The Constellation
Fall 2008 Newsletter
Kim Park Nelson
Interview by Livia Montana
Livia Montana: You’re working on an oral history project with Korean adopted adults. How did you get interested in the project?
Kim Park Nelson: I’d been thinking about it for quite a long time, but I actually started it in 2002 as my Ph.D. dissertation project. I’d seen research that was supposed to be about adoptees but that didn’t really take adoptees’ voices into account. For instance, there’s a lot of adoption-related social work research where researchers would ask parents about their kids. Those answers were then used to represent the point of view of adoptees. Of course that’s not actually the point of view of adoptees, that’s the point of view of adoptive parents. So my initial intent was to work on a project that focused on the experiences of Korean adoptees.
LM: Why did you choose oral history in particular? Why not just conduct regular interviews?
KPN: My goal is to have adoptee voices heard. But when you interview people you’re asking them to talk about the subjects that you’re interested in, so you don’t actually get to hear what they’re interested in speaking about. That’s why I sit down and ask people to tell their life story, and to tell it in whatever way they feel comfortable with.
LM: What are some of the research questions that you see transracial adoptees regularly asked?
KPN: There are a couple of themes that a lot of researchers seem to be really concerned about. One main question is, “How well-adjusted are you?” Another is, “What was it like for you to grow up as a person of color in a white environment?” Of course these things are important, but I think you get a different set of responses if you only ask what everybody else has asked as opposed to asking someone to speak about what’s important to them. My expectation was that not everyone had the same story and that turned out to be completely true. Though there’s no real uniformity in the oral histories I collected, I feel that I didn’t miss a lot because of the method I chose.
LM: How do you think this research you’re doing is going to affect the lives of Korean adoptees?
KPN: That’s always the soul-searching question for anyone who’s an academic. Academics are such a tiny part of society and life, so I certainly can’t expect that my work is going to touch all adoptees. But I do hope that adoptees who do find my work are helped by it; that it helps them see that our story is important and that we do have something interesting to say. I want to believe that the work I’m doing is going to make life better for adoptees in the future and for adoptees right now, too. One place I can really see that happening is in the class I taught about Korean adoption history at the University of Minnesota. It’s the first class of its kind. Many of the students in that class were adoptees. My hope is that it was empowering for them to hear their history for the first time. So many adoptees don’t know anything about adoption, and so many Korean adoptees don’t know anything about Korea. One of the things that was really nice for me about teaching the class was that I could package the information for students to easily access. I’m very proud that each one of those students now has the tools to be as much of an expert on history, content, and social issues around adoption as anyone who’s doing graduate level research. That’s information I was able to offer to them that very few people have right now. I think it’s important for any group that’s out of the mainstream or marginalized to know the history and policy that’s being written about them. If you never hear about yourself it’s difficult to develop a comprehensive idea about your identity.
LM: In the fifties adoptive parents were told to concentrate on Americanizing Korean adoptees. In the seventies they were told that the “love is color blind” approach was the best. How would you categorize today’s approach to Korean adoption and transracial adoption in general?
KPN: While there’s certainly an interest with acquainting adoptees with their birth cultures, in a lot of ways I think that the “love is color blind” approach is stronger than ever because we’re firmly embedded in a society that’s actually less willing to talk about race than it was in the sixties. The popular notion is that race doesn’t matter. In fact, there’s been such a backlash against the idea of race-based identity that if you talk about it you risk being categorized as a racist yourself. I think it’s good that parents are being coached to get their kids involved in education or arts to try to connect them back to their birth cultures, but it can be misleading because I don’t believe there’s a magic bullet to figuring out racial, cultural, or national differences in adoptive families.
Livia Montana: You’ve spoken in the past about some of the pros and cons of culture camps. How can culture camps be improved?
Kim Park Nelson: The material at culture camp is often filtered through American adoptive parents, so they think it’s cool to teach something that’s “traditional.” Maybe that’s fine for little kids, but a lot of culture camps go through high school and there’s a lot more that adoptees could be learning. For instance, Korean pop culture is huge and it’s extremely popular all over Asia—there’s so much in Korean pop culture that kids would enjoy. I also think it’s important for adoptees to know about contemporary Korea—it’s actually a very technologically and economically advanced society. In addition, if adoptees intend to pursue some element of their Korean identity with other Korean people, they need some important skills. They need to know about Korean cultural norms and social norms, as well as Korean history and immigration history. They need to learn about how Korean communities operate and what it takes to participate in them.
Actually, I think there are many adoptees that experience camps as traumatizing because the social world that adoptees live in is so segregated—you can get used to being the “only one.” So then when you are in a room that’s filled with Koreans, it feels freaky because you’ve been so well-socialized to be in entirely white environments. Maybe that underlines how much we need these camps. But to me what it also underlines is that we live in a very segregated society.
LM: I read an interview where you said what’s going on in transracial adoption is a microcosm of society. Can you talk more about that?
KPN: I think that a lot of the policy that goes on in transracial international adoption and transracial domestic adoption is based on gender and race perceptions. For instance, Asian girls have been in high demand for quite a long time. To me that seems connected to the stereotype of Asian woman being passive, obedient, intelligent—things that parents want in a child. The children that seem to have the hardest time being adopted in the United States are African-American boys. The stereotypes about African-American males is that they’re going to be difficult, they’re going to act out, and they’re probably going to wind up having drug problems or being criminals. So there’s this “love is color blind” rhetoric, but the adoption agencies certainly respond to the wants and desires of adoptive parents.
LM: You spoke before about how difficult it can be discuss topics around race because of the popular notion that race doesn’t matter. How does that impact your work?
KPN: One of the things that’s very difficult for me in doing adoption research and also being adopted is that there’s a lot of interest right now in the conflict between adoptees and adoptive parents. So much of what happens in adoption research ends up being framed in that way. I think there are adoptees that view transracial adoption as a racist act. What winds up happening is that adoptive parents feel like they’re being accused of being racist by adopting. It’s a lot more complicated than that. Partly what’s going on is that adoptive parents are unwilling to look at the institutions that they’ve been involved in and see what’s wrong with the picture. Another problem is language. You can’t use the word “race” without people getting upset, but yet there is a racial element in transracial adoption and there is a lot of racial inequity tied up in the practices of transracial and transnational adoption. For instance, most people who are adopting from overseas are white and they’re mostly adopting people that aren’t white. I don’t think that that’s some sort of coincidence. There’s clearly a power differential that, unfortunately, is also racial.
One thing that’s really sad about the United States international adoption policy is how it’s participated in convincing whole populations of women across the world that they’re not worthy of being mothers: that any white woman in the United States can be a better mother than them. I don’t think most adoptive parents would say that a rich parent is better than a poor parent, but that’s essentially what the transnational adoption policy for the last fifty years has been based on. This has been going on for so long in Korea that the attitude has been internalized among poor women there. And that breaks my heart.
About Kim Park Nelson:
Kim Park Nelson is a scholar and educator of Korean adoption, Asian American Studies, American race relations, and American Studies. Between 2003 and 2006, she collected 73 oral histories from Korean adoptees in the United States and the around the world. She also developed and taught the first college course on Korean adoption in the United States. Her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Minnesota American Studies Department is titled “Korean Looks, American Eyes: Korean American Adoptees, Race, Culture and Nation.” In 2007, Kim put together an academic research symposium at The Gathering, a conference for Korean adoptees that is held every three years. She is an Assistant Professor of American Multicultural Studies at Minnesota State University at Moorhead.
Photo:
Kim Park Nelson courtesy of HERE Project/Kim Dalros.
http://www.adoptionmosaic.org/?page_id=148