Introduction: The Residues of Korean Adoption

Abstract

Adoption & Culture Vol. 6, Issue 2 (2018) Copyright © 2018 by The Ohio State University Introduction: The Residues of Korean Adoption KIMBERLY McKEE WHAT WAS believed to be a remedy to provide care for children in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War finds itself a continued and much-critiqued practice in the twenty-first century. International adoption from South Korea is frequently cited as paving the way for other adoption programs that move children into ostensibly better homes and families than their families of origins. Yet, as adoptees speak out and reflect on their experiences, it became clear this was not and is not the case. And this pertains not only to instances of adoptions from Korea to Australia , North America, or Europe; Korean transnational adoption maps to adoption generally. At the same time, ideas about adoption have shifted to acknowledge the complexity of existing in the messiness of what it means to separate parents from children and the impact of those separations on both parties. This particular shift centers the biological family—a unit historically overlooked or pathologized in mainstream discussions of both international and domestic adoption. The special issue arose following “The Ends of Adoption: A Symposium on Transnational Korean Adoption” held at the University of California-Irvine on May 13, 2017. The symposium drew inspiration from Kim Park Nelson’s Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism , which features the accounts of more than sixty Korean adoptees, making it one of the most comprehensive texts featuring Korean adoptees speaking about their lived realities. In her conclusion, Park Nelson provocatively queries what will happen if Korea ceases to send children abroad for adoption. This includes grappling with the legacy of sending children for more than sixty years to North America, Australia, and Europe and the potentialities and new futures when Korean adoptees assert their agency in public discourse on transnational adoption. 268 ADOPTION & CULTURE 6.2 To begin this special issue is an essay from Park Nelson featuring an excerpt from her book, as it served as an impetus for raising the possibility of Korean adoption’s end and what is at stake when we make such a speculative leap. Interested in contemplating the ends of Korean adoption, Eleana J. Kim and James Kyung-Jin Lee co-organized the symposium to listen to the voices of scholars, adoptees, activists, and allies. Featuring a keynote speech by Pastor Kim Do-hyun—a long-time activist engaged in adoption-related advocacy in South Korea—the event consisted of three panels and ended with a screening and panel discussion of the documentary film, Resilience (2009). The discussion explored issues ranging from birthmother activism in South Korea and adoptees’ engagement in campaigns for retroactive citizenship in the United States, to the ways at-home DNA test kits are reshaping notions of adoptee kinship and what happens when adoptees critique mainstream society’s understanding of adoption . I approached the co-organizers about generating a special issue based on the symposium as a method of sharing the knowledges produced there to a broader audience invested in critical adoption studies. Special issue contributors push against the grain of dominant notions of Korean adoption and require readers to rethink their preconceived concepts of what ideas and information adoptees, birth mothers, and allies currently engage. The Ends of Adoption symposium occurred a decade after the first International Korean Adoption Studies Symposium (ISKAS) was held in Seoul, South Korea, on July 31, 2007. That symposium occurred the day before the International Korean Adoptee Association (IKAA) gathering—a weeklong convergence of more than three hundred Korean adoptees who were raised across the globe. In its first iteration, ISKAS reflected Korean adoption studies claiming space as a subfield in adoption studies. Kim Park Nelson, Eleana J. Kim, and Lene Myong crafted a daylong event capturing the groundbreaking scholarship being completed by scholars on a range of topics including reunion with birth parents, the importance of racial mirrors, and the racialization of adoptees in their adoptive countries. ISKAS’s fifth iteration will be held in the summer of 2019. Because of this work, the field of Korean adoption studies changed. No longer is the subject of Korean...