Adoptees return in search of lives not lived
Koreans adopted overseas often return to Korea in search of their identity. But many of them experience difficulty staying or living in their “motherland” and, realizing their lack of Korean language skills, often find themselves lost in translation. Korea Times file
Editor’s note
This article is the 10th in a series about intercountry adoptions. While over 160,000 Korean children have been adopted abroad since the 1950-53 Korean War, it is believed that many cases have infringed on relevant laws or violated children’s right to know the truth about their filiation. The series will review such violations in transnational adoptions of Korean children and elsewhere, and discuss receiving countries’ moves to conduct their own investigations. This series is co-organized with Human Rights Beyond Borders. ― ED.
By Kimberly D. McKee
For many adoptees, Korea is a vexing site of return. It’s simultaneously home and not home. We’re too loud. Too foreign. Our mannerisms signal our lack of cultural capital, even as the “han” (internalized sorrow or grief) of adoption and separation courses through our veins.
Yet, there’s a fantasy held by some that a wave of Korean cultural knowledge will be imparted on us when our flight touches down at Incheon International Airport. Or, even in our more realistic fantasies, that a taxi driver will understand our Korean, and we will seamlessly order food at a restaurant. Nonetheless, the Korean language does not easily dance across our tongues and pour out of our mouths in the ways we hope. For every adoptee you meet who speaks Korean, we can show you a hundred others where this is not the case. Korean remains a language of familiarity and unease, operating at the edges of our consciousness.
We are both reminders of a failure to care and support our birth families and celebrated markers of racial liberalism and multiculturalism. This contradiction influences perceptions that we were “better” off as a result of adoption, even as lawsuits and adoptee activism in Korea make visible, what scholar Kit Myers terms the “violence of love” that is adoption. The myth of “successful” adoptees, as seen in Korean cultural productions, overlooks adoptees’ first-person accounts.
The question remains: What is this imagined Korea? It’s not the adoptive parent-curated edition offered by culture camps, nor is it the Korea depicted in K-dramas. How do we reconcile adoptees’ competing notions of Korea? Here, I am reminded of Korean adoptee writer and scholar Jenny Heijun Wills’s reflection: “This story, these stories are not all mine. Some of them, in fact, belong to no one at all, but are the fantasies that seem to flower so naturally from the mouths of those of us who’ve grown lives out of half facts, wishful thinking and outright lies. Who piece themselves together from the residue of lost records. From withheld or secreted records.” That is why mixed-Black, U.S. domestic transracial adoptee writer Shannon Gibney’s words ring true: “The only way for people like me — adoptees — to express the truth of our lives and experiences is to embrace that there are no singular truths. There is no one reality.”
I contemplate these potential futures and pasts as I explore adoption fantasies, or rather in this case, adoptees’ fantasies, to examine the paths not taken, the lives not lived, and the ones we inhabit. The day-to-day activities of life in Korea fascinate me as my young son and I carve a life in Seoul for ourselves for this year, while my husband remains in the United States. For me, this is about exploring the fantasies of the mundane that adoptees hold, yet often these go undisclosed because too often reunion is the fantasy or just coming to Korea is too much, unearthing emotions one did not even know existed underneath the surface.
As someone married to a Korean adoptee, I cannot help but contemplate how our son’s navigation of Korea offers a glimpse into the possibilities of what could have been. This may be a romanticized view of return; however, it’s the rote family and childhood activities that provide a window to a life that will never be ours. Thus, even though I’m not the first adoptee to return with one’s child, nor the last, I consider how our returns and motivations to return will shape the next generation and their access to an experience and identity that did not readily come to us.
Kimberly D. McKee’s son stands in Seoul Forest in Seongsu-dong, Seoul, in November. / Courtesy of Kimberly D. McKee
In November I had the opportunity to go on a family field trip sponsored by my son’s daycare. The field trip involved riding the bus with other Korean children and a relative, mostly mothers, with the occasional grandparent or father. As the bus carried us from Mapo District to the outskirts of Seoul toward a farm, I could not help but become teary-eyed. This is not the first time I found myself almost crying as I witnessed my son experience something that I never will in Korea. The same feeling of emotion came over me when I volunteered at market day for his daycare. My “eomma” (mom in Korean) and I will never share those memories. And even now reunited, so much is lost in translation. Our tender moments are punctuated by the grief of adoption and the words left unspoken.
If Korea is to confront the legacies of its adoption past, we must address the precarity, fabrications and wrongdoings that generated our adoptions and hamper adoptees’ ability to access our records. A national reckoning is required. Have we fully addressed the “painful questions” of babies for export, as Korea still participates in transnational adoption and adoptees return?
Korea will never be what we fantasized it to be. It will be both familiar and distant, which is why I return to the mundane. Going about daily life in Korea is a fantasy that so many adoptees hold, but this imagined life may not necessarily align with what life is actually like. How do we go about world-building and home-building that acknowledges both adoptees coming for the first time and those living here for years if not decades? Where we lean into our identities as people whose mannerisms, affect, and lack of fluency give us away while also understanding that this is home.
Perhaps the most transgressive fantasy we can have is what I’m currently living — carving a home in Korea and sorting out what it means one day at a time. And while I thought this time would support my growing relationship with my eomma and “appa” (dad in Korean), I’m realizing that it is also about the sisterhood I’m forging with my “yeodongsaeng” (younger sister in Korean). I cannot help but wonder, what the future holds for those children recently adopted from Korea as those of us who return continue to disrupt narratives of adoption.
Kimberly D. McKee (mckeeki@gvsu.edu) is an associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University. McKee is the author of “Adoption Fantasies: The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood” (The Ohio State University Press, 2023) and “Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States” (University of Illinois Press, 2019), as well as the co-editor of “Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School” (University of Illinois Press, 2020). She is a 2023-2024 U.S. Fulbright Scholar at Sogang University. The views expressed are hers and do not represent the Fulbright Program, the U.S. Department of State, or any of its partner organizations.