By Rebecca Cheek

I saw a baby bird on my walk recently: long legs, tiny body, fluffy feathers, and barely moving. It had fallen from its nest on the sidewalk, frantically chirping for its mother. I watched it for some time. As I bent down to pick it up and put it to safety, it hopped closer to the tree’s edge, hiding in the monkey grass. The mother bird finally chirped back, calling out to her baby. I left it alone since she knew where it was, safe in the monkey grass, camouflaged from predators.

My oldest child, Noah, just started sixth grade, which is middle school where we live. At the prospect of this occasion, I have had myriad of emotions since the beginning of this year. I could not name what it was, but now I know: it is fear. I am scared for Noah, much like the mama bird who was chirping for her baby, hoping it was close by and away from danger. Noah’s strong, extroverted personality will not allow him to stay hidden.

Middle school scarred me, as it does with most. The taunts and ridicule for being an adopted Korean made my middle school experience hell with no fire. I stuck out in my mostly White middle school in Alabama with no chance to blend in, although that is what I desperately wanted.

Noah and I approach life in the same way. However, whereas I was completely unprepared for middle school,  Noah was ready for sixth grade and has been for the past couple of years. Even through the COVID-19 pandemic school years, he showed signs that he was prepared academically and mentally for whatever challenges middle school would bring. For instance, Noah reads on a Lexile Level for college and career readiness and is also learning Spanish and Korean. In 1996, I was not ready for middle school, and I am the one who is not

ready now.

With many of my parental moments, there is a mix of joy and sorrow. Joy because Noah has made it to 11 in one piece, and sorrow because my circle of influence is much smaller than it used to be. I am losing him bit by bit with each passing day as he forms his own sense of self and the person he is growing to be.

Parenting in general is a challenging adventure. Parenting as an adoptee brings another layer of complexity that I did not foresee as a newlywed dreaming of the prospect of motherhood. I did not realize that many of the struggles I faced as a child, such as identity and belonging, would be issues my own children would face too but in different ways.

I am not one of those mothers who cries with each achievement: cutting teeth, crawling, toddling, walking, talking, potty training, starting preschool or elementary school. I was happy to put each of these occasions behind me because I knew once achieved, something new would take its place. But Noah starting middle school has made me cry multiple times, which has surprised me.

Sadly, I do not have a mother, birth or adoptive, to call and ask, Is this reaction normal? To feel this scared? To feel this ill equipped? Melancholy mixed with a side of bittersweet makes me wonder if my birth mother ever longed to see what I have accomplished. Or does she view me as a forever baby trapped in 1985? Was there a “before” time, before I was a problem or a burden, and an “after” time when I was no longer there that chronicles her life and keeps her trapped too?

The adoptive mother who chose me did not pattern healthy love, so I am doing my damnedest to break that cycle of hurt, hopelessness, and pain. It is a choice I can make to protect myself and my children. I am grieving one mother who, for whatever reason, could not keep me and another one who “loved” me to the point that she suffocated me with control and manipulation. This complicated adoptee grief, starting from my relinquishment at birth and enduring to today when I am an adult in my late 30s, has been hard coded into who I am. Grief flows into my body like blood, vitally important to live but messy when it gushes out.

Like all child-rearing milestones, the start of middle school has come, and another will soon take its place. I will figure it out like I normally do and handle my fear with deep breaths and long sighs. I will tell Noah, “I’m new to being a parent to a middle schooler like you’re new to being a sixth grader. But I’m here for you, I love you, and I’m already so beeping proud of you. Not because of your academic achievements or cunning wit, but because you are you.” That is what I would have wanted to hear when I was in middle school.

Later I walked by the same tree where I found the baby bird. I looked in the monkey grass, but it was not there. I hope it is safe with its mama, up high in the tree, where it will grow and fly away as it was meant to.

Rebecca Cheek (she/her/hers) is a transracial International Korean American adoptee living in South Carolina. She has a bachelor of science degree in chemistry from the University of Alabama in Huntsville with a background in manufacturing of drug delivery systems and quality assurance management in chemical manufacturing. However, she’s taking a pause in her professional career to raise her children and try to figure out what she wants to do when she (really) grows up. In the meantime, she’s actively volunteering through multiple organizations. She’s a peace seeker, who strives to live her life yogically.

Born a member of the Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, Vicki Charmain Rowan was adopted at two by a white couple who renamed her Susan. Already, at two, it was as if she were a child divided.

Susan Devan Harness has spent most of her life straddling two worlds, never having a secure footing in either, learning early that “It hurts to be an Indian” in the world in which she lives. Her extraordinary memoir, Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption, is evidence that one can pluck a living thing from the soil in which it grew and plant it elsewhere, and though it may survive, surviving isn’t the same as thriving. Her account is a reckoning of a bitter isolation and a harsh record of a tenacious search for a sense of belonging. It’s a story streaked with a particular kind of loneliness, the kind that takes hold not in solitude but among people in whom the author can’t see herself reflected.

Raised by a mentally ill mother and an alcoholic father, Harness sees herself as different from those around her, and she’s acutely aware that she’s perceived as different, not only by the townspeople, but even by her father, whose lexicon is laced with ethnic slurs and who speaks derisively about Indians, describing them as gold diggers, deadbeats, “goddam-crazy-drunken-war-whoops.” She’s aware she’s not the cute little blond-haired blue-eyed girl her father says he always wanted. And at the same time that she feels hatred toward him, she’s aware of a self-loathing coiling inside herself.

She encounters few people who looked like her growing up, and she’s reminded at every turn that she doesn’t fit in. She lives in a kind of a gap between cultures where a question took root early: what did it mean to be Indian if she wasn’t raised in an Indian family? “The Indians don’t want me; the whites don’t accept me. They push me into each other’s court, always away from them. I am isolated; I am in-between,” she writes.

Harness fantasizes about finding her “real parents,” and yearns for them to feel real to her. “It is important they feel real because being Indian, living in this white family in this white town, and going to school with these white kids reminds me not only how different I am but how I will never be one of them.” So she dreams of the life that might be more authentic, “where I was ‘real’ instead of ‘adopted; a life where my skin color was the same as everyone else’s and I wouldn’t stand out, isolated; a life where ‘American Indian’ meant something more than ‘I don’t know.’”

When she’s a teenager, her father tells her her biological parents had been killed in a car accident, but years later, when she obtains a hard-won file of information about her adoption, she discovers there’d been no accident—that her mother, Victoria, is living only 30 miles from where she lives. In fits and starts, advances and retreats, Harness embarks on a quest to learn where she came from. She wants an origin story, a glimpse of her childhood, to find out what it means to be an indigenous person—the things no one in her family can tell her. She searches for her birth family and finds strangers. She tries to make meaning, but comes up hard against facts she can’t make sense of. “I don’t know why I was taken from a chaotic family filled with alcoholism and dismembered relationships and placed in a family with alcoholism and dismembered relationships,” she remembers. “My experience is that when I was removed from my blood family, then my birthrights, my membership in a family and a community, and the sense of who I was in the world were also removed from me.”

Although she develops a relationship with her mother and other members of her first family, there’s no place where she isn’t isolated, where she fully belongs, where she isn’t “other.” Still, she retains empathy for the family she can’t fully rejoin and is clear-eyed about the jagged complexity of reunions. “I had been flung to the waiting arms of a world who found Indians repulsive, with our lazy, drunk, promiscuous ways. The wounds I was left with still bled under the right conditions. And my being in her presence put me in emotional limbo. I had longed for this moment, fantasized about it when I was six, dreamed about it when I was fifteen. But my soul filled with dread as the reality check of who I really am seeped into the cracks of my fragmented identity.”

More than an account of her own story, Bitterroot is equally a biting indictment of the brutal assimilation policies of the U.S. Government and the historical injustices—the laws and treaties that dispossessed Native Americans in myriad ways. Harness comes to study anthropology  and labors to bring about change in the child placement policy. She works with other transracial adoptees to shed light on their experiences of living in a white world as American Indians and explores their collective pain of not belonging.

Bitterroot is exquisitely written and deeply moving. It’s essential reading—achingly beautiful prose that will resonate with anyone who’s ever felt they weren’t enough, who’s had to fight for the story that should always have been theirs, who’s ever struggled to find a place to belong.

matthew charles is a poet, podcast host, and educator. We talk to him about the experience of being a transracial adoptee (TRA), his emergence as a poet and activist, and the importance of self-expression.

In your bio, you use the phrase “racially marooned.” Can you talk about what that choice of words means to you and how it describes the experience of being a transracial adoptee?

The popular term I’ve heard other transracial adoptees use is “racially isolated” but I coined “racially marooned” because I feel it more viscerally evokes a sense of void in regard to lack of racial mirrors. I have a poem I wrote called “Closed Transracial Adoption is | God’s Gift” where I write, “i’m the first landmass that drifted from Pangea / you don’t understand how alone i feel.”

You’ve written that as a child you experienced life as if a veil covered your eyes. What did you mean by that and what happened to cause the veil to drop?

As a transracial adoptee whose body was raised racially marooned, I was acculturated into whiteness, made to believe that there were my kin, and my allegiances. Yet I was also rejected daily by whiteness through micro and macro aggressions. Realizing that even though my body was literally purchased by whiteness I had no purchase in whiteness was an apocalypse, of sorts. It freed me to practice Sankofa—a Ghanaian symbol that means, “to retrieve.” I had to retrieve the Black essence of who I am in order to reorient myself in the world—not as a(n adopted) child of whiteness but as a doubly displaced African.

Hip-Hop was formative for you as an adolescent and you were a performer. What happened that caused you to shift to poetry?

I’d always practiced writing Haikus to sharpen my ability to say a lot with not many words, so in some senses I was already interdisciplinary. However, at 17 when I was recording music in Saint Louis I lost my voice. I’d end up not able to speak for three years. This vocal disability still affects me to this day. It was in that purgatory that I more consciously altered my craft to poetry because I was afraid I’d never be able to perform or tour again.

When you began to express yourself—first in Hip-Hop and later in poetry—did you immediately take transracial adoption as your subject, or did that happen later?

No, I didn’t use rap to talk about myself. I used rap to project a false image. One of the reasons I shifted to poetry was because how I engaged with the genre of Rap felt constricting. I’d felt like I couldn’t be vulnerable. Themes of adoption began appearing in my work as early as 2018 but I didn’t set out to create a body of work with adoption as the central theme until my newest and as of yet unpublished book of poetry, meet me in the clearing.

Did you ever study formally or was Hip-Hop all the education you needed?

I taught myself all of the forms of Creativity that I practice—poetry, rap, essay, memoir.

Is poetry as much a means of survival as an artistic expression?

I wouldn’t be alive today if I didn’t have my art practice. As i write in “To Pimp An Adopted Butterfly,” art is one of my most enduring and longstanding relationships, and it has helped me know myself, and in the process of knowing myself it has saved my life countless times.

Similarly, are poetry and activism synonymous for you? Do you see your artistry as a form of activism?

While I don’t see them as synonymous, my artistry often is laced with activist intent. But the first goal in my creative process is to create something meaningful to me.

In art and in activism, who are your influences? Who are the most important voices among transracial adoptees—poets or otherwise? Who do you listen to? Who do you admire?

When it comes to art I like Lucille Clifton, Hafiz, Jay Electronica, and Joy Oladukun. But I’m not sure who the most important voices are for TRAs. Voices I’ve been most impacted by are Daniel Drennan ElAwar, Rebecca Carroll, and Hannah Jackson Matthews.

Can you tell us about your first book, You Can Not Burn the Sun, and the series of books you have planned?

You Can Not Burn The Sun is a self-published book of poetry I wrote during the 2020 Uprisings about my involvement in the Movement for Black Lives in Madison, Wisconsin. The follow-up is meet me in the clearing, a collection of poems about my life as a transracial adoptee raised racially marooned in Roseburg, Oregon. And book3 is in the works, it’s a memoir. Can’t tell ya the title yet, tho.

You created a podcast, little did u know, to “center the lived experiences, learned and inherited wisdom of transracial adoptees.”  Can you say more about how this came about? Did you start this to fill a void in the conversation about adoption?

In January 2021, my big homie Charles Payne told me I should do a podcast for You Can Not Burn The Sun but I was too insecure to pursue that. That was the genesis of the idea of me podcasting. Around August 2021, I realized what I would love to do is create a media platform for transracial adoptees because I wasn’t hearing the kinds of conversations I wanted to hear via podcast. My hope is to make more accessible conversations of race, class, gender, colony, and displacement from a critical adoptee lens.

So far, you’ve posted three episodes with fascinating guests, but you haven’t had a new episode recently. Do you plan to continue and if so, do you have new guests lined up?

Yeah, the next guest is Dr. Daniel ElAwar. I’m very excited about that. Hoping to get Susan Devan Harness on the show too, but we’ll see.

In your introduction to one of your podcast guests, identity reclamation coach Hannah Jackson Matthews, you say that as a result of the reaction to a poem you shared on her platform you realized you weren’t alone in your experience and that it was the first place you felt seen in ways “I’d never dared to show myself.” Can you talk about why it’s important for adoptees to share their voices and tell their stories?

As Black people in the US, we have historically had to explain our existence as oppressed peoples living in a racist society. After 2020, this is happening less so. Yet, as adoptees, the truth of our lived experiences is not as ingrained in the public imagination because the public’s imagination of us is shaped by adoption industry propaganda. First and foremost, sharing our voices is a liberatory act for ourselves because as adoptees we’re often taught not to be critical of adoption—bucking off this expectation empowers us to be more honest with ourselves about ourselves and the world around us. In sharing our voices, we find resonance among other displaced and dispersed peoples, and in that way, sharing our voice becomes an act of building radical community. It is invaluable to be seen and known by the communities we partake in.matthew charles is the host of little did u know, a podcast that centers the lived experiences—the learned and inherited wisdom—of transracial adoptees. He is also a poet, and his debut poetry collection, You Can Not Burn The Sun (2020), is sold out, so you can’t buy a copy. But you can eagerly anticipate book2. And you should definitely listen to his podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @CantBurnTheSun or Instagram @matthewcharlespoet.

On Venmo @matthewcharlespoet

Rebecca Carroll, author, cultural critic, and podcast host, was adopted at birth by a white couple and raised in a predominantly white community in rural New Hampshire, where, as the only black resident, she’d see no one who looked like her until she was six years old. Growing up among her white relatives and white townspeople, she had no touchstone for what it meant to be black, no mirror of her own blackness to reflect and illuminate who she really was. And worse, no one cared. Her only point of reference as a child was the character Easy Reader from The Electric Company, whom she fantasized was her father. When she first encountered a black person in real life—her ballet teacher, Mrs. Rowland—she wondered, “Did she know Easy Reader from The Electric Company? Did she go home at night to live inside the TV with him and the words and letters he carried around with him in the pockets of his jacket?” As she grew older, Carroll was aware of being seen by this teacher in a way her parents did not, yet she was also aware of the differences. “I felt small pangs of fragile awareness regarding who I might be, what my skin color might mean. There were days when I wanted to be, or believed I was, black just like Mrs. Rowland, but it also seemed as though I would have to give something up in order for that to remain true.” She was increasingly aware that unlike her teacher, she moved through the world with the “benefits afforded by white stewardship.”

As a transracial adoptee, Carroll had to hurdle barrier after barrier merely to become who she was always meant to be. And considering that the most formidable obstacle to her ability to truly recognize and finally claim her authentic identity as a black woman was her family—both her adoptive parents and her white birthmother—it was an extraordinarily lonely struggle carried out by a force of one. How, isolated in an overwhelmingly white world, could she know what it meant to be black?

While Carroll’s adoptive parents were largely oblivious to her need to understand, absorb, and assert her racial identity, her birthmother aggressively denied her daughter’s racial and cultural heritage. When they began a relationship, 11-year-old Carroll was curious about and soon enamored of her mother, but learned there was a cost to the relationship. She carried that burden for a long time, making excuses and ignoring her intuition as her birthmother did everything possible to torpedo her growing attempt to construct an understanding of herself as a black woman—gaslighting her, subjecting her to blatantly racist comments, and effectively dispossessing her of the right to her own blackness. She straddled two worlds, ill-fitting in one and made to feel like an imposter in the other.

All adoptees are stripped of their histories and their genetic information, but in her powerful memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, Carroll shines a light on this additional theft of something equally fundamental—racial identity—and details the painful journey to take back what should always have been hers.

When she was writing the memoir, one the few black students she taught at an all-girls private school wrote to tell her what she meant to her. “This,” Carroll writes, “is what black folks are to one another—we are the light that affirms and illuminates ourselves to ourselves. A light that shines in its reflection of unbound blackness, brighter and beyond the white gaze. The path to fully understanding this, and my ultimate arrival at the complicated depths of my own blackness, was a decades-long, self-initiated rite of passage, wherein I both sought out and pushed away my reflection, listened to the wrong people, and harbored an overwhelming sense of convoluted grief—a grief that guided me here, to myself.”

In this moving coming of age story, Carroll illustrates the cost of feeling unseen, of being disregarded, not only by the community but by those closest to her who thwarted her at every turn. She pulls no punches, squarely placing the blame where it belongs, on everyone who failed her again and again. It’s the story of pride and persistence, of hard-won healing and redemption.—BKJ

By matthew charlesAs a transracial adoptee raised by a white family in a small racist town in Oregon, I’ve always known that being Black meant being different. My Black body was both a cocoon and a womb, working overtime to birth and metamorphosize my self.

I used to long for my father. The one whose seed impregnated the woman I was told I looked like—the woman whose picture I’d never seen.

Looking like a ghost can be a kind of curse.

As a child, I fantasized that my Black body was a descendant of African royalty. That one day, a man with skin like the soil would knock on the door of my adopters’ home and tell them he’d come for me. He’d tell them flowers grow best in the soil and most eagerly when they are watered. He’d tell my adopters that he was my soil and he wanted to be my water, too.

Being a Black boy without a Black father is a common experience, but it hits different when the Black child is a transracial adoptee and lives in a town with almost no other Black people. Adoption scholars call this phenomenon “a lack of racial mirrors.”

How was I to imagine who I was? Who I could be? Who I might desire to be—without a robust intimacy with Black people?

My three most enduring and long-standing relationships with Black people are myself, my twin (with whom I was adopted), and Hip-Hop.

I discovered Hip-Hop at 12. Before that, I’d heard friends rave about Eminem, but I was so disconnected that when Eminem was at the height of his career between ’05 and ‘10 and I heard people talking about him, I thought they meant the M&M’s from the candy commercials were putting out albums. I couldn’t fathom why anybody would be interested in music made by animated candy. I mean, really!

Eventually I’d discover that Eminem was, in fact, a real human. I never connected with his music but it inspired me to probe Hip-Hop. As a West Coast kid, that meant I discovered folks like Snoop Dogg, NWA, and Tupac. Coming into contact with their music was the first time I was experiencing Blackness or Black cultural productions. Even though I couldn’t relate to their stories of gangbanging, drug dealing, partying, and hood life, the kinds of pressure the music placed on me was immediate and life altering. These gangsta rappers became my stand-ins for the Black father I longed for.

As I let myself be fathered by them, I changed the way I dressed, talked, and behaved to be more like them. To be more like the only image of Blackness I was presented with.

I call this my first identity crisis. I was 12. And I had no one to talk to about what I was going through—the invasive and ever crippling doubt that I wasn’t and could never be “Black” enough. This was reinforced in the schools I attended by white classmates who would chastise me for my intelligence by saying, “you’re so white” and who would reward me for performing the kinds of Blackness I learned from Gangsta Rap by remarking, “you’re the Blackest person I know,” even though they only knew a handful of us.

None of us knew what Blackness was except for what mass media and music told us.

Back in the day, I used to use LimeWire to pirate music, and somehow in that journey I discovered Lupe Fiasco. He presented a different kind of Blackness. One that, sometimes, I could relate to. Nowhere was this more evident than in his song “He Say She Say,” about a single mother and a fatherless child. For the first time, I was seen.

And then I discovered B.o.B.

Mixtape era B.o.B was different. He was a trailblazer. A genius. A Black man who was actively trying to be different, a breath of fresh air in a stagnant industry—an Andre 3k throwback.

When I started rapping at 12 the first thing I did was try to remake “I’ll Be In The Sky” myself, exchanging words and phrases so that B.o.B’s story would be mine as well.

As my Hip-Hop tastes evolved, so too did my ideas of Blackness. And as my perceptions of what Black people could be expanded, like our universe did when the Creator big-banged us into existence, I began to fathom that I might have permission to be different, too.

But I was still isolated. Marooned in a sea of Whiteness. I still had to contend daily with how Whiteness policed my body and behavior. At the end of the day, for survival’s sake, I could only be as “Black” as Whiteness and my adoptive family permitted me—and their permission was filtered through their own (mis)understandings of what Blackness might be.

I was told the reason there is a higher percentage of Black people in prison than white people is because Black people are a more criminal race.

How can a Black body that is both womb and cocoon birth and metamorphosize a self that is not criminally malformed when it is laden with expectations like that?

I was pimping myself before I ever heard of Kendrick Lamar. Tryna figure out how to sell myself to a people who were in the market for a pre-prescribed Blackness that was self-destructive. And as a transracial adoptee raised in racial isolation, this pimping was a survival skill, and a violence inflicted on myself.matthew charles is the host of little did u know, a podcast that centers the lived experiences—the learned and inherited wisdom—of transracial adoptees. He is also a poet, and his debut poetry collection, You Can Not Burn The Sun (2020), is sold out, so you can’t buy a copy. But you can eagerly anticipate book2. And you should definitely listen to his podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @CantBurnTheSun or Instagram @matthewcharlespoet.Severance Magazine 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, @matthewcharlespoet

By A.D. HerzelThe 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: @pseudopompousBEFORE YOU GO…

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