There has always been this underlying tension surrounding interracial dating, and the double standard when it comes to the ways in which women and men are often treated for their dating preferences in Korea.  Not to mention, the White standard is still the Gold standard in Korea.  If Korea does institutionalize anti-discrimination legislation, you can bet there will be a lot more “discussion.”  KADs also have a unique experience, which I was happy they accounted for in this article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/world/asia/02race.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=print

South Koreans Struggle With Race

SEOUL — On the evening of July 10, Bonogit Hussain, a 29-year-old Indian man, and Hahn Ji-seon, a female Korean friend, were riding a bus near Seoul when a man in the back began hurling racial and sexist slurs at them.

The situation would be a familiar one to many Korean women who have dated or even — as in Ms. Hahn’s case — simply traveled in the company of a foreign man.

What was different this time, however, was that, once it was reported in the South Korean media, prosecutors sprang into action, charging the man they have identified only as a 31-year-old Mr. Park with contempt, the first time such charges had been applied to an alleged racist offense. Spurred by the case, which is pending in court, rival political parties in Parliament have begun drafting legislation that for the first time would provide a detailed definition of discrimination by race and ethnicity and impose criminal penalties.

For Mr. Hussain, subtle discrimination has been part of daily life for the two and half years he has lived here as a student and then research professor at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. He says that, even in crowded subways, people tend not sit next to him. In June, he said, he fell asleep on a bus and when it reached the terminal, the driver woke him up by poking him in the thigh with his foot, an extremely offensive gesture in South Korea.

“Things got worse for me this time, because I was with a Korean woman,” Mr. Hussain said in an interview. “Whenever I’ve walked with Ms. Hahn or other Korean women, most of the time I felt hostilities, especially from middle-aged men.”

South Korea, a country where until recently people were taught to take pride in their nation’s “ethnic homogeneity” and where the words “skin color” and “peach” are synonymous, is struggling to embrace a new reality. In just the past seven years, the number of foreign residents has doubled, to 1.2 million, even as the country’s population of 48.7 million is expected to drop sharply in coming decades because of its low birth rate.

Many of the foreigners come here to toil at sea or on farms or in factories, providing cheap labor in jobs shunned by South Koreans. Southeast Asian women marry rural farmers who cannot find South Korean brides. People from English-speaking countries find jobs teaching English in a society obsessed with learning the language from native speakers.

For most South Koreans, globalization has largely meant increasing exports or going abroad to study. But now that it is also bringing an influx of foreigners into a society where 42 percent of respondents in a 2008 survey said they had never once spoken with a foreigner, South Koreans are learning to adjust — often uncomfortably.

In a report issued Oct. 21, Amnesty International criticized discrimination in South Korea against migrant workers, who mostly are from poor Asian countries, citing sexual abuse, racial slurs, inadequate safety training and the mandatory disclosure of H.I.V. status, a requirement not imposed on South Koreans in the same jobs. Citing local news media and rights advocates, it said that following last year’s financial downturn, “incidents of xenophobia are on the rise.”

Ms. Hahn said, “Even a friend of mine confided to me that when he sees a Korean woman walking with a foreign man, he feels as if his own mother betrayed him.”

In South Korea, a country repeatedly invaded and subjugated by its bigger neighbors, people’s racial outlooks have been colored by “pure-blood” nationalism as well as traditional patriarchal mores, said Seol Dong-hoon, a sociologist at Chonbuk National University.

Centuries ago, when Korean women who had been taken to China as war prizes and forced into sexual slavery managed to return home, their communities ostracized them as tainted. In the last century, Korean “comfort women,” who worked as sex slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army, faced a similar stigma. Later, women who sold sex to American G.I.’s in the years following the 1950-53 Korean War were despised even more. Their children were shunned as “twigi,” a term once reserved for animal hybrids, said Bae Gee-cheol, 53, whose mother was expelled from her family after she gave birth to him following her rape by an American soldier.

Even today, the North Korean authorities often force abortion on women who return home pregnant after going to China to find food, according to defectors and human rights groups.

“When I travel with my husband, we avoid buses and subways,” said Jung Hye-sil, 42, who married a Pakistani man in 1994. “They glance at me as if I have done something incredible. There is a tendency here to control women and who they can date or marry, in the name of the nation.”

For many Koreans, the first encounter with non-Asians came during the Korean War, when American troops fought on the South Korean side. That experience has complicated South Koreans’ racial perceptions, Mr. Seol said. Today, the mix of envy and loathing of the West, especially of white Americans, is apparent in daily life.

The government and media obsess over each new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, to see how the country ranks against other developed economies. A hugely popular television program is “Chit Chat of Beautiful Ladies” — a show where young, attractive, mostly Caucasian women who are fluent in Korean discuss South Korea. Yet, when South Koreans refer to Americans in private conversations, they nearly always attach the same suffix as when they talk about the Japanese and Chinese, their historical masters: “nom,” which means “bastards.” Tammy Chu, 34, a Korean-born film director who was adopted by Americans and grew up in New York State, said she had been “scolded and yelled at” in Seoul subways for speaking in English and thus “not being Korean enough.” Then, she said, her applications for a job as an English teacher were rejected on the grounds that she was “not white enough.”

Ms. Hahn said that after the incident in the bus last July, her family was “turned upside down.” Her father and other relatives grilled her as to whether she was dating Mr. Hussain. But when a cousin recently married a German, “all my relatives envied her, as if her marriage was a boon to our family,” she said.

The Foreign Ministry supports an anti-discrimination law, said Kim Se-won, a ministry official. In 2007, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recommended that South Korea adopt such a law, deploring the widespread use of terms like “pure blood” and “mixed blood.” It urged public education to overcome the notion that South Korea was “ethnically homogenous,” which, it said, “no longer corresponds to the actual situation.”

But a recent forum to discuss proposed legislation against racial discrimination turned into a shouting match when several critics who had networked through the Internet showed up. They charged that such a law would only encourage even more migrant workers to come to South Korea, pushing native workers out of jobs and creating crime-infested slums. They also said it was too difficult to define what was racially or culturally offensive.

“Our ethnic homogeneity is a blessing,” said one of the critics, Lee Sung-bok, a bricklayer who said his job was threatened by migrant workers. “If they keep flooding in, who can guarantee our country won’t be torn apart by ethnic war as in Sri Lanka?”

I just came across the article in the Boston Globe and thought I’d spread the word.  -GS

A cousin’s wish: Find Ashley, and let her know we love her

By Peter Schworm, Globe Staff  |  October 16, 2009

Audra Peek clings to childhood memories of her cousin Ashley Marie McFarland, of frolicking together at playgrounds or singing a favorite song from “Annie,’’ about an orphan dreaming of her parents.

The song held special meaning for Ashley Marie. Born to a drug-addicted father and a mother she never got to know, Ashley Marie was put in foster care when she was just a toddler. But the Peek family thought of her as one of their own, frequently sweeping the girl away for family outings or weekends at their Andover home. They hoped to adopt her, and young Audra made space in her bedroom for her “next sister.’’

But one day in 1995, they say, the 7-year-old was abruptly taken from her foster family and placed with another family in parts unknown. The heartbroken Peeks, without even a chance to say goodbye, grieved as though she had died.

Now, after nearly 15 years of wondering, Audra Peek has launched an all-out search for her long-lost cousin, driven by a deep longing to redeem the lost years and fulfill the dying wish of the girl’s father, who had eventually kicked his cocaine habit. Succumbing to cancer this summer, he asked Audra to find his daughter and tell her that, despite his failings as a father, he always loved her.

“He said: ‘I need you to find her. I need you to find Ashley Marie,’ ’’ Audra Peek, now 25, said as she cried softly at the memory of her uncle’s final days. “It was the first time I had ever heard him say her name, and I promised him I would find her.’’

Since his June 1 death, Peek’s personal quest, which she secretly began in high school, has taken on new purpose. She has enlisted more than 1,000 online volunteers, and in July launched a Web page, “A Wish for Ashley,’’ where she writes a blog about the search, and maintains a Facebook page. The family has approached state social workers, who advised them to file a court request that could give caseworkers permission to contact relatives. They were told the process can take years.

Peek, and the growing ranks of those who are taking up her cause, send a standard message to any 21-year-old they can find named Ashley or Ashley Marie. Over the years, Peek has cold-called hundreds of people in the faint hope one might be her cousin, and combed reams of public records for any clue to her fate.

They have precious little to go on: A few family photographs, showing a wide-eyed biracial girl with a mischievous, missing-teeth smile and a frizzy ponytail. A passing remark from a social worker that she had been taken in by a family in Connecticut. Her birthday, Feb. 20. And the closely held memories of a shared childhood that ended too soon.

“You may remember our trips to Amazement [an arcade and indoor playground], Papa Gino’s, and the big Christmas tree,’’ Peek wrote on the website. “You may recall the song you would ask my sisters and I to sing to you.’’

The popularity of the name Ashley was among the search’s greatest challenges, but more than 500 of the 1,400 Ashleys whom Audra contacted have joined the search, moved by her resolve in the face of steep odds. “I needed to find a way to make this work in my favor,’’ she said.

So far, Peek and her family have had no luck, and are now making their search more public. In recent weeks, Peek and her siblings have held up signs behind the set of a morning television program in Manhattan and passed out hundreds of pins to participants at a Boston charity walk. They are planning to wear sandwich boards in Times Square in New York City and pass out fliers.

Peek, who lives in Cambridge and works at an East Boston charter school, said she realizes her search “may not have a happy ending.’’ She recalled a harrowing time three years ago when a biracial woman of her cousin’s age named Ashley Marie Cesenas was murdered in the Midwest. A friend called the police and begged an officer to tell her about the victim. He eventually whispered that she had been born in Texas, not Massachusetts.

Audra also knows her cousin may not be interested in reuniting.

“I recognize she might not want to have anything to do with us,’’ she said. “All I want to know is that she’s OK and for her to know we’ve always loved her.’’

Alison Goodwin, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Children and Families, said the agency cannot release information on individuals once they reach adulthood without their consent, and are restricted in contacting people simply to tell them family are looking for them.

Still, Goodwin urged Peek to contact the department to determine whether anything can be done, saying officials evaluate each case individually.

“If they are looking for family, we’d like to help if we can,’’ she said.

Peek also feels bound to tell Ashley Marie about her father, how he always felt haunted that his drug use forced her departure, how he quit and rebuilt his life, and how he never stopped caring for her.

“She deserves to know he turned it around,’’ she said.

Peek recalls visiting her uncle, Will McFarland, when he was in prison on a breaking-and-entering conviction. She recalls him as a larger-than-life figure who made everyone laugh and feel like they belonged.

While in prison, McFarland relinquished his custody rights, hoping they would pass to his sister. When he was released, he got clean and landed a steady job, but avoided his family for years, ashamed of the man he had been. Not until he was hospitalized with prostate cancer in 2007 did he see them.

“He would say, ‘I thought you guys were better off without me,’ ’’ Peek recalled.

Over long bedside chats, Peek and her uncle reconciled, and as he neared death he asked Peek and her mother to find his daughter and tell her he loved her.

Peek had to confess to her mother, who had been so grief-stricken over losing Ashley Marie that she never spoke her name, that she had been quietly searching for years. When she left, Peek had already cleared space for Ashley in her bedroom, and remains bitter that her “next sister’’ was snatched away.

“She was my best friend,’’ Peek said. “I just didn’t understand. I still don’t. We had been her family since she was a toddler.’’

Peek remains hopeful that her cousin will turn up, that an e-mail will magically pop into her in-box. Recently, she has dreamed about taking a plane trip to see her again at last, spotting her in the crowd gathered at the gate.

“I see a girl, and I know it’s her,’’ she said.

“I would know her anywhere. We stare at each other, and she smiles.’’

Has anyone heard of this show Glee?  Apparently there is an actress named Jenna Ushkowitz in the show.  I just had to do a google search because my KAD-dar was going crazy.  And yes, she is an adoptee. 

If you care to check out her film credits take a look at her wikipedia page or on imdb.

Jenna Ushkowitz

http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2009/s2686908.htm

Many of us thought China was the next “big” sending country via intercountry adoptions.  However, Chinese adoptions have slowed almost to a halt.  Across the country, agencies that began to thrive off of Chinese adoptions are shuttering to make room for agencies that have programs in Ethiopia.  The waits are shorter, the price?  It’s cheaper, and sexier for that matter.  Can we please stop talking about Madonna and Angelina now, please?!?!

Intercountry adoption needs more regulations, more international oversight.  Who is holding these governments accountable for profiting off of children?  Apparently the Ethiopian government makes somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million dollars for their intercountry adoptions.  And of course, when there is money to be made, there is corruption to be found.  This report is unfortunately not a surprise to me.  We’ve seen this before in many countries whether it’s in Korea, Samoa, Guatemala or Ethiopia.

Apparently there are around 70 adoption agencies in Ethiopia…70!!!  Over half are unregistered.  That’s freaking unbelievable!  Christian World Adoption is just one example of how gruesome adoption practices can become unchecked by the Hague.  And that’s not saying the Hague can completely control the illegal recruiting, selling and harvesting that takes place around the globe either.  Watching the scene where a CWA worker is harvesting children from these families makes me feel ill.  I’m sorry, to think there is a DVD catalogue where you can CHOOSE your child makes me want to throw up.  Children should not be treated like products!  Agencies like CWA can sugar-coat their euphemisms as much as they want, but at the end of the day how can you ever think that this sort of practice is humane or ethical?

“The father has died, and this is their mom…”  the social worker says with a big smile as she hugs the mother and children[violin music plays in the background]…How, on earth, can you say that with a smile?  How can you sit there and effectively make a sales pitch for a child’s life on a dvd catalogue?  They celebrate the tragedy of one family as the potential for another family’s gain.

Let’s back up a bit and discuss what is at the root of this issue.  If there really are poverty issues, and hunger issues in this country, and I think we can all honestly agree that there are-why are we not working on reinforcing social infrastructure?  If adoption agencies are truly invested in their missions which tends  to be something like “Looking out for the well-being of children,” why is the placement of children more important than helping to create systems that can assist poor families raise their children?

There is no blame being hoisted upon any one party.  This is part of much bigger and more complex industry that has developed over the past several decades.  Intercountry adoption has some incredibly large gaping holes that are still not yet visible to the general public.  Human trafficking seems to not apply when they are children or their “families are absent.”

It’s tough watching this piece at certain times, but it is something that you should watch.  -GS

Lately I’ve been having incredibly vivid dreams.  I can’t remember ever having such vivid dreams that I remember during the day.  Most times, you have dreams that disappear during the day.  Every day for the past week I’ve been having dreams that I remember.  Most of them have been unremarkable, reliving particles of my previous day.  I was Anthony Bourdain’s producer on No Reservations, I was on a ghost adventures investigation show…But last night was different…

For the first time, I had a dream about my birth father.  It started on the streets of Seoul, memory remnants from my first trip to Korea over three years ago.  Taking in the sights and sounds from the only place I knew, from the back of a taxi cab-a tourist’s view-Briskly moving through store fronts as not to hover for too long attracting conversation from shop-owners.  In my dream I walk through a CD store, part is owned by Koreans, part owned by Asian Americans.  I stop between both, then immediately stay on the side of the store owned by Asian Americans.  A friend comes in and leads me out.

At one point I am told by a figure that is not clear that my father wants to see me.  I call a phone number that appears on my phone and hear a voice on the other end in fluent English.  I say I want to meet him, and he says that he is in Korea.  I hang up.  My view cuts away to a dentist’s office where my father is lying down getting a procedure done on him.  And for a brief second, I am him as I look up I see the dentist talking to me in English, or at least I am able to understand what he is saying.

Then, I appear in the room, I switch back to myself and stare down at my father whose face is covered by a white mask as his teeth are being worked on.  We talk, in English.  No this is not my imagination, or me understanding Korean.  After his procedure ends he stands and removes his mask, he is white, middle-aged, and has a stubby graying beard.  I look, and almost laugh.  “You’re not my father, this is a joke right?”  He looks back at me and smiles, for a moment, he becomes my adoptive father then changes back to himself.  Suddenly things start to spin.  I back away, trying to regain my composure.  Thoughts begin spinning.  Who is this man, who am I, who is my family?  My dreams ends, and I wake up.

-GS

Just found this piece that Mei-Ling Hopgood (author of “Lucky Girl”), wrote.  Take a look.  -GS

Another country, not my own

One overseas adoptee explains: Parents’ embrace of the ”home” culture can have its costs

By Mei-Ling Hopgood  |  August 23, 2009

The woman, I know, was just trying to be loving. She was a bubbly Midwestern mom who had adopted two Korean daughters and went to great lengths to “keep” her daughters’ culture. Her girls took language lessons, and the family celebrated Lunar New Year – they never missed it. To help sensitize her daughters’ white classmates, each year this woman went into her daughters’ school and did a presentation on Korea, pointing out the country on a map, explaining its traditions, and showing the children a real hanbok, a traditional Korean dress.

She told me this, and I nodded and smiled, trying to listen politely to her story. But something about what she was doing made me uncomfortable, despite her good intentions. Like her daughters, I’m an adoptee born in Asia; I was born in Taiwan and raised by a white family in Michigan. I thought to myself: Korean-Americans do not walk around in hanboks all day, and this child had never really done that either – unless her mother made her.

When I was her daughter’s age, I wanted desperately to avoid the kind of identity that she was trying to give her child. I averted my gaze if an Asian-looking stranger threatened to look me in the eye. I didn’t want people to think I was one of them, because really, I wasn’t: I couldn’t speak Mandarin, Cantonese, or any other Chinese dialect, and didn’t do “Chinese” things in my home. My parents weren’t even Asian. I was trying so hard to show that I was just as American as anyone else. If my own mother had done something like that woman did, I would’ve hidden beneath my desk.

Over the last two decades, international adoptions have become commonplace in the United States. More than 268,000 children have been adopted from abroad since 1991, with China, Korea, and Guatemala topping the list of countries they have come from over the last five years. At the same time, there has been a huge push to import adoptees’ culture with them, a dramatic shift from a time when parents were told that assimilation was best. Today, almost all parents who adopt internationally try to cultivate some kind of connection to their child’s birth land. Efforts range from throwing some ramen noodles in a salad to remodeling the interior of their homes to an Asian motif and spending thousands of dollars to send their children to language schools and heritage camps on another continent.

Parents do these things hoping to help their children adjust to the sometimes tricky duality of their existence. Yet I worry that some parents are now taking things too far: Going to extremes to idealize the native culture might be as damaging to an adoptee as ignoring it. Asian-American activists have for decades fought the idea that you are born with a culture – that if you look Asian, you must eat with chopsticks, wear different clothing, speak a different language; that you are different and thereby less American. Parents, to some extent, are asking children to conform to those expectations. And without adequate acknowledgement of the reality that actually is – their experience in America – I suspect that children might have an even harder time figuring out where they belong.

When my parents adopted me from Southern Taiwan in 1974, many social workers were still telling multiracial families that the best thing was to try to help their children assimilate into the majority culture. Focusing on differences could cause the child to feel more out of place; love was supposed to conquer all. The idea was that parents should “raise the child ‘as though she was born to you,’ ” said Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, based in Newton, and author of the book “Adoption Nation.”

As many adoptees started to enter adulthood, especially during 1980s and 1990s, the adoption community began to see the profound flaws in the love-is-color-blind philosophy. Grown adoptees – many of them Korean born – began to speak out about their feelings of self-loathing, racial taunting, and feeling like they had lost or been denied their birth culture. Those cautionary tales sent the pendulum swinging the other way. Adoption advocates at all levels, from social workers to the ministries of foreign governments, now consider preserving the child’s heritage to be vital. Countries such as China even require that some element of their culture be maintained in adoptive homes.

Eager to do the right thing, many adoptive parents – usually white and middle-to-upper-middle class – have tried to re-create their children’s native cultures. Moms and dads formed and joined support groups, enrolled their children (and themselves) in language, dance, and art classes. They decorated their homes with Russian paintings, threw Lunar New Year parties, bought Guatemalan jewelry, and made regular pilgrimages to the local Chinatown. They established their own specialty magazines, attended culture camps in the United States, and spent more than $10,000 on “heritage tours” in the Motherland. An entire industry – from travel agencies to doll makers – caters to these families’ desires to provide adequate cultural touchstones.

Parents do these things to help instill in their children pride in who they are, and where they came from, but also to prepare them in case they want to return to their homeland and search for their birth family. What perplexes me is when parents say things like they are sorry for removing their children from “their culture.”

Sociologist Heather Jacobson told me the romanticization of culture is common among the adoptive families she interviewed for her book, “Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference.” Jacobson said mothers with children from China told her they felt a deep connection with the country of China, its traditions, and people.

Yet, she also noted, “it did not translate into actual friendships or deep meaningful day-to-day relationships with Chinese people here in the United States.” Most of the women she spoke to wanted their children to have more contact with immigrant Chinese – rather than, say, third-generation Chinese-Americans – because they were more genuinely “Chinese.” The traditional culture – fan dances, tea ceremonies, and holidays – is more accessible, more alluring, than the actual, complicated experience of being Asian American.

“It’s the parents who enjoy it so much – and that’s largely how Asian cultures are understood and experienced in the US,” she said.

But focusing on a museum view of culture can ignore – or become a way to ignore – the reality of life as a racial minority in America. One of the first racial experiences I can remember was when boys at my grade school made fun of me, pulling their eyes back and saying, “Ah-So!” I went home and reported the injustice to my mother, and she told my 6-year-old self to go back and tell those boys they were “ignorant.” That’s just want I did. As I grew older, though, those kinds of experiences grew more varied, from whispering classmates to men yelling, “Go back to your country!”

“So often families are more comfortable talking about culture because culture is something that we can celebrate, and food, music, and other fun things can be associated with culture,” said Amanda Baden, who was adopted from Hong Kong, and is now a Manhattan psychologist who advises adoptive families. Being open to talking about race is just as important, she said.

I was Miss Everything in high school, from class president to pompom captain. Looking back now, part of that was probably an effort to prove to everyone – but mostly myself – that I was as American as anyone else. This was a discussion that I didn’t have with my parents, though, as open as they were. I didn’t want to worry them, knowing how hard they had tried to impress how wonderful we were. I didn’t know how, nor did I want, to tell them about my feelings of isolation until much later, when I could understand them myself.

It wasn’t until I met my birth family, at age 23, that I actually started trying to “be Chinese.” They were nothing like the poor, farming family I had imagined them to be; my father had clawed his way out of poverty and into the middle class. In fact, their own culture had evolved into a wild mix of traditional Chinese values and modern influences. Taiwan similarly challenged my assumptions, with its Buddhist temples juxtaposed against spanking new skyscrapers.

After spending a good portion of my life ignoring my heritage, I started to study Mandarin, and even took a year off of work to immerse myself in Chinese language, culture, and history. I adopted the styles of my sisters – their hairstyles, their fashion preferences. I learned to make dumplings and bought tea sets.

Yet, my enthusiasm and best efforts only took me so far. Today, I might be able to make small talk with the Chinese owner of my local grocery store, but I can still barely have a one-on-one conversation with my birth parents. I’ve come to recognize that I will never know them in a deep, substantial way, and I will never fit perfectly back into the country where I was born.

More and more adoptees are returning to their native countries these days, with similarly mixed results. Sook Wilkinson, a psychologist and author of “Birth is More than Once: The Inner World of Adopted Korean Children,” said, “I’m learning from those Korean adult adoptees who’ve visited Korea many times and who have even moved to Korea to live there for years, that no matter how much they learn about the culture and heritage, they’re never accepted as native Koreans.”

This is a danger, I think, in presenting the birth country and family in an overly romantic way, and in raising a child’s expectations that they will and should fit in. Adoptees can end up feeling bad not only because they don’t fit in, but because they disappoint their parents.

My return to Taiwan and meeting with my birth family were an important part of my own internal personal journey. But just as important have been the friendships I have built with other Asian-Americans: What I share with them is not a mythical culture, but an experience in America. Seeing others who defied cliche encouraged me to do the same – and to be proud of who I was.

It can be tough to maneuver the multiracial dynamics inside, and outside, the confines of a family, but what I tell parents is: “Relax.” There is a healthy middle ground that I think my own family more or less found. My parents celebrated my heritage, and that of my brothers, who were adopted from Korea; and they also went out of their way to find Asian-American baby sitters and incorporate Asian-American adults into our social circles. It wasn’t easy. Mom and Dad, as uncomfortable as they may have been at times, learned to live with the differences in our racial perspectives, our rebellions, our journeys to Korea and Taiwan and back. They listened, let us vent or cry, and backed off when they needed to. Ultimately, they let my brothers and me decide how our past would influence our present.

Today, I don’t wish that I were more Chinese, even if my biological family and our heritage hold a place in my heart and history. I’m glad that in college I chose to study Spanish in Mexico for a semester. Almost five years ago, my husband and I moved to Argentina, where we are living and raising our daughter. No regrets, either, at having to weather some racial nastiness here and there, and come out with a more confident, fought-out self-image. I appreciate that my parents were loving and patient enough to let me figure out these things at my own pace.

My way of life is culled from so many places and influences, including where I was born, where I grew up, and who raised me, but also where I’ve lived and the people I’ve loved and admired. I’m hoping my own daughter will inherit her Midwestern grandfather’s hard work ethic and passion for learning, and the good health of her grandmother. May she also love languages and all kinds of food, from mac and cheese to Chinese dumplings and Korean bibimbop. I hope she’ll enjoy spending Sundays visiting long into the night with her extended family, like they do in Argentina.

I realize that adoptees will all come to their own view of culture and adoption, but I imagine many international adoptees and children in multiracial families share this wider, more global view of themselves. Our blended family backgrounds, beliefs, and practices – as diverse, complicated, and dissonant as they might seem – are as authentic as any. We are another version of the immigrant story, with a culture is just as rich as the one we might have had.

Hi all.  I had some really personal stuff to share, and felt like PW protecting it for now.  The feelings are still pretty raw,  I hope you all understand.  If you would like to read it I have no problem giving out the password to you.  Please email me at gangshik.kadnexus@gmail.com for the password.

There’s no real way to start this post.  My time in Korea was short.  I was there for two and a half days, barely enough time to do anything let alone meet my mother for the first time.

The initial meeting was tough for me.  As excited as I was to meet her for the first time, it was hard swallowing the truth-the truth that she IS my mother, but we don’t know each other.  There was no feeling of an automatic connection, there was only our words.  In a way it was sad.  For so long, I always felt that there would be this electric connection between the two of us-something that would forever connect us to each other.  In the end, I had to tell myself that despite our blood ties, we still need to get to know each other.  In the end I knew it would be hard.  It was even harder saying good bye after meeting her only hours ago.

I can’t say much more now because it has taken me so long to figure out how to say what I just said.  All I can say is that I’m happy she and my family are in my life, and that I can get to know them better.  I wish I could say more, and I’m sorry that I’ve left so many of you “hanging.”  I learned some pretty hard truths while I was there which I am still trying to process, and I’m not sure where to begin.  I’ll write more as soon as I am able.  -GS

It’s the last minute stuff that’s killing me-the packing, the forgetting to pack certain things, the last minute trips to pick up things…And then on top of that, not knowing what to expect on my trip.  Most of my trip will be in China, and only a few days in Korea.  Although, I’ve been stressing way more about my last few days in Korea than China.

I have made lists for myself, but I know in the end, as I seem to do, I’ll forget something…of great importance.  I have almost all the gifts I need for everyone I’ll meet on my trip, most of the paperwork printed that I’ll need.  Now it’s all about enjoying myself!  I can’t necessarily guarantee that I’ll be able to give updates while I’m abroad but if I have internet access I’ll try my best to post updates.

Thanks for all the support!

GS