Wild geese and goslings set adrift

My heart sank like a stone when I read this article (click link for full text). An excerpt:

A growing number of South Korean parents are paying retired couples in the United States to adopt their children. These Korean parents say teaching their children English is a priority, as well as other factors including avoiding compulsory military service for young men and gaining the prestige of an American education.One out of three Korean parents are willing to send their children abroad for the sake of a better education, according to a study by the Center for Korean Education Development in Seoul in the Korea Times. In the past, parents would ask relatives living in the United States to adopt their children, but more parents are now seeking out Caucasian families.

Putting a child up for adoption in the United States allows Korean parents to skirt around normal immigration procedures, a drawn-out process with no guarantee of approval. Parents generally seek retired American couples, whose own children often have left and have room to spare. The American couples receive an agreed-upon sum of money in exchange for adopting the child and providing food and housing. Couples receive upwards of $30,000, with additional payments as necessary to cover room and board for each child they adopt. In return, the child gains legal status in the United States, as well as the privilege of attending American schools.

The Korean birth parents relinquish all legal claims to their children, sending them instead to grow up in a house with people they have never met.

Please let this be a horrible mistake, I thought, as I read. One of those fabricated newspaper reports that some jackass journalism-school flunky created as a career vehicle.

I don’t know where to begin. How can I articulate my indignance and my utter fury over this — these reckless acts of blind desperation that add another stratum of shame to Korea’s out-of-control reliance on intercountry adoption?

Once in shambles as a war-ravaged nation, South Korea is no longer an economically frail, socially weak “third world” country. Yet the number of Korean children adopted abroad in recent years has not shown a significant enough drop even as Korea’s national economy has become more and more viable. Does the statistic of 2,000 Korean children still adopted overseas per year include these new deportees?

My Korean mother was more or less strong-armed into relinquishing me for adoption when I was just a few hours out of the womb, in part believing that she couldn’t provide for me. Perhaps also, my mother wished more for me than to follow in her footsteps down a road as dimly lit as hers. (No doubt, nobody at the maternity hospital was on hand to try to counsel my mother on her options.)

At any rate, I can’t help but think that by being sent on my journey east to the West as a 4-month-old — though no less in significance than the journey made by those adopted older — I was somehow spared some of the distress and awareness of taking that one-way plane ride at a more cognizant age.

Yet these were only my supposed “paper parents” — faceless, mythical people I never grew to trust before I was sent overseas as an infant to become an all-American girl in the whitebread heartland. Not my mom telling me at age 7, 10 or 14 that she was no longer my mom — that some gray-haired strangers across the ocean had been paid to make important decisions for me and my future. That living displaced with an elderly white couple in a retirement community in another country would be better for me. For my life. All in the name of education.

It’s crazy that this issue makes the kirogi families seem like Norman Rockwell paintings (see also here).

I know a little about the ridiculously competitive, inordinately stressful Korean education system, which, at its most intense, strips children of their youth and instead turns them into college-prep machines as early as grade school. When I visited a private high school in Korea in 2002, I spoke with eager young students who enthusiastically listed off names of American pop stars and then, in the next breath, described how their typical day is spent either in the classroom or studying, often from before sunrise until almost midnight. No time for relaxation or socializing outside of school unless they wanted to forfeit their chances at getting into the best universities. Even Saturdays are given to their studies.

Was it any wonder that at age 16, many of them looked and sounded to me more like 9-year-olds, giggling and hiding behind one another in their identical starched uniforms, unsure of their identities beyond which college they were dying to get into?

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On the new wave of exports:

Peter Chang, who heads the Korean Family Center in Los Angeles, says kids like this “often grow up feeling betrayed by their parents.” Chang says he is becoming increasingly concerned over the negative psychological and emotional effects on young Koreans adopted this way.

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Oh, you think? How delusional must these parents be that they see the United States as some glorified boarding school, their children as extended foreign exchange students, and the potpourri-filled home of an aging white American couple as some sick kind of academic hostel?And what hideous sort of adoption fraud must be going on anyway, to place these kids with retired couples? I thought adoptive parents could be no older than 44 in most Korean adoption cases.I’m not sure how this abhorrent new twist on adoption is being received, or if it is being acknowledged at all, in Korea. But this is a key illustration of the degree to which Korea’s adoption system is outright fucked.

Where is the action behind the superficial small talk of Korea’s shame in disinheriting generations of its own children of their birth culture? Are Koreans really this complacent with the continuation of the intercountry adoption practices that they claim to denounce as dishonorable? Is it that they are so ashamed, they’ve just decided to roll with it rather than bother to advocate change? “What the hell? Let’s ship off some more.” Talk about losing face.

It takes a huge stinking pile of societal shit to get me this angry at my own people. We need to target the problems in the intercountry adoption system at their sources. In this case, Koreans need to get over the eyelid surgery and start working on their brains instead.

Wake up, Korea! Your children are more than empty vessels waiting to be filled with the English language.