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.”
The small platform at Duoliang Train Station in Taitung County’s Taimali Township (太麻里) served villagers from 1992 to 2006, but was eventually shut down due to lack of use. Just 10 years later, the abandoned train station had become widely known as the most beautiful station in Taiwan, and visitors were so frequent that the village had to start restricting traffic. Nowadays, Duoliang Village (多良) is known as a bit of a tourist trap, with a mandatory, albeit modest, admission fee of NT$10 giving access to a crowded lane of vendors with a mediocre view of the ocean and the trains
For many people, Bilingual Nation 2030 begins and ends in the classroom. Since the policy was launched in 2018, the debate has centered on students, teachers and the pressure placed on schools. Yet the policy was never solely about English education. The government’s official plan also calls for bilingualization in Taiwan’s government services, laws and regulations, and living environment. The goal is to make Taiwan more inclusive and accessible to international enterprises and talent and better prepared for global economic and trade conditions. After eight years, that grand vision is due for a pulse check. RULES THAT CAN BE READ For Harper Chen (陳虹宇), an adviser
Traditionally, indigenous people in Taiwan’s mountains practice swidden cultivation, or “slash and burn” agriculture, a practice common in human history. According to a 2016 research article in the International Journal of Environmental Sustainability, among the Atayal people, this began with a search for suitable forested slopeland. The trees are burnt for fertilizer and the land cleared of stones. The stones and wood are then piled up to make fences, while both dead and standing trees are retained on the plot. The fences are used to grow climbing crops like squash and beans. The plot itself supports farming for three years.
President William Lai (賴清德) on Nov. 25 last year announced in a Washington Post op-ed that “my government will introduce a historic US$40 billion supplementary defense budget, an investment that underscores our commitment to defending Taiwan’s democracy.” Lai promised “significant new arms acquisitions from the United States” and to “invest in cutting-edge technologies and expand Taiwan’s defense industrial base,” to “bolster deterrence by inserting greater costs and uncertainties into Beijing’s decision-making on the use of force.” Announcing it in the Washington Post was a strategic gamble, both geopolitically and domestically, with Taiwan’s international credibility at stake. But Lai’s message was exactly
RSS