Donaldson Institute Study Details Struggles of Korean Adoptees - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By RON NIXON

As a child, Kim Eun Mi Young hated being different.

When her father brought home toys, a record and a picture book on South Korea, the country from which she was adopted in 1961, she ignored them.

Growing up in Georgia, Kansas and Hawaii, in a military family, she would date only white teenagers, even when Asian boys were around.

“At no time did I consider myself anything other than white,” said Ms. Young, 48, who lives in San Antonio. “I had no sense of any identity as a Korean woman. Dating an Asian man would have forced me to accept who I was.”

It was not until she was in her 30s that she began to explore her Korean heritage. One night, after going out to celebrate with her husband at the time, she says she broke down and began crying uncontrollably.

“I remember sitting there thinking, where is my mother? Why did she leave me? Why couldn’t she struggle to keep me?” she said. “That was the beginning of my journey to find out who I am.”

The experiences of Ms. Young are common among adopted children from Korea, according to one of the largest studies of transracial adoptions, which is to be released on Monday. The report, which focuses on the first generation of children adopted from South Korea, found that 78 percent of those who responded had considered themselves to be white or had wanted to be white when they were children. Sixty percent indicated their racial identity had become important by the time they were in middle school, and, as adults, nearly 61 percent said they had traveled to Korea both to learn more about the culture and to find their birth parents.

Like Ms. Young, most Korean adoptees were raised in predominantly white neighborhoods and saw few, if any, people who looked like them. The report also found that the children were teased and experienced racial discrimination, often from teachers. And only a minority of the respondents said they felt welcomed by members of their own ethnic group.

As a result, many of them have had trouble coming to terms with their racial and ethnic identities.

The report was issued by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a nonprofit adoption research and policy group based in New York. Since 1953, parents in the United States have adopted more than a half-million children from other countries, the vast majority of them from orphanages in Asia, South America and, most recently, Africa. Yet the impact of such adoptions on identity has been only sporadically studied. The authors of the Donaldson Adoption Institute study said they hoped their work would guide policymakers, parents and adoption agencies in helping the current generation of children adopted from Asian countries to form healthy identities.

“So much of the research on transracial adoption has been done from the perspective of adoptive parents or adolescent children,” said Adam Pertman, executive director of the institute. “We wanted to be able to draw on the knowledge and life experience of a group of individuals who can provide insight into what we need to do better.”

The study recommends several changes in adoption practices that the institute said are important, including better support for adoptive parents and recognition that adoption grows in significance for their children from young adulthood on, and throughout adulthood.

South Korea was the first country from which Americans adopted in significant numbers. From 1953 to 2007, an estimated 160,000 South Korean children were adopted by people from other countries, most of them in the United States. They make up the largest group of transracial adoptees in the United States and, by some estimates, are 10 percent of the nation’s Korean population.

The report says that significant changes have occurred since the first generation of adopted children were brought to the United States, a time when parents were told to assimilate the children into their families without regard for their native culture.

Yet even adoptees who are exposed to their culture and have parents who discuss issues of race and discrimination say they found it difficult growing up.

Heidi Weitzman, who was adopted from Korea when she was 7 months old and who grew up in ethnically mixed neighborhoods in St. Paul, said her parents were in touch with other parents with Korean children and even offered to send her to a “culture camp” where she could learn about her heritage.

“But I hated it,” said Ms. Weitzman, a mental health therapist in St. Paul. “I didn’t want to do anything that made me stand out as being Korean. Being surrounded by people who were blonds and brunets, I just thought that I was white.” It was not until she moved to New York after college that she began to become comfortable with being Korean.

“I was 21 before I could look in the mirror and not be surprised by what I saw staring back at me,” she said. “The process of discovering who I am has been a long process, and I’m still on it.”

Ms. Weitzman’s road to self-discovery was fairly typical of the 179 Korean adoptees with two Caucasian parents who responded to the Donaldson Adoption Institute survey. Most said they began to think of themselves more as Korean when they attended college or moved to ethnically diverse neighborhoods as adults.

For Joel Ballantyne, a high school teacher in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who was adopted by white parents in 1977, the study confirms many of the feelings that he and other adoptees have tried to explain for years.

“This offers proof that we’re not crazy or just being ungrateful to our adoptive parents when we talk about our experiences,” said Mr. Ballantyne, 35, who was adopted at age 3 and who grew up in Alabama, Texas and, finally, California.

Jennifer Town, 33, agreed.

“A lot of adoptees have problems talking about these issues with their adoptive families,” she said. “They take it as some kind of rejection of them when we’re just trying to figure out who we are.”

Ms. Towns, who was adopted in 1979 and raised in a small town in Minnesota, recalled that during college, when she announced that she was going to Korea to find out more about her past, her parents “freaked out.”

“They saw it as a rejection,” she said. “My adoptive mother is really into genealogy, tracing her family to Sweden, and she was upset with me because I wanted to find out who I was.”

Mr. Ballantyne said he received a similar reaction when he told his parents of plans to travel to Korea.

The Donaldson Adoption Institute’s study concludes that such trips are among the many ways that parents and adoption agencies could help adoptees deal with their struggle with identity and race. But both Ms. Towns and Mr. Ballantyne said that while traveling to South Korea was an eye-opening experience in many ways, it was also disheartening.

Many Koreans, they said, did not consider them to be “real Koreans” because they did not speak the language or seem to understand the culture.

Mr. Ballantyne tracked down his maternal grandmother, but when he met her, he said, she scolded him for not learning Korean before he came.

“She was the one who had put me up for adoption,” he said. “So that just created tension between us. Even as I was leaving, she continued to say I needed to learn Korean before I came by again.”

Sonya Wilson, adopted in 1976 by a white family in Clarissa, Minn., says that although she shares many of the experiences of those interviewed in the study — she grew up as the only Asian in a town of 600 — policy changes must address why children are put up for adoption, and should do more to help single women in South Korea keep their children. “This study does not address any of these issues,” Ms. Wilson said.

Ms. Young said the study was helpful, but that it came too late to help people like her.

“I wish someone had done something like this when I was growing up,” she said.

Friends and Family Look Forward to Detained Journalists' Return

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 5, 2009

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 4 -- One woman approached China's border with North Korea as a seasoned foreign correspondent, the other as a sharp editor who was on her first trip abroad in her new role as a producer.

Laura Ling, 32, one of the two American journalists released by North Korea on Tuesday after five months in captivity, had reported from Sri Lanka, Iran, Brazil, Pakistan and Eastern Europe, among other places.

"She knows her way around the world," said Morgan Wandell, who supervised Ling at San Francisco-based Current TV after working with her at another startup, the Channel One news outlet that is broadcast into classrooms. "And she's a smart, prepared journalist. One of the things I take a little bit of issue with, she's not a cavalier risk-taker at all. She's very smart, and while she's curious and ambitious, she knows her limits, and she's certainly not a cowboy."

Euna Lee, 36, had been a standout editor at Current TV, the cable and Web network co-founded by former vice president Al Gore, and was breaking into producing via the route that had worked for Ling a decade earlier: hard work backed by language skills and cultural knowledge that could add immense value to a story that demanded discretion and delicacy. The women had traveled to the Chinese border with North Korea, where they were preparing a report about North Korean refugees.

"It was unfortunately her first assignment," said Annika Mandel, who was hired as a writer-producer at Current in 2005, about the same time Lee came on as a video editor, the person who ties reports together.

"She was the editor we all wanted to work with," said Mandel, who now works for a health insurer. "I knew that if I worked with her, my work was going to be 10 times better than if I was going to do it myself. She brought a really critical, creative eye to things."

Friends said they expected the women to arrive in Los Angeles on Wednesday on the plane carrying former president Bill Clinton, who arranged their release Tuesday during a trip to Pyongyang.

"We are counting the seconds to hold Laura and Euna in our arms," said a statement from their families, whose united effort to free the women displayed the qualities -- discipline, determination and devotion -- that friends said marked the captives' lives.

"We especially want to thank President Bill Clinton for taking on such an arduous mission and Vice President Al Gore for his tireless efforts to bring Laura and Euna home," the statement said. "We must also thank all the people who have supported our families through this ordeal, it has meant the world to us."

Gore and Current co-founder Joel Hyatt released a statement through the network Tuesday night, saying they were "overjoyed" at the women's release. "Our hearts go out to them -- and to their families -- for persevering through this horrible experience," they added.

In Los Angeles, Lee will reunite with her husband, actor Michael Saldate, and their daughter, Hanna, 4. Lee's parents live in Seoul, the South Korean capital, where she grew up. She has two sisters in the United States, where she attended college.

"She has a little bit of an accent," Mandel said.

Ling will see her husband, Iain Clayton, a British-born investment banker who has said that he wrote her a letter every day of the five months she was captive. Wandell said the two met in college on a concert date that went so well that Ling purposely left her ID in his borrowed jacket "so she had an excuse for contacting him."

"We have been together for 12 years and this is the longest I've gone without hearing her voice," Clayton wrote on a blog for CNN's "Larry King Live." Many family members appeared on that program in late May when they judged that going public might help the women. After North Korea sentenced the women to 12 years of hard labor, the families largely withdrew again, following the advice of experts including Gore.

"There was a strategy for a long time to keep things sort of low-key," Mandel said. "They didn't want to make them any more marketable as detainees than they already were."

Ling grew up in the Sacramento suburb of Fair Oaks. Her father, a second-generation Chinese American, was a military contractor; her mother was born in Taiwan. At Del Campo High School, her sister, Lisa, was on her way to success as a TV journalist on a program, "Scratch," that went national, said Jim Jordan, who taught Laura Ling honors English her junior year.

Lisa Ling went on to National Geographic, "Oprah" and "The View," but, Jordan said, "I wouldn't say Laura was in her shadow." Friends and relatives describe the sisters as best friends.

"Laura was always just really secure," said Angie Wang, a cousin. "She knew who she was."

The sisters helped each other. When Gotham Chopra, a producer at Channel One, was preparing to travel to China for a story in 1999, he told Lisa that he needed an interpreter. She recommended Laura, fresh from UCLA and fluent in Mandarin. By trip's end, Channel One had offered her a full-time job.

On the trip to the North Korean border, Lee was following the same path into producing. Fluent in the refugees' language, "her Korean would be very helpful," Mandel said. Plus, she was a good listener.

"If you're ever having a problem, you can go to Euna and just vent, and she validates your feelings and helps you get through a hard time." Mandel said.

"She's a devoted worker and a devoted family person and just a sweet soul. A very sweet soul."