Rewriting the Adoptee Experience

Adoptees’ print and online works provide a critical starting point for other adoptees as they negotiate their multiple, intersecting identities. The autobiographical narrative encourages adoptees’ assertion of what it means to be an adopted person as they create counterstories and engage in narrative repair. This chapter examines how adoptees moved from articulating their collective identities in the earliest published, adult adoptee-edited anthologies, Seeds from a Silent Tree: An Anthology by Korean Adoptees (1997) and Voices From Another Place: A Collection of Works From a Generation Born in Korea and Adopted to Other Countries (1999), to their deployment of social media to connect with one another and members of the broader Korean diaspora through an examination of adoptee hip-hop artist Dan Matthews’ YouTube series asianish (2015-2016).

Adoption in Practice

This chapter analyzes thirteen adult adoptee oral histories. Oral history offers a more comprehensive lens to consider how adoptees experience the world outside of narratives found in anthologies, memoirs, or documentaries. Their voices provide a lens to create a more holistic portrait of the adoption experience filled with nuance that cannot be reduced or generalized to a singular narrative. These adoptees may not espouse happiness and gratitude about adoption all of the time nor are they all angry and ungrateful. Instead, they exist on a continuum of adoptee affects ranging from the every adoptee to adoptee killjoy. These interviews are part of this study’s wider examination of cultural authenticity and how adult adoptees trouble mainstream adoption discourse following over sixty years of infantilization and fetishization.

Counseling Adult Adoptees

This review presents various resources about working with adult adoptees in order to inform counselors in their practice. Topics covered include basics of adoption, including types of adoption and adoption statistics; possible issues adult adoptees may face; and suggestions and implications for counselors. The article addresses some of the serious emotional and psychological issues the adult adoptee can bring to the counseling relationship. Also included is a discussion of the search process for birthparents and the counselor’s possible role in this process.