South Korea Archives | My New England Seoul

I am a Korean adoptee. At 29 years old I returned to my country of birth, South Korea. The decision was easy for me. I wanted to check this trip off the list before we expanded our family.

Korean adoptee returns to motherland — Visiting a Buddhist temple in Daegu with my birth family

A motherland tour is emotional and thought provoking for any adoptee. I think what helped me was our mindset leading up to the trip…with 0 expectations. We booked the nicest hotels we could find in each city we planned to visit. I made a list of things we wanted to do and places we wanted to see. This was supposed to be a luxury vacation before we embarked on parenthood. It turned out to be so much more than that…

After deciding to go back I initiated a birth family search. Mostly, it was a formality. I never had an intense need to know more about my origins but I also didn’t want regret. I filled out the necessary documents and officially submitted my intent to search.

We finalized our itinerary for the trip. We had so much fun stuff planned! I checked in with the adoption agency often in the months leading up to the trip. I would find myself anxious and hopeful whenever I got a reply from the agency seemingly caring more than I would have admitted at the time.

Almost exactly two months from submitting my intent to search I woke up one morning to the email that would change my life as I knew it.

Present day

Six years later in the year 2020 I am ready to share my story. I encourage all international adoptees to consider returning to their birth place at some point, with or without a birth family search.

Realizations from my motherland tour:

Stepping off the plane at Incheon I had an immediate sense of peace being surrounded by people who looked like me. I was one in the crowd for the first time in my life. Nobody knew my story or questioned why i was there. In S. Korea I was never the only person of color in any given room or environment. I would often have reality checks with myself which were almost out of body experiences as I couldn’t believe I was back surrounded by my original culture and language.

Going back meant so much more to me than I could have known before the trip. Or maybe meant so much more than I could have admitted to myself. It was seeing and experiencing a culture and language that I will never be a part of but there were moments throughout the trip where I felt a sense of belonging. A feeling not often felt in the States as tolerance is not the same as belonging.

Being there made me sad. A different kind of sad being Korean than I had experienced growing up. Until then I had only experienced racial negativity being Asian in a white world but this sadness was a sense of loss. Now knowing what it felt like being in Korea I knew once and for all that I would never truly fit in there either. You can look the part in passing but with any interaction with shopkeepers, waiters, etc. they knew I was American in an instant. I guess through all of the adversity growing up in America maybe I had in the back of my mind that I could always go back to Korea and feel normal. This trip was confirmation that was not the case.

The biggest realization I had was probably that nobody can or will understand these feelings of loss being immersed in a country and culture where you look the part but which you share no part. I believe only transracial adoptees have a chance of understanding the complexity of emotions I was feeling. Not my husband, my adoptive parents, my birth parents or birth sisters.

Seeing my birth country further solidified who I was then and more importantly who I am today…a Korean adoptee. My children are descendants of a Korean adoptee. A different topic for a different day…

Being a transracial adoptee is messy and complicated. I returned to S. Korea to simply check it off my life list but the realizations and clarity of identity I gained was far more than I could have expected. The time spent in Korea was happy and sad, fulfilling and draining, full of clarity and added confusion. I realized that who I am today actually had very little to do with who I was when I left South Korea at 9 months old. I control my destiny regardless of my past and I shall live without fear or regret.

Thanks for reading!

-Christina

Korean Adoptee returns to motherland 29 years later

Let’s start at the beginning. I was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1984 and came to the United States when I was only 9-months-old. My family consisted of my mom and dad as well as two older brothers, age 6 and 4, also adopted from South Korea. Approximately two years later, we met our sister at Logan airport who was 18-months-old when she arrived, also from South Korea, making a grand total of four children in our family unit.

Our mother’s family is French-Canadian and our father’s family is Italian. We grew up in a small, very rural, New England town. In a lot of ways my childhood was above average compared to my peers. My siblings and I always had the latest and greatest toys and gadgets, we vacationed often, lived in a big house outside of town with lots of land and we even had a swimming pool on our property which if you remember being a kid, was one of the coolest things ever! So, all in all, pretty sweet.

The population in our area was pretty much all white. My siblings and I were the only “non-white” kids in our school with the exception of the occasional foreign exchange student…that was always awkward, especially if they happened to be Asian of any kind…Or, I suppose there were also “fresh-air kids,” city kids, usually black, who got to experience living in the country for a summer with host families in the area. Both of those scenarios were awkward for us, as people would always assume “minorities” go together, regardless if they were the same race, culture, etc. I guess what people were really implying was all those who looked different (aka non-white) should be grouped together. This mentality was especially difficult for us as adoptees because culturally we were exactly the same as our peers. Unlike children of 1st or even 2nd generation immigrants who may speak a different language at home, eat different foods that are part of their culture or have different traditions, we were, for all intents and purposes, white.

Even though I grew up with three siblings who were in the exact same boat as me, I can’t remember ever talking about being Korean, or looking different from our friends, or even different from our parents and relatives. This realization, now reflecting back, might seem like we had an unhealthy family dynamic or weak sense of self; however, I don’t think those were the reasons at all. It’s not like we didn’t know we were adopted (we knew very early on for obvious reasons) and it’s not like we didn’t know we were different…we experienced racism and discrimination all the time. I suppose we didn’t feel the need to acknowledge those who tried to tell us we were different or put us down because we knew we were just as American as the next kid and if people couldn’t see that then that was their problem. We were “bananas” or “twinkies,” yellow on the outside and white on the inside 🙂

Now, with all that said, it doesn’t mean that my siblings and I weren’t sensitive to the fact that we “looked” Asian. I can’t speak for them but I know that I was always very insecure about my appearance. I attended university in NYC at the age of 18 where for the first time ever I was not the only minority in the classroom.

In my adult life, I feel I have made great strides in the identity department. I am still the only “non-white” person in most rooms but am not nearly as self-conscious about my appearance. Maybe this is a result of living in a more diversified area of the country or me just caring less about how others perceive me. Either way, I’m proud of my New England roots as well as my Korean roots, and through the power of the internet I have enjoyed reading other Korean adoptees’ journeys so much so that I was inspired to start My New England Seoul.

Korean Adoptee: Returning to the Motherland

Present day

Realizations from my motherland tour:

Growing up white…kinda…