Death is white. Virginia says: "In addition to the images of other people’s lives and consciousness—these biographies and stories—there are also other pictures—pictures of current events, photographs. Photographs are, of course, not arguments that appeal to one’s reasonable sense, they are simply a finding of the facts, addressed to the eye. […] Then let’s see, if we feel the same, when we look at the same photographs. Here, we have some photographs on the table in front of us. The Spanish government sends them a couple of times a week with a stubborn persistence. It is not nice to look at these photographs. It’s mostly pictures of corpses." Sitting on a coffin, on death, halfway into the grave, halfway through life—statistically—I wish to ask: In what war does it happen to be so, that the ONE party wades around in the corpse, apparently without worrying? Where the one party is allowed to raise doubt, that the war is going on at all? Where the one party scold the wounded, blame the killed? Where the one party stands so firmly on the resources, culturally, legally and economically, that it never loses more than it chose to invest itself, and where the opportunity to be ignorant is just one of it’s privileges? That’s my question. But the woman as an artist and the woman as gender are an always already dead figure. I’m a person of color. I am a woman. I am less than 1.60 meters tall and not Christian. I’m used to not being heard. I’m used to having to speak loud to be heard. I am used to being ignored, patronized and exposed to prejudice and stereotyped notions of my personality, motives or behavior based on my skin color. I am used to being passed over for the benefit of white colleagues, and I am used to hearing that I am troublesome, when I demand the same as them. I am used to being demonized or exoticized, and I am used to nothing existing in between. I am used to being categorized as white, heterosexual, masculine, and Western. I am used to the fact that all "the others" are experienced as one, unified mass. I am used to murders happening at all levels and across minority divisions. That feminists are racist, that people of color are homophobic, that religious are fascist, that homosexuals discriminate against people with disabilities. I am used to minorities being played against each other, and that this is part of the strategy to maintain a basic oppressive, racist and patriarchal system against everything that is characterized as "the other." I’m used to people not seeing it. I’m used to dying a bit every day. Virginia says: "A woman must have money and a room of her own, if she is to write. Give her a room of her own and five hundred pounds. Let her write, what she has in mind, and then cut half of the text, and soon she will have written the best book ever." A minority person, who has decided to go to war against history, must prepare for death. She must be ready to learn the nauseating art of swallowing along the way, in which she can look forward to swallowing an innumerable number of camels along with her own pride. She must learn superficial forgiveness and rhetorical ingenuity so that she—for the majority—in a warm and safe and comfortable way, can point out politely, that it has just killed her. Again. And again. And again. She must rely on the intellectual and emotional habit of the majority, because without these, the majority will not carry her forward, and without being carried by the majority, her words will gain neither weight nor power. Once she realizes that death is the ultimate space of her own, she can write. The paper she writes on is white. Written by Joan Rang Christensen, and Korean-Danish adoptee and award-winning playwright. Joan is educated at The Danish National School of Playwriting in 2004, and has had around 40 radio and stage plays produced in Denmark, England, Germany, Sweden, and the USA. Most recently, “Tonight the war comes home” (Copenhagen, 2019)—about the shootings at the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris. WAR DEATH THE SEA was performed by the author at museum Munkeruphus in Denmark, on August 2, 2015, in connection with Jette Hye Jin Mortensen’s exhibition "A Landscape Theater" and as a part of the exhibition “The Voyage Out” about Virginia Woolf. Photo credit: Timme Hovind

By the end of the war lies death, and around death lies the sea. Once a woman has been given a room of her own and has started writing, she may run into very deep water. On an eternity of velvet. The sea is the Farewell, as well as the Arrival. The sea is the kidnapping, abduction or escape from one’s own, unchristian land—a land of one’s own—and into Fort Europe. It looks innocent. But she, who enters the sea, never returns. There are gaps in the world. The illusion of idyll or "the healing breath." The timeless space—nature—where you can release your gaze on the sea, so that it can wander and dance on the horizon and disappear into time. It is the vertical pause button of the soul. This might as well be the 19th century. Virginia could walk around the corner, over the grass. In uplifted maiden humor or dark as a fall weather and with grinding voices in his head. 1910 or 20 or later. We wouldn’t know. Talland House, the Virginia’s family’s vacation home, was large, square and with a huge garden, that sloped towards the water. With fences and hedges divided into many smaller gardens, all at different levels. A garden is a place where the world fades into a blackberry bush and guilt is a purple beard around the mouth. To disappear between branches. To sink away in the bushes. Seeing the blue behind the hedge is the deepest secret of the world. A crack through everything where the light comes in. Denmark is so small. Denmark is just a tiny dot on a tiny globe, and the globe is just a spot, a fart, a short sigh, in the universe. I look at a picture of the universe, taken by NASA, and even though I don’t trust NASA, I trust the picture. A tiny image of a tiny fragment of a very large universe. The only thing I like about Earth, is that it is a tiny dot in the universe. The only thing I like about the universe, is that the Earth seems so insignificant, when you look at it in a picture taken by NASA. When I look at the picture taken by NASA, I feel calm inside. When I feel calm inside, it’s because I feel that we, the Earth and the humans, are insignificant and make no difference in the universe. When I look at the picture taken by NASA, I understand that emotions such as shame, guilt, anger, grief and fear are just details and as such insignificant. Evil does not exist. The universe operates with completely different strings and makes no use of anything of such meaningless size. This, I write at night: When I was a child, I feared the thought of the vast universe. Now the idea of the infinity of the universe and the insignificance of the individual makes me calm inside. Virginia says: “If you had not believed that the human nature, ordinary men and women’s thoughts and feelings lead to war, you would not have written and asked me for help. You must have made the conclusion, that men and women, here and now, are able to follow their own will. They are neither pieces in a game nor puppets dancing in a leash, while being guided by invisible hands.” That’s the dilemma of the human race. To be led through dogmas of war and death or to control one’s own movement. All life starts in the sea. From there, it grows. When we lift our feet out of the water, we can walk on earth. These are the color blades on Vanessa’s palette. A split Union Jack. A bankrupt Europe. A defaulted humanity. It is ending of nothing and the beginning of everything. Written by Joan Rang Christensen, and Korean-Danish adoptee and award-winning playwright. Joan is educated at The Danish National School of Playwriting in 2004, and has had around 40 radio and stage plays produced in Denmark, England, Germany, Sweden, and the USA. Most recently, “Tonight the war comes home” (Copenhagen, 2019)—about the shootings at the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris. WAR DEATH THE SEA was performed by the author at museum Munkeruphus in Denmark, on August 2, 2015, in connection with Jette Hye Jin Mortensen’s exhibition "A Landscape Theater" and as a part of the exhibition “The Voyage Out” about Virginia Woolf. Photo credit: Timme Hovind

You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it. Grace Lee Boggs Over the coming weeks and months, The Universal Asian (TUA) will be regularly posting work by various Asian-diasporic writers, artists, photographers, thinkers, etc. on Black Lives Matter (BLM) in relation to Asians4BlackLives (A4BL). While not all of the views/opinions published in TUA always reflect those of our editors, the work that is and will be posted here under our A4BL section is in keeping with our views and support for Black lives and the BLM movement. We are deeply cognizant of the factual truth that our liberation, as members of the Asian diaspora, is bound up together with the liberation of Black lives, and that it is our responsibility as individuals and communities to proactively support and stand up for Black lives. We also recognize that there exists a multitude of nuanced layers in regards to BLM and A4BL being talked about from the Asian-Western immigrant/refugee and Asian-Western adoptee perspectives; and that how, for example, a Korean-Danish adoptee creates work about BLM will be different than how this is addressed from the voice/perspective of a fourth-generation Japanese-American. However, at the core of what is expressed and shared here is and will be a shared support of and for Black lives. If you or someone you know would like to submit work to this section please contact Kim Thompson at importedasians@gmail.com Photo credit: Kalaya’an Mendoza @kalamendoza

For folks who haven’t heard about your cultural group before, could you give us some background about the founding of In Between? In Between is an organization that unites and supports those who don’t feel strongly aligned with either their Asian or their American culture. I founded it in March of 2020, so pretty recently. I was motivated to do so because I’m a Chinese adoptee myself. I grew up with a white family, a white brother, in a predominantly white high school, and all white friends. Now, I go to UC Berkeley, and it’s 40% Asian-American there, which is way more Asians than I’ve ever seen before. I felt left out of the groups in both my scenarios. In high school, I didn’t face blatant racism, but I just felt a little different in the way I looked even though I acted the same, was raised the same. Then, I went to college, and now a lot of my friends are Asian-American and I can’t connect to them on cultural things, foods, holidays, and language—I only speak English. So, I didn’t feel comfortable joining my school’s Asian-American Association, because I felt like the only Asian thing about me is the way that I look. I wanted to create a space for people who feel this way and in the in between, hence the name. I read the bios of your executive board and it doesn’t seem like everyone is from an adoptee background. Is this group for anyone who feels like they’re in between being American and Asian? When I first started thinking about the club, I was going to name it Four A: Asian Adopted American Association or something like that, but there’s not that many people on my campus that are adopted and Asian-American. I was a freshman this past year. I was going back to my dorm and I saw my friend Hannah in the hall, and I said, “Hey! You’re Chinese-American, can I tell you about this club?” I was just expressing how I was feeling; I just can’t really relate with either group. She said, “Honestly, I know that I’m not adopted, but I feel like I understand this feeling.” Because her grandparents and parents speak Cantonese but she doesn’t speak it very well, there’s a disconnect there. She acts very differently around her family versus her friends. So, then I realized that I don’t need to limit this to Asian-American adoptees. I also have a few friends that are mixed race, and they have that same feeling. So it’s really open to anyone who feels like they lie on this spectrum of being in between. It sounds like maybe the common thread is a feeling of displacement. I love that it is open to anyone who feels that way, and that you saw this need even at UC Berkeley, where it is so diverse. So you founded In Between, but it sounds like you are already starting chapters all over the country? Yeah, so it really is funny. From March to July, there was not much growth. I didn’t even think about opening other chapters, I was just thinking this would be a UC Berkeley club. I have four other kids who are Cal students helping me with our chapter and it was summertime and I thought, “Do people even want to work on clubs in the summer? We should just wait to get everything started for the fall.” But then I don’t know, just one day I was thinking “Why? Why not make it a bigger thing?” In 2018, I flew to China. I went to Wuhan, China with a group of 30 other Chinese adoptees who were adopted throughout different provinces in China, but all live in the States now. We have a group message and we’re all pretty close. We do Zoom chats, we text all the time. So I thought, well this is the perfect place for me to target opening new chapters, because a lot of them are my age, college students. I just texted all of my friends and said, “Hey, this is a thing I started at Berkeley, does anybody want to start a chapter at their school? I’ll hop on a call. I’d love to talk to you more about it.” I had three girls from that start chapters. Plus, Facebook is an amazing platform. I’m in really niche Facebook groups, like International Children from China, Subtle Asian Adoptee Traits, very niche Asian adoptee Facebook groups. So, I posted in there, and that’s how I had more people reaching out. That’s how we started expanding. It’s so amazing to see how quickly things start and spread nowadays with everything you have accessible to you through different types of technology. Do you picture this as something that goes beyond college for you? It seems like this could grow to be for anyone that feels the way that you feel. I think I like taking baby steps. I’m not really sure down the road. Right now, I don’t foresee a future in making this my life, my career, building this non-profit. But, I do wish to continue it after college. I have a few girls who are starting a chapter at Cal Poly SLO and they are seniors, they’re about to graduate, and they said, “This is what we want to go into. We want to grow this, we want to make this big. We want to do summer camps. We want to file it as an actual non-profit.” And, they’re very motivated to do that. I think this year is not the time for that, especially since we’re so new. Hopefully in the long term, it will continue. Have you thought about what this club will be like once you’re back in school and in person? Before COVID hit, we were planning in-person events. We have different committees, so we’ll do social events, cultural outreach events, and then service events. A big part of it is this common thread, this feeling of in between. I really wanted to emphasize community and relationship building within the group, so hopefully when COVID goes away, we can do more in-person socials, a lot of food related things that have to do with our culture and we can’t do through Zoom, so I’m excited to go back so we can do all of that. Then, I’m hoping we can do service events—there are a couple of third party organizations in Berkeley that work with orphanages in China, so we were hoping to collaborate, but we’re going to take a different spin on how we do service this year, just because of COVID. Hopefully, we can focus on building community in person. What would the service with the orphanages in China look like? There’s a lot of fiscal donations that these places need. Finding ways to fundraise, to donate. This probably wouldn’t happen in the near future, but there’s heritage tours that take adoptees back to where they’re born and they need translators. Hopefully, having a few people in our club help with trips. My VP of service is fluent in Korean and he goes back and does translating when people meet their birth parents, and that is a surreal experience. So, hopefully giving kids the opportunity to do that. With COVID, there was a need for masks. Trying to reach out in those forms. Could you tell me a little bit more about your personal experience with your identity and feeling these two different parts of your identity. You mentioned being able to do the heritage trip in 2018. What other parts of growing up as an Asian adoptee really drove you to found this group. What was growing up like for you as an Asian with white parents? I grew up in Colorado all 18 years of my life, and then last year I moved to New Mexico. It’s not like every single second of my life I am reminded that I’m adopted, that’s not how it is. But, when I was growing up, in a predominately white school, I have prom pictures and it’s literally all these super white people and boom! dark hair me. I think growing up with everyone looking the same and you looking different from them… I didn’t try to forget I was adopted and Asian because you can’t forget your race and pretend you’re white. But, it was something that I didn’t love to think about. It’s not all of who I am. I would tell people because obviously it’s apparent. Yet, I didn’t want it to be a huge part of my life. I have met girls my age and older and that’s how they think also. Obviously, not all Asian adoptees think the same. I liked to pretend it wasn’t a thing. When my mom came to me with this opportunity, “Hey, there’s this trip back to China.” I was going to be a junior in high school, and I just thought it would be really interesting. I didn’t really think about how it would affect me long term and psychologically also; it’s a very heavy trip. I went on this trip and—I don’t know if eye-opening is the word—because I kind of knew what was going to happen. I would be playing with these orphans in China. I thought we were going to be with young kids, cute babies, playing and singing and dancing. A lot of the kids were 16, 17, 18. I was 17 at the time. First of all, I had never been out of the country and being in China was crazy for me. Standing in an orphanage in China, across the world, looking and talking to somebody your own age who’s been in the orphanage for 18 years and you have lived this entirely different life, and you speak two different languages. I have great opportunities, go to university, and they’re still in the orphanage. That was what really hit me. I think since—I’m getting a little emotional—I think since then, I realize I need to be more grateful and appreciative and acknowledge the first 12 months of my life and I can’t just forget that I’m adopted now. It just made me more grateful for being adopted because I could still be over there. My senior year [of high school], I was in music. I’ve always been into singing and music and my Chinese name is Yeong Cheong which is “forever singing.” I just have these moments I remember specifically thinking about my story. I was in choir one day singing this song called “Underneath the Stars.” This song is about two people who love each other who can’t be with each other, but they’re both under the same stars. It was originally written as a love song, but as I was singing, it hit me that I’m under the same stars as my birth mother and it’s the same story but in a different way. Yet, I’m probably most likely never going to meet her. So, that was one specific time in my life that it really hit me. Sometimes I get pretty emotional when I think about it, but most of the time, I’m pretty light-hearted and open about everything I feel. Then, I started college and saw so much diversity that I’m not used to. I saw people really embracing things about their Asian culture, because all their friends did, and their parents did. Like traditional foods that my friends in high school would say is weird or gross, that was the norm now. Then, really small things also, like anime and boba, that are small and not even a significant thing. But growing up in such a suburban, vanilla neighborhood, if you watched anime in my high school, you were the weird kid. It’s not even a weird thing! If you drank boba, you were so weird! Now, that’s just so normal. That’s not even a big thing about the culture, but it made me see Asian-American culture differently than I had previously. I thought, I just need to start somewhere I can be in the in between. Thank you for sharing that. That emotional connection is such a big piece of your experience not being raised by people who look like you or who know the culture that you are from. And it sounds like you didn’t have very much access to that when you were growing up compared to being in the Bay Area. How can people participate in In Between? We have national events, at least twice a month. Anybody from any chapter can join and even if you’re not a college student, if you’re post-grad or you’re still in high school, we allow anybody to come as long as you feel in between. You can follow us @inbetweennational on Instagram and through the bio on Instagram we have links for you to sign up for a chapter and register for our future events. We have a newsletter, it goes out every two weeks and updates people on the events we’re having, the chapters we’re opening, and member spotlights. If you’re interested in starting a chapter in your school, you can email us at inbetweennational@gmail.com. I’m really open to talking to people and helping them open their own chapter. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inbetweennational LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/in-between-berkeley/ Website: https://www.notion.so/In-Between-3fce06ad22c44a91ba436d78194cab81

Reposted from Ildaro.com As Koreans from the diaspora who have returned to the motherland we are acknowledged by the government as part of the minjok, but that identity is disputed by many. First, those of us who were adopted sometimes find it difficult to identify as Koreans. Then, because we usually arrive with very bad or totally absent Korean language skills, and often with bare understanding of Korean culture, people who lived the majority of their lives on the peninsula see us only as foreigners. Even those Koreans who are 1.5+ generation diasporic Koreans see us as similarly kyopo, or totally whitewashed. My experiences are atypical, though. Since I was so active in the Korean-American community and lived among other immigrants, I transitioned to Korea quite easily. I had close friends from NYURI waiting for me when I got off the plane in Incheon. We quickly and effortlessly resumed our friendship from New York. I also knew a lot of people who had also been adopted and who had returned to live in Korea. Daejeon, however, took more getting used to. For the first time in 15 years, I was mostly socializing and working among white people again. Most of the native English teachers (NETs) and English language department administration were North American white men married to Korean women. Their behavior and attitudes belied their privilege, and their plainly evident white supremacist ideology was something I had to get used to again. My bubble in New York had been thick and had lowered my defenses against being in the stark minority. What a paradox to be in the minority as a Korean in Korea! I heard co-workers repeat Fox News pundits’ claims and read ex-pat [sic] uninformed netizen chatter like: Korea was better because it was more socially conservative; taxes were rightfully lower than in North America; the government stayed out of peoples’ private affairs. I nearly fell off my chair when a co-worker from North Dakota claimed that Korea could not possibly be sexist because the president was a woman. The term “expat” became insufferable. I realized it was used to separate migrants from rich countries from those who are from the Global South, although both populations are seeking economic opportunities they do not have in their native countries. And what about returned migrants? In the U.S., I was clearly an immigrant. In the ROK I needed a visa to live and work in the country, but I had been born in Incheon (probably?), so I wasn’t a foreigner, and I certainly was not an expatriate since I wasn’t “outside my country.” I believe I have a right to live in the country where I was born without being labeled as a foreigner by either the government or its citizens. While in Daejeon, I tried to get an F4 visa, but the ROK immigration office requires U.S. citizens to show their naturalization certificate. I never needed the certificate in the U.S. after I got a passport, but ROK rules that U.S. passports are not acceptable proof of U.S. citizenship because Samoa (whose population is less than 56,000) are U.S. nationals holding U.S. passports, but not U.S. citizens. I worked for a year on a professor visa, essentially as property of my university, because I did not have my U.S. naturalization certificate to prove my U.S. immigration status. I had applied to replace it, but I was running into red tape with the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service (USCIS). It took two years, intervention from my Congressional Representative, and about USD 500 to get a replacement certificate. I was caught between the immigration services of both countries, and classified as an immigrant in both. Around the time I was wrestling with USCIS, adoptees without citizenship in their adoptive countries, mainly the U.S., were in the news again. The U.S. was deporting adoptees back to Korea and other countries that had sent children overseas to be adopted. It was a part of the draconian Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, (IIRIRA) that made misdemeanors deportable offenses that adopted people were getting caught up in. Sometimes this was fatal. In Brazil Joao Hubert was killed after being forcibly removed from the U.S. by the USCIS. In Korea adoptees compelled to live in the ROK for various reasons stemming from problems with U.S. immigration were treated as Koreans legally, but as foreigners socially. Korea has been known as the Hermit Kingdom, hostile to foreigners for centuries. I understand the reasons. Foreign invaders and colonizers were historically bad news for Korea. The state of the ROK was built on the dubious claims of pure blood and race by Syngman Rhee (who was married to a non-Korean white woman). That is the often-repeated story of why intercountry adoption began after the 6.25 war—mixed-race Koreans and their mothers were marginalized so severely that adoption agency workers “rescued” them by sending them overseas to be adopted. Another myth promoted by the adoption industry is that Koreans don’t adopt, but even Rhee adopted three children, one of whom legally ended the adoption. The antiquated view of 우리 나라  needs to expand the idea of “Korean” and reboot the definition of “foreigner.” Mixed-race Koreans, diasporic Koreans, Koreans from both Korean states are all Korean. And what about Korean-born people whose parents have no Korean blood? Who are culturally integrated but not biologically? Furthermore, why is there a hierarchy of people not “typically” Korean? Why are mixed Koreans who have a white parent treated so differently than Koreans who have a Black parent? Or “multicultural” children who are not mixed race, but who have one Korean parent and a parent from Southeast Asia? Why does society use “International Family” to mean that the non-Korean parent is from a rich developed country and “Multicultural Family” to mean that one parent is from a country that the ROK society deems less developed? While I lived in Daejeon, there was a Korean language course taught on our campus for multicultural families. Most of the students were either from the Philippines or China. A few were Vietnamese or NETs. There was one white Norwegian woman who had met her Korean husband in China. (I used my marriage to my now ex-husband to enroll in the class.) The classes reminded me a lot of the classes I had taught in New York, although more chauvinist—we learned words to honor husbands’ parents and vocabulary deemed especially useful for housewives like cleaning and shopping for groceries. The students were mostly very young and quick to learn Korean. I felt quite comfortable with my Filipina classmates, even if they learned more quickly than I did and were half my age. They spoke English better than almost any of my Korean students, and we became quite friendly despite our very different lives. I really felt a part of the migrant community. Sometimes, just like in New York, we had “Know Your Rights” presentations from the local police department. An officer told us how to get help in cases of domestic violence, and we got advice about practical matters about daily life in Korea. Although I am not a foreigner and certainly would never call myself an expat, I strongly identified as a migrant and being the recipient of migrant services. English-language Internet communities constantly ask for advice about what our rights are as tenants, workers, and non-citizens. I see discrimination against "foreigners" myself from my landlord and neighbors who claim I have noisy parties every day. The condescending and misguided attempts to “help” people whose Korean is not native-level is offensive and patronizing. Even the public rental bicycles assume that if one is using the English-language service, he or she must be 1) a tourist 2) a visitor. English-language websites for KoRail and bank services are similarly truncated compared to the Korean language services rather than the mirror images like I saw in the English and Spanish language sites in the U.S. Even so, I realize I am fortunate and privileged to be an native English speaker (even if jobs do not consider me a native speaker because I look Korean, or many other Asians to be native speakers even if they are very fluent from South Asia or the Philippines). If my native language were Bangla or Vietnamese, I know I would have even far fewer options. After two years in Chungcheongnam-do, I gambled and moved to Seoul even though I had no job. My friends and community were in Seoul, and although Daejonites are exceptionally friendly and generous, I felt isolated. I relocated and eventually co-founded an organization that does advocacy and activism around intercountry adoption issues and works in solidarity with other groups like migrant workers, unwed mothers, and queer activists as part of the larger social justice movement in Korea. South Korea has been called a very xenophobic and racist society, simultaneously granting unearned privileges to white people while still discriminating against them, which is is socially acceptable. Westerners who aren’t white are mimicked and their pop culture contributions have been appropriated by the hallyu touts, but still must contend with extremely ignorant and offensive stereotypes. Although Black Americans have told me that is preferable to being pulled over for DWB (driving while Black) like in the U.S., or being physically assaulted in ways that initiated the Black Lives Matter movement, it is still unacceptably common for Koreans to believe racist ideas about Black or Brown westerners. Migrant workers from Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia must fight for more basic rights such as the right to change jobs. Western and non-western workers, blue collar and “professionals,” all face wage theft and illegal workplace practices perpetrated by Koreans who take advantage of our lack of legal rights, racism, xenophobia, and native-Korean language skills. Even with my coveted job as a university employee, my prospects of promotion are nil because I’m a “foreign” professor. This kind of discrimination is illegal in most western countries and actively (although not always effectively) discouraged in many developing countries where quotas attempt to correct for social discrimination through legislation. We 재외동포 are given the F4 visa, as mentioned above. The visa restricts the types of jobs we can do, however. We are not allowed to do the 3D jobs, those that are dangerous, dirty, or degrading. Some adoptees from non-English speaking countries struggle to exercise our birthright to live in Korea due to these restrictions. Americans, Canadians, and Australians can earn sufficient salaries teaching English, but because of the ROK’s nonsensical belief that fluent, but non-native language teachers are not qualified to teach a language, plus the reasonable (but inadequate) requirement  of a university degree, adoptees from Scandinavia, French, Dutch, German, and Italian speaking countries must find alternative employment. Without a degree, some adoptees find themselves forced to do unauthorized work in kitchens, factories, farms, and or other menial jobs. Many people whose lives were spoiled by adoption to circumstances that did not give them the privilege and opportunity to get a degree. The rationale is that these low-skilled jobs should go to Korean citizens rather than “foreigners” who were supposedly privileged by living overseas. But Koreans migrated and sent remittances back or their bodies and labor were sold to create the miracle on the Han. I think at the very least we should have full employment privileges across the labor spectrum. Now as the ROK is facing the prospect of becoming an asylum for Yemenis, in addition to accepting refugees from DPRK. Who is labeled a refugee is always political, but some South Koreans’ reactions to this development just feels like xenophobia and racism. As the U.S. separates migrant children from their families (and perhaps sends them into the adoption industry system) it seems like an extension of the Trump agenda reaching Korea. I live near Seoul Station and see and hear rallies of right-wing Korean groups. They wave American flags and display photos of Park Chung Hee and Donald Trump weekly. Hundreds of thousands have signed Internet petitions in reaction to 500 people seeking relief from a war, despite so many Koreans having experience as refugees themselves during our war, the resulting poverty, or from dictatorial persecution. Only one person from South Korea has been granted political asylum by the U.S. Who is labeled a refugee is always political. When accepting refugees or asylum-seekers a government is labeling the situation that the person is fleeing from as unacceptably brutal or dire. It’s labeling another state as the perpetrator or unable to control abuse in that country. I assert it’s not really about being able to serve or support the 500 refugees themselves. Korea has a labor shortage and birth rate deficit. Koreans are taking irregular jobs in retail and factories, but the agricultural industries are struggling to find workers because Koreans won’t take these jobs. Even urban labor jobs are shunned by extremely schooled but poorly educated graduates who call Korea "Hell Choseon." Some even want to deny immigrants and migrants access to these jobs and scapegoat foreigners for their lack of prestigious or acceptably professional positions. Even with an F4 my fellow adoptees are legally disallowed from taking labor jobs. Some of my comrades were adopted into situations like mine where we couldn’t earn a degree. Although I eventually obtained a graduate degree, I had to postpone my return until my late 30s until I had finished my bachelors. All my work experience would be considered relevant, and in this land of excessive credentials and certifications, I only had a high school diploma. Documentation is a fact of life regardless of where one lives. Immigration documents, citizenship papers, and diplomas,  dictate our rights and define our qualifications around the world. Despite constant corruption scandals, the ROK tries to combat corruption with more and more paperwork. When we are legally made orphans, as required by law to be sent overseas for adoption, we are issued a family register, an orphan hojuk. This makes adoption agencies our guardians and our next of kin. When we return to Korea, even after finding actual family, since most of us are not truly orphans, we still have this relationship with the adoption agency. If we die here, they become responsible for our remains. Finally in death, Korea fully claims us. I hope to live in Korea for the rest of my life, assuming that the discrimination vitriol against foreigners here does not proceed to levels it has reached in the U.S. I believe South Korea can legislate better protections and the government has the power to turn public will around. I will continue to try my best to keep working on these issues as a migrant in Korea as a Korean.

As adoptees, many of us have had to create our own joy. We have to work at joy because it doesn’t come naturally to us. We are too busy worrying about fitting in or where we came from or even who we are. When asked what brings me joy, it’s changed throughout the years. As we grow, so do our needs and wants. When I was younger, I thought having a boyfriend would bring me joy. All I wanted was a boy to fall madly in love with me. I’d wish upon a star every night: Wish I may, wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight…the wish was always a boyfriend. And then, I got one. And surprise, that which can bring great joy can also bring great sadness. When I was young, I took ballet lessons. I felt free on the dance floor and expressed my emotions through movement. I was good at it. I didn’t have to think; I could just be. In college, I taught ballroom dancing as a side gig. When I turned 18, we went to a club called The Industry in Pontiac, Michigan. I spent hours dancing at that club, drinking flaming Blue Ferraris, watching the flame disappear as it was sucked up my straw. Then, turning to help my girl, Virgie, when she instructed, “Hold my braids,” as she sipped the drink of fire. As an adult, I try to dance, but who has the time or the money? Adult ballet classes are expensive. I’d love to go to the club, but I’m nervous I’ll end up on someone’s TikTok with the #MOMDANCE. And, to be honest, I don’t want to dance to current music. I want to dance to the music of the '80s and '90s. I want to be transported through time and space to when I ate whatever I wanted and didn’t worry about my pre-diabetes and high blood pressure. But, this dancing queen now comes with strings attached. When I was younger, nothing excited me more than succeeding. I was always ready for a competition. Be it a spelling bee or a trivia contest, I would study to win. Just like Ricki Bobby said, “If you’re not first, you’re last.” I possessed a desire to prove that I could do something great, that I was worthy of praise. Outward recognition was important to me and built what little self-esteem I had. I didn’t ask for the role of people pleaser, but I wore it well. I was always chasing happiness, always trying to get to the greener grass on the other side. Happiness was elusive. It would materialize in front of me for a hot second and just when I thought I had achieved it, it would fade away slowly, like Homer Simpson into the bushes. It wasn’t until I was older, I realized I was constantly trying to make myself happy with outward possessions like food, money, and external approvals. These things never filled the hole I felt inside. An old episode of "Oprah" had a guest speaker, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach from his talk show on TLC called "Shalom in the Home." He shared how one can never find peace until they learn to fill the hole in their soul from the inside. External material possessions will temporarily fill the hole, but it won’t last. The hole returns and the person feels empty again. Only by finding inner peace can one fill the void permanently. I think everyone has a hole in their soul. Everyone has loss and feelings of insecurity. For the adoptee, we have our own baggage and our own hole carved out by abandonment, isolation, and feelings of inadequacy. Growing up not looking like anyone in your family can create a feeling of loneliness and isolation—that idea that you can feel alone in a crowded room. Some adoptees have trouble accepting that they were abandoned, while some find their birth family but are denied a relationship, being abandoned twice. We spend years trying to fill the empty hole from the outside. It’s been a long road to get to this point in my life where I don’t feel the dull ache of yearning and uneasiness. I find joy in my relationship with my husband. Our marriage hasn’t been perfect, but I’m proud of where we’ve been and where we are now. I feel loved and accepted for who I am and feel lucky to have a partner in life. I love to dance and still find moments at live concerts to dance in the aisles and feel the joy of my youth surrounded by people my age, doing the exact same thing. And while I’m still a bit competitive, I’ve learned the value of supporting others and experiencing joy through success as a team. I don’t have to be the best, nor do I see it as a realistic goal. I am fine with my imperfect self and do the best that I can with what I’ve got. There are still those moments I stumble, moments I don’t think I’m being a very good sister, or mother, or wife. But I’ve learned to give myself a little grace. Adoption isn’t the perfect answer to someone’s infertility or failing marriage, in fact we come with more questions than we do answers. We are not a quick fix to a couple’s issues. We have our own issues to battle through. But, finding joy is possible through thoughtful introspection and years of therapy. I can continue to fill the hole in my soul from the inside.

Angela Wu is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Empowerment Coach who is passionate about de-stigmatizing mental health in the AAPI community as well as helping women of color reclaim and raise their voices in order to embody their empowered authentic selves! In her therapy practice, she helps individuals find healing from trauma, anxiety, depression, grief, as well as navigate acculturation and intergenerational issues, difficult life transitions, and relationship issues. Her approach to therapy is strength-based and anti-oppression. In her coaching practice, she helps Asian women break barriers that keep them feeling stuck, find and strengthen their voices, and reclaim their empowered selves in order to take up space and combat the harmful narratives that subjugate Asian women. She has developed a group coaching program called “Take Up Space” to help individuals unpack their Asian experience in order to better align with their cultural identities. She also provides speaking engagements and leads training to spread awareness around AAPI mental health issues. Angela Wu was a former high school teacher (Teach for America 2012 Corps member) and taught in Title 1 high schools in Miami and San Francisco. She received her Master’s of Science in Education and Social Change from the University of Miami. It was through witnessing her students struggle with toxic stress and racial trauma caused by structural inequities that led her to pursue a degree in counseling at Fuller Theological Seminary School of Psychology. Her passion for working with culturally diverse and underserved communities with various mental health needs led her to work at the Los Angeles Department of Mental Health Agency. With the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic, she has seen the need to be a resource for the Asian community. This led her to start her own therapy and coaching practice. As a 1.5 generation Taiwanese immigrant, Wu has experienced first-hand the challenges that come with acculturation stress—racial trauma, burdens of being the cultural broker, code-switching, navigating between two worlds but belonging in neither, the model minority myth, imposter syndrome, intergenerational trauma, immigration issues, identity formation, internalized racism, etc. As an Asian American woman, she has experienced and fought against the fetishization of Asian women and combatted the expectation that Asian women are to “be seen and not heard.” By raising her voice to educate on issues that minorities face, Wu advocates for myself, her community, and marginalized groups. In her own journey of healing, she was able to reclaim parts of herself that had been lost, rejected, and stolen. She has challenged barriers that held her hostage, and Wu has used her voice to find liberation. She has learned to unlearn dysfunctional familial patterns and has broken generational cycles. She is able to occupy a liminal space, an intentional space of belonging and of not fully belonging, in order to be someone who connects to all of humanity. Wu believes that deep suffering can lead to profound healing if encountered with the right tools, space, and people. Her own experience of liberation and healing motivates her to help others find that for themselves! You can find Angela here: Website Facebook Instagram LinkedIn

Reposted from Ildaro.com Introduction: As someone who became a migrant through intercountry adoption, Kristin Pak has a unique perspective into the dominant American culture and its prejudices against migrants. As someone who has re-migrated back to Korea sans the privilege native language fluency, she is also a part of the migrant community in Korea. Continuing work that started in New York, she is attuned to the struggles of migrants and advocates and organizes for more human rights in Korea as she did in the U.S. In 2005 a Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives from Wisconsin introduced a bill that would make assisting “illegal” immigrants a crime. The introduction of the bill triggered massive demonstrations and determination in the immigrant communities in the U.S. to declare our right to dignity and basic human rights. We also came together to fight against the blatant xenophobia and racism that the bill enshrined. That year I was working at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in Manhattan, telling visitors about the Jewish, Italian, Irish, and German families who had immigrated to what was a vibrant Chinatown in the mid 2000s. The museum also offered tours of the neighborhood where we pointed out the Fujianese streets in contrast with the Cantonese and Vietnamese businesses that were more common. Another stop on the walking tour was the Chino-Latino bodega, because right around the museum was where the Puerto Rican Loisaida and Chinatown met the dwindling Little Italy. As museum educators, we talked about New York City being the most densely populated square miles in the world during the beginning of the 20th century. Many of the guides were also immigrants from Colombia, China, Cuba, Jamaica, and me, the Korean. I was active in an organization called young Korean American Network then. Simultaneously I volunteered for Also-Known-As which is a post-adoption services organization. Also-Known-As’s constituency included families who had adopted children from China, Korea, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, and other countries, but our adult members were nearly all Korean. The two organizations often collaborated and yKAN usually had a representative proportion of people involved who were adopted from Korea, in addition to the more typical members who had immigrated with their families, or were born to immigrants. yKAN is also how I joined a poongmulpae (Korean drumming group) at New York University. In 2003, we celebrated Seollal (Korean New Year) by hiring a drummer who played sulchanggo and spun a sangmo. 2003 was also the year of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The winter before the invasion there were massive demonstrations against the war in Washington, D.C. I went down to the National Mall and watched a poongmulpae marching in the freezing cold, and I loved the loud metallic music. When I saw the drummer playing later that winter, I asked him where I could learn to play. He directed me to NYU and I joined them in February. The drummer showed up again at the annual concert where the group, NYURI, plays outdoors in Washington Square Park. He played the modeum buk, and later during dwitpuri I found out he was an international student from Korea, who had been involved in the student movement in the 1980s. By January of the following year we were married. I also started to disengage from yKAN and Also-Known-As. The organizations had started to feel too out of line with my politics. The Korean American community is overwhelmingly Christian and very conservative. I found that I prefered to surround myself instead with more “radical” peace activists, community organizations, and left-leaning Koreans who critiqued the capitalist American Dream. Some brought their activist culture with them from Korea, and critiqued the capitalism that the white-collar professionals of yKAN and Also-Known-As adored and embodied. That also set me apart from most of the active AKA members, who were overwhelmingly adopted into upper- and middle-class families. I had been adopted by a factory worker and a retail store clerk, neither of whom went to college. We lived in a poor city where about 75 percent of the kids in my schools were on federal school meal programs. Unlike most of the people I met who were adopted from Korea in subsequent years (and excluding the New Yorkers, of course) my city was not majority white. I just did not relate to their experiences of growing up in white suburbia. My neighborhood was white, but English was only dominant as the lingua franca. Walking from my house to my best friends’ houses, I heard Polish, Canadian French, Albanian, Italian, and Portuguese. The walk took about ten minutes, tops. In other parts of the city there were parishes that said mass in Puerto Rican Spanish and Lebanese and there was a sizable Jamaican community as well. All the immigrants were attracted to the city in Connecticut by the brass factories that gave it its nickname, the Brass City. In September, the first day of school brought back classmates who had been sent back to their parents’ countries to stay with their grandparents over the summer vacation. Their identities were firmly rooted in the Caribbean and Europe. A few students, who didn’t go back, were from Vietnam. I talked with them in the cafeteria as we waited on line for French bread pizza (Friday in such a Catholic city meant a meatless option was still served long after Vatican II). There weren’t many students from Asia in my school, just a few Vietnamese kids, some Filipinos, and as far as I knew, four Koreans. I sometimes hung out with the boy whose Korean mom got really excited when she met me, but generally only had short lunchroom talks with the Vietnamese girls. One of them and I became acquainted and got me a job working at the factory alongside several non-English speaking workers and suddenly my Spanish and Portuguese (I took Portuguese all four years in high school) got a lot better. Where, in high school, a lot of racial tension meant that the white, Black, and Latin students self-segregated, in the factory we had no choice but to work side by side on the line. I went to university for a few years in Washington, D.C. until my adoptive father died. During those years, I found out about a B.A./M.A. program in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages). If I took five classes while I was an undergraduate, I would need just a few more after graduation to get a master’s degree. In the meantime, I would earn a TESOL certificate. The Tenement Museum piloted a program for English language learners to discuss their lives as immigrants in the historically immigrant neighborhood. Although I had been trained in English teaching methods, identified strongly as an immigrant, as I discussed this with a co-worker, she told me about an opening at the Diocese of Brooklyn and Queens teaching an accent reduction class to priests at the Office of Migration. Still nominally Catholic then, I became a favorite teacher for the priests from Africa, Latin America, and Asia. I used this experience on my resume to apply for another job that a different co-worker told me about at Forest Hills Community House in Queens. I began teaching in Jackson Heights in 2006. During the interview with the director, I told them that I knew that my native English language skills were a privilege that I wanted to use to fight against the anti-immigrant sentiment which was sweeping the country. They liked this rhetoric, I think, because I got the job. I started teaching as an hourly employee and met a strange student from Mexico. He came into class one day very happy because after years of trying, he finally got a green card. Then, he went back to Mexico. I would learn that about half of the students in the program were unauthorized immigrants. Most were visa overstays, like most unauthorized immigrants in the U.S., but a large number had crossed by land from various countries to get into the U.S. (One memorable exception was the marine merchant from Burma who jumped ship.) As Jackson Heights is the most linguistically and generally diverse district in the world, where about 180 different languages are spoken, a large gay Latino community shares the area with Nepalese, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Sikhs, I was just one among tens of thousands of immigrants in Jackson Heights. I learned about the rules and practices of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as we frequently had “Know Your Rights” workshops for the students. Our in-house paralegal would answer our questions about applying for various visas and waivers, and even helped my friend, who was also adopted from Korea, to bring her fiancé from the Philippines to the U.S. after they met while she worked in the Peace Corps. We also had an Action Group that the teachers and students could join political efforts like marching against the SECURE Communities program from DHS/ICE, which would report the immigration status of anyone arrested by the NYPD. Many of my students would join the Action Group, and I became the teacher liaison. We fought for fair housing, language access at the public hospitals, and funding for English language programs in the state and city budgets. By this time, the DREAM Act and DACA was political news. I learned that Koreans were in the top ten of the applicants seeking to become DACAmented. Also making news was the story of some people who had been deported, or otherwise compelled, to live in Korea after being sent to the U.S. to be adopted. Then, I heard about a Korean citizen, who was sent to the U.S. to be adopted, who had been arrested several times. His English was still punctuated with Korean turns of phrases because he left Korea as a pre-teen and never totally nativized his English. He was facing removal from the U.S. because although he was a legal permanent resident, a status which normally doesn’t expire, he was deportable due to the draconian 1996 Clinton-era IIRIRA Act. I offered background to others who were testifying at hearings as experts about the immigration system history and current practices which I had heard about from the thousands of students I had had at Queens Community House and the Catholic Migration Office. Russell’s verdict ended well, with deferred action. Basically that means that he has an order of removal, but it is suspended due to his lawyer’s arguments that it would be inhumane to send him back to Korea. I was promoted to Assistant Director of the Adult Education English Language program and was going to be sent to train to be a Bureau of Immigrant Affairs certified legal representative, but I decided to move to Korea instead. The war against immigrants had taken its toll. The program lost two-thirds of its funding; it was clearly time to go. I knew that as an overseas Korean, a dongpo, I would be eligible for the F4 visa. I eventually was hired at a university in Daejeon. I decided to move to Korea, and  I would soon find myself in my students’ position—a functionally illiterate adult living without the dominant language skills, unaware of my rights or the laws of the country where I would live. (to be continued) Cover image: New York, NY 2007

“I think, maybe, we should talk about starting a family,” my husband said one day, as we sat on the back porch of a winery north of our home. Just a few days prior, we had received news of the passing of Aunt Nancy, a woman with an outsized personality, big laugh, and gravelly voice. She was our favorite of his extended family, and, personally, the only one who never made me feel like a Korean Jewish interloper in a white Christian family. Her death was unexpected, one at odds with her age, the kind that accelerates the normal steady crumble of childhood invincibility, our own mortality becoming prematurely salient. It is in this context that my husband and I sat, sipping our favorite red, pondering the question that could change our lives. When I was a child, I played a lot by myself. My adoptive sister, six years older, left me behind as soon as she became a teenager. I often crept into her room and took an artifact of our time together, a doll named Becca. My aunt made the doll for my sister as a gift to commemorate my adoption from Korea. Recalling that doll now, I remember her porcelain-colored face, black yarn hair, and true blue eyes, a seemingly impossible representation of a Korean child. Then again, memory is funny and it would be as likely that my aunt would make a Korean doll with blue eyes as my mind would conjure that image, a reflection of how I saw myself in my Jewish family. In any case, Becca joined Kira, a floppy doll with peach skin and very pink hair, and a more plausible Korean baby named Jae, as my children. In every situation the dolls would start out as friends, but then Kira would start excluding Becca and stuffing Jae in the closet. The white doll was the last one left standing every time, the play ending with her superiority, and, me, the mother, helpless even in her own imagination. “You want to start a family?” I asked, pouring myself another glass. My husband and I never spoke about having a family before marrying. We just kind of left it open, like a window cracked on the first nice day of spring, remembering it occasionally as we walked by but never bothering to close it. “Yeah. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, and with Aunt Nancy…I just realized our kids will never get to know her. How will she be remembered?” My mind reels back to my ninth grade history teacher, Mr. Torrence. One day, at the start of class, we found him sitting on his desk with a framed picture of his father and a CD player. He told us about his dad, a soldier who lost his life in the Vietnam War, an example of the real costs of war. Then he played his father’s favorite song, Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” As Louis’s voice warbled with rich, joyful truths, my teacher wept in front of a room full of high school freshmen. When the song ended, he looked up at us, eyes red, tears reflecting the fluorescent lights of the classroom, and walked out. I had never seen a man cry before that day. The vulnerability he showed demonstrated a type of self-assuredness that inspired me. It burrowed beneath the armor I had wrapped around myself, seeding the possibility of living an awesomely authentic life, something I had never considered before. In the years after, I thought of Mr. Torrence often. I thought about how he demonstrated how to endure loss honestly and without shame. I thought about how he inspired me to pursue teaching in college, but also inspired me to abandon the idea, the bar he set out of my reach at the time. I thought about him, now, as he breezed through the window we had left open. “How will she be remembered?” I echoed, remembering Mr. Torrence’s fluorescent tears. “By the generations that follow,” I concluded. Parenthood is complicated for adoptees, severed from our first family; and for international adoptees, our first language and first country. We are handed an entirely new life like a gift, but when unwrapped, we realize it is more like a witness protection program alias where our birthrights are smothered under expectations of gratitude and silence. Becoming a parent would require the deconstruction of the immersive theater production called my life, risking my emotional safety to travel backwards, back to my adoptive family, to Korea, and to my birth family. It would require vulnerability and bravery, two things I had avoided until this moment. But then, overtaken by the soul-stirring sunlit vineyard and the unexpected wave of urgency to live after Aunt Nancy’s death, I said, “Yes, let’s do it.” Immediately, I felt like I had pushed a button that catapulted me into the hands of the future, byway of the past, a circuitous explosion of a route that I am still riding now. As I think about the path we have taken, four times across the world to Korea to adopt our sons, and one time across town to birth our daughter during a pandemic, I smile. I smile at the fact that I have three kids, much like those dolls, two Korean sons and one biracial daughter who, though she does not have pink hair, looks a lot like her white father, life imitating play. I smile at my dreams of being a teacher as I pack away the homeschool books we used this morning. I am a teacher after all. I smile about the cracked window that now is flung wide open, with all its beauty, pain, and unpredictability. Out of loss erupted hope.

Reposted from The Korea Times This is the 29th article of the series. It is time to turn our attention to the least discussed, but the most powerful and decisive actors involved in the flow of children for inter-country adoption—the receiving countries. — E.D. The Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH), an intergovernmental organization facilitating cross-border cooperation in private legal matters, has been collecting the statistics of children adopted transnationally from the immigration authorities of 23 receiving countries, mainly in Western Europe, North America and Australia. In the case of Korea, the main receiving countries (in the order of the largest number of children received) consist of the United States, France, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Italy, and Luxembourg. Historically, this group of receiving countries has remained stable while the number of sending countries expanded from 20 in the early 1980s to more than 80 in the ensuing decade. The expansion of global adoption coincided with geographical shifts in major sending regions, which included Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Although the HCCH collects data from receiving countries, greater attention is dedicated to the statistics provided by the sending countries. The disproportionate scrutiny given to the latter group is understandable in light of the established narrative that many adoption-related problems rest with the sending countries. However, these countries evade responsibility in international forums by deflecting the blame onto “single mothers” or parents “too poor to raise their children.” They cite data, most of which comes from private adoption agencies, to attribute responsibility to an unseen marginalized group while simultaneously evoking emotive images of young unwed mothers. While an overwhelming majority of adopted children came from single mothers, this had not always been the case. Instead, governments found an ideal scapegoat and unloaded an undue amount of culpability onto certain groups of parents, thereby promoting a deficit perspective that individualized structural problems. Instead of addressing systematic failures that compel family separation, failings were placed squarely on the shoulders of parents for their lack of resources, marriage, or some other socially constructed standard. Even in high-level meetings, foreign delegates engaged in the same stale discussions that targeted “young unwed mothers” as the source of inter-country adoption. Why is the role of receiving countries important? Claiming that one party represents the impetus for transnational adoption obscures a constellation of factors and the elaborate network of actors involved. We must bear in mind that the receiving countries forged the rules to move children across national borders, then legitimized the procedures by erecting a complex bureaucracy of paperwork and administration. Moreover, we must also remember that while adoption is about a change in family relations, inter-country adoption constitutes a set of immigration procedures that sends a child from the global south to the more affluent global north. Normally, in cases where a child must be sent alone for immigration, the conditions, criteria and scrutiny must meet a certain threshold for safety. But in the case of inter-country adoption, this form of immigration was characterized by procedures and standards so loose that it bordered on negligence. Eventually, bad practices and poor oversight culminated in a series of inter-country adoption scandals in the 1980s and 1990s and impelled governments to argue that they hadn’t been engaged in baby buying and selling. Consequently, those countries involved in inter-country adoption set regulatory measures to prevent further tragedies. The most significant development was the Hague Convention on Inter-country Adoption, established in 1993 at the HCCH. Although most of the sending countries were not members of HCCH, they were invited to sign and ratify the convention, as excluding them would diminish the effectiveness and the purpose of this legal instrument. As one of the main sending countries, Korea was invited to the drafting meeting of the convention and eventually became a signatory. However, although nearly 100 states have become contracting parties, Korea has done little in this regard. Despite the scale and influence of the country’s inter-country adoption program, Korea still cannot commit itself to the obligations of the convention, which guarantee the safety, welfare and rights of children in procedures and matters related to such adoption. Rethinking the principle of shared responsibility of sending and receiving countries A pillar of the convention is the shared responsibility of both the sending and receiving countries, and the drafters attempted to operationalize this by delegating specific duties to designated competent authorities and setting out safeguards. After nearly 30 years of operation, the fundamental flaws of this approach have emerged. Where irreconcilable discrepancies exist between family law, child protection systems, and child adoption programs, questions about achieving mutual responsibility remain unanswered. Moreover, in welfare policy, the size of the national budget plays a critical role, but the scope of the convention never extends to such matters. Adoptees are citizens of receiving countries In 2020, while leading a workshop on how to make changes to rectify the current situation and realize adoptees’ right to access their identity and origins, I proposed, “Use your nationalities and move your governments’ to put pressure on the Korean government to make the necessary changes.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I instantly felt the atmosphere of the room cool. Some of the adoptee participants seemed to feel uncomfortable, perhaps even slightly unsettled, by my suggestion. Until now, the discussion on inter-country adoption has focused on the issues of sending countries—their poverty, unwillingness, incapability, and incapacity to protect their own children. And for these same reasons, they have managed to elude blame and responsibility. In the course of this series, the guest writers and I have tried to illustrate that the dominant narrative of adoption—a portrayal that paints sending countries as saving their children through adoption—is an inaccurate and incomplete picture, but we must remember that adoption entails the mutual responsibility of both countries. This also means that the receiving countries should act to protect and realize the rights of their own nationals to know their true identity. Because after all, adoptees are the citizens of receiving countries. Click here to read the 22nd article of this series, "Rewriting my adoption story truthfully" by Kate Powers. Cover photo: This picture was taken right before Korea officially signed the convention on May 24, 2013, Chin Young, then-minister of health and welfare, visited the Hague to sign the document with a promise to ratify it within five years. However, as of today, nearly a decade later, the Korean government has yet to fulfill its promise.

Time Time flies by In the blink of an eye How should I spend my day So many things that I could do But in my bed i just lay Being productive would surely do I bet you’d agree too Oh to do something different today But in my bed I just lay A poem for you Dear reader please listen close I appreciate you the most I can’t put it into words My heart soars with the birds Sharing my art with you So thank you dear friend My love I do send And my heart it fills with joy Knowing you took the time to read Something you didn’t need So I thank you once again Lauren is a regular contributor for The Universal Asian. To learn more about her, check out her Contributor’s Page here.

I was adopted into a small farming community with one blinking stop light. For all my life, I was surrounded by people who did not look like me. Once Facebook became a thing, I joined a lot of Korean adoptee groups. It filled the need I had inside to belong somewhere, to fit in. My feed was filled with families who looked like mine, white parents, Asian kids. It was a great way to meet others who have similar experiences being Korean and adopted. I follow issues such as the Adoptee Citizen Act. I learned how to start a bio-family search. So many relevant topics are discussed and shared in these groups. They can be extremely informative, but they can also become drama-filled, turning slightly Real Housewife-ish. But overall, the camaraderie is nice, and the conversation is cathartic. Recently Jia Sun Lee, author of "Everyone Was Falling," posted a very thought provoking article titled “What White Men Say in our Absence” by Elaine Hsieh Chou in one of the Facebook groups. The essay begins with a disclaimer that it contains graphic descriptions of murder, sexual violence, and racist language. With an intro like this, I can already gather the nature of what white men say in our (the Asian-American female) absence. She starts by recounting an incident on the bus when she was teaching ESL in Taipei. Two white men were discussing dating Taiwanese women very candidly as they assumed no one around them could understand English. Before I even read the details, I knew what this conversation was all about. How could I not? I’ve spent a lifetime hearing about/being a part of Asian female stereotypes. The article was not shocking or surprising. The author laments not standing up for herself and other Asian women and exposing these men for their offensive conversation. Even eight years later she was still troubled by the experience, troubled that she didn’t face her oppressors and tell them off. How many times had I been in that same position? Not the exact details, but a situation where I wish I had said my mind, told someone off, or even reacted at all. I remember the time after a bar night I was standing in line at Taco Bell and some guy thought he could grab my tit. I was visibly pissed, but I didn’t do anything. I stood there. Got my Mexican Pizza and brushed it off. I remember the time a woman, co-worker of my high school boyfriend, had asked him how I could use tampons…since my vagina was slanted. I remember guys hitting on me with the line, “I’ve never been with an Asian woman before.” By the grace of God, I was never a victim of a sexual crime or sexual violence. But, it’s not hard to point to countless examples of Asian women being attacked, violated, and killed throughout time. I experienced enough looks, comments and situations to be wary of certain men. To this day, I will tell my husband if I get a strange vibe off a guy when we are at social events and let him know when I don’t want him to leave my side. Doing an online search in areas like Reddit, one can spiral down a rabbit hole of disgusting content regarding Asian women’s “sexual-ness” and the unending stereotypes of the submissive Asian female. Online anonymity is a double-edged sword that allows people to speak their minds, but then say horribly offensive things they’d never say out loud. After reading article after article online, Chou stated, “I wanted these men identified. I wanted their thoughts broadcasted above their heads. Because how can I move through the world knowing that the men who think these thoughts are real? They’re subway riders, salesmen, police officers, teachers, bosses, friends. They’re someone’s father. They’re someone’s husband. They’re someone’s lover.” I get this. There’s no way of knowing who the “bad” men are. You must rely on your instincts and have faith that most people are good people. You hope. As a 49-year-old woman, this knowledge disgusts me. The fact that my ethnically ambiguous daughter must navigate this world frightens me. Just the other day her Uber driver asked her if she had Chinese blood in her family. I’d love for this to be an innocent question, but because of such offensive and violent stereotypes, innocuous statements like this scare me. Yet, at the same time I’m scared for young Asian women, I also realize there is a benefit to these outdated tropes. When I was a young woman, I know there was a side of this disgusting obsession that was beneficial to me. There is a power dynamic between white men and Asian women where the Asian woman wields a certain power that she may not have experienced in her young life. She has that “pussy power” that gets men to buy her drinks, gifts, and to give her attention. To a young confident girl, this means nothing. To young girls who are never looked at in high school, who lack attention, who lack confidence…this can be exhilarating. Chou recounts a time in her life she dated an older white male who showed her a box of photos of his past conquests…all Asian. Instead of being repulsed and seeing the red flags flying in her face, she became, “…dreamy, even wistful. I wanted my photo in that box. I wanted him to choose me.” So as f****d up as that thought process is, having the power to be chosen, to be special is not lost on me. Another fabulous writer Chou quotes is Jenny Zhang from her article “Far Away From Me: I was never the girl in the Weezer song.” In her essay, she discusses the song by Weezer, “Across the Sea,” and how it affected her. She noted, “My only choices, I thought, were to be invisible and ugly or to be exoticized into worthiness.” Sometimes it’s better to be wanted for the wrong reasons, then to never be wanted at all. At this stage in my life this sounds ridiculous. But, I try to put myself back into that melodramatic, starry-eyed teenager mindset and realize logic and reason are not something we all have, they sometimes must develop. The need to feel wanted and belong may overpower the desire to think logically. Even now, I sit in a place of comfort and safety I was not afforded at age 23. I believe this younger generation will do better. They demand to be seen and occupy space much better than we ever did. Their identities are validated more in film and theater and their stories are being told. But these hopeful thoughts are soon forgotten if I read the headlines in the news. It’s so easy to find Asian women being targeted, attacked, and killed. As women, we exist with caution. As hyper-sexualized Asian women, we exist with extreme caution, fear, and realize we bear the burden of our own safety. Chou ends her article finally stating what she wanted to say to the two white men on the train: “Be careful what you say. I’m listening. And I’m not going anywhere.” And this gives me hope.

Reposted from The Korea Times This article is the 25th in a series about Koreans adopted abroad. Apparently, many Koreans never expected that the children it had sent away via adoption would return as adults with questions demanding to be answered. However, thousands of adoptees visit Korea each year. Once they rediscover this country, it becomes a turning point in their lives. We should embrace the dialogue with adoptees to discover the path to recovering our collective humanity. — E.D. “Vincenzo,” a Korean TV drama starring Song Joong-ki, centers on the story of a Korean adoptee who becomes a mob lawyer after being raised by an Italian mafia family. Despite being adopted to Italy at a very young age and spending most of his life there, he arrives in Incheon International Airport speaking perfect Korean and manages to integrate seamlessly into Korean society without experiencing any culture shock, awkward social exchanges, or misunderstandings. The main character’s adoption experience enables the drama not only to create a background that would have otherwise been impossible, but it also sets up a typical emotional plot device related to adoptees: a reunion with the birth mother. The implausibility of this plot was not lost on one Korean-American journalist who asked to interview me about the fantastical portrayals of adoptees in K-dramas. Having been raised using Korean in her family, she said that she still struggled to speak Korean fluently, and this experience led her to question why Korean entertainment writers and consumers failed to question improbable stories, such as that of “Vincenzo.” She added that Koreans seem to presume that language is engraved in Korean people’s DNA, regardless of their social upbringing. I have also had to ask myself this, “Do we Koreans truly believe in such fantasies, or are we desperately averting our eyes and covering our ears to the truth?” Dramas such as “Vincenzo” are less about accurate adoptee representation in Korean society and more about catering to society’s indulgence in romanticized adoption myths. In fact, the depictions of adoptees in Korean films and dramas have become so stereotyped that they border on constituting tropes. In most of these stories, the adoptee is sent to the United States, which serves as a symbol of wealthy western countries, at a very young age. Eventually, the adoptee returns to Korea and encounters some form of adversity. But owing to the adoptee’s enormous wealth or some extraordinary ability, he or she prevails. While there are variations to this plot, with some films having the adoptee rescue his or her birth family or even the nation itself, the overall plot remains the same. The 2009 Korean hit “Gukgadaepyo” or “Take Off” in English (although the direct translation of the original Korean title would be “A Member of the National Team”), is an example of this stereotypical Korean adoption fantasy. In this film, Korea’s winter sports team lacks enough skiers to participate in the Winter Olympic Games, especially in sporting events such as the ski jump. Like a deus ex machina, an American adoptee appears to save the team and enhance the international prestige of the country. The ending scene shows everyone celebrating under the Korean national flag. Sometimes film mirrors reality. In 2018, Korea hosted the PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games, and several intercountry adoptees restored their Korean nationality to participate as members of the Korean national team. Seizing on this occasion, the minister of health and welfare designated some of them as promotional ambassadors of the search for origins. Ironically, this ministry was the same one that has kept adoption in the private realm, while permitting private agencies to receive fees from overseas adoptive parents under the guise of child protection. Despite publicly supporting adoptees’ search for origins, the ministry failed to carry out any meaningful changes that would secure adoptees’ rights to accessing their true identity and origins. While one may ask how we can interpret the state’s demonstration of shameless ignorance and lack of accountability. Indeed, this country has a long history of committing such acts. Korea’s media has played a decisive role in reinforcing this adoption myth by continuously reproducing the discourse and further embedding it in social consciousness. Heavily dramatized stories about adoptees, whether in the form of dramas, documentaries, or news reports, capture the public’s interest, yet this attention wanes as easily as it aroused. What is left is a superficial understanding of the true history of adoption in this country. This adoption myth functions as a source of entertainment for the public, and these stories remain sufficiently shallow to avoid any critical reflection that could bring on a collective sense of shame or blame. Screenwriters and producers will continue using these types of stories as long as they serve as effective vehicles to reap financial gain. Consequently, the reproduction of the adoptee myth in Korean entertainment silences the voices of adoptees. Instead of representing the complexity of their experiences, adoptees’ lives are reduced to cliches. This treatment is not only deplorable for adoptees, but in the context of human rights discourse, it functions as a form of objectification: adoptees are no longer subjects with their own voices but caricatures for movie plots. They exist in the public eye because people find entertainment in the emotional drama surrounding adoptee characters, but this interest fails to extend to the very real injustices inflicted on actual adoptees. While we may level criticism against writers, producers, and reporters for perpetuating stereotypes, we must ask ourselves whether these people are the manufacturers of these misrepresentations or if they are merely reproducing what they have already learned. South Korea has been sending its children overseas for the past seven decades. Its laws and system, which have been designed to facilitate this process, are a testament to its long history of adoption. Thus, when injustice becomes the norm, one can violate another’s human rights without realizing it. By portraying the adoptee as the savior and including an element of the birth family reunion on screen, Korean dramas and movies distort and manipulate the truth of adoptees’ lives to assuage the collective guilt society feels for what it has done to its most vulnerable members. Unfortunately, most adoptees reside outside of Korea and may not realize that Korean entertainment companies continually appropriate adoptee stories to satisfy their viewers. As long as this practice prevails, the adoption myth will remain the predominant adoption narrative in Korean society’s consciousness. Click here to read the 21st article of this series, "Imagining equality between Koreans and overseas adoptees" by Han Boon-Young. Cover photo: Vincenzo, not a typical Korean adoptee — Courtesy of tvN

I loved my shirt With three pockets of color Gym shoes Blue shorts And black hair That flopped over My gold-rimmed glasses I was ready for lessons Who wants to play tennis? I’ve got plenty of time to spare. But imagine my surprise When I saw my reflection Already hitting some balls on the court That’s weird Is she me Who is she And why is she wearing My outfit? Why does she have the Same haircut? And the gold glasses What’s up? Is this a joke or I’m nuts? I figured it must Be just a coincidence That the one Asian girl that shows up Basically looks like my twin It made me uneasy A little bit queasy So I stayed clear away Of the girl who seemed to be mocking me Cause I thought there was just one of me But maybe the universe made copies. The following week I arrived for lessons Bracing myself Feeling leery Would ‘ya look at that I was horrified to see That girl again She was wearing an eerily similar red t-shirt And yellow shorts just like me! What’s going on? I say in my head Who told her what I was going to wear? This is so creepy Should I go back to bed Am I sleepy? I rub my eyes But she’s still there Practicing serving balls She hits so high in the air And listening to the teacher Just like me Who relishes being so good. But there’s more I hear the teacher call her Wilomena Which is odd Because my name is Wendy How many names start like these two Both using the same letter double-u? This girl reminds me of me She looks an awful lot like me too So I finally asked her Are you Chinese? And she says yes I was amused And got more curious. But when I asked her Do you have a big family? Go to banquets in Chinatown Serving big, nine-course meals Eat loquats, char siu, and ginger steamed fish Sesame balls with sweet lotus paste Winter melon soup Or steamed, sticky rice, wrapped in leaves? She said No. I asked Do you give gold peaches to your grandparents When they turn seventy or eighty Belong to a family association Or say gong hay fat choy for the new year? She also flatly said No. She said no And I was disappointed Cause I thought we could relate Maybe be friends after all But how could it be That we were both Chinese? When nothing I said was familiar. That girl invited me over to her house And when I entered She gave me new slippers to wear And slipped her blue velvet ones on So we wouldn’t scuff The intricate, handcrafted floors. Her mother called on the phone through the speaker It didn’t sound like Chinese Even though she said it was too It sounded completely different. This girl Wilomena Offered me something out of a plastic container Something dried, red, and spicy Her chopsticks poked pieces into her mouth She said it was her favorite And gave me the Chinese name for it Which I had never heard of in my whole life. Wilomena told me that They didn’t have any extended family here Just her nuclear family Just Mom Dad and brother Her grandparents didn’t approve of the marriage So her parents ran away to America. Sometimes it felt lonely Being different at school Coming home To the echoes in the house She explained. Here With these drippy, cold trees Barren outside under overcast skies Sheltered we sat on a hard, slippery staircase Polished so clean Vented heat on our faces We talked about mean Mr. Smolten Classmates and math class Funny kids and the one with his seat by the window We looked at each other And let out a giggle So cute was this boy Liam So. We nibbled on Sara Lee pound cake Which we found in the commercial-sized freezer Thawed fast in those new microwaves She showed me shelves of long, red, dried peppers And containers holding yellow and white, strings of dried noodles Lined up aplenty in the bright, walk-in pantry. Noodles more noodles There sure were a lot of noodles So many kinds Long live the noodles! Noodles for long life!! We shouted at the same time And burst into laughter Our eyes shining smiles As we shared Our dreams of flying And magical powers Hushes of wishes And warm, misty visions Of what we wanted to be Hopes for a beautiful crystalline future A secret of immortality. Dancing on otherworld timelines Recollections of real-world lifelines Tied by halos of memories Me and my old-time, childhood friend Wilomena and me Reuniting to play some tennis. Cover photo: Pexels

Yalian Li is a filmmaker currently located in Los Angeles. She completed her Bachelor of Arts degree at Baylor University when she was 19 years old. She has also just graduated from USC Cinematic Arts recently. During her years at USC, she was awarded the James Bridges and Jack Larson scholarship, the Fox Fellowship Endowment, and the Irving Lerner Endowment Fund—three of the most prestigious scholarships for students at USC. Her films have been selected for more than 30 international film festivals. She has also served as an assistant director for the movie "The Day We Lit up the Sky," which scored over 20 million at the box office in China in 2021. Furthermore, her short film "Mantis Club" is currently on the film circuit. It was in the official selection in Annapolis Film Festival and RiverRun International Film Festival. The film also screened at Hanesbrands Theater in North Carolina on April 23rd. "Mantis Club" is all about gender. The story of "Mantis Club" is set in a gender-flipped world. The log line is “In a world where females devour males during sex, Zack, a 17-year-old virgin is asked on his first date.” The idea first struck Li after seeing a documentary back in 2017 during a road trip. She was in a crowded train station watching a documentary about praying mantises, and was particularly captivated by the sequence about female mantises devouring males after sex. She wondered, “What if women ate men after sex? How would that affect our society?” “Women eating males” is a metaphor. The film is a dark comedy that functions as social commentary. She hopes the story simultaneously serves as an open window for the audiences to rethink the patriarchal and heteronormative elements we experience today. What is gender, and how does gender divide power? Is it based on our society, our history, or our biology? As a storyteller, Li is very passionate about making films about women’s empowerment and the Asian community in the United States. She is currently developing a story about an Asian boy who’s trying to be the flute-playing leader of a local orchestra after he immigrated to the States.