Santoki's World

Synopsis:
Many Korean adoptees experience difficulties in the development of their own identity. This is one of the reasons why many Korean adoptees only return to Korea after a certain time. Every adoptee has his or her own pace. This explains why Korean adoptees return at different ages to the country where they were born. I can see a difference between older generations and younger ones. The younger generations tend to return to Korea in their late teens or 20s. In contrast to this many older generations return in their 30s to Korea.
After a first visit many Korean adoptees experience problems with the re-adjustment to their lives they led prior to the visit to Korea. The problems can vary from short episodes of sadness, grief, excitement and other emotional instabilities in best cases versus onset of depression like symptoms which may require treatment or even hospitalization. The symptoms may vary very much with every adoptee. There are also documented cases of adoptees who committed suicide after returning from their first trip to Korea.

Analysis:
Identity forming is a very complex process. Korean adoptees who grow up mostly with Caucasian adoptive parents have additional layers to resolve in contrast to their peers who grow up with parents of the same ethnicity. A visit to the country of origin opens a new perspective to the Korean adoptee. All of a sudden the Korean adoptee realizes that there are other persons around who just look like him/her. Being in the majority and not sticking out like a sore thumb is a new experience which helps many Korean adoptees to further comprehend their own identity. Especially those who happen to be reunited with their biological family will go through more layers. Juggling the Korean and the western identity around, finding the family means also that sooner or later the adoptee needs to consolidate the various identities into one. Post-reunion development shows that there is a need for further development. Various stages can be passed within a short period, but some of the stages will take more time, months, maybe even years, until the adoptee is able to process all stages. Grief is an important part of the process, where the adoptee can grieve the past, the loss of the biological family, the loss of the lives they never lived, the loss of the culture and language.

Conclusion
It is very important to understand the complexity of the situation in which many adoptees all of a sudden are when they are reunited (many times completely unexpected) with their biological family. In light cases there needs to be just enough space and time for the adoptee to process the whole events. Many times it helps to have close friends who listen to the adoptee. In other cases it is recommendable to seek the help of a professional therapist/counselor. Ideally the counselor would be specialized in adoption issues. In severe cases we recommend hospitalization with stationary treatment (if needed in closed environment and with support of antidepressant or similar drugs where use is indicated, especially in case of suicidal tendencies). A thorough briefing prior to a visit to Korea would be highly recommendable but is not possible due to the fact that the adoptee is in most cases not aware of the consequences of his/her visit. It should be in any case included in the counseling of the adoptee at the adoption agency. But there are limits to this, too, due to financial constraints and due to the fact that the countries where the adoptee lives is not the same as where the adoption agency is located (Korea).
We also recommend the use of so-called peer-to-peer counseling. Connecting the adoptee to other adoptees in his area who went through similar experiences is highly recommendable. A list of the existing Korean Adoptee Associations is available at G.O.A.’L.

Dae-won Wenger

- added 2010-01-27
One action plan could be to develop an international network with the existing adoptee organization and try to locate local resources for counseling/therapy in order to fight the difficulties adoptees experience. This would require financial resources not only from the Republic of Korea but also from all other countries that are involved in international adoption from Korea.

The Korean Adoptee Community here in Seoul has constantly changed since I came to Korea. Back in 2003 there were some groups, mostly Americans and Europeans who tended to hang out separately. After the Gathering 2004 many adoptees decided to stay longer and during fall/winter that year we had a development into one large group of adoptees.

I still remember how we used to hang out in groups with at most 50-70 persons. All 2005 it was fun to hang out and the only fights were those between someone from our community and someone from outside. But already towards the end of 2005 there was a new trend visible.

More and more adoptees decided to come to Korea and to live here for at least one year. Naturally our community grew larger and larger. Towards end of 2005 there were maybe 150 adoptees living here and connected to each other through our text message list. That was the beginning of a big change. As soon as more than a certain number of adoptees arrived from one country they formed another group.

I guess this is natural and is called group dynamics. On one hand I miss those times when we were in such a large group. On the other hand it’s just a normal development. I wonder where the community will go to in the future. Of course we are still connecting all adoptees – irregardless to their background and affiliations – to each other as I think that the community is a very important thing here in Korea. The community is for many adoptees the only network they can rely upon since as adoptees we are foreigners in our own birthcountry.

It’s one thing many adoptees don’t know about.

There is a possibility that you are still considered a Korean citizen even though you are a citizen of your adoptive country.

There are probably several reasons for this situation. Either when you acquired your new citizenship, nobody cared to let the Korean authorities know. Maybe within the Korean system there had been some communication problems. In any case, it happens actually more often than I ever thought. Adoptees arrive in Korea, they apply for the F4 visa and in that process they also get their Korean family registry.

Take a good look at it. If there is a Korean ID number on it, then you’re still considered a Korean citizen. The number is easily identifiable. It starts with your birthdate (YYMMDD), then comes a dash and then it starts with a 1 for male and 2 for females.

Being dual citizen is officially illegal and only under certain circumstances allowed (for example children from an international marriage can be dual citizens up to the age of 20 and then they have 2 years time to decide). G.O.A.’L is trying to lobby for a Korean citizenship for adoptees where we could still keep our adoptive country’s citizenship. And of course the issue of the military service needs to be discussed. There was recently also a discussion on K@W about the pros and contras of a dual citizenship.

In any case, so far none of the adoptees has given up his/her adoptive citizenship and everybody renounced their Korean citizenship, although many after much consideration since it’s not only just a matter of military service or so but it’s also a matter of heart.

Giving it up is actually just a form you fill in and then you hand it in prior to the whole paperwork for the F4 visa.

Today I’m sitting in front of my computer. I thought back how everything started, back in 1990 when I first participated at the YWCA Summer School and then in 1994 when we founded Dongari Switzerland. There was no internet, everything went by sending letters. Nowadays I can’t even think about how to organize things without the internet. The internet is part of our daily life and plays a very important role when it comes to networking.

When I grew up I had several penpals from all over the world. There was this Japanese businessman collecting empty beercans. He had more than 5000 at that time. There were other ones I met through others or met at the WWF summer camps or through work.

I had so many penpals that kept me busy writing letters. But the cool part for me was always to return from school and to find a letter on my desk. The farther away it was sent the better. The more colorful the stamp the better. I didn’t care much about what the letter itself said. It was just the excitement of receiving a letter… a sign that I was alive.

I kept most of the letters. I’ve already forgotten most of the names and only rereading the letters can update my memory… for a short while.

When I was in New York back in the early 90s I also wrote letters. But when I returned and was working in the IT department of the same company I soon discovered the internet. At that time it was through Compuserve, the first account the company had and I was the only user of it. It was very interesting and exciting to chat with people from all over the world and to browse through all those sites that already existed at that very early time.

Yet when we founded Dongari Switzerland most of the work was still done the old-fashioned way. We still sent letters, called and my phone bill was every month so huge…

I used mostly the company’s computers and copymachine to edit and print the Dongari newsletters. I still have some copies of those early newsletters from 1994. One big part of the whole budget was assigned to postage. Letters, newsletters, announcements… everything was sent via regular mail and it was really expensive at that time.

Soon though more and more internet users showed up. Everybody was keen to learn the new technology and to master the howto of emoticons. The old fashioned mailing list was soon replaced by a new technology. Soon our Dongari homepage was designed and ran originally on the geocities website. Of course there were drawbacks like limited webspace and popupads… just like today on certain blog providers.

But then I was part of a team that built a local area network within the student dormitory we lived in. The budget we had was nothing against what a professional company asked for. We provided all our work for free and the dormitory covered the material and the computer. That’s how I became administrator of the dorm’s server. And soon Dongari Switzerland had its own webspace with almost unlimited (at that time) webspace. I also created two mailing-lists, Dongari for our local Swiss users and Urinara for all the others. By using majordomo, one of the common mailing-list servers on Linux, I had many options I could use. But one of the first thing I had to learn is that running a mailing-list is not as easy at it seems to be. Who sets up the rules? Where are the limits? How long should a flame war last? Who should be kicked? How long may a mail be and are attachments allowed or not? Many more questions popped up during the time I ran those lists.

At the same time the topics were also very interesting and similar to today’s discussions. Where do we belong to? What do you think of international adoption? How did you experience it? How much Korean are you? Many more questions, many more flame wars and sometimes it was also exhausting to just go through all those mails. Learning from all those messages and growing, that was the important part.

Soon other mailing-lists appeared in the cyberspace. The biggest list was Sunny Jo’s “Korean Adoptees Worldwide” list on Yahoo!Groups. I closed down my lists after some time as less and less traffic was on it and more and more went to the mailing-lists with graphical user surface.

I think the internet created so much more options for all the Korean adoptee organizations in the world. It is nowadays much easier to communicate through the help of emails, mailing-lists and websites than it was before. But there are also dangers. I realized that when I spoke to other adoptees in Sweden. When it comes to important topics nothing can replace a personal talk. Only when you can feel, see, hear and touch the person you talk to, then you can really know what the person is saying. Well, apart from cultural and lingual problems, of course.

Recently there has been also a surge of BLOG writers in the internet. There are really old ones but many just recently discovered those BLOGs or mixture of various functions…
Especially in the USA there seem to be more and more communities on the internet who function through the internet. Of course there are also new dangers coming with the new technology but I’m certain that especially the Korean adoptee community profited a lot from it.

G.O.A.’L invites you to:

National Assembly Seminar for Policy making:
Why should we discontinue overseas adoption out of Korea? What are the realistic obstacles in accomplishing this?

Organizer: Congresswoman Jang, Hyang-sook
Date: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 – 10:00 a.m.
Place: National Assembly Memorial Hall, 1F. Grand Seminar Room (http://memorial.assembly.go.kr/)

Schedule:

Part I. 10 a.m – 10:30 a.m.
Opening Address: Chang, Hyang-sook (Congresswoman)
Welcoming Address: Kim, Deuk-kyu, Kim, Choon-jin (Congressmen)
Introduction of Guests

Part II. 10:30 a.m -12:30 a.m.
Moderator: Kim, Do-hyun (KoRoot)
Interpreter: Han, Ji-sun (G.O.A.’L Volunteer)

Speakers:
Boonyoung Han (Danish Adoptee) – “My own experience in Korea and Opinion about International adoption policy”
Jae Kauffman (American Adoptee, ASK member) – “Moving away from overseas adoption towards domestic solutions”

Discussants:
Hong, Seung-joon (Representative of Anti Baby Export Civil Movements)
Shin, Young-chul (Director, Department of Children and Population Policies, Ministry of Health and Welfare)
Yang, Seung-joo (Director, Department of Family Policies, Ministry of Gender Equality and Family)
Kim, Don-young (Manager, Department of International Cooperation, Holt Childrens’ Services, Inc. )

Part III. Further Discussion with Audiences. (12:30- 13:00)

Purpose

For the last 40 years, South Korea has lived with the stigma as a child-exporting nation, is still sending many of its children overseas for adoption. South Korea is the only OECD country that keeps sending children for overseas adoption. Even though South Korea’s Gross National Income per capita is more than US$12,000, its level in terms of adoption and social welfare issues is actually same as those nations with a GNI per capita of US$3,000.

There were 13,857 South Korea children adopted between 2002 and the early half of 2005. Among them, 8,204 children were sent for adoption internationally, comprising 59% of the total number of adoptions.

During the annual Inspection of Governmental offices by the National Assembly this year, many congressmen made inquiries on current adoption policies. Kim Geun Tae, the Minister of Health and Welfare, answered that overseas adoption will be banned in the near future.

With regards to these facts, we would like to raise awareness on the reasons why South Korea should stop overseas adoption, and to find out what difficulties exists in the process to implement this policy by discussing this topic with specialists and the people in-charge of making these decisions.

How many of you out there wonder what happens once you find your family? Of course the chances of finding depends on the circumstances of every single case. Were you abandoned, relinquished, how much information did the parents leave? But here I’m talking about things that happen after a reunion.

A reunion with the birthparents can be very joyful, sorrowful, happy, ugly… but instead of just trying to generalize I rather tell you from my personal experience.

I started to search back in 1984 and did that out of respect for my adoptive parents secretely. I know that our adoptive parents wished to adopt orphans so that they wouldn’t have anyone else to fear. Unfortunately for them we were not orphans (my brother got adopted together with me) but that’s a fact I discovered only 10 years later when actually meeting our birthmother.

The search and reunion was a short story after all. Through a newspaper article in the Chosun Ilbo on August 16, 1994 I was reunited with our family. Our birthmother remarried though and had two more daughters and one son.

The first time after meeting them I was in shock. I can’t describe any feelings during that time, all was numb and even back in Switzerland the only time I had feelings was when I told our adoptive parents about what I had found in Korea and that I actually travelled to Korea which they didn’t know either at that time. For our adoptive mother it was a very harsh blow. She felt threatened by the sudden “competition” from far east, as she put it. I felt kind of torn in between my adoptive parents and our birthfamily. It took me not much time though to wish to go back to Korea in order to get to know our family better.

So I packed my stuff and went one year later to Korea and enrolled at the Yonsei Korean Language Institute. I managed to go straight to level 2 so all the Korean lessons I had previously since 1984 paid off…

Yet the communication with our birthfamily was still difficult and I had the feeling that our birthmother still had some dark secrets in her closet. Every time I went to see her I was completely frustrated at the lack of communication. I wanted to tell her so much of my life in Switzerland, about my life in the U.S.A., about what happened to me and about my hopes and wishes.

At that time I thought all she wanted was to see my brother who is older than me. She always mentioned him and almost the only thing she told me was to get married and to have children. The latter she still mentions although she probably has given up on me…

It was kind of difficult to understand as to why my older brother was so much more important to her than I was. The first born son is the one who takes care of the parents. That’s the tradition here in Korea and our mother longed so much for our older brother, to see him, to actually touch him. But he hasn’t travelled to Korea yet. And I doubt that he will. Anyway… for me it was also kind of difficult to get along with the stepfather here in Korea. Everytime I couldn’t phrase what I felt, what I wanted to tell them, I felt such a frustration that I ran out into the rain and to the next phone booth. Fortunately my friend T. was also in Korea and he usually visited his mother in Pusan. So we called so many times and I got rid of so many things off my breast. I was so happy to have him here and was able to talk to him. And I also envied him so much for his strong connection he had to his mother. I don’t have any memories whatsoever from Korea although I got adopted at age 5. That’s why I couldn’t recognize our mother at all. It made it also more difficult to kind of bond with her.

There were about 2 years of hardship in Switzerland during which I didn’t call or write our birthfamily at all. The family was very upset about that but I just needed that at that time. I felt that everything had come too soon and I just needed time to digest all the experiences and also to work on some of the issues before I could continue a relationship with our family. At the same time the relationship to our adoptive parents was also one thing we had to work on.

I had to make clear to our family that I just needed more time, more space and distance because the relationship was so important to me. Furthermore with all the Korean traditions and customs it is sometimes also not easy, to get together with a Korean family when you were educated in a western society. There were so many misunderstandings due to cultural differences and there will still be as usually Koreans have no idea that other concepts than the Korean one exist in this world. I don’t blame our mother on her ignorance. But I blame the Korean society for being unable to take responsibility for their own children, for relying on a practice that came from abroad.

Being an adoptee is not an easy thing. Sometimes I wonder how much Koreans understand of what adoptees go through just to meet their family. How much I had to suffer to actually see them from person to person. To be able to hug her, touch her. She’s there now, she’s not a ghost in my closet any longer.

There will be thousands and more stories of this kind as there are so many adoptees out there who come back to Korea, to search for their roots, for their families. There will be good stories to hear, bad ones. I wish all adoptees a good future and hopefully a good reunion with a good relationship afterwards.

I still mourn my friends who left me because they couldn’t stand life. I wish you were here today.