The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (50 page)

INSIDE A COUNTRY
that has become one of the world’s strongest economies, however, the persistence of a huge international adoption program has become an embarrassment. In 2011 South Korea’s government revised its adoption law, partially in the hopes of promoting more domestic adoptions and decreasing the number of children sent overseas. It wasn’t the first time they had tried to do this.

During the 1970s North Korea condemned South Korea for having sold out to capitalism so completely that it was now selling its own children. During the 1988 Olympics in Seoul publicity around the country’s continuing adoption trade besmirched South Korea’s image with a stark question: why should a country that could afford to host the Olympics have an adoption program that dwarfed that of third world nations?

In response to the first criticism, in 1976 the government imposed quotas on agencies to reduce international adoptions by one thousand per year. Then, in 1989, a rash of fraudulent adoptions of children who had gone missing from their families and who were wrongly adopted out of the country as “abandoned” led to a crackdown on abandonment adoptions. In response, the government restricted international adoptions instead to the children of women who relinquished directly to agencies, and those agencies reacted by quickly setting up maternity homes to make such handovers smoother. In 1994 a quota system was implemented to make the number of international adoptions agencies were allowed to broker dependent on the number of (much less lucrative) domestic adoptions they completed first. The country’s adoption agencies also took their adoption pitch to the public, launching ad campaigns featuring South Korean celebrities holding babies, described as “orphan angels.” In 2006 the government designated May 11, falling in a month already replete with Korean family holidays, as national Adoption Day.
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And in 2007, the government decreed that children relinquished by their mothers should be reserved for domestic adoption for at least the first five months of their lives. But after every effort, domestic adoptions failed to increase enough to take the place of international adoptions. Many Koreans were still resistant to admitting publicly that they had adopted and, more broadly, to acknowledging nontraditional families.

After the 2011 law indicated that South Korea’s support for international adoption was waning, Christian adoption advocates in the United States mobilized a counter-campaign. In January 2012 Hope for Orphans and a Korean-American pastor called on adoptive parents to make thirty-second videos to lobby the South Korean government, “describing how Korean adoption has blessed your life.”

Dawn Davenport, a respected adoption blogger, considered the law’s greater significance for all of international adoption: Was South Korea, the program from which all contemporary international adoption had sprung, now signaling the institution’s decline, the “canary in the coalmine”? Davenport wrote about her conversations with South Koreans about the remaining challenges to open acceptance of domestic adoption. South Koreans just weren’t ready, she was told. In the end she came down where many adoption advocates do: that although there were many justifiable reasons to seek to reduce Korean adoptions, in our nonideal world, where children were still being abandoned, it wasn’t yet possible. “Artificially limiting international adoptions before domestic adoptions and acceptance of single motherhood has caught up with the demand is not in the best interest of children,” she wrote.

Supportive readers chimed in with a more enthusiastic defense of the program than Davenport had offered. “We could boycott the process and not adopt, we could wait for Koreans to adopt domestically at much higher rates than they currently are, or we can adopt,” wrote one. “We chose to adopt.” In a way, it was the same argument that had been made for decades. 1988 Molly Holt, who inherited her father’s work in South Korea, regretfully told the
Progressive
that, of course, ideally Korean children should stay with their families or at least within their country. However, with so little domestic adoption, she argued, international adoption agencies had to continue their work. Agencies protesting that they would love to “work themselves out of a job” routinely voice similar sentiments. But missing from all these equations was the source of almost 90 percent
of the children being adopted and, seemingly, the ready-made solution to caring for many of these so-called orphans: their mothers. That many such mothers would like to parent is evident in the fact that in maternity homes where unwed mothers are given support to raise their children, more than eight out of ten have done so, compared to just three out of ten in maternity homes run by adoption agencies.

To many adoption reformers, the advocates’ regretful insistence that international adoption from South Korea must continue obscured the reality that the adoption system has benefited from the stigma against single mothers in South Korea. Agencies that have highlighted South Korea’s Confucian heritage as the reason so many mothers must relinquish did nothing to challenge the stigma, critics said, but instead used the stigma to justify continued adoptions. Sometimes, they said, the agencies even helped perpetuate that stigma by reinforcing the status quo. When adoptive parents and agencies defended adoptions that existed because of a coercive system on the grounds that children would suffer in institutions in its absence, to critics, this suggested a circular logic: women relinquished because adoption offered an easy way out of the stigma, shame, and economic peril they faced in Korea’s traditionalist society, and agencies seeking to find adoptable children told women they shouldn’t keep their babies because of the stigma, shame, and economic peril they and their child would face.

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, a Korean American adoptee and a creative writing professor at St. Olaf College who studies trends in the Korean adoptee diaspora, wrote in response to Davenport’s article that “Adoption agencies are benefiting from the mothers’ shame and lack of knowledge, and even encouraging both as a way to ensure a steady supply of children—the very orphan crisis that you’re asking us to consider.” She criticized some of the adoptive parents commenting on the blog for displaying “a sense of ownership” over Korean children of unwed mothers. “Speaking in the child’s ‘best interests’ has too often become a segue to speaking about the children as if they belong with foreigners.”

Kwon Dobbs wasn’t alone. A stream of similar critiques from other adult Korean American adoptees who have dedicated themselves to studying international adoption flooded Davenport’s comments section, many suggesting that the real challenge isn’t increasing domestic adoption but fostering a cultural shift in which South Korean society will increasingly recognize and welcome more diverse forms of family, including single-parent families.

“They say, ‘They are so Confucian. They have an ancient culture that can never change; they’re kind of backward.’ But actually, [culture]
changes really rapidly,” said Jane Jeong Trenka, president of the adoption reform group Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK). “What it really is is patriarchy, and how the patriarchy was legalized and institutionalized in a certain way on the family registry.”

From the perspective of Trenka, Kwon Dobbs, and their colleagues in the adoption reform movement, South Korea’s adoption problem is in fact a women’s rights problem. Although the economic role of women in South Korea has changed dramatically, social traditions and hierarchies have not yet caught up, leaving unwed mothers to face a massive double standard that punishes them severely while letting their partners off the hook. Although South Korea’s economy has rocketed, progress in gender equality has lagged far behind. A 2012 World Economic Forum report on the global gender gap ranked South Korea 108th of 135 countries, between the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. It’s that reality, reformers say, combined with continuing Western demand for adoptees, that undergirds the adoption industry’s continued survival.

“The mothers don’t want adoption,” wrote Kwon Dobbs. “They want their children. Their children are not at home in the US with paying strangers, but rather with their mothers in Korea.” Rather than US parents saying how sorry they felt about the circumstances that led unwed mothers to relinquish, she wrote, adoptive parents could instead become their allies, helping change the system that compels them to do so. “Korea is not a canary in a coal mine—as if overseas adoption is a dark tunnel that’s about to collapse,” she continued. “Let’s look at the flickering at the end of the tunnel instead.”

THE CHORUS OF ADOPTEES
responding to Davenport’s article was itself a demonstration of a changing reality with regards to South Korean adoption: adoptees who were once mute recipients of international salvation have become independent adults, and many of them are astute critics of the international adoption system through their activism, scholarship, or writing. To some dismissive adoptive parents and agencies, the children who grew up to criticize the circumstances of their adoption were “angry adoptees,” driven by emotion or bitterness toward an irrational backlash. Others treated critical adoptees as perennial children, responding to them with the clucking condescension of parents who know better, even when the adoptees in question were the same age or older than people trying to adopt. Indeed, in one response to Kwon Dobbs’s
comments, one reader chided her, saying she should express “a little more gratitude” to her American mother and father.

Adoptees were used to hearing this expectation of gratitude. Whether they had grappled with challenges in their childhood—dealing with ambient racism that their usually white parents couldn’t or wouldn’t understand—or had largely been happy in their adoptive homes, many commonly experienced their adoption as loss. Many felt they had become “church projects” in their undiversified communities. (Of the 150,000 Korean adoptees in the United States, a full 10 percent were sent to Minnesota, which adopts more children internationally per capita than any other state in the United States, thanks in part to the tradition of adoption among the state’s heavily Scandinavian population.)

Although JaeRan Kim, former author of the adoptee blog Harlow’s Monkey, described her childhood among Minnesota evangelicals as “idyllic in many ways” and maintains a good relationship with her adoptive family, she nonetheless grew up feeling at times that her parents had adopted her to score points for “their heavenly tally.” When her family’s church talked about mission work in other countries where people were “unsaved,” it felt like the comments were directed at her, intentionally or not. “I always felt there was this underlying sense of, ‘Aren’t you lucky that you were saved, and that you’re here, and that you’re not one of those heathens in fill-in-the-blank country.’” Kevin Vollmers, a Korean adoptee who began the adoption reform group blog Land of Gazillion Adoptees, agrees, saying, “Once you save somebody or when you are ‘saved,’ there is always a power dynamic with the people who saved you.”
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Driven by this complicated mixture of experiences, starting in the 1990s many Korean adoptees began to visit their ancestral home. Among them was Jane Jeong Trenka, raised in a Minnesota Christian home after her adoptive parents’ pastor exhorted them to adopt. In 1995, forty years after Harry Holt’s late-night epiphany in the Tokyo hotel room, when he felt God was calling him to rescue South Korea’s children, Trenka returned to the country she was born in on a postcollege trip, a “Motherland Tour” organized by a US adoption agency. Among other tourist destinations the trip took adoptees and often their adoptive families to a Korean
market, an orphanage, and an unwed mothers’ home. Though today Trenka views the preponderance of agency-sponsored homeland tours with a cynical eye—“They’ll make money off us until we die,” she told me—at the time it was a way for her to meet her birth family, including her mother, who had been writing Trenka and her older biological sister, also adopted to the same family, ever since their relinquishment.

Although Trenka’s adoptive parents had been told that the two sisters they adopted from Korea were the children of an unwed mother who had abandoned them, in reality the girls were two of several children born to a married couple; their abusive and alcoholic father had forced their mother to give the girls up. Afterward the mother had wept inside the adoption agency until the staff gave her the address of her children’s adopters, to whom she wrote letters to be given her daughters for nearly two decades. She even strapped a dog to her back to replace the feel of her missing youngest child, Trenka. All the while, Trenka said, “my American adoptive parents thought they were getting these completely unwanted children.” Trenka returned to Korea several times, including for an extended trip to care for her mother while she was dying. Ten years after her first trip, in 2005, Trenka returned to stay.

Because South Korea is the oldest international adoption program, its alumni constitute the oldest class of international adoptees. And with between 166,000 to 200,000 children adopted overseas from Korea since 1955—nearly 100,000 of them from unwed mothers—there are more adoptees from Korea than any other country. As this massive population of adoptees ages, many, like Trenka, come back to Korea. They started returning in the late 1980s, sometimes on short visits or homeland tours, sometimes to teach for a year, and sometimes as a complete repatriation to learn to live in their mother country for good.

Starting in 1999 a new series of reunions for adoptees began. The Gathering of the First Generation of Adult Korean Adoptees, cosponsored by Holt International, was extensively documented by Korean media, which portrayed adoptees as glamorous and cosmopolitan. Even though individual birthmothers who relinquished for adoption were often invisible in Korean society, adoption was undeniably a part of the cultural landscape in a country that had seen a quarter of a million children adopted away from their families (including an estimated seventy-five thousand domestic adoptions). As shown in the 2009 South Korean documentary film
Resilience
, about an adoptee from South Dakota finding his Korean mother, adoption reunions play an interesting role in Korean pop culture. In the film, directed by Tammy Chu, an adult adopted
man travels to meet his mother with the financial support of a sentimental Korean talk show called
Beautiful Forgiveness
and is finally reunited with her after a countdown in a booth in front of a studio audience as he decided whether or not he forgave her for letting him go.