The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (51 page)

His search was not unique. According to one tally, adoptees submitted 76,000 requests for birth family searches between 1995 and 2005 alone. And more than thirty-six-thousand adoptees and their adoptive family members have come on trips like the “homeland tour” Trenka attended. But when most adoptees managed to reunite with their birthparents or met pregnant Korean women in unwed maternity homes on agency-sponsored tours, they were effectively left speechless, staring at their family or their countrywomen across the chasm of a language barrier.

In the late 1990s and 2000s that began to change, as groups of adoptees began to organize on their own, forming several groups, including Global Oversees Adoptees’ Link (G.O.A.’L), which helps adoptees track down their birth families; and Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK), which advocated against international adoption and for single mothers’ rights. In 2006 some of the birthmothers who had been reunited with their children through G.O.A.’L’s work formed their own organization, Dandelions: Adoptees’ Families of Origin, to advocate against international adoption. In 2004 Reverend Kim Do-Hyun became manager of another organization, KoRoot, which runs a guest house to help adoptees visit Korea, and politicized its mission, urging adoptees to consider the plight of single mothers and to cast single mothers’ rights as a matter of social justice and spiritual solidarity. And in 2007 TRACK was founded to establish a truth and reconciliation commission to look at adoptions and to highlight the issue of illegal and corrupt adoptions with the government; soon it also joined ASK to work toward unwed mothers’ rights.

This network of overlapping groups helped lay the groundwork for some adoptees to make Korea a more permanent home. By 2012 rough estimates held that there were several hundred adoptee expatriates living in Korea again, forming a tight community in which activism blossomed.

As Kim Stoker, the representative of ASK and a professor at Duksung Women’s University in Seoul explains, adoptees who returned began to connect the dots from their own isolated experiences into a more global critique of adoption in Korea. They began to see it as something operating in a system of racial, gender, and class inequalities combined with religious drives. “Nobody comes to get involved in advocacy,” said Trenka. “But they may get involved later after they’ve spent a lot of time sharing stories with other adoptees.”

To grapple with the stark language barrier that left adoptees as outsiders in Korean culture, some adoptees started teaching English classes, sometimes to birthparents seeking to communicate with their lost children and sometimes to unwed mothers who wanted to know more about adoptees’ stories than the sanitized stories they heard at maternity homes. Some less overtly political adoptee groups provided translation services that helped establish a link between adoptees and unwed mothers—single women who, for many adoptees, were coming to symbolize what their own mothers might have endured.

In 2007 members of Dandelions demonstrated during one of The Gathering’s meetings: a group of 80 mothers and their supporters held signs in a subway near the conference hotel that read, “Raising our children with our own hands,” while adoptees wore bandanas in solidarity. The loose web of adoptee and mothers’ groups had become a movement.

ASK then began offering another kind of trip to unwed mothers’ homes like Ae Ran Won. Instead of the “zoological” tour that Trenka had gone on years before, ASK brought in groups of adult adoptees for translated discussions about what each groups’ experience had been. “Here were all these young women, pregnant, and having to decide if they’re going to keep their kids or not,” recalled ASK’s Stoker. (Stoker was adopted privately, not through an orphanage or agency, and so belongs to the tens of thousands of undocumented adoptions that took place in addition to official government tallies.) “Some have all these fantasies about what would happen to their kid if their kid got adopted to America. We were maybe the same age as they were, and we got to share our stories and say, ‘Actually, this is what my life was like, and I’m back here in Korea now. I’m looking for my mom, and I can’t find her.’”

The resonances were strong for adoptees, even if their own personal histories didn’t exactly resemble the circumstances of unwed mothers today. “Adoptees were being asked to support these women as kind of the generic birth mother who has suffered and might even stand in for their own birth mothers,” remembered Eleana Kim, who documented the early history of the coalition in her book
Adopted Territory.

At one meeting of coalition members, recalls Trenka, an unwed mother who had nearly relinquished her child to adoption went around to every adoptee in the room, apologizing for almost making her child an adoptee like them. “She was crying, and there’s this certain hand-rubbing thing that Koreans do when they’re really sorry, and she was just apologizing and rocking back and forth,” remembers Trenka. “It was terrible.
But there’s definitely this feeling among the adoptees, that this could be my mother. And among the unwed mothers, that this could be my child.”

What to some seemed an unlikely coalition—of adoptees, birth mothers, and unwed mothers, coming together across generational lines and language barriers—struck the activists as the natural result of the Korean adoption system. Slowly, in time, wrote Trenka, “An environment started to grow where single mothers also were able to become activists.”

IN 2009 CHOI
and three other mothers, including one she had met at the unwed mothers’ home Ae Ran Won, began an online Internet forum for unwed mothers called Miss Mama Mia. The simple message driving their early activism was radical in its way: demanding that Korean society acknowledge its hypocritical approach to sex in a modern society—looking the other way at premarital sex but condemning those whose lives proved its existence, through unmarried pregnancies or childbirths. The fact that there was proof Choi and her colleagues had had sex out of wedlock didn’t make them immoral women, they insisted; they were just women who wanted to keep their kids after doing the same thing everyone else had done. On the group’s Korean-language website a banner reads, “We have not chosen to be a social minority, but to raise our children.”

Choi’s group isn’t the only single mothers’ group in Korea, though it is the only one run by unwed mothers themselves. They were preceded in 2007 by an ally group named Korean Unwed Mothers’ Support Network (KUMSN), started by a US adoptive father from Connecticut, Dr. Richard Boas. He was inspired to action after accompanying his Korean daughter on her own “homeland tour” and meeting a group of pregnant women at a maternity home, every one of whom was planning to relinquish her child for adoption. Boas imagined his adopted daughter’s mother in their places and realized that the adoption that had completed his family had been a zero-sum game. “Our family’s gain was truly this woman’s loss—forever,” he wrote. “I began to understand why I, like others, had found it difficult to be aware of the reality of unwed mothers. . . . Once you ‘get’ this, it changes you forever.”

KUMSN also reached out to allies from outside the Korean adoption community, including birthmothers organizing in other countries. Among them was Evelyn Robinson, a “first mother” activist in Australia who helped lead the campaign that forced nearly all of Australia’s provincial governments to apologize for “forced adoptions” during Australia’s own Baby Scoop Era and who has become an ally to South Korea’s adoption reform
community. In 2011 Robinson came to South Korea to meet with KUMSN, TRACK, and KoRoot as well as to help bolster the call for unwed mothers’ movements advocating for themselves. “Adoption has always been largely a women’s issue and has been linked to the status of unmarried women in society,” Robinson wrote after her South Korea trip. “In countries like Australia we take these freedoms largely for granted nowadays, but they only came about because women were prepared to fight for change.”

In 2010, Miss Mama Mia became the Korean Unwed Mothers’ Family Association or KUMFA, for which Choi served as planning and publicity manager. Today they work first to try to bring unwed mothers—mostly women in their late twenties and thirties—out of the closet. This is no easy task, considering that when they started their work several years ago even other classes of single mothers, like divorcees, shunned unwed mothers. KUMFA also hosts joint family holidays for unwed mothers and their children, as many of the women have been disowned by their parents and have no place to go for celebrations that most Koreans spend with family. They also provide emergency support to mothers facing pressure to relinquish.

One such mother was Suzie, a thirty-year-old single mother to a three-year-old daughter who requested I not use her real name because she is not yet one of KUMFA’s “public moms.” After a birth control failure with a boyfriend left Suzie pregnant, she broke up with him out of fear that he would pressure her to abort. When coworkers at her office began to suspect her weight gain was really pregnancy, she went to an agency-run maternity home, where nearly all of her fellow residents relinquished. Although she had first planned to raise her child, after several months of counseling sessions (and mandatory six a.m. daily worship services), she said she would consider adoption. Her file was then transferred to the inhouse agency offices.

She hadn’t realized how painful relinquishing her child would be until after she had done it. She visited her child in foster care once a month every month for the half a year she stayed at the maternity home, trying to get back on her feet. At each visit she tried to gather her courage to say she had changed her mind, but she always lost her nerve. Instead, she looked online and found KUMFA. She read about other women who had challenged their children’s adoptions, and then she asked for advice: “I gave my child for adoption and now I want her back,” she wrote. KUMFA members responded with information about her legal rights.

Shortly after she went online the agency called her to say her daughter was being adopted and she could see her one last time. But when Suzie
arrived at the agency offices, she instead was greeted by a social worker with a tape recorder, who scolded her for posting questions online and said she would record their conversation in case it was needed for legal proceedings. When Suzie asked to take her daughter back, the social worker said she had to wait a week and ask again. When Suzie returned, a supervisor came instead of her daughter, badgering her with pictures of the adoptive family, emphasizing how much better off her daughter would be. When Suzie didn’t back down, they forced her to write a letter of apology to the family as a last means of discouragement. But after she wrote it they allowed her to take her daughter home, for the first time in nearly eight months, to an attic apartment with an understanding landlady. Although people in the neighborhood sometimes glare and keep their distance, Suzie has found a part-time job and said that one day she will come out publicly as a single mom.

It’s a sign that some things have begun to change. A 2009 survey co-conducted by KUMSN on issues facing unwed mothers found that unwed mothers’ self-advocacy had increased “tremendously” since 1984 and that more women are trying to keep their children in spite of how hard it can prove merely to support themselves and their child. In 1991, according to Ministry of Health figures, 472 single women officially kept their babies; the number rose to 2,464 in 2007 and likely higher still in the years since 2008, when women were finally allowed to register their children’s births themselves.

Other changes are in the air. KUMFA’s Choi has begun conducting education exercises for civil servants in public offices that interact with single moms, hoping to change the hostile government attitudes that many unwed mothers have encountered. And two homes for unwed mothers, out of the country’s thirty-six, have shifted their focus from adoption to helping support women who want to raise their children. In one of the homes, the percentage of mothers who keep their babies when given some help is 82 percent. (It wasn’t all positive though: in late 2012, rumors circulated that the government might cut its already negligible support for single parents.)

The coalition of single mothers, adoptees, and birthmothers has also taken aim at the larger culture of stigma in South Korea. When Trenka became president of TRACK, the group began incorporating some of the political theater and activism traditions she was familiar with from Minnesota. On South Korea’s May 11 “Adoption Day” in 2009, TRACK commissioned a Korean artist to create two enormous puppets, one a bride and one an unwed mother who lost her child to an adoption, and the two figures soared overhead as TRACK members held picket signs calling for
“Real choices for Korean women and children.” Two years later, on the 2011 Adoption Day, the coalition held a counter-ceremony: South Korea’s first Single Mother’s Day, marked with an array of donated birthday cakes to celebrate the children of unwed mothers, so long considered shameful. At the end of 2011 KUMSN launched a postcard campaign, with cards featuring cartoon children, in the care of their unwed mothers, declaring, “I am not an orphan!”

The coalition’s biggest victory came in 2012 after years of organization and work. Four years earlier, in 2008, TRACK and its coalition partners had filed a complaint about irregular or corrupt adoptions with the government’s ombudsman, and succeeded in getting the cases recognized on the official record for the first time. After the complaint was lodged with the ombudsman, the documentation of corruption eventually became part of discussions to review the country’s Special Adoption Law, the 1961 legislation that had first set the parameters for the country’s international adoption program. Reforming the law became TRACK’s most important goal, and it partnered with KUMFA, KoRoot, ASK, and Dandelions as well as a public interest lawyers’ association to begin the slow push for reform.

With the support of a sympathetic representative from the national assembly, Choi Young-Hee, and strategic organizing advice from Korean American activists, the coalition called for revisions to the bill and, incredibly, fought to have members of their coalition—including adult adoptees who weren’t citizens of South Korea—become part of the group drafting reforms to the law. They succeeded, and with the rare input of the people most affected by adoption, they suggested reforms focused on a number of serious recurring problems in Korean adoptions: unclear relinquishments, adoptions that proceeded from kidnappings by family members or orphanage staff, misrepresentation of children’s adoption history, and contradictions in adoptees’ records that suggested further fraud. They took their struggle through public hearings at the Ministry of Health and argued for it in the public square. The bill was introduced to the National Assembly on Adoption Day in 2010. It passed in 2011, and was to be implemented in 2012.