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Severance Magazine
Monthly Archives

October 2021

    AdoptionEssays, Fiction, Poetry

    Holt Motherland Tour 1987

    by bkjax October 29, 2021

    By A.D. Herzel

    The return flight was most memorable. A six-month-old boy slept in my lap for 18 hours, never crying once. He was not my baby and legally no longer belonged to the woman who gave birth to him. On many papers signed by governments and agencies on opposite sides of the world, he belonged to a family in the United States. I was 19, and my thoughts and memories reeled back and forth through time. I reflected upon the experiences and challenges I had encountered as an Asian adoptee in America, and I wondered about the known and unknown possibilities his future would hold. As I thought about his journey to the other side of the world, I silently cried. Did anyone notice? No one said a word. My tears fell on and off through the course of the long night. We were flying together in limbo, he and I leaving one home on the way to another, though I felt neither place was truly ours to claim. Was this only my story? Would it be his too?

    In the summer of 1987, after I completed my first year of college, my adoptive parents generously sent me on the Holt Motherland tour. Holt international was an Evangelical Christian adoption agency founded by Harry Holt and his wife, Bertha, in 1953. Harry Holt is credited with creating the logistic and legal pathway for the intercountry adoption of Korean children to families in the United States. The Motherland tour was an effort by the Holt organization to create an opportunity for adult Korean adoptees to learn about their Korean heritage and visit their “homeland.”

    I did not ask to go on the tour, but when it was offered, I readily accepted. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I didn’t have much access to Korean culture. My parents were not the kind who celebrated or shared the beauty and culture of the country I and my two adopted siblings had come from. I recall meeting Bertha Holt on two occasions at large gatherings when I was very young. The evangelical church community my adoptive parents belonged to recruited new members throughout the suburbs of Long Island, New York. The church members adopted roughly 100 Korean children. I have a picture in my mind of us all posed in a hall with Bertha wearing a hanbok. Somewhere on Long Island, in a box of my now-deceased parents’ photos, it may be hidden.

    Unlike most Korean adoptees dispersed into the white American population, I was raised among many other Korean adoptees and their families. When my parents’ church devolved into a conservative, Sephardic, Kabbalistic, messianic cult, I was in first grade. I was told we do not pray to Jesus anymore. Two of my brothers and I were put in its private religious school until sixth grade, where half of the children in my class were Korean adoptees.

    Yet we never talked about being adopted. My best friend was a Korean adoptee, as was her sister. My adopted siblings and I talked quietly, privately, about many things, but never about our lives before adoption or our families on the other side of the world. We, according to my adoptive mother, were God’s will in her life, her mission. Thus, I was named Amy Doreen—beloved “gift of God.” Amy is a common name among Korean adoptees. When I was a child, I imagined it made me special. As a teenager, I held on to the name of “love,” hoping if I embodied it, it would come to me.

    As I grew up, I came to find the name silly and ill-fitting. Amys were pretty, sweet, and bubbly. Cherished, they were something that was not me. Inside, and occasionally outside, I was mean, cutting with words, hungry, lonely, awkward, uncomfortable in my skin, angry, and always afraid. I cursed myself, as I was cursed at, and felt cursed. Being “God’s gift” was always a chain.

    In a recent interview with an adoptee, she reminded me of my past self. I had forgotten the feeling of my anger, my self-hate. Though I spent my elementary school years in a religious bubble where I did not think about my race, when I was in my home, my neighborhood, and when I finally went to public school in seventh grade, I was harassed, afraid, and I hated being Asian. I cringed at the sight of another Asian in public or on tv. I was ashamed of being part of the denigrated class. I was taught at home that Asians were stupid and ugly and weak. Was I made fun of? Of course, this was the 70s.

    After learning the breakdown of my DNA, I was reminded of having been taunted with “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these!” I used to say, “I am Korean, stupid,” with fury and fear bubbling inside. The kids never knew what or where Korea was.  But now I know. I am Chinese and Japanese and Korean. I knew it never really mattered. The truth was always clear. I was more interested in being invisible or at least visible on my own terms. It would take me decades before I even knew what my own terms were. This was never possible within my adoptive family or within the upper-middle-class Long Island suburbs where I grew up. I escaped Long Island and my adoptive parents’ home at the end of college and returned only for major family events.

    My Motherland Tour shifted many things. The American spell of my “minority self”—”ugly, powerless, and unworthy”—broke when I saw the beauty of the landscape and the masses of people and witnessed the culture. It was an awakening that some Korean adoptees have, but not all. The tour helped create a space for “Korean pride”—a long well-guarded taboo. It was also the first time I actually spoke about the nature of my adoptive family struggles with fellow adoptees. How many tears were shed? How many cheap Korean cigarettes were smoked at Il San Orphanage, sitting around Harry Holt’s gravestone? No one understood. Counselors might have been helpful. Alcohol, cigarettes, tears, and late-night confidences carried us through the two-week tour—“orphans” once more figuring things out on our own. Seven of us were close in age and created an odd “Breakfast Club.” It was a strange brief enlightenment and a respite for those of us not wanting to return to the families that sent us. We would all return to our respective states—Tennessee, Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, California, Kansas, New Jersey, and New York—after sorely straining the nerves of the late Dr. David Kim, the former director of Holt International Children’s services.

    The most profound stop for me on our tour was Holt’s unwed mother’s home. I do not remember the inside or anything I saw. I only remember being doubled over outside the building bawling my eyes out, finally having a complete emotional breakdown. I do not have memories of any words from the moment. A geyser of sorrow had broken free and I no longer had the will to fight it. The unwed mother’s home was considered progress—something Holt International was proud of. Dr. Kim always told us his dream was that adoptees would end up running Holt. I wonder how he interpreted all the tears and wailing sobs elicited by these annual tours.

    As our tour bus obliviously rode through the South Korean peninsula, the June 1987 Democratic uprising was occurring. The demonstrations led to a democratic election and other reforms as well as the Great Workers’ Struggle, which was marked by the largest and most effective union organizing and walkouts in South Korean history. One night, our bus was stuck in the demonstration traffic, and several people were sickened by the tear gas that floated through the windows. The political struggle for Korean democracy was not on the Holt Motherland Tour cultural menu, so context was never given.

    At 19 and older, had we grown up on the peninsula with or without our unknown birth parents, we likely would have been part of, or greatly invested in, the outcomes of the crowds on the streets.

    Instead, we were buying tourist trinkets in Itaewon. “Eol meyeyoh? How much?” and “Kamsa hamneda, thank you,” were the pillars of our Korean language acquisition. My American freedom had already been bought by the war, by my adoption. I had not grown enough to truly protest with my fellow Koreans. In Korea, I was an “orphan” in an American wrapper, envied and looked down upon. In America, I was an American in a Korean wrapper, a dirty import.

    Time has passed. The first experiments have grown up. The adoptee outcomes from the first wave of Korean adoptees and my subsequent generation resulted from prescriptions of assimilation and religious charity. Though research is scant and belated, it showed what many of us have privately known. A study by the Evan B Donaldson institute I participated in, reported by the New York Times in 2009, showed that 78% of Korean adoptees identified as white or wanting to be white. It also documented that, “as adults, nearly 61 percent said they had traveled to Korea both to learn more about the culture and to find their birth parents.” This shows us; the majority of adoptees assimilate and displace their identity with that of their foreign families, and that their innate identity is still almost equally important. Intercountry adoption and many forms of adoption demand the “erasure” of a life and identity prior to placement in the foreign environment, but identity can only be controlled by external forces for so long.

    Revolution and a way to culture, identity, and citizenship reclamation is still being paved by adoptees born after me. According to data culled from US State Department reports by William Robert Johnston and the Johnston archives, only 4,400 Korean children were adopted the US in the 1960s. During the 70s, 25,247 Korean children were recorded as adopted to the US, and during the 80s, the number rose to 46,254. A small fraction of these younger and older adoptees would move back to Korea, search for birth families, and demand accountability from adoption agencies, the government, and their birth families. With the rise of the Internet and DNA technology, these numbers appear to be increasing, though they have yet to be measured.

    Unceasingly, these same demands have been and will be replayed by every adoptee who understands what it means to ask for their rights as defined by the UN Rights of the Child Agreement. (The United States is one of the few countries that has not ratified, and does not subscribe to, the Rights of the Child Agreement.) Thus, our work continues: supporting Korean adoptees, making community, creating birth search and reunion resources, and sharing our stories in writing and through the arts. Today, adoptees are fortunate to find a varied handful of Korean adoptee-centered organizations, podcasts, and magazines online among them: ICAV, IKAA, AKA, KAMRA325, GOA’L, Adoptee Hub, the Adapted Podcast, and The Universal Asian.

    When my return flight landed at JFK airport with the other HOLT 1987 Motherland Tour members, I was brought to meet the family waiting for the baby I carried. My service as an escort paid for my plane trip back to the US. I do not remember the name they gave him. I recall the family—white, with perhaps two older daughters. I may have intentionally not wanted to remember them. I had not wanted to give him up. I had not wanted to give him to them. I gave him up knowing, whether they were kind or not, the road could be difficult. America was uniquely hard on Asian boys. He would have questions they could not answer, desires for self-knowledge they could not fulfill, and my heart was inadequate and broken. I was still inadequate and broken.

    I hope he was fine, was loved, was fairly treated, found pride, self-acceptance, friends, and self-love. He should be 34 now and still on the journey that never ends, reconciling the before and after, the with and without. My best hope is that he was one of those adoptees who was able to be proud and have an easy knowledge of his Korean cultural heritage and identity. What I could not do for him then is what I do now—share as much as I can and show what I am able.

    And to him I say, “If you are out there looking for a friend on the road or the mule that carried you to America, here I am.”

    미안해  Biahnay

    I am sorry.

    A.D.

    A.D. Herzel was “found” in 1968 in Hari, Yeouju eup, South Korea, and brought to the U.S. in 1970. She is a Korean American adoptee, visual artist, writer, and educator who has exhibited work nationally for the past 20 years. Trained as a painter and printmaker at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she also earned her M.Ed. in art education from the Tyler School of Art. Her current project, titled Seeds from the East: The Korean Adoptee Portrait Project, will be shown in multiple venues in 2022-2023. These exhibits are scheduled for the Philip Jaisohn Memorial House in Media, PA, and the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University in Roanoke, VA. She’s working with Adoptee Hub for an exhibit in Minnesota, and plans are in the works for shows in Oregon and, possibly, Boston. She is also a regular arts contributor to The Universal Asian, which describes itself as an open and safe online database platform in a magazine-style to provide inspiration to Asian adoptees (#importedAsians) and immigrated Asians (#hyphenatedAsians) around the world. Learn more about her work here. Find her on Instagram @pseudopompous.

    Severance is not monetized—no subscriptions, no ads, no donations—therefore, all content is generously shared by the writers. If you have the resources and would like to help support the work, you can tip the writer.

    On Venmo: @pseudopompous

    BEFORE YOU GO…

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  • AdoptionEssays, Fiction, Poetry

    An Untold Story From Before Roe v. Wade

    by bkjax October 27, 2021
    October 27, 2021

    When a letter arrived in my mailbox saying, “I think you might be my grandma,” it dredged up shattering memories of a campus rape 52 years earlier. I threw the letter on the floor of my car and drove erratically in a state of high anxiety and angst. My body went rigid at the thought of reviving that story from my past. All would be revealed. Would I want to go down that path? To relive scenes and open sores from episodes long buried, the chilling details of an incident that began with rape on a college campus in 1962? How would this grandchild ever understand that repressive period I lived through after WW II and before the birth control pill? Society then held single unmarried pregnant women in their grip. Rape or unplanned sex led to blistering consequences as unplanned pregnancies made women face the scourge of illegitimacy, undergo illegal and dangerous abortions, or carry a child to term only to sever that extraordinary bond between mother and child with separation. It’s estimated that as many as 4 million mothers in the United States surrendered newborn babies to adoption between 1940 and 1970.* I had had no choice but to carry my child to term. At the time, thoughts of motherhood were tearing at my moral senses. After all, I’d been raised with the idea that motherhood within marriage was the shibboleth in our society. I was facing the dilemma of my life. Would I dare keep a child under these circumstances and bring shame on me and my family or allow the baby to be adopted? Opting for adoption, I faced the deep sadness of that very moment you hand over your own child. That final act of severance between mother and child caused a quake deep in my soul. I can recall that moment with crystal clarity but mostly I keep it compartmentalized, forever afraid to revisit that devastating moment. The deep shame I felt should not have been mine but the rapist’s who drugged me and took me to his fraternity for his pleasure. After that sorrow of an unplanned pregnancy and what I had put my family through, the anger and resentment were knotted together and locked deep inside.

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  • AdoptionArticles

    Adoptees in Film

    by bkjax October 26, 2021
    October 26, 2021

    Sonia Derory spent the first six months of her life in a hospital in a Parisian suburb while her parents reflected on whether they could raise a child with what they perceived as a disability. She was born in 1983 with dwarfism, a medical or genetic condition characterized by short stature. Ultimately, her parents concluded it would be too great a challenge to raise her and placed her for adoption. After spending another six months in a nursery, Derory was adopted by a couple from a small town in the St. Etienne region in center of France into a family with other children, some also adopted. Derory had always known she’d been adopted—a fact that otherwise would have been evident because her Algerian heritage set her apart in appearance from her French Caucasian adoptive parents. But she always wanted to know who she looked like and where she came from. Early on, she was afraid to discuss with her adoptive parents her desire to know about her origins. “They weren’t particularly open-minded about my search,” she says, and she felt guilty and conflicted. But in 2006, when she was 23, she searched for her birthmother—not a challenge since her birth parents’ names and identities were listed on her birth certificate. After several months, she located her birthmother, who at first seemed pleased by her appearance in her life. They were in contact for more than a year and a half, and Derory welcomed her mother into her home. She even wore an identity bracelet engraved on one side with her original birth name and on the other with her adoption name, to demonstrate the depth of her connection. “I did everything—in fact too much—in order to be acknowledged as her daughter because I had this deep-down need to build a relationship with this mother who could help me discover my cultural origins.” After those months, she says, her mother decided to cut ties and all contact, but by that time, Derory had already become very attached to her, so it was deeply difficult to accept—another devastating rupture. “In her mind she had given me away as a baby many years ago and so felt nothing for me emotionally as an adult woman.” She didn’t want to have any type of relationship, and and they never met again. A few years later, Derory met her birthfather, who told her he’d searched for her when she was very small but was unsuccessful because her name had been changed. He, however, was also unwilling to engage in a relationship with his daughter. Derory had grown up near her birthplace in Saint-Etienne in east-central France, where she went to high school and developed a love of theater. She took acting and circus classes and workshops but, daunted by the difficulty of earning a living as an actress, she turned to another career. For ten years she worked as a communications and media officer in Clermont-Ferrand, a city in Massif Central, a highland region in Southern France. But in 2014, drawn back to her love of theater, she boarded a train to Paris, intent on becoming an actress. She studied in a theater school and won some small roles in a few classical plays, a television show, and many short movies. She also nurtured an interest in directing and taught herself the necessary skills, learning from trial from trial and error and by being inquisitive on set. Soon she’d use those skills to tell her own story.

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  • Micro-MemoirsSpeak Out

    Dear Mother

    by bkjax October 22, 2021
    October 22, 2021
    Read more
    7 FacebookTwitter
  • ArticlesDonor Conception

    When the Truth Finally Comes Out

    by bkjax October 22, 2021
    October 22, 2021

    As a professional coach* working with donor conceived adults, parents, and donors, I’ve observed a common issue among many donor conceived clients seeking support: feelings of anger or disappointment that their parents kept the truth of their conception secret from them for so many years. Because there may be disruption in the relationship between these adults and their parents, one or both parties seek coaching to help them work out their differences and adjust to the newly challenging reality. My donor conceived clients of all ages typically discover the truth of their conception either from their parents or from having taken a DNA test. Less commonly, they find out from a person other than a parent. Donor conceived people are often confused as to why their parents didn’t think such information was vital enough to share with them much earlier on. Indeed, many donor conceived people feel that knowing the identity of both biological parents is a basic human right for multiple reasons (psychological, cultural, and medical); they therefore feel violated and betrayed by their own parents for denying them this right to their complete family heritage—information that most others take for granted. Donor conceived people sometimes point out their parents’ hypocrisy in having chosen gamete donation over adoption for the purpose of establishing a biological connection to at least one parent and later complaining when their adult child shows interest in the typically anonymous biological parent. Should biological relatedness only matter to parents but not to children? The parents may say things like, “It shouldn’t matter. Love is all you need, and you received that.” Yes, but we also need to make sense of our traits and know where we came from so we can form healthy adult identities, not to mention our need for an accurate family medical history. Equally hypocritical, some parents enjoy doing genealogical work on their own family trees but criticize their adult donor conceived children for also valuing and investigating their true and complete heritage. Parents’ explanations for their failure to disclose the manner of their children’s conception are often confusing. For example, they may say, “We couldn’t find the right time,” or “We thought it would be better for you not to know.” They may state that they didn’t want to layer on additional challenges when their children were going through difficult life events, such as going to college, or when there was trauma, loss, or divorce in the family. These justifications may or may not be excuses to avoid the difficult “telling conversation.” Sometimes, donor conceived people recognize their parents’ good intentions, but the problematic secret, which they consider a major lie, may overshadow those good intentions. Many feel there were numerous opportunities over the years for their parents to tell the truth. There are several psychological reasons why parents may keep such secrets. Recipients of donor sperm may experience denial, as some may have lied to themselves for years by believing that the donor sperm didn’t “take,” while theirs (or their partners’) did. (Egg donation doesn’t afford the same opportunity for denial, since in vitro fertilization is necessary.) And in the past, fertility professionals encouraged such denial by mixing the sperm of two men—donor and intended father—or by telling heterosexual couples to have sex the night of the artificial insemination. Even today, most fertility professionals aren’t well informed about secrecy’s negative effects on donor conceived people and their family lives, being only concerned with running their businesses and achieving results.

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Call Right To Know’s resource hotline to talk with another MPE be paired with a mentor, get resources, or just talk.

Original Birth Certificates to California Born Adoptees

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erHylYLHqXg&t=4s

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Recommended Reading

The Lost Family: How DNA is Upending Who We Are, by Libby Copeland. Check our News & Reviews section for a review of this excellent book about the impact on the culture of direct-to-consumer DNA testing.

What Happens When Parents Wait to Tell a Child He’s Adopted

“A new study suggests that learning about one’s adoption after a certain age could lead to lower life satisfaction in the future.”

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I’m Adopted and Pro-Choice. Stop Using My Story for the Anti-Abortion Agenda. Stephanie Drenka’s essay for the Huffington Post looks at the way adoptees have made unwilling participants in conversations about abortion.

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@2019 - Severance Magazine

Severance Magazine
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Severance Magazine
  • About
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    • Submission Guidelines: How to Contribute
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  • Articles
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    • Adoption
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@2019 - Severance Magazine