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Families with Children From China, Northern California
 

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The KAAN Conference: Connections, Growth, and Gardeners 
by Allison Branscombe 

©Allison Branscombe 2001

So, you are almost 3 years old. You are secure in your home. Your big problem this morning is cutting molars. But in the afternoon, your mother walks away from you. Life becomes a blur in a place with other children. Then two tall white giants walk in, smile, give you a cuddle, pat you on the head, put you on a plane, and take you to another country. Then they hand you off to more tall white people, and you drive away in a car. The family, friends, and familiar home you wanted to go back to when you were in the blurry place don't come back for you. Everything is gone. Everything is new. Everything smells strange. 

Where you arrive, the place is teeming with people who want to be your friends, talk incessantly, but don't speak your language, and act as if you should be able to understand them because they are nice. They offer you foods you have never seen before; you are hungry, but your stomach is upset. You have a toothache, a headache, and a heartache. They call you a name you don't answer to. You try to tell them you just want to go home. No one understands you, but they smile knowingly, pat you on the head, and hand you off to the next person who wants to see the really adorable child from the other hemisphere. 

Everyone wants to touch your hair, stroke your cheek, make eye contact, teach you their language, and help you learn to love their strange food. There is a cacophony of unfamiliar sounds from people talking all day at you. Then they want you to stop crying and sleep on a strange bed. You can't stay awake, but you are too tired and confused to fall asleep. Why did this happen to you? Why didn't your mother warn you? How do you know the big white people won't hand you off to someone else tomorrow? You don't know. You worry about it every day, actually, for years, but it doesn't happen. 

You grow up. You think you are white too. You have been told you are an American, and who is to challenge that? Then one day, you look in the mirror and you realize that you are not white. You realize you are the only one around you that looks the way you do. Oh, well. Then you find out that people who look like you speak differently, have different customs, eat different food, and act in different ways. You try to figure out where you belong. But you have no tools, no life history, no conscience of what you have missed, and what you might have been, except that it's not American. You try to figure out if you should want to be different from what you are, but you are not sure what you want to be, or who you want to be. You have no inner sense of pride in self. You have a vague sense of shame, because they sent you so far away from your home, your family could not find you, even if they wanted you back (which you fantasized about). You are-who? Who were you also known as? You have always heard that you must know where you have been to know where you are going. So where does that leave you? 

This is a composite of stories I heard in July 1999, when I attended the first national conference of the Korean American Adoptee/Adoptive Family Network (KAAN), subtitled: "A Tapestry of Voices and Energies Raised in Unity." I am left with a blur of memories and emotions about 50 years of Korean adoptions. Adult adoptees, adoptive parents and their kids and teens, Korean government officials reaching out to their sons and daughters, Korean birth parents brought over to tell their story, and adoption specialists all gathered together. 

What made the strongest impression on me was the struggle the adult adoptees spoke of to find an identity that was comfortable to them. Synthesizing their life's experiences, transforming from their trauma of adoption through to the acceptance of their self-worth is, sadly, a very common, very tough job for most of these adult adoptees. In the early years of Korean adoptions, there were no tools for their parents, no studies, no conventional wisdom about the need to recognize and value a child's birth culture or share experiences with other Korean adoptees. Many seemed to have had lonely, lonely struggles as the Korean child of European American parents in all-white, or nearly all-white, communities. The issues were around not knowing how to deal with racism, not understanding how to process the concept of their adoption, feeling a stranger to their Korean-ness, feeling isolated and unlike anyone else in the world, but still thinking of themselves as white. 

Ironically, at times, I felt a bit like an eavesdropper. I am not an adoptee, particularly a transracial, transcultural adoptee, and my parents are alive and well. I am not Asian; I am European American. I am not the parent of a grown child/adoptee who has struggled through the teen years; I am the parent of a kindergartner and a preschooler. I have not walked in the shoes of the conferees. 

I was there to learn, to listen, and to find out what I could do to help my children. And to share with others. I sensed angst, displacement, and camaraderie among the adult adoptees. They shared stories of successful and unsuccessful searches for their birth parents. One woman in her late twenties, early thirties and appearing to be of both Asian and African American descent sobbed as she asked the panel of Korean birthmothers, "Why, why did you feel you had no choice [but to place us for adoption]?" She asked the most important question on the minds of adoptees in closed adoptions. Many adult adoptees had never met with more than a few other adoptees before. Being around 100-150 other Korean adoptees just like them was a life-changing, mind-boggling experience. 

One woman spoke of traveling to her homeland and handing out a business-card-sized explanation of her situation, printed in Korean and English, which she shared with the conferees. It explained that she had been born in Korea and adopted by people in the U.S. as an infant. Her card warns that even though she looks Korean, do not expect her to act and speak like a Korean. And do not think less of her, because she had no say in the choices that redirected her life. She was in her homeland to learn about her roots, but had nothing in common with what she was finding. 

The most reassuring part of the conference was watching the kids on the teen panels. They had come from different communities, mostly urban, and were there to share their experiences in being in Korean culture and adoptee support groups. There was a nationally prominent Korean drumming group, called the Hanulsori Kids. There were teens that had attended culture camps such as Camp Sejong, teens who talked about monthly get-togethers around a social event, such as movies or bowling, with an adoption educator present to help discuss hard topics, someone who could do reflective listening, watch, guide, intervene, and facilitate. There was discussion of the Friends of Korea Family Exchange Program, where Korean adoptees live with a family in Korea for two weeks and then host a Korean teen here in America. There was a presentation from Dr. Eun Mi Cho, of the Korean Language and Culture School here in Sacramento, which is a great example of what many of our Mandarin/cultural playgroups are moving towards. People were there because they understood that connections to their children's birth culture need to begin in the preschool years, then gain strength through the middle grades and junior and senior high school years, not peter out. The playgroups we have begun are only the foundation for more building blocks. Deborah Johnson, a Korean-born adult adoptee and adoption educator, talked about parents as florists, not gardeners: our job is not to cut beautiful flowers and arrange them in a vase, but to nurture our transplanted children and help them put down roots, blossom, and flourish in their community. 

Our job is to help our children foster a positive sense of self, carved from what is possible and reasonable. Our children will never be the person they would have been had they stayed in their birth countries. They will be a blend of the gifts from their birth parents and from us, the adoptive parents, from the friends they choose, the schools they attend, and the experiences that shape their in-born and acquired spirits. We will never be able to give them all the answers they seek to the questions of their life. They will always have a dual identity. Our job is to make them comfortable in their own skin. 

Allison Branscombe is the mother of two children adopted from China.

Amy Klatzkin, who attended the conference with Allison, adds: I was surprised to learn how isolated Korean adoptees are from their nonadopted Korean American peers. So far our China-born adoptees have not been so excluded. All the groups and culture classes discussed at the conference were set aside for adoptees; there were no examples of Korean adoptees studying Korean language and culture side by side with Korean American children born into their families. I was told that such integration was "impossible." But it is not impossible for our Chinese children, not even for those with two white parents. Although it is sometimes challenging for non-Chinese parents to take part in Chinese community activities when we don't necessarily know the codes of behavior and may feel awkward standing out in the crowd, it strikes me as vastly better for our children to learn Chinese language and culture together with their nonadopted peers than in segregated classes just for adoptees (or, as friends in Boston have experienced, classes set aside for adoptees and "half-Chinese"). We are fortunate that the community here does not force segregation on us; it's a gift we should not take for granted. And it's good for us non-Asian parents to experience being in the minority for a change. After all, that's how it is for our children at every family gathering.