Reframing Adoptee Narratives

Very public transnational, transracial adoptions by celebrities and the inclusion of transnational, transracial adoption in prime-time television sitcoms make this form of family making increasingly visible. Yet the majority of representations privilege the adoptive parent’s point of view. Drawing on two recent Korean-adoptee-created media, the Netflix documentary Twinsters (2015) and NBC Asian America’s docuseries akaSEOUL (2016), this chapter examines how adoptee-centered media converge with and diverge from traditional renderings of transnational adoption. In doing so, these media provide not only new portrayals of transnational, transracial adoptees but also new conceptions of Asian and Korean American racial, ethnic, and familial identities.

Theorizing Korean transracial adoptee experiences: Ambiguity, substitutability, and racial embodiment

This article articulates a critical phenomenological account of the being of the Korean transracial adoptee, through an analysis of three fundamental interrelated experiences. First, I argue that adoptee being is marked by epistemological ambiguity, or the impossibility of knowing and the ambiguous value of any knowledge gained. Second, the arbitrary sense of one’s place and identity contribute to a sense of substitutability among adoptees. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body schema, I then argue that for the Korean adoptee, racial difference is inscribed in the body schema as absence. The article ends with a discussion of the complexities of racial embodiment that underpin adoptees’ identifications and experiences of belonging and place, and which result in what I term ‘hyper(in)visibility’.

Hidden Among the Hidden: Transracially Adopted Korean American Adults Raising Multiracial Children

The parenting practices of both transracially adopted Korean American adults and multiracial families are often overlooked in developmental science, yet are important to address given that the majority of Korean adoptees are now adults with families of their own and given rapid increases in the multiracial population. This qualitative study examined the cultural socialization beliefs and practices among transracially adopted Korean Americans who are parents of multiracial Asian-White children. Drawing upon interviews with 31 Korean adoptee parents (29 female; Mage = 41.26), we identified four themes that capture parents’ understanding of their children’s multiracial identities, how that understanding subsequently shapes their cultural socialization practices, and how parents’ socialization beliefs and practices vary by developmental stage. These themes described the ways that parents’ cultural socialization practices were shaped by their children’s phenotypes, parents’ understanding of their children’s multiracial identities, geographic location, and the multiracial family context. This study also demonstrated how multiracial couples in our sample engaged in cultural socialization together. Results suggest that Korean adoptee parents largely acknowledged their children’s multiracial identities through labels, but primarily socialized children as monoracial minorities.

Producing Model Korean Adoptees

This chapter complicates popular visions of the model Korean adoptee. It begins by examining how the Immigration and Naturalization Service monitored which Korean children were fit for entry, and sought to assure that they would not become charges of the state once they arrived. Hiring the International Social Service to manage the placement of Korean children, the INS transferred its responsibility to adoptive parents, a move that laid bare the interconnectedness of state and private entities. The chapter also shows how Harry Holt found ways to circumvent the red tape. His crusade to bring Korean GI babies to the United States necessitated their racial management, since existing domestic adoption policies precluded the crossing of black-white lines. What resulted ranged from state agencies denying African American couples’ adoption applications to South Korean prejudice against mixed-race children, particularly those “mixed with black.” The chapter closes with a look at the model construction of full-Korean adoptees in popular media as a way to reveal how making Korean children Christian, well-behaved, and assimilable was not happenstance, but rather a transnational process that began in US-administered orphanages in South Korea and was later overseen in the United States.

Being a Transnational Korean Adoptee, Becoming Asian American

The 2018 Winter Olympics saw Korean adoptees celebrated as global ambassadors bridging Korea and the U.S. Yet, in their daily lives, Korean adoptees often feel they are not quite full members of either country or culture. What does it mean for these adoptees to be inbetween, historically and contemporarily, and how do they fit into Asian America?