When we think of adoption, and thus of adoptees, we often think of children. Will the children stay in their birth family? In their birth country? How do adopted children do with separation? Do they have trouble in school?
Susan Soon-Keum Cox, herself an adult Korean adoptee and the editor of Voices from Another Place, points out,
“That we mature, grow up and come into our own wisdom is often not acknowledged. We can and wish to speak for ourselves.”
This book gives some of those adoptees a chance to speak to a wider audience. Voices from Another Place: a Collection of Works from a Generation Born in Korea and Adopted to Other Countries was designed, Cox explains in the introduction to reflect the experiences of the first generation of Korean adoptees.
“We are a legacy of the destruction of war,” Cox explains, referring to the fact that intercountry adoption as an accepted global institution began nearly fifty years ago in response to the needs of children orphaned or left homeless by the Korean War.
The adoptees represented in the book were adopted from 1956-1976. Naturally there is a broad range of experiences represented by this group, but as compared to today’s adoptees, they shared certain experiences for the most part:
–Many of them were older at the time of their adoption. Many remembered not only orphanages in Korea but also the several years they spent living with their birth families.
–A majority were adopted in rural or small-town areas where they were the only, or one of very few, people of color.
–Intercountry adoption and transracial adoption were much less common at that time.
The forty-six pieces in this book are packed with insights and experiences, too many to list here. A few that stand out in my mind include: adoptees feeling sad that they were not like their family, and adoptees feeling sad that they were not like other Koreans or Korean-Americans. A little boy coming from Korea and starting first grade knowing no English and deciding he must be unintelligent. Koreans facing prejudice in Korea because they didn’t speak Korean. An adoptee whose adoptive mother asks her to find the gravesite of the child who died before the family could adopt her. A letter from a Korean adoptee to the birthmother of the Korean child she is about to adopt.
I was impressed that the book was open to a diversity of voices. For example, one contributor shared that she has never really felt any angst about not knowing more about her early years. She feels that that is a very small part of who she is, and that most of who she is comes from her adopted family. “I believe my life really began when I was adopted into a group of people known as a family,” she says.
By contrast, several of the book’s contributors have studied and/or lived in Korea as adults. One shared the story of touring a birthmother home and an orphanage; another shared an unsuccessful search for her birth family and the poignancy of some birthmothers who turned out not to be hers, but who so longed for their child that they offered to serve as her “substitute birthmothers”.
The 46 works in the book include not only essays and memoir but poetry, photography, sculpture, drawing, fashion design and Asian-style rice paper painting by Korean adoptees who have grown up in the United States and Belgium.
Please see these related blogs:
Book Review: Cultures of Transnational Adoption
Book Review: Birth is More Than Once
Books for Adults on Adoption from China and Korea