By JAMES C. YU

WASHINGTON-New legislation affecting more than 75,000 foreign-born adoptees and the recent PBS broadcast of a critically acclaimed film on one American couple’s Korean adoption experience have spawned a flurry of press coverage in recent weeks addressing the subject of international adoptions.

These kinds of adoptions have been highlighted in particular, with South Korea being by far America’s largest historic source of foreign-born adoptees.

The Korean government estimates that over the course of nearly half a century, 150,000 or so Korean children were adopted by overseas families, about two-thirds going to white American couples. KAAN, a national network of American families with Korean-born children, calculates that with the adoptees’ extended families more than 2 million Americans are impacted directly by this transpacific migration. Two million is about the size of Mongolia.

"It’s hard to find anyone that doesn’t at least know someone who has adopted, or know of someone who has adopted a child from Korea," said Susan Soon-Keum Cox, Vice President of Holt International Children’s Services and herself an adoptee. "It’s pretty ordinary today."

Up until the 1950s, international adoptions were a rare occurrence anywhere, let alone in the race-conscious United States. It wasn’t until two very average, very middle class Americans, Bertha and Harry Holt of Oregon saw a film documenting the impoverished state of Korea’s orphans and were so overwhelmed by the images of "emaciated arms and legs, such bloated (from starvation) stomachs and such wistful little faces searching for someone to care," as Mrs. Holt would later write, that the couple soon vowed to adopt not one, but eight Korean children.

The Holts faced a number of legal hurdles, but their determination eventually brought them before the U.S. Congress. In 1955, Congress passed a law written specifically to allow the couple to adopt eight abandoned children from Korea. A year later the two founded the now famous Holt agency that pioneered the international adoption movement and still processes about 1,000 of the 16,000 American adoptions of foreign-born children occurring every year. It goes without saying that the Holts’ homegrown initiative challenged, and in a way revolutionized, this country’s notion of family.

Surprisingly though, discriminatory policies and lingering segregation-era attitudes continue to make an already trying situation more difficult for many Americans. For example, it recently occurred to Congressman William D. Delahunt of Massachusetts that his adopted foreign-born daughter couldn’t travel with rest of her family overseas. She couldn’t get a U.S. passport because she wasn’t yet a U.S. citizen. Congressman Delahunt then authored and persuaded his colleagues to support the Child Citizenship Act, which only went into effect in March, giving foreign-born adoptees the right to automatic citizenship. Prior to this law, adoptive parents were faced with tackling an arduous and demeaning process of naturalization that often took years to complete. There have even been heinous instances of adoptees being deported back to countries where they no longer had family ties. "It’s at long last a recognition that a child of American parents, whether born here or adopted overseas, is an American, and there’s no distinction between the two," said the congressman.

And yet while laws are changing to better accommodate the adoptees’ transition to their new country, parents have begun realizing that they can no longer pretend their children’s racial or ethnic differences aren’t real.

"Most of the families were your typical middle class families who had absolutely never traveled outside," recalled Barbara Kim of the Asian American Adoptees of Washington. Ms. Kim is one of many older Korean American adoptees who came of age when parents sought to suppress their children’s ethnic distinctions. Adoptive parents "were really not exposed to the differences, that the world exists outside of their own little neighborhood," she said.

But the prevailing wisdom soon changed. "When we adopted Emily 16 years ago," said Carol B. French of Vermont, "it was emphasized to us the need to embrace another culture." Mrs. French, the mother of two Korean-born children, noted that some adoptive families still find that difficult or problematic. "For us it was not a big deal," she said, "but for some families it is, and they’ve just never known anybody that’s not Caucasian or this is just very foreign to them. They expect to adopt a Korean child and have them grow up Caucasian."

Ms. Cox of the Holt agency believes that there is now a greater understanding that individuals will always retain a desire to connect with the people and culture of their past. "Most Koreans who are adopted now really embrace that, and adoptive families are informed and educated and prepared to the fact that that is a very important part of the adoption process," she said.

Ten years ago, Mrs. French, thinking it would be good for her children to have role models they can relate to, met with a group of area families and suggested they create what became the Big Sib/Little Sib Program, which pairs older Korean American students at the nearby university with younger Korean-born adoptees. "At the first meeting we organized, there were 50 people there," she said. "It was amazing."

Korean American Sarah Oh, a senior at Dartmouth College, directed the Sibs program for about three years. She noted the irony of having Korean Americans introduce youngsters to Korean culture: "Most of the Korean American students at Dartmouth don’t even speak Korean fluently, a lot of them don’t know much about Korean culture, but we’re willing to share what little we do know even if it is just opening a jar of kimchi or barbecuing bulgogi. Honestly, I don’t think that we as the Big Sib program do much in the way of teaching them about what it’s like to be Korean, but just the fact that we introduce them to little things a few steps at a time is, I think, helpful."

"It’s one of those things that ten out of ten people will say is real, but none of them will be able to explain it or point to the tangible manifestation of it," said Seuk Jo Won, whose film "Ni kohyang-un odini? Nan koyang-i opso" profiles issues that confront Korean America’s second generation. "It all boils down to the fact that Koreans are a very homogeneous society and they’re very recognizable. Koreans can tell one another apart just by their features, and that goes to the core of Korean identity," he said. "And I think in the case of adoption there’s really this thing about Korean blood. If they’re sent out of the country and raised by non-Korean families, then people have feelings about that."

So-called "homecoming visits" are a welcome innovation sponsored by the Korean government geared to Americans with severed ties to the country, "something that has been just enthusiastically embraced both by adoptees as well as by their families," according to Ms. Cox. It’s an interesting development considering that not too long ago the government took on a more sinister role in adoptions, promoting them not so much on their philanthropic merits but more as a means of obtaining foreign capital. This was especially the case under Park Chung Hee at a time when millions were encouraged to emigrate, hundreds of laborers died building pipelines in the Middle East and literally planeloads of nurses were essentially exported to Europe. It’s seldom acknowledged, but this trafficking of humans as commodities largely bankrolled Korea’s modern-day prosperity.

In any event, Korea’s most monumental contribution to America, however accidental, turns out to be its children. More so than our common ties to the past, the bonds of commerce or even the friendships shared, it was Korea’s discarded children who brought the greatest joy to thousands upon millions of Americans. As Ms. Cox said: "While my brother and I look Korean and the rest of my family do not, there’s no difference in our connection to each other. That transcends anything that has to do with race or culture or adoption. And that’s why adoption works."

James C. Yu is a government specialist resident in Washington, D.C.
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