In the past two weeks, I’ve heard two different people express concern that adopting from Korea is bad for the child. In both cases, they were reading posts from angry Korean adoptees who are anti-adoption because of their own experiences. So, I decided it was time to post something from a happy Korean adoptee who is pro-adoption.


(A picture of me and my son at the zoo. He saw a giraffe.)

A couple years ago, I joined an on-line group of Korean adoptees. I was getting ready to adopt our son from Korea and I was searching out groups of people who could give me certain insights. I only lasted about two months in the group. The site was full of angry people who talked about feeling like they were half a person…people who were so angry at the world that it hurt to read their posts. So, I did what most children do when they are upset. I called my mother.

It helped to talk things through and I took a good look at the posts. First, there were maybe a half a dozen prolific posters on the site and, when you consider how many Korean adoptees have come home since the 1950s, that’s really a small percentage of the whole picture. In addition, I realized that none of the Korean adoptees that I know personally were having these problems. Even the people who were actively searching for birth parents were not unhappy with their adoptive families. For the most part, we seemed pretty happy with life. Then, I started wondering if there might be other factors in their life (totally unrelated to being a Korean adoptee) that were making them unhappy. It occurred to me that I knew children who were not adopted who complained about the same things that these Korean adoptees were complaining about. Hmmm. Interesting.

Keep in mind that:

• There are a lot of Korean adoptees that are not out on the websites posting their life stories or writing books. Until recently, I was one of them. There is a large group of Korean adoptees who are very happy and who are too busy living their lives to worry about scaring potential parents.

• Most of the adult adoptees came home between the 1950s and the 1970s. International adoption was not as common as it is today. Born in 1975, I was still one of the first internationally adopted children in our community. It was big enough news that people wrote articles about it. By the time my sister came in the mid-1980s, people were more educated on international adoption and she actually had several adoptees in her school. The reason I bring this up is because many of the adults may have had a really rough time growing up in a society that wasn’t open minded about their differences. Some were adopted before the Civil Rights movement brought race to the forefront of people’s consciousness.

Remember that you cannot take everything you read to heart. I know that this is funny advice from someone who is currently writing a blog, but it’s the truth. Much of what I’m writing in these blogs is my own opinion and certainly does not represent everyone. It can’t, because I can only speak for myself. People on all the different message boards, chat rooms, books, etc… are going to have their own opinions and not all of them will help you because you and your child will react differently depending on your own individual situations.

I have lived a wonderful life. It has not been perfect and, now that I’ve reached adulthood, I know that it shouldn’t be perfect. We have to learn from the bad things that happen and use them to grow. It doesn’t matter if you are adopted. Life’s lessons are lessons no matter how you formed your family.

When it was time to make my family grow, it never occurred to me that I shouldn’t adopt from Korea. I am very pro-adoption because I learned from my own parents that adoption really doesn’t matter. I am their child and they are my parents. Don’t get me wrong, adoption is not good for everyone and you have to be strong if you are going to make the decision to adopt from Korea. You have to be strong enough to listen to negative stories and comments and regard them as learning experiences instead of signs of things to come in your future.