Meeting Once More: The Korean Side of Transnational Adoption by Elise Prébin

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 247-252
Author(s):  
Kimberly McKee
Keyword(s):  
Transnational Adoption

scholarly journals THE PORTRAYAL OF A KOREAN ADOPTEE’S EXPERIENCE IN NICOLE CHUNG’S ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW: A MEMOIR OF ADOPTION

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 28
Author(s):  
Rizqia Nuur Maziyya
Keyword(s):  
Identity Development ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
Adopted Children ◽  
Transnational Adoption ◽  
Western Countries ◽  
White American ◽  
Korean Adoptees ◽  
Birth Country ◽  
Save The Children

Transnational adoption has become one of the factors of transnational migration to Western countries, including America. Transnational adoption can be viewed from at least two perspectives, South Korea as the origin country and America as the targeted country. From the birth country, transnational adoption becomes a way to help the children from poverty, have a better future, and contribute to the birth country when they return. From the adoption-targeted country, this adoption is a humanitarian way to save the children from poverty, primitive way of life, and God’s blessing. One of the countries which regularly “send” the children to Western countries is South Korea. The children become Korean adoptees and mostly living in white American neighborhoods. Living with white Americans has shaped the Korean adoptees’ behavior and way of thinking same as Americans. Korean adoptees face various problems, starting from adjusting themselves in new environment, finding their cultural roots and identity, and struggling to find their biological parents. This study employed Phinnes’ ethnic identity development to make sense of the experience of a Korean adoptee called Nicole Chung in her memoir, All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir of Adoption. Through the discussion, it can be understood how transnational adoption programs become national agenda and big business field since it is not expensive to have children from other countries. There is also an assumption that the children will have better and happier life when they are taken to America and other western countries. However, throughout their life as adopted children in America, the children also find difficulties, especially in finding their identity.

The Desire for Adoptive Invisibility

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Sadowski-Smith
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Adoptive Parents ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Transnational Adoption ◽  
White Children ◽  
The Right ◽  
Death Cases ◽  
Unrealistic Expectations

This chapter explores three of the most influential parental memoirs of adoption from the former Soviet Union—Margaret L. Schwartz’s The Pumpkin Patch (2005), Theresa Reid’s Two Little Girls (2007), and Brooks Hansen’s The Brotherhood of Joseph (2008)—to complement scholarship on transnational adoption that has focused on questions of race for adoptions from China and Korea, while emphasizing adoption failures for Eastern European adoptees. In these memoirs, parents explicitly eschew the traditional humanitarian narrative of adoption and portray themselves as neoliberal consumers who have the right to select healthy white children from the international adoption market in order to forge families whose members look as though they could be biologically related. While the authors’ belief that they share a preexisting racial identity with post-Soviet children grants them immense privileges, it also subjects adoptees to unrealistic expectations of their complete assimilation that ignore the conditions for the children’s relinquishment and displacement from their birth countries, languages, and cultures. The belief that US adoptive parents share a racial identity with children in the former East Bloc not only turns them into preferred commodities but also renders them particularly vulnerable to rejections or adoption disruptions, which may help explain the significant numbers of abuse and death cases of post-Soviet adoptees at the hands of their US parents.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Kori A. Graves
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Adopted Children ◽  
Transnational Adoption ◽  
World War ◽  
Birth Mothers ◽  
Adoptive Family ◽  
Displaced Children

The introduction provides a brief history of the development of US domestic adoption, and African Americans’ roles in US and transnational adoption in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since the professionalization of adoption in the United States largely evolved around the needs of birth mothers, children, and adoptive parents who were white, African Americans’ efforts to care for orphaned and displaced children through formal and informal adoptions has been underappreciated. The introduction describes the ways African Americans adopted children in the United States and, after World War II, foreign-born children of African American soldiers. This approach provides a foundation for understanding how African Americans’ participation in Korean transnational adoption was similar to their domestic adoption efforts and their efforts to adopt World War II GI children. It also suggests reasons why efforts to increase the professionalization and standardization of Korean transnational adoption reduced African Americans’ participation in this method of adoptive family formation.

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