Everyone went to their adoption agency today, so I went to Holt to look at my file in person. I didn't get any more information about my father but they did give me one of the original photos of when I was registered as a baby. They even still had the negative!
This is Hye-lim Seo: the social worker I've been working with over the last couple of years. We've spoken on the phone once and it was so great to meet her in person.
We had samgyeopsal 삼겹살 (pork belly bbq) for lunch with the Holt group.
A note about adoption and agency conversations:
We're trying to piece together who we are now, who we were then, and where we came from. We ask a lot of questions and it's easy to blame the people that are seemingly withholding some of that information (our social workers) - even when they're doing all they can to help. Privacy laws in Korea are strange -- on one hand there are CCTV cameras everywhere, which makes it super safe here, and per the kdramas it doesn't seem like there are any HIPAA laws. But when it comes to our own history, we're not allowed access to it unless our biological families permit it.
I've had a lot of time to sit in that realization. How can I not have access to my own history? Why do I have less rights than other people? Why am I a second class citizen where I was born but take advantage of white-adjacent privilege in America? It's not been easy to let my anger go and allow myself to see myself in each birth family's shoes.
It was nice to meet the social workers at Holt - not just to see my file in person - but to remind myself that there's a human, just like me, on the other end of the phone.
When I had time to sit with EJ (은정), the Director of Holt Korea, I asked her about the current adoption laws and how many children are still adopted per year. Last year, less than 100 children were adopted both domestically (60%) and internationally (40%) from Holt. But that's not all the children that were left behind last year by their families -- that's simply the number of families that could qualify to adopt from Korea.
This is what I took from the conversation -- by no means has this been fact checked and is mostly my own emotional interpretation.
A past Korean President declared that the country should be able to take care of their own and not send children overseas. So a law was introduced where children would be provided for if abandoned, and kept in safe housing until their birth families came back for them. But without other assistance for the birth families to reach the opportunity to get their kids back, this law falls extremally short for the children. Kids end up in foster homes or group homes instead.
Quite opposite of the US where we often remove children from loving homes and communities because of a past conviction long forgotten and place them as quickly into permanent adoptive families to keep them "out of the system." Korea actually wants to keep children in their system because their hold so much shame and guilt for letting so many of us leave in the first place.
It's a lot to take in. This whole experience thus far has helped me process so many emotions and I'm sure it'll continue for months to come. Thanks for reading!
❤
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