Lab Note #15

Reflection

So much is happening in the adoptee and child welfare community, especially as November comes and we begin to wade through the swarm of National Adoption Month posts. I had a whole different reflection planned for this Lab Note but given it’s Adoptee Remembrance Day, I decided to go with a different reflection. Thank you, Pamela Karanova, for continuing to shed light on Adoptee Remembrance Day.

Over my sabbatical last year, one of my goals was to choose fewer, but more meaningful, projects to work on. I’m choosing to focus even more on projects that really center adoptees, particularly adoptees of color and adoptees throughout the lifespan. So many other scholars explore adoption from adolescent and young adult perspectives but naturally, as I age, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the experiences of adoptees in their 40s and older.

I’ve been part of the adoptee community for 24 years now. In 1999 I started to attend adoptee groups. I went to Korea on a birth family search in March of 2000. The first Korean adoptee gathering in Washington DC had taken place the previous summer. I’d only just started my path toward examining what being adopted meant to me and I heard about the Gathering from my first adult Korean adoptee friend a month before it was held. I heard about how wonderful and also difficult it was to hear from so many adoptees from my friend, and accounts on the Yahoo discussion groups and social media. I was eager to be in a community with other adoptees. For a few years in the early 2000s I attended mini-gatherings and conferences, adoptee groups, started my blog, and met many amazing adoptees. I also chose to go back to school, to get my social work degree in order to focus on adoption.

We are in a generative time for adoptee cultural and scholarly work. The number of podcasts, books, artists, films, groups, and research I come across on a daily basis is astounding. I walk to work most days and I tend to listen to adoptee podcasts (or adoptees on podcasts). I hear such similar stories: growing up in isolation, perfectionism as a survival strategy, self-medicating away the pain of feeling gaslit, learning about the history of adoption, engaging in a retrospective analysis of the impact of adoption on our identities, and the life-altering experiences of finding community.

Our experiences of isolation drive us toward community and it can also drive us toward thinking we are the only ones who have ever felt the way we do, or the only ones with healing ideas for ourselves and the adoptee community. But there have been so many others who have created groups, developed models, and been activists for change. I think social media has made us think that only what we see on these different platforms is what exists.

I remember how shocked I was to come across Bastard Nation and Transnational Abductees (the site is no longer available). I had no idea adoptees had these thoughts since I was in my early consciousness when I learned about these folks. I’ve seen adoptees target other adoptees for the ways they’ve chosen to express their lived experiences and opinions. I’ve engaged in ego-based defensiveness and I’m seeing it in now our community from others as well. Thankfully, other more seasoned adoptees helped, listening gently and compassionately as I tried to figure out my own thoughts.

This reflection is just a reminder that if we are not careful, we can engage in lateral violence toward the very communities we claim to want to support. This is a tactic organizations and institutions promoting adoption want – they want us to destroy each other to make it easier for them to continue the status quo. I wrote about this many years ago (2006!) in a post called “Adoptee vs. Adoptee.” I’m calling for us to resist this – I encourage all of us to think about how we can engage with adoptees who have different views or different goals and move toward a stronger liberatory model (for inspiration, think of the Liberation Health model).

The Liberation Health Model includes a section on “rescuing the historical memory of change” which speaks to the tendency of dominant power structures to erase or subvert the work that has been done in the past. For example, the New York Times article below about Florence Fisher, one of our adoptee elders, is an important history lesson for today’s activists.

I wanted to take this opportunity to congratulate and applaud all the amazing things adoptees are doing – and also ask we extend grace and compassion for each other. There is no scarcity model when it comes to adoptee voices – there is room for all of us. Indeed, there have always been adoptees before us, paving the way.

Recommendations

SafeCamp Spotlights from The Imprint is a podcast that focuses on issues related to the child welfare system.

A very provocative article called Baby Heists by Andrew Lee at The New Inquiry argues that international adoption has been used by nation-states as a means of “imperial warfare and extraction as humanitarianism.”

The New York Times published an obituary for Florence Fisher, one of our adoptee activist elders. I’ve provided a gift link for the article for those who are not subscribers. Here is one excerpt I found especially impressive:

“In 1971, she took out a classified advertisement in several newspapers: “Adult who was an adopted child desires contact with other adoptees to exchange views on adoptive situation and for mutual assistance in search for natural parents.” She expected a few dozens responses. She received hundreds, many of which recounted deeply personal stories. Inspired, Mrs. Fisher created the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association. The group grew rapidly. Within a few years, it had 50,000 members, 50 chapters and a database of 340,000 names and other information. Sometimes Mrs. Fisher got involved personally: She once dressed as a nun to sneak into the records room of a Roman Catholic adoption agency. Mrs. Fisher and her association became a leading force in pressuring states to open their adoption records.”

This was an interesting video about Korean adoption that came across my feed.

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A whole slate of adoptee-authored books are coming out soon! Here are a few of them!

Susan Ito’s memoir, I Will Meet You Anywhere is coming out November 4th from Mad Creek Books. She has a whole list of readings and events on her website. I will see her for her two-day trip to Seattle/Tacoma!

When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology edited by Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung comes out Oct. 24th from Harper Collins!

Also launching in November is Adoption Unfiltered: Revelations from Adoptees, Birth Parents, Adoptive Parents, and Allies, a unique book co-written by Sara Easterly (an adoptee), Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard (birth parent), and Lori Holden (adoptive parent) with contributions from interviews with many others connected to adoption.

The Anna Jinja show focuses on the stories, issues, and questions connected to adoption and foster care experiences. The host is an international adoptee with biological roots in Korea and adopted roots in the United States. As you can imagine, her journey and experiences as a transracial adoptee are multifaceted. Her experiences have been with the pain of discrimination and rejection as well as the joys of self-discovery and learning to embrace all aspects of her identity.

I also learned about this great resource from Unraveling Adoption – they developed a community calendar of verified events in adoption, addiction, and mental health. What a great resource!