mark. They have three adult children, two of whom were adopted from Korea."
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string(101942) "Introduction
Susan Soonkeum Cox
"When the orphanage director says, "I'm sorry it is still haunting you," I ached at the disconnect that was unfolding on-screen between Deann and the Korean staff looking at her. I believe they were sincere in those expressions and meant them to be comforting. But I also know these words are not comforting, or easy to hear, and especially to accept, when you know you are entitled to your feelings." Read more »
E.J. Graff, Journalist
"Liem shows us how shockingly easily it can be to change a child's identity -- cavalierly moving her from one name to another, one family to another, one country to another. By investigating her origins without bitterness or blame and showing us the rich lives led by the "real" Cha Jung Hees, Liem never allows us to conclude complacently that growing up in the wealthy United States was necessarily better than growing up in impoverished post-war South Korea." Read more »
Eleana Kim, Author, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging
"By 1966 there were an estimated 71,000 children in roughly 600 institutions. In an attempt to address the problem of child abandonment and overflowing orphanages, the government implemented a program to return children to their families. In the process, however, it found that many of the children on the rolls of these institutions were actually 'ghost children' who were not even in residence at the orphanages claiming them. These 'ghost children' served as conduits for overseas aid." Read more »
Steve Morrison, Founder, Mission to Promote Adoption in Korea
"In In the Matter Cha Jung Hee, Deann Borshay Liem raises an honest question about how and why a humanitarian effort became an industry worth millions of dollars. However, it is a fact that year 2009 statistics from the Korean government show that approximately 10,000 children became homeless that year. Out of those, approximately 1,300 were adopted domestically within Korea, and approximately 1,100 were subject to intercountry adoptions. That leaves 7,600 of children who are either in foster care or in institutions." Read more »
Kim Park Nelson, Researcher, Korean adoptee issues
"In the decade since the release of this seminal film, the explosive growth in cultural and artistic production by Korean adoptees has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the amount of research on Korean adoptee experiences. A critical mass of adoptee artists, activists, authors and researchers has emerged and gained visibility -- not only to the general public, but, just as significantly, to one another." Read more »
Julie Rosicky, Executive Director, International Social Service-USA
"At ISS-USA, we understand these issues because we encounter cases of international separation every day. Each story is unique, but the common thread is the brokenness that comes with loss of family, loss of heritage, and loss of connection to the fundamental underpinnings that make us all what we are. No caring person can watch Deann's film without feelings of sadness, anger and betrayal." Read more »
Kim Stoker, Adoptee Solidarity Korea
"Fifteen years ago I returned to live in the country where I was born. Like so many of my fellow Korean adoptees from all over the world, I grew up in a white family in the white suburbs. I had white relatives, white friends, white teachers and white role models. Encased in my own internalized whiteness upon returning - or rather, going -- to Korea I had no agenda, no schedule to search for my birth family, no aim to discover my roots and no plans to stay beyond the one-year teaching contract that I had signed. Or so I thought." Read more »
Jane Jeong Trenka, Author, Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee's Return to Korea
"Cha Jung Hee was a 'perfect orphan.' Her parents were dead, and she longed to live with the kind Americans who sent shoes and money to her orphanage. This template of a perfect orphan was then used by the Korean orphanage to deceive the Borshays into adopting Kang Ok Jin, who despite all odds would eventually reunite with a living Korean mother and family." Read more »
Dae-won Wenger, Former President of G.O.A.'L.
"Launched in 2007, the dual citizenship campaign took only three years to reach fruition. In May 2010, the Korean government promulgated the revised nationality law, which allows all Korean adoptees to regain their Korean citizenship while keeping citizenship in their adoptive countries. This law revision is important not only to Korean adoptees but to the entire adoptee community worldwide." Read more »
Chris Winston, Adoptive mother, Founder of KAAN
"Twenty years ago when my husband and I adopted our children from Korea, it was suggested that if we loved them enough they would not crave missing identity elements from their past. We were told not to include Koreans or Korean Americans in our lives, as they might stigmatize our two Korean-born children for their orphan status. Somehow this advice didn't seem right. We wanted to acknowledge our children's experience of often being the only Asian faces among their peers. " Read more »
Susan Soonkeum Cox
Susan Soonkeum Cox is the Vice President of Public Policy and Advocacy at Holt International. She was adopted from Korea in 1956. She shares how Deann's story struck a chord with her own personal experience.
Deann Borshay Liem has exquisitely captured her long journey to learn the real story of Cha Jung Hee, which is, of course, her story as well.
As Deann describes how she felt that she had been "walking in Cha Jung Hee's shoes" all her life, it is easy to see how this experience would be disquieting for a young girl, and how it would be impossible to disassociate Cha Jung Hee from her own identity.
I love the poetic use of enlarged photos and images that Deann uses to weave together her story and her narration that is so thick with feeling. The home movies that Deann's family took capture the transition of a little girl who arrived from Korea as she grows into a woman, but the images that we see of the sparkling, pretty girl who smiles into the camera over the years mask the authentic feelings behind that smile.
The juxtaposition of the happy family pictures as Deann describes how "my world began to fall apart" is a sharp contrast to the difficult reality of her search in Korea for Cha Jung Hee, and the difference in culture and understanding on the part of the Korean orphanage staff who assist her. When the translator says, "We think it is wise to forget the unfortunate past," it reminded me of my own experience with searching for my birth family, and how different the expectations and longing of adoptees are from those who stand between the quest and answers.
When the orphanage director says, "I'm sorry it is still haunting you," I ached at the disconnect that was unfolding on-screen between Deann and the Korean staff looking at her. I believe they were sincere in those expressions and meant them to be comforting. But I also know these words are not comforting, or easy to hear, and especially to accept, when you know you are entitled to your feelings.
In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee is a powerful film. It articulates the complicated and nuanced issues of intercountry adoption. I know Deann's adoption is not entirely unique -- other adoptees have discovered inconsistencies and untruths about their lives in Korea before they were adopted. But I also believe that in those early years after the Korean War when intercounty adoptions were just beginning, there was no road map for how it should be done. No one in Korea expected or anticipated that adoptees would return to learn about themselves.
More than 50 years later, it is clear that adoptees are returning -- and will continue to return -- to their birth country. I believe it is our birth right to have all there is to know about ourselves. I also believe there are many in Korea who are dedicated to making this possible. However, good intentions aside, adoptees are entitled to this as a matter of practice. Hopefully this film will bring clearer understanding of why this is important.
In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee tells a deeply personal story, and Deann has shown courage and generosity in sharing this with the rest of us -- I am grateful for that.
Susan Soonkeum Cox is the Vice President of Public Policy and External Affairs for Holt International Children's Services. She has worked with international adoption and child welfare issues for more than 25 years. Adopted from Korea in 1956, her life experience as an early international adoptee gives her a unique and personal perspective. Susan is a frequent presenter and trainer and has testified before Congress on issues related to adoption, child welfare and foreign affairs. She is a member of the Hague Special Commission on Intercountry Adoption
E.J. Graff
Looking at Fraud in International Adoption
E.J. Graff is the associate director of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. She suggests that fraud in international adoptions is more widespread than we think, and that governments must be
more active in preventing criminal fraud and support child welfare systems.
Is it ever right to arrange an adoption via fraud or under false pretenses? That question is at the heart of Deann Borshay Liem's film, which shows us so movingly the profound and painful consequences of erasing and replacing a child's identity, past and even her footprint. Liem shows us how shockingly easily it can be to change a child's identity -- cavalierly moving her from one name to another, one family to another, one country to another. By investigating her origins without bitterness or blame and showing us the rich lives led by the "real" Cha Jung Hees, Liem never allows us to conclude complacently that growing up in the wealthy United States was necessarily better than growing up in impoverished post-war South Korea. In the end she may have constructed a rich identity out of her partitioned childhood, but her film leaves us with the understanding that that does not necessarily justify the well-intentioned fraud that changed her fate -- a fraud apparently motivated by an uneven tangle of humanitarian intentions, adoption agencies' business interests, poor countries' need for Western investment and a lack of Korean (or international) investment in Korea's urgently needed social and family services.
All those factors continue to lead to fraud in international adoptions. Two years ago this month, the United States and Vietnam let lapse the three-year bilateral agreement that allowed Americans to adopt Vietnamese children. Fraud lay behind that decision -- in some cases, extremely serious fraud. As revealed in my recently published article, "Anatomy of an Adoption Crisis" on Foreign Policy's website, the U.S. State Department believed in 2008 that the vast majority of Vietnamese infant adoptions involved falsifying official documents, at a minimum, as well as frequently lying to, bribing or coercing birthfamilies to relinquish their children, and at times even abducting infants outright. According to internal government documents received in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, the State Department concluded that Vietnamese adoption fraud was widespread. The U.S. Embassy in Hanoi and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services personnel at the Ho Chi Minh City consulate investigated and came to believe that those frauds were perpetrated by various networks that were comprised of police officers, orphanage directors, hospital personnel, coercive maternity homes, American adoption agency representatives and government officials at the village, province and national levels. And yet there was little the State Department was able to do to stop those questionable adoptions, short of shutting down all adoptions from Vietnam -- the needed adoptions along with the problematic ones. Nor is Vietnam's an isolated case. Over the past 20 years, similarly endemic adoption problems have been found in Cambodia, Guatemala, Albania and at least a dozen other countries. The latest allegations of significant adoption fraud have been coming from Ethiopia, where foreigners adopted more than 3,000 children in 2009.
Korea, on the other hand, has long been held up as a country with a "clean" international adoption program, one in which the children involved genuinely needed new homes. Korea has had this reputation ever since Bertha and Henry Holt, an Oregon evangelical couple, pioneered large-scale international adoptions after the U.S.-Korean war in the 1950s. That's why it's so shocking to learn from this film that identity fraud could so easily be perpetrated in adoptions from Korea.
At 8 years of age, Deann Borshay Liem was old enough, when adopted, to know that she was not Cha Jung Hee, the name on her passport. As a result, when she was ready, she could search for her birth family and her case file, which in turn helped her piece together a meaningful identity. Infants adopted under falsified documents have no such option. In some cases, adopted infants whose identities have been fraudulently altered have been "found" by searching and bereft birth families from such countries as Guatemala, India, Nepal and Sierra Leone. But that's rare. Most such fraudulently adopted infants will lose their original identities more permanently than Liem did, and -- if those adoptees feel that as a loss -- will be forced to fashion their new selves with gaping holes where real facts might have been.
How can such fraud be stopped? My article "The Baby Business," published in this summer's issue of Democracy Journal, examines the holes in the treaties, statutes, regulations and policies that currently govern U.S. ventures in intercountry adoption -- and looks at what needs to be done to plug those holes and protect birth families, children and adopting parents from fraud. Representative Albio Sires of New Jersey is planning to introduce legislation toward that end.
Liem's moving film reminds us that "the matter of" a child's identity is an important matter indeed. And yet, given how relatively few of us adopt or are adopted across national borders, it's easy to believe that fraud in international adoption is an obscure and narrow issue. But the problems in international adoption have implications that reach throughout child welfare and development efforts worldwide. What's the right way to help children after the Haitian earthquake or the Liberian civil war? How can the United States help African AIDS orphans become productive citizens instead of pirates, child soldiers or insurgents? What is international adoption's correct role in child welfare? How should Western nations and the international community balance their citizens' personal investments in individual adoptions with the need to build better social services infrastructures for all of a poor country's children? The answers are linked. The United States needs to put in place improved policies, practices and regulations that simultaneously help prevent the criminal underside of the adoption trade and support child welfare and protection systems, so that impoverished families and disrupted communities can keep most of their children home -- and so that the children who truly need new families can find them without fear of fraud.
E.J. Graff is the associate director of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University, and investigates and reports on fraud and corruption in international adoption and on the policies, practices and regulations that could help prevent them. Her work has recently appeared in such publications as Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Slate.com and Democracy Journal. For an extensive array of information, reporting, academic research, government and non-governmental organization reports and other resources on irregularities in international adoption, go to http://www.brandeis.edu/investigate/gender/adoption/index.html.
Eleana Kim
International Adoptions From South Korea, Lessons From 1966
The year 1966, when Kang Ok Jin of Kunsan, South Korea became Cha Jung Hee in order then to become Deann Borshay of Fremont, California, was the same year that an observer from the International Social Service (ISS), the agency that facilitated the adoption, wrote with some concern, "In Korea today where there is strong need for foreign exchange, I am inclined to think that agencies are assessed by the Ministry [of Health and Social Affairs] in terms of dollars they bring into Korea. The quality of service or service rendered is only secondary." Between the time of the first four international adoptions from Korea in 1953 and the moment in 1966 when 494 children left Korea, the humanitarian effort to rescue war orphans and Amerasian or "mixed-race" children had become tied to profit motives, economic development and nation building. On the ground in South Korea, an array of social workers, fortune seekers and religiously motivated good Samaritans were involved in a complex and competitive scene. The same ISS report quoted above also observed "quite a bit of rivalry and competition among the different agencies, and it is not beyond agencies to bribe or pressure the mothers for the release of these children."
By 1966, the population of mixed-race children in South Korean orphanages had drastically declined, as their mothers were less likely to relinquish them than to raise them in kijich'on, or the camptown areas where military sex work was prevalent. As the ISS report noted, "Agencies including ISS have to go to find the Korean-Caucasian children by visiting prostitute areas, as it is not a common practice for the mothers to approach the agencies for the release of their children." In these areas, the appearance of mixed-race children was becoming normalized, and many of the women held on to their children in hopes of being reunited with their fathers through international marriage. And at least some of these hopes were not in vain, as American servicemen stationed in Korea filed hundreds of marriage petitions in the 1960s alone. With fewer abandoned mixed-race children and fewer women volunteering them for adoption, agencies struggled to meet the continuous demand from Americans who wanted to adopt "Korean orphans." Social workers were sent to the border zones and kijich'on to persuade the mothers that Korea's monoracial culture held no future for their children, especially as they reached school age. The experiences of Amerasians who stayed in South Korea attest to the validity of those concerns -- the majority were relegated to an underclass status that condemned them and their children to social stigma and marginalization against which many of them have struggled to the present day. Nevertheless, as the1960s progressed, fewer mixed-race children were relinquished or abandoned and Americans, and later Europeans, hoping to adopt increasingly had their hopes fulfilled with adoption of fully Korean children. By 1965, 70 percent of children sent overseas for adoption were of full Korean parentage, and by the mid-1970s virtually none of the children adopted were of mixed race.
The children had ended up in orphanages for a variety of reasons, but the majority, like Kang Ok Jin and Cha Jung Hee, were not actual orphans. Some had been lost by their parents or adult caregivers and ferried to orphanages by police officers; others were sent to orphanages as a temporary form of daycare by working-class parents without other options for childcare services. Yet others were sent to orphanages when their parents divorced or remarried, with some of these retrieved later. Thus, even as government statistics reflected skyrocketing cases of abandonment (from 755 in 1955 to 11,000 in 1964), it is difficult to assess whether all of these children were legally "abandoned" and what placement in an orphanage meant in each case. What is known is that by 1966 there were an estimated 71,000 children in roughly 600 institutions. In an attempt to address the problem of child abandonment and overflowing orphanages, the government implemented a program to return children to their families. In the process, however, it found that many of the children on the rolls of these institutions were actually "ghost children" who were not even in residence at the orphanages claiming them. These "ghost children" served as conduits for overseas aid -- and one might wonder whether one of the girls identified as Cha Jung Hee was, in fact, one of those "ghost children."
Immediately after the war, orphanages were the main beneficiaries in South Korea of overseas charitable donations, and as late as the 1960s they continued to receive the majority of their support from individual sponsorships through organizations such as Foster Parents Plan and World Vision. Donations from overseas funded the needs of children, from food to basic education, and for families in precarious economic circumstances the orphanages became crucial resources for family preservation. The sponsorship system that supported the orphanages also created fictive links of kinship between individual children and donors overseas. As we learn in Liem's film, developing these fictive relations through written correspondence and the exchange of pictures and gifts was vital to the maintenance of the child welfare institutions. Ultimately, however, this sponsorship system was unsustainable over the long term, as it made orphanages dependent on monthly installments of foreign capital and thus required a steady population of children feeding into the system. In effect, long after the war had ended, orphanages and the foreign capital they attracted were producing a new generation of "orphans" that many Americans and Europeans, motivated by infertility, religious conviction or liberal humanitarianism, were eager to "rescue."
Some at ISS were critical of sponsorships precisely because of the dependency they promoted, with one social worker suggesting that monetary aid be transferred to a child's family after the child left the orphanage to return home, perhaps as seed money for the child's parents to set up a small business. Yet sponsors preferred to send money to morally innocent "orphans" rather than to poor families in need. As the ISS social worker reported, "Can you believe it -- one objection to the idea of letting money follow a child into his home was 'There is something wrong when a parent has to be paid before he will take back his child.' There may be in some instances, but such a sweeping indictment!"
With 2 percent of South Korea's national budget spent on social welfare and more than 40 percent on national defense, welfare institutions were entirely dependent upon sponsorships, and directors of orphanages and baby hospitals held on to as many sponsored children as possible in order to ensure a continuous flow of money from foreign organizations. As overseas sponsorships began flagging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, adoption agencies faced greater pressure to expand their international adoption programs. In the case of the Child Placement Service (now called Social Welfare Society), the Korean agency affiliated with ISS, locating children, securing their welfare through foster care and waiting for families to be matched to them in the United States required time and money that it did not have. Without sponsorships to fund the care of these children, the only solution was to expand the adoption program to Scandinavia, where more lax social welfare policies meant a shorter waiting period for adoption placements and less money required for foster care in Korea. Adoptions to Sweden began in 1967 and extended to the rest of Scandinavia and Western Europe by the end of the decade. As the four government-approved agencies enlarged their operations throughout the 1970s, South Korean policies required them to implement programs for poor families and children, including homes for mothers, disabled children and abandoned children, effectively offsetting the state's welfare budget with revenues earned through international adoptions. ISS eventually left Korea because it viewed its role in international adoption as compromising its commitment to promoting universal standards of child welfare. It believed that children in Korea were being abandoned for reasons of poverty and a lack of social welfare services, a situation that ISS considered to be counterproductive to the goal of creating indigenous solutions for children in need.
Indeed, as ISS feared, international adoptions persisted as a proxy child welfare system, becoming virtually unregulated in the 1980s, when an average of 20 to 25 children left the country each day. South Korea today has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, high rates of infertility and negative population growth, yet overseas adoptions, now of infants born to unmarried women, continue at a rate of approximately 1,000 per year. The Korean international adoption program, the largest and longest in the world, is often held up as a model for other nations. Rather than being considered a model to follow, however, it might instead be seen as a model to disarticulate, in order better to comprehend how a temporary response to postwar crisis was transformed into an enduring solution to a nation's social welfare needs.
Toward that end, we can consider 1966 a pivotal year in the history of Korean adoption. That was the moment when full-Korean children began replacing mixed-race children, when sponsorships were on the decline and when organizations like ISS and even some government officials were questioning the appropriateness of international adoption as a solution to the problem of child welfare. It was a year, like so many that came afterwards, when adoptions from South Korea might have reversed course instead of increasing exponentially throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Indeed, it may be surprising for some of us today to realize that these issues, which seem so contemporary, were being explicitly argued more than four decades ago. Today, as war and natural disasters continue to put poor families and children in developing nations at risk, adoption often appears to be the best or even only solution for children's immediate survival. As the case of South Korea demonstrates, however, humanitarian rescue can easily turn into a long-term social welfare policy, especially in contexts where welfare programs and basic infrastructures are weak or nonexistent. In South Korea, what Rosemary Sarri and her colleagues identified as "goal displacement" shifted the objectives of adoption agencies and the state away from addressing the social welfare issues at the heart of child abandonment and relinquishment and toward the maintenance and reproduction of the system for its own sake. Even if children were not literally being bought and sold, in the context of South Korea's tumultuous modern history, it is hard not see how their lives, like those of their parents and many other South Koreans, were leveraged in the name of economic development, national security and foreign relations.
As Liem uncovers during the course of her investigation into her own past and that of Cha Jung Hee, which is intertwined with Liem's, some Koreans believed then and believe now that despite the fact that Liem was severed from her original identity and lost her connections to her Korean family, she was the fortunate one -- lucky to have been switched with Cha Jung Hee and to have had the chance to pursue the American dream. Similarly, many adoptees have found that questions about their origins have forced them to weigh their privileged lives as American or Danish or French citizens in loving families against the prospects of abject lives in orphanages. With greater understanding of the broader political and economic conditions that produced adoptable "orphans" and the seemingly necessary solution of international adoption, many Korean adoptees, like Liem, are beginning to recontextualize their life histories as well as those of children being sent for adoption today.
Eleana Kim is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Rochester. Her book, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging, will be published by Duke University Press in November 2010. This article is based on archival research at the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota. For a full-length discussion of the early history of Korean adoptions, see "The Origins of Korean Adoption: Cold War Geopolitics and Intimate Diplomacy." Working Paper Series (WP 09-09). U.S.-Korea Institute at SAIS, Johns Hopkins. 28 October 2009.
Steve Morrison
Adoption is About Finding Homes for Children
While watching In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, I was reminded of an incident that happened right before my eyes just a day before I was to leave for the airport to go to my family in the United States. The year was 1970, and I was a 14-year-old boy who was very excited and anxious to go to the United States to be with my new family. In the same orphanage there was a little boy about 5 years old whose name I cannot recall, and he was an Amerasian with blonde hair and Caucasian features. His mother was Korean, and she entrusted her son to the orphanage to be adopted, as she could not keep the boy because he looked different and also due to the fact that he had been born out of wedlock. This fact would have made it extremely difficult for her to raise the boy, as in Korean society there is a strong negative social stigma against children born out of wedlock and their mothers. While the boy was in the orphanage, the mother would periodically visit the boy and take him out of the orphanage to buy some treats for him from neighborhood stores, but she always returned him to the facility. The boy was scheduled to leave for the United States the same day I did. But just a day before we were to leave together, the boy's mother came and took him away without telling anyone. I watched her take him away, and I thought she was going to the store with him as usual. But they never came back to the orphanage. A commotion followed as the orphanage director and others looked for him around the neighborhood, but they could not find him. So I was sent to the United States without him.
The story of In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee is strikingly similar, except that no substitution took place in my case. In both cases, I believe the birth parents made last-minute decisions to stop their children from being adopted rather than face permanent separation. Both parents found it difficult to tell the orphanage directors of their changes of heart after having committed to adoption, so they decided to take their children away quietly without telling anyone. In those days, many parents abandoned their children to orphanages because they had no means to take care for them, and many of those children were adopted abroad.
As for the reasons for the deception in In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, I do not believe financial motive was the cause -- the orphanage director most likely made the decision not to disappoint the waiting family in the United States, and also he knew the unfavorable conditions that orphans faced in Korea and made a humanitarian decision to give a chance to another girl, an 8-year-old girl named Kang Ok Jin, who became Cha Jung Hee.
Orphans growing up in Korea face incredible challenges as they are subject to strong social stigma. Compared to ordinary children with families, orphans in Korea experience what I call "status discrimination," as they are not given the same opportunities to get good educations and good jobs. In the old days, 3 to 5 percent of orphans were able to go to college. Although educational opportunities for orphans have increased in recent years, they still fall significantly short of those afforded ordinary Korean children with families. By contrast, approximately 70 percent of Korean adoptees in the United States and Europe receive education to the high school level or above.
The discrimination does not end with education. If a young man with background as an orphan wishes to date and marry a woman with a family, often the woman's parents reject the man even though the woman loves him. If two men of equal ability apply for the same job, and one grew up in an orphanage and the other in a normal family, the man who grew up in the orphanage usually loses out. Although the social stigma against orphans has lessened greatly in Korea over the years, it still presents a big challenge for orphans growing up in orphanages. Not many orphans are adopted domestically in Korea, as they are mostly older, and Korean nationals tend to prefer adopting infants to keep the adoptions secret. For these reasons, I still believe that orphans should be given the opportunity to be adopted into families in the United States.
In In the Matter Cha Jung Hee, Deann Borshay Liem raises an honest question about how and why a humanitarian effort became an industry worth millions of dollars. However, it is a fact that year 2009 statistics from the Korean government show that approximately 10,000 children became homeless that year. Out of those, approximately 1,300 were adopted domestically within Korea, and approximately 1,100 were subject to intercountry adoptions. That leaves 7,600 children who are either in foster care or in institutions. Even with all the efforts to reunite biological families and promote domestic adoption in Korea, only 13 percent of homeless children have found homes domestically. Although the adoption industry started as a humanitarian effort, saying that it has become an industry seems to suggest that the focus of the adoption business is more on profit than on finding homes for children. Although I am not affiliated with any adoption agencies, I am keenly familiar with all the agencies and their work in Korea and in the United States, and I truly believe that even today the agencies are driven more by the humanitarian need to find homes for children than by a business motive. It doesn't matter whether a child is a war orphan or the child of an unwed mother in modern times -- that child still needs a home.
I believe domestic adoption should be promoted more, and when domestic adoption improves, the need for intercountry adoption will decrease. In the meantime, improvements should be made to the adoption process in order to prevent the irregularities that are portrayed in In The Matter of Cha Jung Hee from being repeated in the future.
Stephen C. Morrison, a senior project engineer at The Aerospace Corporation, is involved with the design and development of the GPS III satellite system. Morrison was orphaned at age 6 and lived in an orphanage for eight years before being adopted by the Morrison family at age 14. He founded the Mission to Promote Adoption in Korea (MPAK) in 1999 to bring about positive changes in the adoption culture in Korea by promoting domestic adoption as well as adoption by Korean-Americans. Morrison received the 2007 National Civilian Medal of Honor from the Korean government for his efforts to promote adoption in Korea and has spoken at many churches and organizations advocating the cause of homeless children. He and his wife adopted a child from Korea in 2000 and are in the process of adopting another child from Korea.
Kim Park Nelson
Will There Be a Golden Age for Korean Adoptees?
The release of Deann Borshay Liem's film First Person Plural in 2000 came at a critical time in the history of Korean transnational adoption. Despite 50 years of adoption from Korea, the experiences of Korean adoptees remained largely absent from popular and academic discourse at the end of the 20th century. But as the children adopted during the peak years of Korean adoption reached adulthood, a wave of networking efforts by Korean adoptee organizations, many then recently established, was gaining momentum; at the same time, new culture-based approaches to researching Korean adoptee communities were achieving acceptance in academia.
In the decade since the release of this seminal film, the explosive growth in cultural and artistic production by Korean adoptees has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the amount of research on Korean adoptee experiences. A critical mass of adoptee artists, activists, authors and researchers has emerged and gained visibility -- not only to the general public, but, just as significantly, to one another. I now wonder if the beginning of the 21st century will come to be regarded as a golden age for Korean adoptees, as it is poised to be a time when the largest generations of Korean adoptees reach adulthood, but the demise of transnational adoption from Korea, already predicted by many, has not yet occurred. In my ethnographic work on Korean adoptee communities, the theme of isolation has been almost ubiquitous, explained perhaps by the fact that my informants are usually the only (or among the few) adoptees, Koreans, Asian Americans and/or people of color in their families, schools and communities. Against this background, the synergy among members of this burgeoning community should not be underestimated, as one adoptee voice inspires, encourages and amplifies another.
The practical and emotional difficulties involved in searching for Korean family, and of making sense of the lost relationships that may be regained as a result of that search, are central themes for Liem in First Person Plural, as they are for the thousands of adoptees who have searched, found or even contemplated searching for Korean family members. This emotional turbulence makes First Person Plural a compelling drama, but through her films, Liem also occupies the position of adoptee-educator within the Korean adoptee community. By embedding her own experiences in the histories of war and social inequity that have created and sustained Korean adoption, she teaches adoptee viewers about the history of our community and about the procedural intricacies of adoption -- including the practice of falsifying records. First Person Plural set off a sea change in Korean adoptee communities as adoptees who saw the film began to think about the possibility that the most basic information of our origins, including our Korean names, birth places and even birth dates, might well be false.
The consequences of this falsification are the subject of Liem's recently released second feature documentary, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee. Born Kang Ok Jin, Liem was renamed Cha Jung Hee in a South Korean orphanage so that she could fulfill the plans made for the first Cha Jung Hee, who had been reclaimed by her Korean family after being promised to an American family. As Liem searches for the Cha Jung Hee whose identity she had been assigned, she explores the many lives of Korean women whose name she shared and whose lives she might have lived if she had not been adopted. This reflects the cycle of "what if" questioning that many adoptees experience as we contemplate the lives of the Koreans we could have been. Through its complex depiction of Korean women, the film also shines new light on the assumptions made about Korean adoptees -- that we have been saved, through adoption, from lives of abject poverty, starvation and prostitution.
In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee takes place almost entirely in South Korea, and return migration to Korea has become more common among Korean adoptees. Liem chronicles her journeys to South Korea through the lens of her own complex and ambiguous identity: at once a native and a foreigner, a daughter and a tourist. Liem once again operates as historian and educator for adoptees. Since reuniting with her Korean family, Liem's relationship with Korea has deepened, and through the exploration of her alternate selves, other Cha Jung Hees of her generation, she gives us a window into the lives of other Korean women. By splintering the idea of a single, monolithic Korean identity into a diverse range of life experiences and perspectives, she also reminds Korean adoptees that we, too, are Koreans.
Relationships between Korean adoptee communities and the Korean nation have also deepened in recent years. Conferences organized by the International Korean Adoptee Associations in Seoul in 2004, 2007 and 2010 have brought hundreds of Korean adoptees from around the world back to their birth country. Beyond their programming for adoptees, the most important function of these gatherings may be the creation of spaces for Korean adoptees and adoptee discourse in South Korea. The severing of legal and social links to South Korea has made our current identities possible, but at the expense of our identities as Koreans. Liem's documentary memoirs contain many examples of these paradoxes of identity. While her own identity is built on her experiences as a child of a white American family, she discovers biological roots in her Korean family and social ties in the fraught world of transnational adoption, where her birth story was constructed from the lives of others in order to facilitate her adoption.
While few organizations recognize the layered nature of Korean adoptee relationships to both birth and adoptive societies, there are a few adoptee-centered groups that have worked to establish space for adoptees in their adoptive countries and in South Korea. One of these organizations, the Global Overseas Adoptees' Link, based in South Korea, recently worked within the South Korean political system to establish the possibility of dual citizenship for Korean adoptees, who lost Korean citizenship upon their transnational adoption out of the country. As Korean adoptees spend more time in South Korea, become politically active there and produce art, literature, film and research in, about and for Korea, the social, cultural and political relationships between adoptee communities and the government and people of South Korea deepen and become more complex. The dual citizenship effort and Liem's films are just some of many Korean adoptee forays into South Korean politics and society, and there are sure to be more in the future. Adoptees are no longer war orphans, and our roles in Korean society are evolving and changing but remain paradoxical: We are objects of shame or of pride, carriers of Western culture or Korean blood, social critics or national advocates, activists for members of the Korean underclass or symbols of Western wealth, reminders of the lies that were used to create so many Korean adoptees or symbols of universal truths of human unity.
Kim Park Nelson's research explores the many identities of adult Korean adoptees, as well as the cultural, social, historical and political significance of more than 50 years of Korean adoption to the United States. She was the lead organizer and proceedings editor for the First and Second International Symposia on Korean Adoption Studies in Seoul in 2007 and 2010. Park Nelson is department chair and an assistant professor of American Multicultural Studies at Minnesota State University at Moorhead. She was adopted from South Korea in 1971.
Julie Rosicky
A New Day
The 1960s were a dark time for intercountry adoptions. Although there were many well-intentioned parties, the absence of regulation and oversight opened the door to a wide range of questionable practices and dishonest behavior.
As Deann Borshay Liem's film poignantly illustrates, those most frequently hurt were highly vulnerable children. Like all adoptees, these children struggled with issues of identity, love, loss and belonging - issues that were compounded because their adoptions crossed international borders.
At ISS-USA, we understand these issues because we encounter cases of international separation every day. Each story is unique, but the common thread is the brokenness that comes with loss of family, loss of heritage, and loss of connection to the fundamental underpinnings that make us all what we are. No caring person can watch Deann's film without feelings of sadness, anger and betrayal.
There is good news, however. Much has changed since the 1960s, and I am very proud to report that ISS - through a network of social workers, lawyers, psychologists, mediators and volunteers operating in 120 countries - has been at the center of the groundswell which has fostered meaningful reform and a burgeoning international acceptance of a set of principles and practices that are grounded in defending the best interests of the child. While we handle all types of cases of international separation, our outreach in advocacy and training are making transformative differences.
For more than eight decades, International Social Service (ISS) has been the lead agency practicing and refining intercountry casework. It was founded in 1924 under its original name, the International Migration Service, by representatives from the United States, the United Kingdom, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Poland and Switzerland in response to increased migration from Europe between the 19th and the 20th centuries. Our network gradually expanded to re-establish family links, and protect and defend children deprived or separated of their family across borders. Renamed International Social Service in 1946, we at ISS have provided psychosocial and legal expertise in child and family matters in an international context. To see some of our many success stories, please visit our website or that of our international federation.
Over the years, we have learned a great deal from the people we have served, and have translated that knowledge into providing better services, developing and advocating for best practices, and providing training and capacity building. As a network, we can provide and advocate for the best possible care of children separated from their families across borders around the globe. These efforts are aimed at protecting the rights of the children involved so that situations like those in Korea in the 1960s are not repeated.
One of the tenets of our advocacy work is the Hague Convention of 29 May 1993 on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption. As an organization, we were instrumental in shaping, writing and promoting the ratification of the Hague Adoption Convention, a groundbreaking document that guides the protection of the best interests of children involved in intercountry adoptions. According to the Hague Conference on Private Law's website, there are now 83 countries signed on to this convention - a convention that has transformed intercountry adoption dogma from finding children for families to finding families for children. In the last few years, ISS, through our international offices in Switzerland, has worked closely with states such as Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Kyrgyzstan and Côte d'Ivoire to reform their intercountry adoption practices and assist them on their path to ratification of the Hague Adoption Convention.
Hague has created many safeguards to protect children throughout the adoption process, including developing central authorities in each country, reducing the likelihood of the abduction, sale and trafficking of children via intercountry adoption, ensuring that children are clearly without family and that no suitable domestic options exist before an intercountry adoption can be finalized, requiring adoption agencies to operate with transparent procedures and to obtain accreditation. Most important in the context of Deann's film is that the Hague Adoption Convention establishes a strict framework for clearly identifying the origins of the child and establishing his/her adoptability prior to the proposal of an adoption for the child. This is wholly consistent with the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which together with Hague Adoption, guides our casework throughout the world.
The ISS General Secretariat International Reference Centre for the Rights of Children Deprived of their Family (IRC) is a division within ISS specifically dedicated to the questions linked to adoption and children without parental care. It is a service provider for twenty intercountry adoption central authorities in receiving countries, provides its services freely to all central authorities in countries of origin and serves a network of over 3000 professionals worldwide. Through this center, the ISS IRC has developed many important documents with other key stakeholders such as UNICEF and SOS Children's Villages that promote best practices in the care and protection of children, including the Guidelines on the Alternative Care of Children recently approved by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) as well as tools for adoption of older children and those with special health needs.
Our advocacy work takes on many forms. When a devastating earthquake hit Haiti in January, many questions surfaced about international adoptions originating there. ISS had to determine how international standards applied to expediting adoptions already in process. ISS recently released: "Expediting inter-country adoptions in the aftermath of a natural disaster ... preventing future harm." The report includes a signed toreword written by Mr Hans van Loon, Secretary General of the Hague Conference on Private International Law. This report examines intercountry adoption practices in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. Its principal objective is to identify lessons to be learned from our experiences in Haiti and to provide an objective analysis of the fast-tracking measures implemented against the backdrop of international norms.
Our efforts have also spawned new opportunities to build on the successes of recent years. Just last year, ISS-USA was awarded a Fostering Connections Discretionary Grant from the U.S Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Children's Bureau. The three year grant, which exceeds $1.4 million, will fund the work of ISS-USA and its partners in New Jersey to improve permanency placement options for children in the New Jersey foster care system by developing and implementing intensive family finding services for all children who have potential kinship placement outside the United States. It is hoped that the Demonstration Grant will result in more family placement options for children, and a training and best practices model that will be replicated throughout the United States.
We sincerely appreciate the opportunity POV has provided us to bring some additional perspective on international adoptions and the work that we at ISS do. To that end, we invite any adoptee or family member searching for relatives to contact us through our website, by email, iss-usa@iss-usa.org or by calling 443-451-1201. We have connected a great number of people by providing information, closure and reunions for people around the globe. We also welcome contact from anyone who would like more information about how access historical information about ISS for the purpose of scholarly research at the Social Welfare History Archives at The University of Minnesota. The records document a wide range of ISS-USA's international social services, including services to refugees and migrants and, particularly, international adoptions by families in the United States.
While heart wrenching and sad, Deann's film will bring important attention and hope to the issues surrounding international adoption. While there is still much work to do, the film underscores how far we have come since the 1960s. We at ISS are gratified that we have played a role in these advances and remain committed to the continued care for the best interests of children.
Julie Gilbert Rosicky is the executive director of International Social Service, United States of America Branch, a non-governmental nonprofit agency which is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, and has an international federation of intercountry social services providers in 140 countries. Julie contributed to the passing of new statutes for ISS, and was elected by her colleagues to be Chair of the ISS Professional Advisory Committee. She serves as a board member on the ISS Governing Board.
Kim Stoker
An Adoptee Comes Home
Fifteen years ago I returned to live in the country where I was born. I truly had no idea that I was embarking on a journey that would lead me to where I am now. Like so many of my fellow Korean adoptees (KADs) from all over the world, I grew up in a white family in the white suburbs. I had white relatives, white friends, white teachers, and white role models. Encased in my own internalized whiteness upon returning - or rather, going -- to Korea I had no agenda, no schedule to search for my birth family, no aim to discover my roots and no plans to stay beyond the one-year teaching contract that I had signed. Or so I thought.
It took the first three years of living in Korea, two more years of graduate school learning about Korea, and another two more years back before I felt comfortable and ready to discard the whiteness that had been years in slowly sloughing off. I found that safe comfortable space in ASK - Adoptee Solidarity Korea.
Founded in 2004 by a group of six American KADs living in Seoul, ASK began as a meeting of like-minded friends interested in examining the complex realities of inter-country adoption (ICA) from South Korea. Since that time, ASK has been a strong voice in advocating for alternatives to ICA, namely social welfare reform and support for single unwed mothers. Members of ASK have presented at conferences and symposiums, lectured at universities, given print, radio and television interviews, made movies and art -- all in the name of increasing awareness about the need for change in the way Korea lets go thousands of its dispensable children.
So often among adoptees these days, the issue of ICA gets whittled down to the facile binary of being either "pro" or "against." If you advocate for ICA you are "pro-child," "pro-family," even "progressive." If you criticize ICA you are "ungrateful," "angry" or even "racist." Children need permanent homes, plenty of parents desire to give them those homes. I don't know anyone who would argue against that. I only wish it were so simple.
International adoption is ethnocentrism at its essence. On a global level, ICA is about inequities of race, gender, class, money, religion and western hegemony; on a local level, it's about a lack of women's rights and reproductive rights, moving people across borders, poverty and Christian values. Children, as the lowest rung on any social strata, fall vulnerable to the vagaries of the times. Not to mention the problems with the business of adoption itself. At its worst, illegal methods of procuring children are still practiced. At the least, unethical practices of coercion, intimidation and misinformation are still commonly used.
The reality of South Korea today is that it is not overflowing with orphaned, unwanted children. The factors that were the impetus for Korean ICA 60 years ago - war, epidemic poverty and racism against Amerasian children - are no longer sustainable reasons to justify the continuation of the Korean overseas adoption industry. On the economic front, Korea has been a member the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) since 1996 and will host the G-20 this November. On the social end, over 90 percent of adopted Korean children are born to single unwed mothers, most of whom would choose to raise their children if they had a viable choice. Yes, it is true that single mothers and their children face very real social stigmatization and struggle with poverty that limit their prospects for survival. But in recent years, supporters, advocates and a small but growing number of brave women are speaking out and asserting their rights to raise their own children instead of giving them up for adoption.
By watching films such as Deann Borshay Liem's first documentary, First Person Plural, and her current work, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, I hope that a wider audience can learn about some of the complexities of ICA and how this modern phenomenon affects the life and lives of individuals and families.
Kim Stoker is a full-time lecturer at Duksung Women's University in Seoul. She has been living in Korea on and off since 1995. She is currently the Representative of Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK), an organization of Korean adoptees that advocates for alternatives to intercountry adoption.
Jane Jeong Trenka
A Call for Accountability
Cha Jung Hee was a "perfect orphan." Her parents were dead, and she longed to live with the kind Americans who sent shoes and money to her orphanage. This template of a perfect orphan was then used by the Korean orphanage to deceive the Borshays into adopting Kang Ok Jin, who despite all odds would eventually reunite with a living Korean mother and family.
Despite similar cases of corruption that are reported anecdotally among adult adoptees, especially those who have reunited with their birth families, South Korea's adoption program is still dubbed the world's "Cadillac" of international adoption, in part because of its supposed transparency. The reputation of the world's 15th largest economy and host of this November's G20 summit is so sterling that it has perennially remained in the top three or four "sending" countries, even while refusing to comply with international law: It has yet to ratify the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, and it holds reservations to paragraph (a) of article 21 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
South Korea was urged to ratify the Hague Convention in May 2008 during a meeting of the members of the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child. At that time, the committee pointed out that South Korean adoption agencies do not keep sufficient documents on adopted children, and added that "a possibility of abuse . . . may have occurred in intercountry adoptions from South Korea," according to South Korea's Yonhap News Agency.
Whether or not the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child was aware at the time that our organization, Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK), had already filed a complaint about abuses in adoption with the Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission of Korea in January of 2008 is unclear. However, one of the cases we had cited was Deann Borshay Liem's, which we had learned about from her first movie, First Person Plural. TRACK also presented the cases of other Korean adoptees living in Korea and other countries. Those cases involved unclear relinquishments, intrafamilial kidnappings, misrepresentations of children's social and medical histories to adoptive parents and various other forms of misinformation contained in adoption files.
In November 2009, TRACK brought these representative cases illustrating what appear to be industry-wide abuses to the South Korean parliament as we introduced revisions to the adoption law with our coalition, consisting of TRACK, KoRoot, ASK, the Gonggam Public Interest Lawyers, National Assembly Representative Choi Young-hee, and the Korean Unwed Mothers and Family Association (KUMFA). KUMFA represents some of the 80 percent of people who raise their children when they are able to access genuine support outside the intertwined web of unwed mothers' shelters, adoption agencies and healthcare providers that harvest babies to send for adoption.
In short, the government knows very well what has happened within the country's borders in the past and what is happening in the present, but it has yet systematically to hold the parties who have engaged in corruption accountable for their actions, nor has "dynamic" and "sparkling" Korea ever bothered to fund a creative campaign to help end institutionalized discrimination against unwed mothers, who give birth to 90 percent of internationally adopted Koreans today.
South Korea has continued to shirk its responsibility to keep original families together as the first internationally recommended priority; perform domestic and international adoptions ethically and transparently when absolutely necessary; and offer adequate post-adoption services to the very people that adoption is supposed to serve most: the adoptees. There is no law in Korea banning adoptees from accessing their birth information; the records are not sealed. It is only agency policy and practice -- including mishandling, forgeries and omissions in records -- that prevent adoptees and their Korean families from being reunited. This kind of negligence and tacit acceptance of negligence is clear in the movie, when the social worker insists that Liem's record is 100 percent accurate -- with the minor exception that the record belonged to a completely different person, as if that were some kind of common oversight of no significance.
Regarding the problems in the adoption program, both past and present, Koreans often tell me, "No one cares." Yes, sometimes I do get the feeling that no one cares. We don't even know exactly how many adoptees were sent away, because the Koreans did not care enough to document all of us properly. We can only guess that it may be up to 200,000 children over the past 60 years. The country that ranks first in the world in broadband Internet penetration while spending the least amount of money on social welfare out of all OECD countries, aside from Mexico, continues to send children away at the rate of over 1,000 a year. Ranking 115th in the world in terms of gender equality, between India and Bahrain, South Korea punishes single mothers for being sexually active while enabling paternal irresponsibility, all while simultaneously maintaining a neoliberal social welfare scheme that financially incentivizes adoption through private agencies. The country with one of the world's lowest birthrates has turned to developing countries in Asia for mail-order brides to boost its population in order to avoid a demographic catastrophe, while it has disincentivized child-rearing by Korean unwed mothers by not providing sufficient support for them to raise their own children.
Many adoptees are reluctant to criticize the Korean international adoption system because they feel that they are no longer Korean, and as "foreigners," they have no right to say anything. However, whether adoptees call themselves "Korean" or not, and whether there were abuses in their own adoptions or not, there are internationally recognized standards of ethics and transparency that Korea simply does not meet. Its refusal so far to ratify the Hague Convention and its reservations to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child are concrete proof of that. International pressure must be brought to bear on South Korea in order to stop the corrupt practices that lead to cases such as Liem's. We all need to start caring.
In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee is especially welcome at a time when highly publicized cases of corruption have come to light in countries such as Cambodia, Vietnam, India and Guatemala, while South Korea has received nary a criticism about the unethical practices that have been cited frequently in the Korean media. As the South Korean government, the private companies on which Korea has become dependent to provide social welfare for its people and their scores of overseas adoption partners turn a blind eye to fraud and abuse, this movie testifies to the never-ending consequences paid by adoptees, adoptive families and original families when adoptions are mishandled, despite everyone's best intentions, and despite everything that we adoptive families thought we knew.
Jane Jeong Trenka was sent for adoption to Minnesota in September 1972 and repatriated to Korea in 2004. Her latest book is Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee's Return to Korea, and she volunteers as president of TRACK (Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea), an organization in Seoul advocating for the full knowledge of past and present Korean adoption practices to protect the human rights of adult adoptees, children and families.
Dae-won Wenger
Dual Citizenship for International Adoptees
My name is Dae-won Wenger. At age 6 I was sent along with my older brother to Switzerland from Korea for adoption. As I was growing up, I was always interested in Korean culture and food. I joined the local Korean association and attended Korean classes.
In the early 1990s I met more and more Korean adoptees. After working in the United States for two years, I returned to Switzerland in 1993 and got involved with the local Korean adoptee community. In 1994 I became co-founder of Dongari Switzerland, a Swiss association for Korean adoptees that grew rapidly to almost 200 members within a few short years.
While I was involved with Dongari Switzerland I traveled to Korea several times, and spent half a year studying Korean language at Yonsei University in 1995. In 1999 I got involved in a nonprofit foundation in Zurich, and in 2003 I was working as its CEO when I decided to move to Korea, something I had been dreaming of since my previous trip in 1995. With only one suitcase, I made the trip with a stopover in the Netherlands, where I attended the famous Arierang Weekend one more time before leaving Europe.
In Korea I became involved with Global Overseas Adoptees' Link (G.O.A.'L). I started as a volunteer working on IT infrastructure. In early 2004, the then secretary general of G.O.A.'L, John Hamrin, decided to resign. I applied for the position and got it, so from February 2004 until recently I served as secretary general of G.O.A.'L.
G.O.A.'L is the only adoptee-run non-governmental/nonprofit organization registered in Korea and is the oldest of all the Korean support organizations. Back in the 1990s, the living situation for Korean adoptees who returned to their motherland was very difficult. That was the main reason G.O.A.'L was founded. G.O.A.'L was created to lobby for improvement in the situation of Korean adoptees. It began as a purely volunteer-based organization but has since grown into a service organization with a staff of eight people. Many services are being offered. These include birth family search assistance, translation/interpretation and counseling on settling in Korea, obtaining F4 visas, finding accommodations, finding jobs, obtaining scholarships and arranging Korean language tutoring, as well as social networking and sports activities, discussion forums, conferences and other annual activities, birth family search campaigns, public outreach and much more. Adoptees can also get involved in providing services, since G.O.A.'L is an adoptee organization.
During my time as secretary general, there were several important projects. The most important one to me personally was the dual citizenship campaign. Already back in 1998, former secretary general Ami Nafzger was lobbying for the inclusion of Korean adoptees in the Overseas Koreans Act, which was passed in 1999 by the Korean National Assembly. This act allowed Korean adoptees to receive F4 visas, residency visas similar to green cards in the United States. In spite of this improvement, living in Korea still presents problems. That's why obtaining dual citizenship (having Korean citizenship restored without having to renounce an adoptive country's citizenship) seemed to be a natural follow-up to the Overseas Koreans Act.
Launched in 2007, the dual citizenship campaign took only three years to reach fruition. In May 2010, the Korean government promulgated the revised nationality law, which allows all Korean adoptees to regain their Korean citizenship while keeping citizenship in their adoptive countries. This law revision is important not only to Korean adoptees but to the entire adoptee community worldwide. It sets a precedent for all international adoptees and is a triumph of the adoptee rights movement. The interest in it within the Korean adoptee community is huge.
Since April 2010 I have been on the board of directors of G.O.A.'L. Currently I am working on some other projects, but I will definitely stay in Korea, at least for the near future.
Dae-won Wenger was the secretary general of Global Overseas Adoptees' Link (G.O.A.'L) from 2004 until March 2010. He has actively worked with Korean adoptees since 1994, when he co-founded the adoptee organization Dongari Switzerland. He relocated to Seoul in 2003. He served on the board of the Euro-Korean Network and the Gathering 2007. In 2008, Wenger was appointed an honorary committee member of the Republic of Korea's 60th anniversary celebrations by President Lee, and in 2009 he received the Prime Minister Award for his contributions to the Korean adoptee community and the Korean society.
Chris Winston
Helping Our Children Find Their Identities
Raising children so that they reach their potential is something that all parents by birth or adoption hope to do well. However, as children move from childhood to adulthood, most parents realize that their children are not as malleable as their parents had originally supposed they would be. In addition to parenting, children are influenced by many factors, including their innate genetics, the communities in which they are raised, the friends they make and the resolution of unexpected experiences that arise in their lives. As children reach adolescence, they need to separate from parents and incorporate all of the above elements into their senses of identity. For some adoptees there is the additional layer of an unknown birth family. And for an interethnic adoptee, there is another culture and another ethnicity to add to the mix when forming a sense of self, while for an intercountry adoptee, there is also another country.
In the movie In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, we watch as Deann Borshay Liem incorporates the missing elements from her past into who she is today. She discovers that Cha Jung Hee's shoes really are Liem's own shoes. Some might be willing to write off Liem's experience as an aberration. They might conclude that Liem's past matters only because she had memories of her life in Korea. They may believe that it is unusual for an adoptee not to have access to all of her original history. However, even in the case of an infant placed in the best of circumstances, there are missing pieces. This is inherent to the adoption experience. What makes this movie meaningful is that the missing pieces and the identity puzzles that adoption causes are clear for all to see.
Twenty years ago when my husband and I adopted our children from Korea, it was suggested that if we loved them enough they would not crave missing identity elements from their past. We were told not to include Koreans or Korean Americans in our lives, as they might stigmatize our two Korean-born children for their orphan status. Somehow this advice didn't seem right. We wanted to acknowledge our children's experience of often being the only Asian faces among their peers. So, we decided to be the only Caucasian faces among many Asian ones in the Sacramento, California Korean-American community. We didn't stay on the surface; we dove in deep to form friendships with first-, second- and third-generation Korean Americans, as well as Koreans living in Korea.
I made my first Korean-American friend by walking into her dry cleaning shop. I spent hours manning the front counter of her store while she took her children to the doctor and attended school conferences. She spent hours teaching me to cook Korean food at her house or simply talking to me while my children played with hers in the back of her store. I spent time helping another friend, a Korean-American oncology pharmacist, at healthcare fairs for Korean-American senior citizens. When I was diagnosed with cancer, she connected me with the best oncologist she knew and made me an honorary member of the Sacramento Korean American Cancer Support Group. Because a Korean-American psychologist friend helped me to make the right Korean connections, when I took my children to Korea we were able to stay with Korean families. We then helped those Korean families find host families in the United States. Can you see the reciprocity in these relationships?
The latest expert advice is to expose adoptees early and often to their cultures of origin. On the Internet, I see many discussions revolving around the question "How much culture is too much?" People ask, "Should children be forced to learn about their countries of origin?" To me, these don't seem to be the relevant questions. This type of experience is different from having family friends to whom children can relate as little or as much as they like. Korean and Asian Americans are often in our homes and in our lives. They are not our "Korean friends." They are our friends. As they grew, our children related to these family friends, asked them questions about Korea and got ideas about how to handle racial incidents.
But let us not suppose that even with many resources at an adoptee's disposal, identity formation is easy. Not long ago I attended a discussion along with fellow parents of a young adult adoptee. They were clearly concerned about their daughter, who was having a difficult transition to adulthood. Some of the panelists were quite judgmental of these parents, suggesting all of the things that they could have done better. But as the discussion went on, it became clear that these parents had done many things to expose their daughter to Korea and to other Asian Americans. As I had done, they had made Korean friends. They were supportive of their daughter. Yet she was struggling to put together her identity. No one was pointing out that adoption and interethnic issues are inherent and normal to the development of an adoptee. No one was acknowledging that these issues might be challenging to resolve.
Liem's film makes clear the resources needed for adoptees to integrate their pasts into their futures. Parents can help by having friends from their children's ethnic backgrounds. We make things easier or harder depending on the tools we give our children and depending on the opportunities we give them to explore. But in the end, I think it is important that people not make judgments about the identities that adoptees choose. Adopted children grow up and become young adults of their own making. They continue to evolve. That evolution never stops. As human beings, all of us, adopted or not and regardless of age, are works in progress.
Chris Winston is founder and former president of the Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network (KAAN), which aims to support networking and build understanding among Korean-born adoptees, adoptive families, Koreans and Korean Americans. KAAN hosts an annual national conference in a different city each year. Winston has published articles and presented papers and workshops for numerous adoption- and Korea-related organizations and conferences. In 2006, KAAN published her book, A Euro-American on a Korean Tour at a Thai Restaurant in China. She lives in Sacramento, California with her husband, Mark. They have three adult children, two of whom were adopted from Korea.