Listen to Adoptees: The Trauma of Transnational + Transracial Adoption
I am a transracial, transnational adoptee from Korea. I have come to be generally against this kind of adoption. I am not alone. Many of us in the TRA+TNA community have first hand experience with all sorts of white adoptive parents, from explicitly racist and abusive white parents to the adoring, loving parents who are doing the hard work to parenting children from outside their race and nationality. We are not a monolith, yet despite our differences and diversity, many of us are against TRA+TNA adoption as a system.
Make no mistake: this is a very complicated issue, and many people have strong, emotional opinions about this topic, arguing as advocates for the good, loving white adoptive parents they know, about how TRA+TNA kids would’ve starved (lived in abject poverty, etc.), about how lucky we are or how adoptees should be thankful they grew up with such loving families or in the U.S.
Okay, yeah, we get that. We know the lines. We’ve heard them our whole lives. We know, we know. We KNOW.
But please consider the bigger picture. There is a despicable system of oppression at work that has produced the Adoption Industrial Complex. This system is rotten at it’s very foundation, and it is built on the legacy of removing children from their families and cultures of origin to be put into white families. Even without this history, most of us have been raised in predominantly white communities, which, on its own, is problematic, at best, but more likely, highly traumatic.
If you know anything about the actual history of racism and oppression the United States, the foundations of this system of adoption should be obvious if you just take a moment to think about it. At it’s core, it is legal family separation based on race and colonization. Its beginnings are in a violent history connected to chattel slavery and “Indian” reeducation. Have you heard about the “Indian Adoption Project?”
For those of us who come from other countries, on a system-level, we are here for awful reasons of patriarchy, poverty, colonialism. In Korea, the country of origin I know most about, many adoptees were given up because their families were starving. Many birth parents had in-tact families, with other children, and They. Were. Starving. They didn’t feel like they had other options. They had to consider the question: Which child would die? How could they provide their children the best lives they could when they had little to no choices? Many were essentially tricked or manipulated into giving up their children. In desperation, they signed away their rights, not fully understanding what they were doing, and then, it was too late.
Many of Asian adoptees were adopted because white parents in the U.S. didn’t want Black children. They wanted “clean slate” babies with proximity to whiteness, who would not, as they feared from their racism, come from poor Black families with “drug problems.” Or as my adoptive mother says, they were not allowed to adopt Black babies in some locations (because the Black community fought to keep their children in their communities because they understood the racial history of family separation and the racial trauma the child would endure in white communities). International adoptions ensured that parents wouldn’t be able to access their children, if they changed their minds.
The Adoption Industrial Complex is a system that is inherently infused with white saviorism, the fallacy of colorblindness, capitalism, and white entitlement. In the past, TRA+TNA adoption was inexpensive, funded by missionaries and religious groups, who believed they were saving these children (and again, the complexity: in some cases, they were.). My own adoption into my working-class family was inexpensive.
Now, however, that’s not the case. For example, to adopt babies from Haiti, according to the Holt International website, can cost up to $60K. (Watching the Amy Coney Barrett’s hearing and following all the media lines about her TRA+TNA children was painful for so many of us.) The networks of companies and organizations that funnel money to each other, lobby for policy, hamper local child welfare systems is mind-bogglingly enormous and complicated: the individual agencies, government agencies, legal consultants, social workers, the foster system, the orphanages, the food systems and welfare programs, the travel industry around visitations, etc. This takes billions of dollars.
Billions.
To approach this from a charity/savior perspective, think of how much good this money could do in these countries of origin, for families to keep their children, or for children to, at least, be adopted into homes in their countries of origin, within their own cultures, with people who look like them, in circumstances where they won’t be bullied or feel like outsiders simply for the way they look, where they can be connected to the legacies of their family lines, know who they take after, where they come from.
If you’re feeling defensive, okay. That’s expected. But like with any form of racism, I ask you to look at the system, not at the individuals.
I know amazing, good people who have adopted children from other countries and races who are doing their damned best, and it moves me to my core. They are people I consider as friends. They are devoted to racial justice. They are loving, devoted, doting parents who are doing everything available to them to parent with love and responsibility. And on an individual basis, I have happiness for their children that they have such great parents. But, again, it’s more complicated than that.
We’re in a period of history when we’re learning a lot. TRA+TNAs are a social experiment. Especially Korean adoptees, the over 200,000 of us who were trafficked out of our home country, largely started being shipped to the U.S. in the late 1950s, with the numbers increasing into the 60, 70s, and 80s. We, who were once cute, sweet, silent and grateful (and totally traumatized) adoptees have grown up. We’ve come out of the fog. As adults, we’re realizing that many of our troubles in life come from the unrecognized, and actively denied, trauma we experience because of our adoptions. The social experiment of TRA+TNA adoption has not worked out for many of us. We have high levels of mental illness, like depression, and our suicide rates, according to one study, were showed to be around 4 times higher than our non-adopted peers.
White parents don’t know what they’re getting into. How could they? They are sold these magical narratives with the happiest of endings. Many, especially from my generation of adoption, are entirely unprepared for what is to come when their adopted children grow up into adulthood. Many adoptive parents live in deep denial and become angrily defensive about their children. Even those who start to understand our trauma often make the experience about themselves and their white guilt. Many adoptees don’t ever communicate our pain with our adoptive parents. We hide a huge part of ourselves from them, one of the most important parts, and in this dynamic, we certainly do not have “normal” families, no matter how much we all want this.
Though it’s very often largely the adoptive parents’ fault, sometimes, it’s not. Our cultural training, what adoptees learn along the way, is silence and required gratitude. We’re gaslit by everyone, from our families to the media, and being anything but grateful incites painful guilt that we hide behind smiles and performativity — even sometimes well into our adulthood. (Many adoptees don’t start a birth parent search until their adoptive parents have passed away.)
Many of us — adoptees, white adoptive parents, social workers, etc. — are trapped in the painful complications of a system in which there is no out. Racially aware and socially just white adoptive parents are now learning of the other side of adoption, the part that they don’t put in the pamphlets or on the websites or in the cute TV shows. And they’re doing their best to mitigate the pain.
And so many of us are trapped. I can’t go back to Korea. I can’t access my birth family, or even imagine a normal life in Korea. The struggle to reclaim my culture of origin — all by myself without family mentorship and connection — is intense. White adoptive parents can’t just send their children back; they are their children. None of this is to deny the reality of loving relationships. None of this is to say pure love and goodness isn’t also infused in our relationships to our white families, or that they’re not actually our families.
But all of this is to point out that transnational, transracial adoption is inherently traumatic. It’s inherently built on an inescapable history of racial, colonial, economic, and often gendered violence.
Personally, I have lived a very good life in the U.S., despite everything. I was loved, and I was also traumatized. As my dear friend, also a Korean adoptee, reminds me: Things can be both, and.
My Korean adoptee community and I make do. Our lives are not necessarily worse than our non-adopted peers, nor better than they could have been had we not been adopted, because, in reality, how would one measure?
Our lives are just our lives, as they are.
Though there is a long road to get there, we should start working toward abolition.
