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Subject	A Permanent Solution to a Temporary Problem? 50 years of Korean Adoption 20040714

A Permanent Solution to a Temporary Problem?
50 years of Korean adoption

GOA’L Seminar

Eleana Kim, NYU

Notes from talk given at the UNESCO Building on July 17, 2004

For the past several months, I have been volunteering at different organizations, talking to lots of people related to adoption, doing historical, media and academic research. I have no personal connection to adoption in the sense that I am not a member of the adoption triad—as birth parent, adoptive mother or adoptee. What I hope to offer, as an anthropologist, a Korean American, and as someone who’s been following adoption-related issues for since 1999, from both the American and Korean sides, is a perspective on Korean adoption as it has developed over the past fifty years into what we now know as “international adoption,” a phenomenon that has become naturalized in the West as an alternative form of family making. I also want to discuss the expansion of post-adoption services over the past decade and the emergence of adult Korean adoptees as a new kind of Korean diaspora.

Part I
The institutionalization of adoption: An
overview of Korean adoption history and policy

The title of my talk is taken from a statement that is, apparently, common in adoption circles: “Adoption is often a permanent solution to an often temporary problem.”

In the case of Korea, this is true on an individual scale, in which sending a child for adoption becomes a permanent solution for an often temporary problem of caring for a child, but also on a national scale, in which adoption policy has become a seemingly permanent solution to what was, at the time, considered an emergency situation. What was supposed to be a humanitarian effort to rescue mixed race children and war orphans became the largest and longest running adoption program in the world. I don’t have to remind you that Korea, having sent between 160,000 and 200,000 adoptees to Western countries, has sent more children abroad than any other nation, and that Korean adoptees account for over half of all internationally adopted children around the globe. Today, other developing nations view the Korea’s adoption system as a model to emulate.

Strangely enough, there is no book written on Korean adoption or Korean adoption history. It’s been ongoing for fifty years, yet there is not one book on Korean adoption history. And after 50 years of adoption from Korea, there is only one Korean professor who is a specialist on overseas Korean adoption. Tobias Hubinette, an adoptee and scholar in Sweden, is currently writing a dissertation on Korean adoption that includes a detailed history, but his work stands alone, aside from a few articles that analyze the history of Korean adoption policy. (Also, recently, SWS published a book about its own history, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Korean overseas adoption.)

It is commonly known that adoption from Korea started after the Korean War, as a response to the problem of mixed-race children who were born to Korean women and fathered by men from the UN armed forces. The Western countries that had helped Korea during the war—including Scandinavian countries, which sent medical support during and after the war––were the main countries to which Korean children were adopted. For some Americans, adopting Korean children was seen as a special responsibility, because the fathers were most likely American soldiers. In some cases, children were even adopted to “replace” soldiers who had died in the war. There is a case, for instance, of the parents of an air force pilot who was killed in Korea deciding to adopt a war orphan, or a mother and her daughters who decided that they really wanted to adopt a little Korean boy because the father of the house was stationed in Korea. Also, the religious factor is very important to remember—Harry Holt, a fundamentalist, born-again Christian claimed that God had given him a sign that he should go to Korea to adopt children, and many others were influenced by his example and by his Christian faith.

I don’t need to tell you that South Korea was devastated by the war, and, according to the UN Korean Reconstruction Agency (UNKRA), in 1954 there were over 400 orphanages housing more than 50,000 children, with another estimated 10,000 children in need of institutional care. In addition, there were 500,000 widows with more than one million children under 13 years of age. From social welfare, to housing, to electricity, education, and basic industries, projects to rebuild Korea from top to bottom were funded by the members of the UN, as well as by independent US organizations. According to one writer, “South Korea throughout much of the 1950s, was the largest development project in the world” (Ekbladh).

With respect to war orphans, many Americans were sending donations of $10 per month to be given to a specific orphanage or to a specific child. This money went through the consular offices in the U.S. and was deposited into what the government called the “Orphan Aid Fund.” Information about a child would be sent to the donor and in this way personal ties were forged, which also helped stimulate desires among some people to bring the child to the US for adoption.

According to Mrs. Hong Oak Soon, director of Child Placement Service (CPS), the first Korean agency in charge of overseas adoptions directly after the war, Francesca Lee, the First Lady of Korea, approached her with a stack of letters from Americans who wanted to adopt children from Korea. She asked Mrs. Hong, who was then a trained nurse working in the Women’s Bureau of the Ministry of Social Affairs, to find a solution to the problem of mixed race children and the parents who wanted to adopt them.

Mrs. Hong approached several Western relief agencies that were working in Korea for help and they provided her with office space, financial assistance and administrative guidance under KAVA, the Korean Association of Voluntary Agencies, which was composed of UN and US humanitarian agencies and Korean government officers. International Social Service, the UN-affiliated agency that oversaw the adoptions of Japanese, German and Greek children after World War II, became the main liaison for CPS as they tried to set up a legal system to transfer children from Korea to the U.S.

In America at the time, there was a huge demand for children—it was the 1950s baby boom, and infertile couples outnumbered available children by rates of around four to one. Because of the high demand and limited supply, social workers imposed strict standards for applicants, who were judged according to financial status, age, education and other factors. Many people who wanted to adopt felt these restrictions were discriminatory and that social workers were “playing God” by deciding who could have children and who could not. So part of the motivation of parents who adopted children from Korea in those days may have been religious and humanitarian, but another motivation was that some people were disqualified from adopting children in the U.S. and they found that Korea was a new option for people like them.

Harry Holt adopted 8 children in 1955, and, employing the controversial practice of proxy adoptions, he set up his own adoption agency, one that is still a dominant institution in Korea today. But Holt was not the only American to find his way to Korea with the express purpose of taking children out of the country. There were other individuals and organizations, some of whom were also religiously inspired, who went to Korea to bring Korean children back to the US. Holt just happened to be the most successful, famous and, as a millionaire, was probably the most financially capable. In the beginning, Holt and many of these other organizations did not follow standard procedures for screening adoptive parents, and Holt, in particular, asked only that the parents prove that they were Christian by having a letter from a church minister.

From the Korean side, because of the crisis of war orphans, overflowing orphanages, and street children, the American interest in Korean children was considered a blessing and the government was more than willing to help interested parents to find children that matched their descriptions. For instance, there was a case involving a woman in Missouri who read a magazine article about the orphanage in Cheju Island. She circled the face of a 3-year-old full-Korean girl and mailed it to the consular office in California asking if she and her husband, a childless couple, could adopt her. President Lee gave his approval and the girl was actually found, and her adoption arranged. In other words, there was not only a supply and a demand, but also a willingness to satisfy that demand. Even into the late 1960s, social workers went to the DMZ area to find children that matched the descriptions that American parents sent them. If someone wrote a letter asking for a blond-haired six-year-old girl, social workers would go “hunting” for a blond-haired six-year-old girl.

(Today it is not so different—the technology is different, but the desire is the same. There are Internet sites that show pictures of “waiting children” and potential parents often respond to these pictures in the same way—they want to adopt the child whose picture they see.)

The demand for children continued long after the initial “temporary problem” of mixed-race children was “solved.” In fact, as early as 1960, the assistant director of ISS wrote:

“Generally speaking it has not seemed either wise or practical to try to alleviate Korea’s problem of homeless children by sending children abroad in large numbers for adoption. More material supplies and money are needed to raise standards in the Korean orphanages and to develop a child welfare program within the country. The children in Korea for whom an overseas adoption program is essential are the children of mixed racial parentage by U.S. servicemen who are not accepted by the Korean community and whose natural mothers are not in a position to provide care and support. For these children we already have a considerable waiting list of approved adoptive homes and have been able to place a large number with approved American servicemen and their families stationed in Japan.”

By 1959, the number of full Korean children being adopted was double the number of mixed-race. Already, the temporary problem was becoming a permanent solution and people were remarking on how “competitive” it was becoming in Korea to find children for adoption. Today, many people argue that overseas adoption must be stopped, saying that it’s about time that Korea took care of its own children. It may be surprising then to see that there were people making the same argument in 1960—that this question of how to solve Korea’s social welfare problems without relying on overseas adoption is, in fact, a forty-year-old question.

Overseas adoption became part of the Korean government’s population control and emigration policy of the 1960s and actually expanded after the initial emergency of mixed race children had diminished. The 1962 population policy, and the Overseas Emigration Law, also of 1962, sent workers to Germany, Scandinavia, and South America. And thousands of Korean women went abroad as wives to Americans and Europeans. Adopted children also were included as one of the groups sent abroad to alleviate the problem of overpopulation in Korea.

In addition to the emigration policy, the family planning and population policy that was put into effect in the 1960s initiated one of the fastest national fertility transitions in the world—with a decline of the birth rate by 40 percent between 1960 and 1975, from 6.0 to 4.2. In 2002, the birthrate is the lowest in the world, at 1.17. The irony of Korea’s holding the record in both the lowest birthrate and the record in highest adoption rate is one of the many contradictions in the history of modern Korea and its rapid development.

On the one hand, Korea is facing all the problems of advanced nations—low birthrate, shrinking workforce, a growing elderly population, late marriage, increasing infertility rates, high rates of abortion. These are the same issues that motivate people in Western countries to adopt children from developing nations, where there is a high birthrate, overpopulation, lack of adequate healthcare, and children die from the lack of basic resources. So what is the difference between Korea and these Western countries? In Korea, as many people have argued, the adoption system has encouraged people to give up their children for adoption rather than seeking other means of support. Today, the main problem is that single mothers do not keep and raise their own children. In the US, over 97% of single mothers decide to raise their own children. They receive financial support from the government and there is very little social stigma related to single motherhood. In Korea, on the other hand, in the case of single mothers, over 97% decide to give up their children and over 85% of them decide to send their children overseas. Meanwhile, because of the low birthrate, married women are being offered financial rewards for having more children.

Korea is 12th largest economy in the world and spends less on social welfare than any other OECD country. The permanent solution for a temporary problem in Korea has essentially turned into the social welfare system of Korea. Money from international adoption supports domestic welfare services that are offered by adoption agencies—homes for unwed mothers, homes for disabled children, foster parenting. So not only did international adoption hinder the development of a social welfare system for Korea, it actually funds the social welfare system in Korea.

Too often the problem of adoption in Korea is framed as one of Confucianism and the traditional obsession with maintaining pure bloodlines in Korean families, as if this were the unchanging cultural essence of Korea. From talking with young Koreans, it seems that many of them have very little interest in the “blood” conceptions of their parents, and the influence of Christianity on this traditional thinking has had an effect of loosening the strict adherence to this ideology.

Blaming Confucianism ignores the structural issues of power, economy and politics and, moreover, shifts focus onto the fact that Koreans are reluctant to adopt, rather than first paying attention to the problem of how to keep families together. As we all know, Koreans do adopt, but secretly, and Koreans most likely will begin to adopt more, because of the growing problem of infertility. But the first concern should be how to give support to families to stay together, and how to expand the notion of what a family is--so that it can include single mothers and their children, and restore the notion of family to include extended families.

The other thing that the Confucianism argument obscures is the fact that adoption is a demand-driven industry. Where there is demand, and a very strong demand, a supply will be found. In the 1970s as Korea was preparing a new law on overseas adoption, American adoption agencies lobbied the Korean government to keep sending children abroad. In the 1980s there was a scandal around missing children who, without the permission of their parents, were adopted overseas. It was unknown whether or not these children were really unwanted or just lost, yet the system was already in place to deal with abandoned children in Korea and they were processed and boarded onto airplanes. The system assumed that adopting children abroad was better and privileged emigration above all else.

The underlying cultural assumption behind Korean adoption, from the beginning, and even today, is that life in the West is undeniably superior to that in Korea. Attitudes towards adoption reflect the power imbalances between Korea and the rest of the world. For instance, after the war, some Ethiopians who were serving as part of the UN forces in Korea, wanted to adopt war orphans. It was considered absurd, it seems absurd even today—but why? The opposite attitude is reflected in the assumptions of some Koreans who envy adoptees because they can speak English, because they are “lucky” to live in the West. As Mihee Cho told a group of Korean recently, don’t think that being an adoptee is like being a “yoohaksaeng” (overseas exchange students). And according to another Korean adoptee, Koreans will only admit that Korea is a developing nation when it comes to the subject of adoption.

Adoption is central to modern Korean society—precisely because it is so marginalized. The Korean obsession with the postmodern family is evident in television dramas and films that often feature the complexities of the postmodern family. There are divorces and affairs, child custody battles, orphans and secret adoptions. An anthropologist has said something to the effect of: That which is most silenced is most symbolically central. Adoption, I want to argue, is symbolically central in Korea because it is about the limits of social reproduction in Korea and points out the gap between the ideal and the real in all family relations. The obsession with bloodline and “natural” families can only be satisfied through “unnatural” means, and that may explain why there are so many family secrets in Korea.

Part of the reason for the obsession with family and bloodties in Korea is precisely because they are so fragile. Family separation is a recurring trope in Korean society—family blood ties may be forever bonding, but social contingencies often mean families do not stay together. Parents work in distant cities while their children go to school in Seoul, children are sent off to study in North America while their parents stay in Korea, weekend parents are a common phenomenon in Korea because of the decline of the extended family and the costs of child care and educational demands.

Especially following the negative press coverage by the international media during the 1988 Olympic Games, the “adoption problem” is an often discussed issue in the media. Discussions focus on the reform of adoption law, the problem of needy children in institutions (18,000 in welfare institutions last year), the need to expand domestic adoption, a review of reasons why Koreans don’t adopt Korean children, the problems or successes of overseas adoptees, the need for better sex education—but the authors, it seems, raise these arguments as if they’ve never been made before. In other words, there has been very little continuity in the discussions surrounding adoption, and very little progress made in finding a solution. Instead, scandals arise and stories about adoptees flip flop between extremely positive or extremely pathetic portrayals, but there has been no concerted movement to make headway on the underlying social causes.

Recently, the hit reality show, “Sarang Eu Uitangmo” (Celebrity Foster Mom) has helped to launch a domestic adoption campaign. But the problem of family preservation is not broached, as far as I have seen. There is no discussion of the birth mother, rather, the celebrity mother herself stands in symbolically for the birth mother—as her separation from the fostered child is the key emotional content of the show.

One reason for the lack of progress on these debates is that many of the arguments are based on a desire to rescue Korea’s national image and pride—“we must take care of our own children; it is a national shame to be the number one exporting country of children in the world.” Instead of prioritizing the human rights of children and families, a concern with national reputation is foregrounded. Meanwhile, Korean missionaries and humanitarian groups go to all parts of the globe to give aid to poor people in underdeveloped countries. If Korea has reached a point in its own development such that it is lending assistance to and promoting human rights in other countries, what about the children and families in its own country? Moving away from nationalist arguments to ones based on human rights is a first step to seeing the adoption issue as specific to Korea, but also as one that is linked to the larger global inequalities and movements of people from poorer countries to wealthier ones.

Part II:
The institutionalization of post-adoption
and the rise of the Adopted Korean Diaspora

Today, international adoption from South Korea hovers around 2,300 to 2,400 per year. The majority of children go to the U.S. where international adoption has become a huge trend since the mid 1990s—there are more than 25,000 children from overseas entering the U.S. every year, mostly from Russia and China. Meanwhile, a few hundred black American children are adopted by European and Canadian families every year. International adoption is a fact in the world political economy; it is political and it is economic in that it reflects the inequalities in the world system.

The first motherland tour was offered by Holt in 1976 and since then, the four Korean adoption agencies (KSS is planning to offer a roots tour starting next year), American adoption agencies, private tour groups, NGOs, and the Korean government, have designed motherland or roots programs. Around 2,000 or 3,000 adoptees visit their adoption agencies every year, based on figures from the Ministry of Health and Welfare (albeit these figures are less than accurate because it is impossible to know how many of those adoptees counted are unique, and not return visitors). It is undoubtedly true that the numbers of returning adoptees is growing, with some estimating that there are 5,000 adoptees returning to Korea every year.

The phenomenon of returning adoptees was largely unexpected and unpredictable considering the numbers of adoptees that are coming back today. In response to these growing numbers, an acknowledgement of the need for post-adoption services was made by the Korean government in the revision of the Special Law on Adoption in 1995. The law called for the establishment of programs and services for adult adoptees, to provide cultural education, language training, preferential job recruitment, and assistance with birth family reunions.

Thanks in large part to the globalizing processes of the past decade, the expected life stages of the adoptee have radically changed from what was expected in the past. With the expansion of the Internet and travel industries, making global connections between adoptees and Korean culture has become easier. Moreover, there are more Korean immigrants and exchange students in Europe and America who often serve as the first “live” introduction to “Korea” or Korean culture for adoptees. These connections then help smooth the way for an initial visit to Korea. Also, flying to Korea is more convenient than it was in the past, and there are more and more Korean cultural products in the West, including Korean restaurants, films, music, and language programs. Korea is no longer a faraway place, but is increasingly imaginable as a place of return. Adoptees who have experiences going to Korea then become useful contacts for others who are also interested in going. Perhaps most importantly, because of globalization and the undeniable importance of English as the universal language of business and trade, adoptees from North America and Scandinavia, especially, are able to go to Korea and find work teaching English, thereby making it possible for them to stay for an extended period, and to experience Korea as more than just tourists.

In response to all these adoptees returning, organizations like GOA’L have formed, and other post adoption services have radically expanded. Motherland or roots tours, summer schools, language programs, help adoptees come to Korea through structured programs that sometimes make their experience as adoptees central to the program.

So, in the past, one could say that the expected life course of the adoptee included being born, relinquished, adopted, and sent on a plane to be “reborn” and assimilated into a new social context. Today, the life cycle appears to be very different given the new opportunities opened up by global trends. An adoptee today is born, relinquished (most probably before it’s even born, in a home for unwed mothers), adopted, sent on a plane to be “gotten” (what’s known as “gotcha day” in America, but sometimes picked up in Korea), assimilated into its family, sent to culture camps, returns to Korea, searches for his or her birthfamily, maybe moves to Korea for a year to teach, and perhaps, in some cases, is (re)assimilated into Korean society. And the experiences of adopted Koreans are now providing a model for other internationally adopted children from other countries—and a model to adoption agencies and parents for what they should expect of children from China, Guatemala or Colombia.

How does this new life course challenge or reinforce the attempts to make adoptees feel or act as Koreans?

In Korea, there is a central ambivalence around the Koreanness of Korean adoptees—their identity as Koreans is at once biologically given and also something that needs to be culturally learned. Adoptees have Korean blood, which makes them Korean (one of us), yet they are not Korean “enough” because of lack of cultural knowledge so must learn how to be—e.g., If you’re Korean, you have to speak Korean, eat Korean food and act Korean. The contradiction between these two notions of Koreanness points to a central problem with the cultural incorporation of Korean adoptees. “Blood” in Korea is used to embrace Koreans based on ethnocentric values—you look Korean, so you have Korean blood, so you are Korean and part of the ethnonation––but “blood” is also is used to exclude people who are outside the family line, who may have bad “blood” because they were abandoned. Blood and Koreanness carry ambivalent meanings, and are used to draw boundaries of difference and similarity. Included in the Korean nation, as Koreans, therefore, Korean adoptees are also excluded from being Korean because of the lack of family ties and / or cultural knowledge.

Korean adoptees, by forming organizations and asserting their identities as Koreans who were adopted, have been building a network that is now supported and recognized by the Korean government as part of the 7 million people who make up the overseas Korean population. The government seeks to recognize Korean populations around the world, from Russia to China, to Mexico and the US. Adoptees, however, are their own unique subgroup, not included as Korean Americans or Korean Germans, for instance. Thus, the official recognition of adoptees as overseas Koreans is creating a new term of Koreanness—the overseas adopted Korean, a distinct, spatially dispersed ethnic Korean identity. What does this mean? Are Korean adoptees then developing into their own disapora? In doing so, does this suggest that adoption from Korea has reached a new stage? Is this the permanent solution?

Post adoption services are necessary resources for adoptees, often for helping them learn about Korea, learn about themselves, and have a more secure understanding of their identities. At the same time, the institutionalization of post-adoption services in some ways feeds into the larger system of perpetuating the adoption industry itself. Holt Travel Services is but one example. It is a division of Holt that provides a guest house, individual, family and adult adoptee tours, and translation services. And the government itself spends money every year for a motherland tour that helps adoptees return to Korea to learn about their roots. I think there is a deep irony here when you consider that children are still leaving the country at a rate of 2,000 children per year and that the Korean government is spending Korean tax money on adoptees, who are, essentially, foreigners, to help them reconnect with Korea. One might consider how the money being spent to help adoptees who have become alienated from Korea because of adoption, might be used to keep children with their families in the first place.

Other important needs for adoptees are also left unaddressed, specifically the problem of access to information, or dedicated counseling services for birth families before adoption and after reunions, or the need to support adoptees to help them live and work in Korea as full social and cultural citizens.

Today the market in children around the world has expanded greatly—in the West, adoption culture is based on a very strong egocentric drive among individuals to have children, by any means necessary. Although fostering and adoption practices can be found throughout human history, international, transracial adoption is a purely modern phenomenon. It is a modern reproductive technology made possible by world wars, transportation technologies and international law. Today, with other new reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization, adoption has become the last resort for childless people, and the rights of the child often become secondary to the right to be a parent, the right to a child.

These people adopt from a liberal individualist standpoint—they are happy to be charitable, to help a needy child on their terms, with the least risk to themselves. But saving one child neglects the needs of the world’s children—“ICA offers an immediate, idealized life for a very small number of children instead of addressing the need to build a global future for all children.” And with costs for Korean children as high as $20,000 in the US, it’s hard not to imagine that the “cost of preventive assistance is amazingly low when compared to the amounts of money that the adopters are willing to spend on ICA” (Ngabonziza quoted in Selman 1999).

I have three main points to make from this talk.

Korean adoption has entered into a new stage. After 50 years, it is a naturalized phenomenon in both the West (especially America) and in Korea. It is a part of Korean society—it is not on the margins, but at its center. But adoption is not just a Korean issue, it is also a global issue. Arguments about adoption need to move beyond nationalist ones to ones that take seriously the problem of human rights—of women, children, and families.

The second point I want to make is that adult Korean adoptees, through the organizations and networks they have built over the past two decades, are asserting themselves as Koreans. Remarkably, adoptees are being recognized as Koreans by the government and with the help of global processes and the rise of post-adoption services we can see that Korean adoptees have developed into a specific group of its own—a unique Korean diaspora.

And finally, I want to question “international adoption” and the ways in which it has radically expanded in the last decade, to include all sorts of “post-adoption” services. Although post-adoption services are necessary resources for adoptees, they also point out a deep irony in overseas adoption––the very system that has created adoptees is profiting from the new adoptee market and adoptees desires to reconnect with their “birth country.” We might ask about how to redirect energy and money away from what is taken for granted as part of “international adoption”—adoption fees, post-adoption services, motherland tours, culture camps, etc.–– to help tackle some of the root causes of the need for adoption in the first place. This would involve improving sex education, supporting needy families, and improving the status of single mothers in Korea.

DATE: 2007.07.23 - 10:20

SYMPOSIUM: INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION AND CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION: INTERNA...

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