by Anne Moody
There were other lessons for her to learn as well. The nicest one was about how immediately and thoroughly her teammates, her coach, the athletic director, and various other friends and acquaintances had come to her defense. It was also nice to learn that those little platitudes the refs say before games about the importance of sportsmanship actually mean something. And it was nice to learn that, this time, bigotry and thoughtlessness were trounced.
But there was also a lesson to be learned that wasn’t so nice, because most of Jocelyn’s life won’t be happening in a well-regulated soccer game. The next time someone says something rude to her, it’s more likely to be on the street or in a bar. Not only won’t there be a ref, but if she throws an elbow she’ll be the one who ends up in trouble. Her friends will probably (and probably wisely) urge her to calm down, and there will be no procedure for airing her grievances.
We did not bring our daughter up to expect racist encounters, nor did we give her any more than the most rudimentary information or advice about how to handle them. As Caucasian parents, we know that we were limited in these areas, and our efforts no doubt fell far short of ideal. We had the good fortune to have been able to raise her in a community that valued her Asian heritage but, at the same time, rarely acknowledged it. She had to be the one to assert an interest in identifying herself as Korean, to embrace both the genetic and environmental influences in her life, and to understand that they have been equally important in making her who she is.
One argument against interracial adoption holds that Caucasian parents can’t adequately prepare their minority children for life in a racist society—and I agree that we have a deficit there. We don’t have personal experience or family tradition from which to draw lessons. When I’m doing a home study for a Caucasian family who wants to adopt a child of a different race, they often tell me that they don’t care about race or “don’t see race.” I know that they think they are saying that they are not prejudiced against any other race and that they will love and welcome any child they are fortunate enough to adopt.
I don’t doubt at all that they will love their child, but families need to understand that “not seeing” race is not a quality that will make them good adoptive parents for a different race child, or good citizens in a multiracial society. It is vital that they not only see their child’s race but also that they embrace it and understand that it is an important part of their child’s identity. “Not seeing” race is essentially to dismiss its importance, a stance that may prove relatively comfortable for most of the family while the child is young but will be far less comfortable for the child as he or she interacts with the outside world—a world that does see race.
It’s clear that the sort of counseling adoptive parents get about this issue, which is a required part of the home study, cannot possibly replace a lifetime of experience as a member of a racial minority, but it can help to make parents more informed and competent in the face of racial insult. Adoptive parents may not handle things in the way a parent of the same race would, but that doesn’t mean their approach will necessarily be insensitive or ineffective. As is true in so many aspects of life, the fact that something is different doesn’t make it inferior.
By this standard, I’m not sure how we measured up as parents. But Jocelyn did say something that seems both revealing and troubling in this regard. At the beginning of the conference process with the athletic director, while updating us on how it was playing out, she suddenly said, “They picked on the wrong Asian this time—the one with white parents.” There are many layers of meaning to interpret in that statement, but she might also have said, “The one with white privilege.”
20
Jocelyn’s Birth Mother
Jocelyn is now twenty-nine years old, the same age her birth mother was when Jocelyn was born. The information we received from Korea in January of 1987 (Jocelyn’s referral packet) contained information about her birth and her first two visits to the doctor. We were also told her birth parents’ ages, level of education, and occupations, and there was a brief statement written by a social worker indicating that her birth mother had “parted from the natural father” and “relinquished her parental rights toward the baby, wishing to have the baby adopted into a loving family for the baby’s desirable future.”
This was all we knew until Jocelyn was six years old. She had developed pretty severe asthma at age five, and after one especially grueling period in which she had pneumonia seven times, we were desperate for any information about her health history. We had been told that if a child had medical concerns, the family could write to Holt Children’s Services to ask if there was anything in the file about the birth parents’ medical histories that might prove helpful. In response to our letter, we received half a page of additional information from Holt. We learned that the birth father was a reserved and quiet man with a roundish face, masculine physique, and a double eyelid. The birth mother was described as outgoing, with an oval face and medium shape. The agency could provide no medical history information, which was unfortunate, but what they did provide we treasured, and we accepted the idea that they had sent us everything they felt we should have from Jocelyn’s file. This was confirmed for us on the trip to Korea when Jocelyn was thirteen and we were allowed to meet with a Holt social worker and review her file, at least the part that wasn’t confidential.
Jocelyn returned to Korea by herself in the summer after her junior year in college. She had been hired by the City of Seattle Engineering Department and sent to Seoul National University for a summer internship. It was incredibly good fortune in regard to her career and an even more incredible opportunity to reconnect with Korea in a truly meaningful way. Her supervising professor and his staff were gracious and kind, and immediately included Jocelyn in their social lives. She was invited to go on long hikes (sometimes by moonlight) with the professor and his friends, most of whom were in their sixties and seventies and were still energetic hikers and climbers who had no trouble scrambling up the steep mountainsides near Seoul. Jocelyn also went on shopping trips with the young women she met and to restaurants and bars with a group of graduate students who socialized frequently. She played soccer with a group of international students (all men) and was disconcerted at first when she realized that people were stopping to stare at the spectacle. Jocelyn’s women friends explained to her that they had loved to play soccer when they were young but had been forced to stop at puberty. They assured her that it was okay, if unusual, for an American to be seen playing soccer with men, but for Korean women, that sort of thing was out of the question. They didn’t think that people were having any trouble distinguishing her from a “real Korean woman.”
Jocelyn’s friends at the university all seemed interested in her status as an adoptee, and one especially sweet and helpful woman offered to accompany her to the Holt offices and serve as a translator. Jocelyn was hoping to meet again with her foster mother, and she was wondering if there might be any other information about her birth parents that the agency was willing to share with her. Attitudes about birth parent confidentiality had changed a bit over the years in Korea, not as much as they had in the United States, but enough so that it was possible to raise the subject again without seeming disrespectful. At the very least, Jocelyn wanted to make sure that the agency knew that she was interested in contact if her birth mother ever sought information from them about her.
Jocelyn had a wonderful visit with Shin Hae Soon, her foster mother, who was delighted to see how she had grown and thrived and that she was now working with an esteemed professor at “the Harvard of Korea.” The social worker at Holt didn’t share any additional information but she did point out that among the information we already had was Jocelyn’s birth mother’s national ID number, a number we hadn’t realized had any significance. She suggested that since there had been no contact from her since Jocelyn’s birth, the birth mother might not welcome it now, but that if Jocelyn wanted to
pursue the matter further she might engage the services of an investigator named Mr. Lee. The social worker told Jocelyn that although Mr. Lee was “a very diligent man,” she would need to be patient.
The group of graduate students was hugely excited about this development, and some of them wanted to take matters into their own hands. They told Jocelyn that they knew people who worked for the government and could trace an ID number and urged her to let them help with the search for her birth mother. Wisely, she decided that she would not take them up on this offer, as well-meaning as it was. She felt strongly about following the proper procedure, as determined by Holt, and she felt even more strongly about not taking any action that had the potential to hurt or embarrass her birth mother. There was one person, an older friend of the professor’s, who told Jocelyn that he felt that she should not try to contact her birth mother. In private, he explained that in his own family a child had been relinquished for adoption and, out of respect for his mother, no one ever spoke of it. The man had tears in his eyes as he talked about his younger brother, who now lived somewhere in the United States. It was obvious that he wanted very much to have information about his brother and to be reassured about his well-being, but it was also obvious that any discussion of this subject within the family was absolutely forbidden. It was slightly less obvious that this man, along with much of Korean society, still believed that this silence was for the best.
So Jocelyn waited. For the first few weeks after engaging the services of Mr. Lee, it felt as though news of her birth mother would come at any moment. But as the weeks turned into months, it became clear that the search wasn’t going to be just a matter of connecting a name to an ID number. It was discouraging, and in an effort to amuse her little sister, Erin, disguised as Raymond Chandler, sent the following message to Jocelyn:
Lee sits at his desk in a smoke-filled office, smoking. It’s night. His jacket is off, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He’s diligent, but distracted. There’s something in the air. He can sense it.
A shadow passes outside his door. It stops. It reads the lettering on the milky glass: Mr. Lee, Private Eye.
Lee waits. He takes a drag on his cigarette.
He waits some more. He exhales. He’s diligent. Maybe too diligent. But he can’t concentrate. Not like this. Not with that shadow, whoever it is, lurking outside. Come in or scram, he thinks.
Lee gets up. He walks to the door, opens it.
It’s a dame.
She looks up at him.
She’s young, a kid really . . . couldn’t be more than 21. She looks sad though.
She walks past him, into the office. Lee watches her back.
The quiet’s getting heavy. Better break it, Lee thinks. ”Why the long face, kid?” he asks. Most Koreans have really round faces.
She looks up at him, then away. “Funny you should ask,” she says. Her voice is soft and low. The kind of voice dames have in the pictures. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
Lee smiles. This one’s a tough nut to crack. She’s going to make him work for it. He likes that. Maybe it’s his diligence . . . who knows? “You stick with me, kid. You stick with me.”
Jocelyn sent it on to us in her next email along with her own message saying that the story had made her laugh so hard she cried. Over time, we all gradually stopped thinking so much about Mr. Lee and what he might be finding out.
After another eight months had passed, Jocelyn again emailed the Holt social worker, who wrote back to say that she remembered Jocelyn clearly and that she had been checking with Mr. Lee regularly. She told Jocelyn that Mr. Lee had contacted hundreds of people who could be her birth mother, mostly through letters and some phone calls, but no one had come forward. The social worker told Jocelyn that she had postponed writing back because “deep down, I wanted to believe that if I waited long enough, something new and interesting would turn up. Each time I have to share disappointing news with adoptees, it makes me feel bad (and sometimes sad).”
And that was that. There has been no further news, nor do we expect there will be. It is probable that none of the women Mr. Lee contacted was Jocelyn’s birth mother, but it is also possible that one of them was and that she made the decision to remain anonymous. Perhaps she has decided that, for her, silence really is for the best.
* * *
Americans began adopting Korean children after the Korean War when stories about homeless and orphaned children began to appear in widely read U.S. news magazines such as Life and Look. The people featured in these articles were usually kindhearted soldiers and the adorable children they had befriended. Their stories were written in a manner meant to elicit sympathy from the American public and encourage them to send money and supplies to help care for the suffering children. But there was a backstory that didn’t get much publicity. As has been true throughout history, when there is an occupying army, there are going to be sexual relationships (some consensual, some not, and many quasi-consensual when women are forced by poverty into prostitution) between the occupiers and local women. This was true for American soldiers after both world wars, but the offspring they left behind in European countries were able to be assimilated into their mothers’ culture in ways that the “G.I. babies” in Korea were not.
Mixed-race children had no place in Korean society. They were outcasts, and their desperate circumstances were impossible for some of the American soldiers to ignore. Through the fence around their military bases, these men could see children as young as three or four years old in rags, digging through the garbage, hoping to find something to eat or something that could provide a little warmth or shelter during the cold Korean winters. (In one camp, the soldiers helped out by digging tiny individual foxholes in the dirt hillside for children to crawl into at night. One man recalled how both charming and heartbreaking it was to see their beautiful little heads pop up out of the holes in the morning.) The children’s suffering was evident, as was the fact that their fathers were likely to have been among the warm and well-fed men inside the base.
As is also true with occupying armies, their leaders had no incentive to acknowledge the reality of the children their soldiers had fathered, and there was essentially no organized action on the part of the U.S. military to care for them. Fortunately, there were individuals who felt different about America’s responsibility to these children, most notably Harry Holt, an Oregon farmer who, with his wife Bertha, was moved to take action that prompted both Korea and the United States to allow the Holts to adopt eight mixed-race Korean children. The Holts went on to establish an orphanage and adoption agency in Korea, change U.S. immigration law so that children could be adopted by American families, and set a precedent for international adoption that has been used (and sometimes abused) in numerous countries around the world.
I had been fascinated by Korean adoption since I was a teenager, but I didn’t really know much about it until I started my job at WACAP in an era when the majority of international adoptees were babies and young children from Korea. After working in the foster care system, in Michigan, I had developed strong views about how harmful it was to allow children to spend so many years of their lives in uncertainty. I saw more than a few situations in which children were placed in a foster home at birth, returned to the birth parent periodically in hopes that things had improved, suffered years of abuse and broken attachments, and were rarely “freed for adoption” before age five. This was about as good as the system got in those days. People who asked me about my new job in international adoptions often wanted to know why Korea had so many children needing to be adopted. Why couldn’t the country take care of its own children? I frankly hadn’t thought a lot about the answer to that question and was just happy that it seemed the Koreans had figured out that it was in the best interests of all children that they be adopted as infants rather than as traumatized five-year-olds. In contrast to the U.S. system that practically mandated extended
foster care, the Korean system looked like enlightened social policy to me.
But a commitment to “the best interests of the children” was not exactly what prompted the Korean government’s support of international adoption. Korea was a patriarchal society in which the father’s name established a person’s entire worth, and there was no tradition of adoption of “worthless” fatherless children within the country. The Korean government’s support of international adoption was largely fueled by attitudes about racial purity and a cultural unwillingness to accept mixed-race children as members of Korean society. It was also fueled by attitudes toward single mothers, their desperate financial situations, and the lack of any sort of social-welfare program or policy to help them. After the war, when the entire country was struggling, it was understandable that there simply weren’t enough resources to help all the people who needed help. But as Korea regained its economic footing and then began to thrive, it was hard to understand why governmental and societal attitudes about helping those less fortunate, or about domestic adoption, hadn’t evolved along with the economy.
In 1986, when Jocelyn was born, it was unacceptable for a woman in Korea to raise her baby as a single parent. An unmarried pregnant woman knew that not only was there no aid available from the government but also that she and her baby, and probably her extended family, would suffer social and economic hardship if she kept her child. This might come in the form of lost jobs, ineligibility for schooling for the child, and ostracism from other people in their community. It was simply true that women in this situation felt that their children would be better off in adoptive homes, and both the Korean and U.S. governments agreed with them. The idea that there should have been some sort of assistance given to these mothers, short of helping them to give up their children, seems to be a relatively recent concept to much of Korean society.