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In March 2023, I met a delegation from the Swedish government at my office. They were an investigation committee on inter-country adoption abuses, and we had met a year earlier in Europe for an intensive consultation shortly after they began their work.
In March 2023, I met a delegation from the Swedish government at my office. They were an investigation committee on inter-country adoption abuses, and we had met a year earlier in Europe for an intensive consultation shortly after they began their work.
What everyone has been led to believe about international adoption is fundamentally wrong. On the surface, my life followed the Korean adoption script as it was written. I had an adoptive family, health and an identity in the United States thanks to benevolent intervention that saved me from a fate that was certain to be worse.
In an interview with poet and translator Don Mee Choi, Korean poet Kim Hye-soon spoke about the language of death. Feminine writing, she says, unlike masculine language, “begins from a place of emptiness/nothingness, a place that’s full with the presence of absence.”
My research focuses on the movement of children across borders, specifically migration matters related to intercountry adoption laws and policies. During my exploration of these issues, a question that has always lingered in the depths of my mind is whether Korea can ever reckon with its history of sending over 200,000 children overseas for adoption and confront its legacy of children's rights violations.