Transracial adoption is not the 'fairytale' ending many believe it to be

As I turned 6 years old, my parents let me have a birthday party and I invited a few of my kindergarten friends. Sitting at my family dining table, eagerly munching on freshly baked frozen pizza, a girl named Jackie asked my mom if I was adopted. "Yep," my mother replied. "From an agency?" the inquisitive child asked. "Yes," my mom replied. I sat in utter confusion.

Later, I asked my mom what Jackie meant. My mother told me that she and my dad had an agency bring me to the airport in St. Paul, Minnesota in the United States from Seoul, South Korea, for them. At such a young age, I didn't notice my physical differences from my parents and their two birth children, a boy and a girl. The contrast suddenly slapped me in the face.

Fast-forward more than 40 years and reflecting on not just my youth but also my adulthood, I realize that many people have such positive views on adoption, particularly transracial adoption where an orphan from another country and race is sent overseas, typically to a Caucasian family.

"You're better off than if you hadn't been adopted"; "Your parents are so generous"; "You're lucky you were adopted, be grateful" — are a small sample of the comments I've heard throughout my life.

I recently traveled to Seoul to learn more about how I became orphaned in what is now a thriving country. A police officer told me, when I was submitting my DNA in effort to search for any blood relatives, that following the Korean War (1950-53), many families were separated between the North and South. In addition, many Japanese and US soldiers impregnated thousands of Korean girls and women. Biracial children were a stigma. The mother and baby were treated poorly in their villages, leading to children being abandoned or relinquished. The country suffered deeply from poverty and had to rebuild.

In 1958, Harry Holt took eight biracial children from South Korea back to his home in Oregon and established a Christian international adoption agency. Over a few decades, demand to adopt Korean orphans outweighed supply and a lot of corruption took place. Mothers were manipulated into relinquishing their children, documents destroyed, babies brought to orphanages and police stations without anyone doing due diligence to find out if these children were truly abandoned as money exchanged hands between brokers, agencies and adoptive parents.

South Korean media, such as the Korea Times and Korea Herald, have published many articles exposing the mishandling of overseas adoptions and the call from adoptees demanding an apology from the government for allowing this corruption.

Birth registration is now mandatory in South Korea to prevent illegal activities in the adoption process.

It isn't just the corruption that transracial adoptees must come to grips with. Psychology journals report that children adopted into families of different races and cultures suffer from mental health challenges related to identity. According to adoptionmatters.org, meeting a child's ethnicity and identity needs is essential to a child's development and promotes the ability to develop secure and healthy relationships. However, many transracial adoptees are forced to assimilate and erase their heritage to "fit in" to Caucasian communities.

Many transracial adoptees are victims of "white savior complex", a real medical term given to people with the ideology that white people act upon feelings of superiority to "rescue" a person of color, which perpetuates white supremacy and inequality.

Most transracial adoptees also endure childhood bullying not only by their classmates, but family members, too. Being called racial slurs while kids pull their eyes back, receiving death threats due to stereotypes or being sexually objectified because of representations in movies or TV shows are all detrimental to feeling safe and loved — two major aspects that contribute to a child's self-worth, security and confidence.

Not all adoptees are "lucky "either. In online Korean adoptee groups, there are many stories of abuse or neglect by adoptive parents. Gaslighting is also a common theme, as adoptive families minimize their transracial adoptee's experiences or ignore them completely.

It took over 40 years to understand the hole in my soul and realize that adoptees require grieving, to understand how we came to be orphans, and to be seen and heard. Most don't know what it's like to never have met a single person they share DNA with. People don't think about how a birth date, a big part of one's identity, can have an impact because theirs will not and cannot change. My birth date is approximate and was chosen after I was found on a public road in 1976.

Education builds empathy and I hope to provide more knowledge to those who believe adoption for children is a fairytale. As I continue my search for my birth family, I learn more about myself and the myths that come with being adopted overseas. Am I lucky? In many ways, yes. But being adopted isn't a factor when it comes to luck.

Contact the writer at schroeder@chinadaily.com.cn