K-pop megaband BTS is back from military service, and their international fandom — long known for its progressive activism — is celebrating by rallying behind a cause: adoptees from South Korea.
Now Asia’s fourth-largest economy and a global cultural powerhouse, the idols’ native South Korea remains one of the biggest exporters of adopted babies in the world, having sent more than 140,000 children overseas between 1955 and 1999.
The country only recently acknowledged, after years of activism by adult adoptees, that the government was responsible for abuse in some such adoptions of local children, including record fabrication and inadequate consent from birth parents.
Photo: AFP
The septet’s fandom, dubbed ARMY, is known for backing causes like Black Lives Matter and ARMY4Palestine, and launched the #ReuniteWithBTS fundraising project last week to support Korean adoptees seeking to reconnect with or learn about their birth families, which can be a painful and legally tricky process.
Almost all of BTS members have completed South Korea’s mandatory military service, required of all men due to the country’s military tensions with North Korea.
“We are celebrating both the reunion of BTS and ARMY, and BTS members being able to reunite with their own family and friends,” the BTS fan group behind the initiative, One In An ARMY, said.
“Helping international adoptees reunite with their birth country, culture, customs and families seemed like the perfect cause to support during this time.”
The fans are supporting KoRoot, a Seoul-based organization that helps Korean adoptees search for their records and birth families and which played a key role in pushing for the government to recognize adoption-related abuses.
Peter Moller, KoRoot’s co-representative, said it was “very touching” that the BTS fans had taken up the cause, even though “they’re not even adoptees themselves.”
For many adoptees, seeing Korean stars in mainstream media has been a way for them to find “comfort, joy and a sense of pride” in the roots that they were cut off from, KoRoot’s leader Kim Do-hyun added.
SOFT POWER
BTS, who have discussed anti-Asian hate crimes at the White House and spoken candidly about mental health, have long been considered one of the best examples of South Korea’s soft power reach.
For years, Korean adoptees — many of whom were adopted by white families globally — have advocated for their rights and spoken out about encountering racism in their host countries.
Some adoptees, such as the high-profile case of Adam Crapser, were later deported to South Korea as adults because their American parents never secured their US citizenship.
Many international adoptees feel their immigration experience has been “fraught,” Keung Yoon Bae, a Korean studies professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, said.
Some adoptees have found that, like Crapser, their guardians failed to complete the necessary paperwork to make them legal, she said.
This is becoming a particular problem under US President Donald Trump, who is pushing a sweeping crackdown on purported illegal immigrants.
Bae said it was possible that “‘accidentally illegal’ adoptee immigrants may fall further through the cracks, and their deeply unfortunate circumstances left unremedied.”
THE WHALE
Reunions between Korean adoptees and their birth families can be emotionally complex, as Kara Bos — who grew up in the US — experienced firsthand when she met her biological father through a landmark paternity lawsuit.
During their encounter in Seoul in 2020, he refused to remove his hat, sunglasses or mask, declined to look at her childhood photos and offered no information about her mother. He died around six months later.
“The journey of birth family searching is very lonely, difficult and costly. Many adoptees do not even have the means to return to their birth country let alone fund a family search,” Bos, 44, said.
To have BTS fans rally around adoptees and provide help with this complex process is “a wonderful opportunity,” she said.
For Malene Vestergaard, a 42-year-old Korean adoptee and BTS fan in Denmark, the group’s song Whalien 52, which references a whale species whose calls go unheard by others, deeply resonated with her.
“I personally sometimes feel like that whale. Being amongst my peers, but they will never be able to truly understand what my adoption has done to me,” she said.
“For me, finding BTS at the same time I started looking for my birth family and the truth about my adoption and my falsified papers, was such a comfort.”
Vestergaard said the grief woven into her adoption would never go away, but that “BTS and their lyrics have made it easier to reconcile with that truth.”
July 21 to July 27 If the “Taiwan Independence Association” (TIA) incident had happened four years earlier, it probably wouldn’t have caused much of an uproar. But the arrest of four young suspected independence activists in the early hours of May 9, 1991, sparked outrage, with many denouncing it as a return to the White Terror — a time when anyone could be detained for suspected seditious activity. Not only had martial law been lifted in 1987, just days earlier on May 1, the government had abolished the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist
When life gives you trees, make paper. That was one of the first thoughts to cross my mind as I explored what’s now called Chung Hsing Cultural and Creative Park (中興文化創意園區, CHCCP) in Yilan County’s Wujie Township (五結). Northeast Taiwan boasts an abundance of forest resources. Yilan County is home to both Taipingshan National Forest Recreation Area (太平山國家森林遊樂區) — by far the largest reserve of its kind in the country — and Makauy Ecological Park (馬告生態園區, see “Towering trees and a tranquil lake” in the May 13, 2022 edition of this newspaper). So it was inevitable that industrial-scale paper making would
Hualien lawmaker Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) is the prime target of the recall campaigns. They want to bring him and everything he represents crashing down. This is an existential test for Fu and a critical symbolic test for the campaigners. It is also a crucial test for both the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a personal one for party Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫). Why is Fu such a lightning rod? LOCAL LORD At the dawn of the 2020s, Fu, running as an independent candidate, beat incumbent Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmaker Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) and a KMT candidate to return to the legislature representing
From the last quarter of 2001, research shows that real housing prices nearly tripled (before a 2012 law to enforce housing price registration, researchers tracked a few large real estate firms to estimate housing price behavior). Incomes have not kept pace, though this has not yet led to defaults. Instead, an increasing chunk of household income goes to mortgage payments. This suggests that even if incomes grow, the mortgage squeeze will still make voters feel like their paychecks won’t stretch to cover expenses. The housing price rises in the last two decades are now driving higher rents. The rental market