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A number of recent news items are focusing on Korean-born adoptees and their reconnections with birth country and family.
Some stories have been put on film, like this one reported on in Stars and Stripes about an adoptee’s search that led to his birth father.
Former Army Staff Sgt. Aaron Bates was adopted by an American family who eventually adopted three other South Korean children and supported their son in his search and reconciliation.
Unfortunately, the birth father is in prison, on death row for the murder of two women, but the circumstance might have something to do with the fact that this reunion story became a movie.
“Korea looks at adoption as not a very good thing,” Bates said. “If you’re not in the bloodline, you’re not family. I want this to show the people of Korea that adoption does work.”
The film is titled, “My Father”. You can read more about it and where fact and fiction part and mingle here.
Of course, not every reunion gets it’s own movie, but that doesn’t take anything away from the experience for people like Adam Kohlhass.
An adult adoptee, he’s now spending his junior year of college at Yonsei University in Seoul City, South Korea after connecting with his birth country in a ten-day Lions Club-sponsored program last year.
“It had a big impact on me, and I really wanted to go back,” Kohlhaas said. “It was really hard to put myself in the mentality that I came from this other place – this other world – where everything is different.”
There’s an interesting letter to the editor in the Korea Times about Korean adoption law.
It appears to make a case for instituting a law that would allow Korean children to become available for international adoption no more than six months after relinquishment, saying, ” … there might be a large number of pending problems in front of our leaders, but for the sake of a pitiful generation growing as orphans due to the apathy of the established generation … “.
The UN has apparently recently concluded its 39th session of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and has included in it’s recommendations information that Korea still discriminates against women.
Suggesting that abolishment of the “hoju”, the patriarchal family registry, is happening too slowing and calling the fact a “prime example of gender discrimination in Korea”, the UN also recommends that marital rape should be punishable even without victim complaints and says that violence against women is under-reported, under-prosecuted and there are too few convictions.
There are also concerns about trafficking, exploitation and prostitution, especially adolescent girls sexual relationships with older men for money.
The report said women in Korea seem to be underrepresented in politics, especially in decision-making bodies. The committee called for a rise in the representation of women in elected and appointed bodies in all areas of public life, including academia and the private sector.
Furthermore, the committee asked the government to take measures against the persistence of patriarchal attitudes and deep-rooted stereotypes regarding the roles and responsibilities of women and men.
To that end, the committee called for a revision of the Civil Act to raise the minimum legal age of marriage for girls to 18, from 16, to enhance gender equality.
And The 7th Disabled Peoples International World Assembly has been held in Goyang, with more than 2,500 people from 71 countries attending and discussing for the first time the UN’s adoption of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in December 2006.
A ‘declaration of rights’ for all disabled people in the world was announced.
Korea has around four million disabled.
From an article I published in Gather.com: “Just A Moment”
Recently I was speaking with my older son, who is Korean and who arrived in 1976 with his younger sister and brother when the three were 10, 8, and 5 years old. We were talking about the business of respecting elders. My older son carries, still, a huge amount of anger – anger which, according to those who study intercultural adoption, is common among those ejected from their birth cultures into homes and families and societies which are not genetically programmed in the same cultural strains. Genetically programmed? As far as I can tell, yes: there are cultural genetics. Anyway, my son was furious with me for bringing up the topic, and kept insisting that he didn’t have to do what old people said, because he wasn’t in Korea now. In the heat of our exchange I simply knew I had to stand firm on the bottom-line value of respect for elders. It was not until I got home and sifted through the conversation that I realized he had confused “respect” with “obedience.” Ahh, I realized. The ancient Oriental training which does, indeed, merge the concepts of respect and unquestioning, unwavering obedience. I know this from my own upbringing under patriarchal principles, as well – girls and women clean the bathrooms, boys and men do not; wives are chattel and must, once married, “love, honor and OBEY” their husbands. All the guys have to do is “love, honor, and cherish.” Unfortunately for many women, that idealistic husband vow too often gets downgraded from three words to one: “use.” And so it can also be with that Oriental merging of respect and obedience. Truly, there are some times when it can work, and other times when it invites slavery.
I thought over my son’s and my discussion again, and felt certain he’d been able to hear my heart when I’d told him of my mother’s teaching me and my siblings respect for elders: how she’d taken us to visit our elderly neighbors, and how she had taught us to always hold the door for older people, those with disabilities, and pregnant ladies, and to always offer them our seats on buses or trains, or in rooms. My son looked at me – I know for that moment he could see me for who I am – just a mom, doing what mothers are supposed to do. For that moment his cloud of anger parted and I could see him considering in his heart whether or not he was also teaching his children properly. Just a moment. It’s sometimes almost more than we could dare to hope for, such a moment.