Tag Archives: International adoption

The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States

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Kit Myers is an adoptee from Hong Kong; he is also an assistant professor at the University of California-Merced. I was fortunate recently to attend a talk he gave at the University of Washington about his book, “The Violence of Love: Race, Family and Adoption in the United States.”

It’s a powerful book, and I recommend it. In full transparency, it is an academic book of sorts, with hundreds of footnotes and many pages of bibliography. Lots of great research presented usefully.

“The Violence of Love” is an important exploration of, as Dr. JaeRan Kim notes in her blurb, the question “How can transracial or transnational adoption be an act of both love and violence, and how can we envision a different future?”

Dr. Kim is herself an adoptee from South Korea, and an associate professor at the University of Washington-Tacoma. She also blogs at the highly respected Harlow’s Monkey.

JaeRan and Kit had a great discussion at the book talk. Many in the audience identified themselves as adoptees. I am grateful to scholars like Kit and JaeRan who share their wisdom with grace, insight, and truth.

From the book: “…we must eradicate not just the family policing system and adoption industry but the structural conditions and ideologies that enable them to exist…How do we draw on radical love to care for the most vulnerable–not in isolation but together? What would we do if we allocated the resources and were unafraid?”

A revolutionary sort of love. “There can be no love without truth.”

You can download a free copy here. You can buy a copy of it at that site as well, or from Amazon, or your local bookstore.

Cam Lee Small on “Why Adoptees Need a New Kind of Village”: TedX Talk

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Let’s “make more space for the adoptee voice, so they can be brought up and witnessed in the light, and be met compassionately with the resources they deserve.” That’s one powerful line of many that were shared by Cam Lee Small, MS, LPC, at his recent TedX Talk, Why Adoptees Need A New Kind of Village.

Cam is multi-faceted: an author (The Adoptee’s Journey: From Loss and Trauma to Healing and Empowerment), a licensed clinician, a transnational transracial adoptee from South Korea, and an advocate for adoptees and for adoption literacy.

His TedX Talk was powerful for me as an adoptive parent, and I believe that may also be true for adoptees and birth/first parents. He is compassionate and insightful, balancing his lived experience with years of professional training and expertise.

In the TedX Talk, he uses anecdotes from adoptee summer camps (sometimes the only places that adoptees see others who look like them and who are all adopted as well) along with powerful recommendations to create that vital village to raise a child.

While noting the variety of adoptee stories and experiences, Cam contends that “adoptees need tools that destigmatize mental health support and honestly address how history, loss, early adversity, and adoption can have an impact on nervous system development, brain and body functioning, racial and ethnic socialization, identity, search and reunion.” He calls for “ethical DNA testing” in the U.S. and around the globe so that people who have been relinquished can find their families. Also needed are “quality language interpretation skills” for when adoptees and those who relinquished them find each other.

All adoptees need access to their own health records and to “targeted health screenings, especially when records are kept from them or are falsified,” as happens so often.

It’s a brilliant talk. Please listen, learn, and share.

Follow Cam on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Korean Birth Mother Sues Holt Agency and Government of Korea for Wrongful Adoption of Her Daughter

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Han Tae-soon is 70 years old. She says that in 1976, her four-year-old daughter was wrongfully sent to the United States for adoption.She is now suing the Holt Adoption agency as well as the government of South Korea.

Per the Associated Press article, this is the “first known case of a Korean birth parent suing for damages against the government and an adoption agency over the wrongful adoption of their child.”

From the article: “Han accuses Holt Children’s Services, South Korea’s biggest adoption agency, of facilitating (her daughter Laurie) Bender’s adoption without checking her background. Her lawyers said the Jechon Children’s Home made no effort to find the parents after Bender was placed at the facility by police in May 1975, a day after Han reported her as missing. 

In her adoption papers, Bender, named Shin Gyeong-ha at birth, is described as an abandoned orphan with no known parents. Under a new Korean name made by the orphanage, Baik Kyong Hwa, she was sent to the United States in February 1976. 

“For 44 years, I wandered and searched for my child, but the joy of meeting her was only momentary and now I am in so much pain because we can’t communicate in the same language,” Han said, fighting back tears. 

“It turns out they didn’t make an effort to find her clearly existing parents and instead disguised her as an orphan for adoption abroad. I want the government and Holt to explain to us how this happened.” 

The AP article notes that “In 2019, Adam Crapser became the first Korean adoptee to sue the South Korean government and an adoption agency for damages, accusing them of mishandling his adoption to the United States, where he faced legal troubles after surviving an abusive childhood before being deported in 2016.

After four years of hearings, the Seoul Central District Court last year ordered Crapser’s adoption agency, Holt, to pay him 100 million won ($74,000) in damages for failing to inform his adopters they needed to take separate steps to obtain his citizenship after his adoption was approved by a state court. 

However, the court dismissed Crapser’s accusations against the Korean government over alleged monitoring and due diligence failures. The case is now with the Seoul High Court after both Crapser and Holt appealed.”

Lawsuits like these in Korea and elsewhere can take a long time to work their way through the system. I hope that Adam Crapser, Han Tae-soon, and her daughter find justice.