Overseas adoptees: Seeking their birth parents

 This article is an AP story from a Japanese Newspaper about children adopted from Korea who now are adults and seeking their birth parents. 

These adoptees are among the 200,000 sent from South Korea to Western nations as children. Many have grown up, searched for their origin story and discovered that their adoption paperwork was inaccurate or fabricated. They have only breadcrumbs to go on: grainy baby photos, names of orphanages and adoption agencies, the towns where they were said to have been abandoned. They don’t speak the language. They’re unfamiliar with the culture. Some never learn their truth.“I want my mother to know I’m OK and that her sacrifice was not in vain,” says Kenneth Barthel, adopted in 1979 at 6 years old to Hawaii....

This is a common theme in K dramas, by the way, but very few US movies or films discuss it properly: often the story is happy happy shiny fantasy, and some are horror movies (the myth of the Bad Seed, i.e. the evil parents legacy to the child)..

In the US, adoptions are common: In my family it includes several cousins, mostly in country adoption but also, like my sons, older children from South America.

My sons were two of a family of six siblings whose parents died, and they remember their parents. I got two of the older boys. Their uncle abused them, so his wife arranged for her friend to take them to the orphanage and say she knew their parents had died and that they had no family. Luckily the uncle didn't bother to answer the ads looking for their family, nor did their siblings, at least one of whom was adopted in the same city and old enough to read the paper. The younger ones were taken in by friends or family: the youngest, a baby, was lost, but last year his cousin discovered the family living in Cali, about 100 miles from their town, so my son flew down to meet her. He also searched genetic databses and found a cousin, born blind, who had been adopted by a family in Minnesota, and met her also.

In the USA, it is almost impossible to adopt a baby: Most are kept by mom ,or aborted. Most of these children, if mom can't care for them ,are cared for by the grandparents until Mom is old enough to care for him or her, or if she descends into drug addiction, often the family will rescue the child who ends up being raised by grandparents or other family members.

Alas this means that often mom is an addict, and it takes years to legally free the child to be adopted, and by then, often the child has scars and attachment problems.

The rule that says to try to place children with parents of the same race. This is good, since after the TV show Different Strokes, there was a lot of upper class white people who wanted a black child, often to show they were liberal. American Indians have the same problem: And then the child, just like adopting older children from overseas, has to adjust to a different culture.