Brief Statement on the Korean International Adoption & Child Trafficking Reckoning
What do you do when you find out your whole life is based on a lie?
I identify as an adopted Korean person. Collusion between the United States federal government and the South Korean government effectively trafficked 200,000+ Korean and mixed-race Korean children for capital gain and ethnic cleansing purposes post Japanese colonization, peaking in the 1980s.
This gravely impacted my life forever.
Colonization, nationalism, blood purity, and imperialism have long haunted my people in various forms and fashions. There have been continued, rampant attacks on the personhood and autonomy of women and children, particularly poor women and children, in Korea for centuries.
Confirmation of the long suspected violations that occurred and the exploitation of the amendments to the INA in 1961 which led to the explosion of child trafficking in Korea has left me in a state of both acute and chronic shock and extreme grief.
There are no more questions. No one can ever gaslight or rage me into submitting to their version of the truth again. Because now, it is both phenomenological and epistemological. It is undeniable.
Adoption from Korea to the West is human trafficking.
I have lived effectively my entire life having very little bodily and psychological autonomy. My body and my life, my identity, name, and culture have been structurally erased and geopoliticized in the name of the Patriarchy, Nationalist ideologies, sociopolitical saving of face, and White Westerners’ ornamental and orientalized fixation and obsession with using my AAPI sisters and I to absolve themselves of -isms, particuarly with Black America and the traumatic legacy of slavery. Effectively, in the name of bordered, boundaried, nationalistic ideals, I lost the right to boundaries of my own.
I will wear these scars forever.
My grief is unimaginable and there are no words to express the loss I feel and am grappling with at this time.
I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t particularly want to think about it. I don’t want to write about it further. I don’t want to address it with White people, Western people, or my own people past a certain point.
Nothing was the same. And never will it be again.
What do you do when you find out your whole life was based on a lie? My whole life, the Han in me knew. The indescribable pain in my bones, in my soul. I knew I was stolen. Bought and paid for. All my life. I knew I was not supposed to be here. We are not supposed to be here.
In America. Our lives have been nothing but trouble. As that is
The reality of not conforming to the stringent, thin margined acceptability of the definition of being a good Korean daughter to the colonizers who brought us here out of their good Christian love and boundless compassion. Trouble. My son sees me as such, his tiny hands coming to my aid to frame my cheekbones and whisper, “Ohh mama mama mama. My Mama. You’re weird. But I love you.
(A beat)
Mama! —
Has anything good happened in your life?”
I laugh like the seas may part.
He is so funny. I cannot lie. Yes.
Him.
I say to my son. Umma longs to go home to Korea. But there is no home for me to go back to. No culture, no language, relationships broken, relationships that never came to be; no way of connecting… no way of being I can comprehend. It’s been colonized out of me. And so.
You grieve.
You become boundaried.
You drive people and users and objectifiers and nationalists away.
And in that silent mass rejection — you thank God.
And you grieve some more.
When you find out that your life is based on lies of this magnitude, the truth becomes very important. It becomes very sufficient. If ever I even get the hint that someone is lying to me or trying to deceive me, I go the extra mile to uncover the truth. And get to the bottom of it. I need to know. If ever someone knew how to express love to me, it would be by never lying to me. Keeping it 100 is the healing remedy, and a huge value to me. Maybe now more than ever.
If you have a wound. Don’t touch it. And don’t let anyone else touch it until you know where you want to go to actually get some remedy, some medicine.
Just let it be. And just be.
