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[ PAPERBACK: US ]Born into one culture, growing up in another

By Suzanne Struglinski
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, WASHINGTON
Sunday, Sep 07, 2008, Page 14

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From hearing “is he yours?” asked to a white mother walking with her Asian child, to playground taunts of “slanted-eyes” and unfair assumptions about being good at math, nine Korean adoptees tell their stories of growing up in American, white families in Once They Hear My Name: Korean Adoptees and Their Journeys Toward Identity.

As children, the book’s featured adoptees, now ranging from age 25 to 53, said they did not need to look too hard to figure out they were different from others in their families. How they dealt with the differences — and the experiences these divisions produced while growing up — varied widely from person to person.

When Marilyn Lammert, an adoptive mother, traveled to South Korea to meet her son’s biological family in 1996, she met other American adoptees searching for their birth families along with some who had moved back to Korea to work or go to school.

As Lammert and Ellen Lee, a Korean-American friend who traveled with her, heard their stories, they sensed a common theme of longing for an identity and a strong desire to know more about their Korean roots. The visitors were amazed by the different paths that the adoptees took to get them to that point.

The two decided to interview Korean adoptees and collect life-experience stories that might help other adoptees through the struggle of being born into one race or culture but raised in another. Mary Anne Hess edited the taped interviews into the first-person accounts that make up the book.

The editors note that there are more than 100,000 Korean adoptees in the US. The oldest are now senior citizens and the youngest are still babies.

“They are part of the largest group of children ever adopted across racial, cultural and geographic lines,” according to the book. The oldest came home with US soldiers stationed in South Korea after the Korean War (1950-1953); the youngest are infants babies still coming over today.

The US Census Bureau reports that South Korea is still the largest single-source country of foreign-born adoptees under 18 years old, at about 48,000 children, according to the book. But China, Russia and Guatemala are the top home countries for adopted children now entering the US.

“As these children grow, they and their parents can look to the long-time experience of Korean adoptees for guidance in coming to grips with the difficult questions of identity formation in families that transcend racial and ethnic categorization,” the book says.

The adoptees’ stories share similar traits of being teased as children for being different — many grew up in rural areas or places without large Asian populations — and seeking a comfort level about being adopted. At the same time, there are remarkable differences.

Some adoptees’ parents went out of their way to teach their children about Korean culture, either through books, Korean food, special camps or trips to their home country. On the other hand, at least one adoptee “never had a bowl of rice.”

Some had adopted brothers or sisters while others had siblings who were the biological children of their parents, creating an entirely different complication. Some families talked openly about adoptions while others did not really discuss it. Some families stayed together while others were separated by divorce or death of a parent.

Beyond examining how the mere knowledge one is adopted (and of a different race) affects day-to-day life, the book also explores the adoptees’ decision of whether to seek out their birth families.

Two in the book, including Lammert’s son Adam Carlson, whose story makes up the first chapter, found their birth parents, while others have either come up empty or did not choose to begin an intense search.

While reading the stories, it is important to remember that those interviewed did not grow up in the age of the Internet, or adoption support groups, or having many of the resources available today. As everyone gets used to just clicking on their favorite Internet search engines, it is eye-opening to read about someone having to go to an actual South Korean orphanage to look up records.

Someone reading this book either thinking about adoption or parenting an adopted child of a different race may read between the lines as to what worked and what didn’t with the book’s nine adoptee contributors. But the overall lesson is that what works for one child may not work for another.

The title comes from one of the interviewed adoptees, Todd Knowlton. He said that once he got to college he would tell people he was adopted right away.

“I would always bring it up — even today — because, I mean, there’s no hiding,” said Knowlton, now 33 and a consultant in Bethesda, Maryland. “It doesn’t bother me, but once they hear my last name, people always ask uncomfortable questions.”

The book itself can be uncomfortable — and thought-provoking — particularly when reading about the outright discrimination or stereotypes that the adoptees endured on top of their struggles to fit into their own families. The stories help answer questions that would normally be too hard or perhaps too rude to ask.

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