Reflection

I skipped out* on National Adoption Month this year.

*well, ok. Not totally. I did several presentations, but I meant I didn’t participate in any online, social media NAM/NAAM stuff like I have in the past. I considered doing several posts specific to NAM/NAAM but in the end, realized I already spend most of my waking hours thinking about or working to elevate awareness about the adoptee experience. The idea of doing daily or even weekly NAM/NAAM focused posts just felt exhausting during a busy time of year for me in my Real Life. Also, November is my assigned government birthday and I’m one of those adoptees who doesn’t really like to celebrate that date. Oh, and November is the month when the U.S. celebrates its settler colonial holiday aka Thanksgiving. So, yeah.

I’m feeling very macro these days, meaning I’m curious about systems and larger theories about ethics and morals as the basis for how we practice adoption. My work with the Adoptee Consciousness Model is a good example of where my curiosities are taking me. While the ACM has been focused on individual adoptees and their processes, the underlying theoretical framework behind the model is about how individual adoptees mobilize with others after gaining critical consciousness about adoption. Another project I’m working on with the Adoptee Mentoring Society and AIRE Roots is also similarly both about individual support and what happens when adoptees take the helm of supporting each other through mutual aid processes in the absence of quality support by non-adoptee entities.

To that end, one of the things I aimed to do in my presentations this November (including the Adoption Knowledge Affiliates conference, AIRE Roots workshop, and Families Rising panel) was to really talk about the ways we adoptees (and others) are socialized to understand adoption in a non-critical way that presents adoption as simultaneously a win-win-win scenario and a pathological identity and status. So much about adoption has been written with an individual focus (the adoptee, the birth parents, the adoptive parents) and far fewer write about social or systems views aside from selected academics. Although, if the academic is an adoptive parent, then it’s less likely to be a solid critical analysis and more of a defense of the adoptive parent personal perspective. Case in point, many years ago (2008) I wrote about how Freakonomics author Steven Leavitt used his personal status as an adoptive father to answer a broader question about the impact of money and economics on intercountry adoption.

The question submitted by a reader was: What is your opinion on how international adoption affects the economy, race and class divisions, and the widening income gap within the U.S.? What do you think of the argument that children are “readily available for adoption” in the U.S., and, further, that adoption is marketed as a product with benefits?

Levitt’s response was, “I don’t think international adoption affects the economy in any meaningful way. We are talking about very small numbers of children being adopted from foreign countries into the U.S. each year – perhaps 20,000 children total, compared to the 3 million children born each year in the U.S. Adoption does, however, profoundly affect those families that adopt. My life has been completely changed because of the two daughters my wife and I adopted from China.”

You can feel the defensiveness in Steven’s response. His response completely evaded an important but hard question about whether adoption is a market, who has the financial resources to participate in the transnational adoption industrial complex (McKee, 2019) and what are the financial impacts on not just the receiving country (i.e., the United States) but also the sending country (i.e. they get financial resources for sending their children away). Levitt responds by sharing his own personal reasons that are textbook problems in how adoption is conceptualized (boo, abortion rights and boo, birth parent rights and family preservation, these rights prevent people from adopting). You can read my response to his assertion that Asian children don’t have racial identity issues here. As a side note, I wonder how his now adult children feel about their racial and ethnic identity ~23 years after being adopted.

My final *not participating in* NAM/NAAM event was a special convening of the White House Initiative on Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islanders to celebrate National Adoption Month. You may recall I was one of several Asian adoptees who were able to meet with the WHIAANHPI last June in Minnesota to share thoughts about what Asian Adoptees would like the commission to know about our experiences as Asian Americans. That meeting apparently was the incentive for the WHIAANHPI to have this meeting in November.

I was particularly heartened to hear Deputy Assistant to the President and Asian American and Pacific Islander Senior Liaison Erika Moritsugu speak about the impact of our June meeting and her emphasis on many of the talking points we shared. And thanks to commissioner Mia Ives-Rublee, I was invited back to share some of my thoughts about Asian adoptees and NAM. I wanted to share with you my talking points:

Thank you, Mia, and to the White House Initiative on Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders for this opportunity to share today. I was privileged to be part of the summer meeting with the WHIAANHPI and it’s good to see some familiar faces.  I appreciate being able to be part of today’s meeting.

I’d like to start by sharing a little of my professional and personal experiences with adoption. I was adopted over 53 years ago from South Korea to Minnesota to a white family and grew up in a predominantly white community. I was raised in racial and cultural isolation. But fortunately, I started meeting other Asian adoptees in my late 20s. I have now spent more than 25 years in the adoptee community.

I have also worked professionally as a social worker. My professional work in adoptions is a result of wanting to improve the experiences of Asian and other adoptees. I have worked with pre-adoptive parents to prepare them for adopting. I have worked with children in foster care to place them into adoptive homes. I have worked in post-adoption services providing resources and support to adoptees and adoptive parents, and I have trained child welfare and mental health professionals on the importance of understanding the life-long effects of adoption.

I am now an Associate professor at University of Washington Tacoma, and I research the post-adoption experiences of adoptees and adoptive parents. Today I would like to share a few thoughts about intercountry adoption based on my personal experience as an Asian transnational and transracial adoptees, as a researcher, and what I’ve heard from adoptees over the past 25 years. I share these thoughts with the hope they will encourage folks here today to consider and prioritize the needs of Asian adoptees.

Much of the research on intercountry adoptees has focused on the perspectives of adoptive parents. These earlier research studies presented mostly positive findings that Asian adoptees are “well adjusted.” But most of the early research on Asian adoptees stopped young adulthood. Now that more researchers are looking beyond the outcomes of Asian adoptees in childhood and adolescence, we are finding more nuanced and complex outcomes. For example, part of my research and community work specifically examines transnational adoptees who were not raised in supportive adoptive families.

In my research, Asian adoptees articulate a need for a stronger sense of connection to their country of origin. These adoptees wanted access to information about their family of origin. Some wished to be able to travel to their country of birth and desired dual citizenship. Some of you may have watched the AP/Frontline documentary about the problems found in South Korean adoptions. For many of us South Korean adoptees, what was reported is nothing new. I have been hearing from Korean adoptees for over 25 years about the lack of access to their pre-adoption information and the inaccuracy of their adoption information. As more and more Asian adoptees are returning to their birth countries and reuniting with their birth families, we have learned that the issues presented in the Frontline documentary are not isolated exceptions but a pattern of practices. Between the news that China has closed its adoption program and the reports from South Korea, many Chinese and South Korean adoptees are having a difficult time processing what this means for them.

From current research and community conversations, we know many Asian adoptees report experiences of Anti-Asian racism, and this increased during Covid-19. Our experiences in our families are often ones in which our ethnic and cultural identity is either superficially affirmed or in many cases not at all affirmed. Research by scholars Rose Kreider and Elizabeth Raleigh found that the average transracial transnational Asian adoptee is more likely to be raised in counties with less diversity than the average white child with white parents. As a result, many of us have struggled to be included or feel included in our ethnic and cultural communities.

To close, this meeting was convened to recognize National Adoption Month which promotes adoption. But across the broader adoptee community there has been a call to consider November National Adoptee Awareness Month, to bring attention to adoptee voices. Asian Adoptees make up about half of all transnational adoptees in the US. Asian adoptees have first-hand knowledge of the effects of intercountry adoption and as a group of people we have a diversity of experiences. The ones who articulate a “positive experience” tend to be praised while the ones who have had challenging experiences are often dismissed. I hope including ALL adoptee voices becomes a standard part of future meetings such as this one. In addition, I would like Asian adoptees to be included as regular and prioritized stakeholders.

I’ve spent my professional career trying to uplift the needs of adoptees. Thank you again for the invitation to be part of this convening and for taking the time to listen to Asian American adoptees.