Picking teams

Please refer to the letter and related attachments that Korean adoptee author Jane Jeong Trenka posts here (note: link expired). This letter and its accompanying helpful pointers are making the rounds, thanks to a certain Minnesota adoption agency and some of its adult adoptee staffers.

(Addendum: As I was drumming my fingers last night trying to verbalize my reaction to the letter, JJT was running circles around me, writing her own reaction — so please also read the fruits of her intellectual labor (link expired). Bravo, Jane!)

The letter is, among other things, a prime example of the wedge driven in between Korean adoptees to filter us into two artificial camps: grateful vs. ungrateful. It’s one of the most insidious yet pervasive illusions ever manufactured in the adoption community (and, dare I say, reaching into society at large).

Many of my fellow KADs are buying into the illusion as well, passing around the e-mail to others they think to be like-minded, as suggested. I have received this a few times in various versions from various KADs with whom I am acquainted. I’ve even received another incarnation, similar in message, forwarded from another agency. Second verse, same as the first.

It leaves me to wonder what this says about how these friends of mine see me. It makes me zone out in the middle of my M&M’s, pondering how much or how little I have shared with them about my politics, my passions, my morals, my experience — and how they came to decide to write my e-mail address into their message’s To: field, especially given the agency’s request for “discretion.” Did these friends linger over my name in their contact list, or did they include me without even thinking? Whom did they exclude? How have the others on the recipient list reacted? Or did they react at all?

I believe the agencies behind this push to drown out the voices encouraging action toward ending Korea’s continued reliance on intercountry adoption with louder voices expressing complacency with the system are acting in their own best interests, to keep open one of their most viable avenues of business. All things considered, this push amounts to nothing more than a smear campaign.

It would be one thing — a vastly more respectable thing – to present the facts, based on third-party sources, and encourage recipients to take matters into consideration and make their own decision regarding where they stand. Instead, these agencies make false, sweeping reference to adult adoptees who return to Korea as a small band of “angry” troublemakers who have had “negative adoption experiences” and who make negativity their platform for ending intercountry adoption.

Combined with the misinformation running rampant throughout the letter and its accompanying tidbits, this campaign amounts to a low blow, a shameful abuse of power, and a divisive and manipulative attempt at goading KADs into choosing sides — sides that have been fabricated for the benefit of the parties that profit from our placements, as well as for the comfort of others who are being fooled into feeling threatened by what should actually be hailed as progress on Korea’s part.

In one corner: the “angry” adoptees. In the other: the “happy” adoptees.

I am aware that many people choose to count me among the “angry.” I believe that for the adoptive parents who do so, it makes them feel better about their own choices, to minimize and exempt my voice from the list of those they should take the time to listen to, so that they only perceive reassurance and praise for doing a kind thing by adopting. I believe that for the other adoptees who do so, it makes them appear superior, or “healthier,” or more worthy of acceptance. I believe that for some adoption facilitators, it benefits their public image to be able to write off outspoken adopted people like me as bad seeds, rogue shoots that have strayed from where we’ve been planted.

What does it mean to be an “angry adoptee”? As letters like the one I mention here would have its recipients believe, “angry adoptees” are the ones who:

• are ungrateful
• are negative people
• have had “bad” experiences
• are dissatisfied with their families
• would rather not have been adopted
• are dangerous and should not be allowed to be heard
• are dwelling on the past by choosing to return to Korea
• (yet at the same time?) are angry with Korea
• assemble with other KADs to support Korea in its efforts to take responsibility for its own children

What does it mean to be a “happy adoptee”? As letters like this one would have its recipients believe, “happy adoptees” are the ones who:

• are grateful
• are positive people
• have had “good” experiences
• are satisfied with their families
• are happy to have been adopted
• are deserving of being heard as the majority
• are “moving forward with their lives” (by not returning to Korea?)
• are pleased with Korea for placing them for adoption
• choose to express their appreciation of their situations by leading silent, successful lives in the United States

Regardless of in which camp I fall (according to those who think they know best), I’d be ticked either way. It occurs to me that — hiding behind this bizarre reasoning — many agencies and many APs are fearful that adoptees will begin to think for themselves and come to realize that many, many of us are, in fact, unwilling to be forced into one of these two artificial categories.

We adoptees should recognize, too, the disrespectful nature of letters like these that attempt to define our lives for us, by stereotyping the human experience as either happy or angry, grateful or ungrateful, well-adjusted or maladjusted, moving forward or traveling backward. How many among us are willing to allow our lives to be reduced to “positive” or “negative”?

As Korean-American adoptees, we know well the false and devious nature of labels and stereotypes. That adoption professionals should play into these labels and forced dichotomies strikes me as deceitful of the great American values — equal opportunity, freedom of speech and thought — upon which we were allegedly placed with our American families.

This letter is artifice, from start to finish, and it shows in its composition.

One of my “favorite” lines from the related documentation, from a section titled “In Respect to the Republic of Korea,” contains some of the most disrespectful language I have seen disseminated by an agency that prides itself on its purported professionalism:

“While there has been a vocal group of young adopted adults who have come to Korea and are unhappy being adopted, their numbers are very small when compared to the number of children who have been adopted, and they often neglect seeing what probably would have been their lives if they had not been adopted.”

I get déjà vu when I read this line out loud and turn it over on my tongue, because of its familiar flavor. It’s crammed down the gullets of adoptees just like me, countless times each day, all the world over. How does it taste? It’s herring, all right, as JJT mentions. Oh — and it’s bright, bright red.

Be assured, agencies and herring-throwers, that I am not neglecting anyone in saying that I do not categorically oppose adoption — rather, that I support programs and measures to help keep families intact. In regard to Korea, I support welfare programs and initiatives that will help Koreans help themselves.

I oppose neglectful adoption. (And no, critics, that statement is not written as a direct reflection on my adoptive family.) I oppose adoptions in which preserving cultural heritage is devalued and made secondary to the promise of a foreign parent’s income bracket. I oppose adoptions in which the transracially adopted child of color is made to live in isolation, as the only person of color or the only person of his or her ethnic heritage in the community. To name a few, that is.

I have been in the orphanage and the newborn babies’ home, holding them at 1 week old and at 4 years old and comforting them as best as I could, with human contact and my embarrassingly remedial monosyllabic survival Korean words. I escorted the baby from ICN to LAX with a suitcase full of reservations. I made wishes for them and continue to do so. I haven’t forgotten about them.

I am more inclined to support adoption when the “match” is made with the child’s needs in mind — not a potential parent’s neediness.

As suggested in the above-referenced letter’s subsequent attachments, all children have the right to a permanent family. What the agency neglects to acknowledge, however, is that the best permanent family for a Korean child is one who can support the child’s cultural needs. Ideally, mothers and fathers should raise their own children. With strengthened commitment from government-sponsored welfare agencies, more Korean parents could do this.

I also find it alarmingly disrespectful, insulting and arrogant that the agency encourages would-be letter-writers to portray Korea’s efforts to take responsibility for itself as “taking a step backward as industrialized countries advocate for adoption and permanency.” (Am I even reading this correctly?) How is doing that very thing — advocating for domestic adoption and domestic permanency — an indicator that Korea is regressing?

If Korea is finally taking long overdue steps toward breaking the cycle of reliance on intercountry adoption as a quick fix for its war orphans and economic hardship — which have long since changed, as South Korea now stands as a thriving world economy (ranking as high as 10th, globally, according to some GDP estimates) and its birth rate declines (!) — then Korean adoptees and non-adopted Koreans alike should be proud of 우리 나라, indeed.

My letter to the Korean congresswoman promoting the supposed legislation speaks to another possibility besides grateful or ungrateful: that an adoptee can grow up appreciative of one’s opportunities (as appreciate as any human being, adopted or not), secure as a viable part of a loving family, a successful and productive, contributing member of American society, and enough of an independent thinker to understand the importance of questioning the status quo.

It is not in spite of my “positive” upbringing with a supportive and loving family that I critique Korea’s continued reliance on intercountry adoption and stand in support of Korea’s efforts to take responsibility for its own people. If anything, it is because of my family’s encouragement and support that I am educated and articulate enough to express my disillusionment with our mythical “colorblind” society — as well as my unwillingness to stump for a tired campaign that devalues Korean mothers and Korean adoptees while ushering wealthy white Westerners to the head of the checkout line.

I shall be more than happy to provide these agencies with copies of my letter upon its submission, which will be happening just as soon as I finish posting this blog entry. And they can be sure that I shall take the utmost care in showing my own kind of “discretion” about whom I pass this news along to.

Thanks for the contact information, agencies! Few things give me greater joy than helping to empower my own people.