Adoption: Neither Here nor There

November is Adoption Awareness Month. Each year, we hold in our hearts the complex nature of the adoption narrative - recognizing that while adoption brings connection and joy, every adoption story starts with loss.

This year, we are honored to share our colleague Whitney's essay on her experience as an adoptee - and her call to action to make a difference for thousands of transracial adoptees in the US.

Image courtesy of Whitney Handrich

by Whitney Handrich, PCD, LMT

November is National Adoption Awareness Month. As a transracial adoptee from Korea, and as a doula, this year it feels even more important than usual to explore assumptions about adoption and shed light on the experiences of adoptees like me and birth families like mine. 

So many current topics and events have felt like gut punches to me this year - racial awareness, family separation policy, the public rehoming of Chinese adoptee Huxley Stauffer, recently confirmed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett showcasing her adopted children… This is also a year in which we have an opportunity to make a difference for thousands of intercountry and transracial adoptees by supporting the Adoptee Citizenship Act.

Let’s start with a story - my story - for context:

What do you think of when you think of adoption?

For me, while I was growing up, I just didn’t want to dwell on it. From what I could remember, I had always known I was adopted from South Korea at 3 months old, and that was the beginning and end of the story. My family was my family, the people who raised me, they loved me as their own - they just happened to be white. Growing up in a nearly all white community, with little knowledge about Korea, I was Korean on the outside but just like any other American on the inside. I was racist to myself, able to joke about being a twinkie or a banana - yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Over the years, I got used to other people being racist, too. I got used to strangers asking my parents questions about me as if I weren’t there, like “Is she yours? She’s so lucky.”

I didn’t realize that even I had assumptions about my adoption. I assumed my birth parents were unmarried, young, not ready for kids, not wanting kids. When I was 25, I finally looked at my adoption paperwork. I learned that my birth parents were actually in their 30s, married, and they’d had 3 children before me - who were 9, 6, and 3 years old at the time I was born. I burst into tears - I couldn’t imagine that loss. It was so different from the story in my head. They were already parents. They knew what it was to parent, to love their children. The adoption paperwork listed “unfavorable financial circumstances” as the reason I was referred to adoption.

Two years later, I finally went to Korea, with plans to stay for a few months to study Korean and learn more about my country of origin. It’s a strange feeling to finally look more like everyone around you, but still feel completely out of place. People didn’t understand why I couldn’t speak Korean, and I couldn’t explain my adoption. I felt stupid. I didn’t feel like I belonged in the United States or in Korea - I was stuck somewhere in between. 

Just before my 27th birthday, I reunited with my birth family. Within an instant of meeting each other, my birth mom hugged me, sobbing and apologizing, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” My dad told me he didn’t think he would see me again before he died.

I learned that my family had been extremely poor when I was born. They struggled to find stable housing - moving from one one-room place to another, sometimes staying with friends. They couldn’t afford enough food, so sometimes they would feed my brothers and sister bread and instant coffee to fill their stomachs and suppress their hunger; sometimes friends would give them food. My aunt later told me that when they brought me to a social services agency, seeking support, they were misled about what it meant to leave me there; when my mom realized that their parental rights had been permanently terminated, she tried to get me back. But it was too late. 

I was left with so many questions. How could this happen? What could I do to prevent this kind of tragic story from repeating?

I came back to the U.S. seeking answers; what I’ve learned has opened up so many more questions. 

In the past 5 years, I’ve learned that many international adoptions have been fueled by bias against single mothers, unmarried couples, sex workers, and mixed race children. Korea was the first country to allow legal overseas adoptions, beginning after the Korean War. With a heavy U.S. military presence in Korea, the majority of children internationally adopted in the first decade were mixed-race children, most born to American soldiers and Korean women. There have now been over 200,000 intercountry Korean adoptions.

I’ve learned that there are more cases similar to mine, where families seeking help and support were coerced into permanently giving up their parental rights. I’ve learned about adoptees who suffered preventable harm at the hands of their adoptive families, failures of the adoption agencies to provide post-adoption support for both families and adoptees, and the mishandling of adoptee documents and information. I’ve learned that adoptees are twice as likely to experience significant mental health challenges and are 4 times as likely to commit suicide than our non-adopted peers.

Whitney with her birth parents.

With a determined heart, I’ve studied trauma resilience, and I’ve trained as a foster parent. I’ve slowly been peeling off layers around my identity, reconnecting with the Korean part of me, relearning my adoption history, and recognizing my own immigration story. I’ve been trying to gradually build a relationship with this birth family of strangers and come to terms with adoptive relatives who claim to be colorblind. And I’ve found that what feels like my truest family are other Korean and transracial adoptees who can understand the complexities of our shared experience.

Every adoption story is different, but this is my story - part of it, anyway. I feel a conflict of gratitude and guilt for the life I have lived. I feel immense pain and grief for the suffering my family has gone through. And I feel a commitment to helping other families, daunted by their circumstances, to remain whole, happy and well. This is why I became a postpartum doula, prenatal yoga teacher, and massage therapist with a mission to provide holistic healing and support to families in need, especially BIPOC and low-income families.

Here’s an action we can all take together, today, to help set things right for thousands of individual adoptees who have been denied their rights:

Due to mistakes and errors by their parents and agencies at the time of their adoption, tens of thousands of intercountry adoptees are living in the US without citizenship. Some have been deported back to their countries of origin, where they do not speak the language or know the culture, and where they are not considered nationals. After the trauma of separation as infants and children, adoptees were promised “forever families,” yet some have been forced to lose everything all over again, and many more remain at risk.

Right now, there is a bill in US Congress called the Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2019 (HR 2731 / S. 1554) that would grant citizenship for all intercountry adoptees and provide a pathway to bring deported adoptees back home. It is the furthest a bill like this has gotten in decades, and adoptees are pushing for this to be voted on and passed - but we need more help! Only 3 Oregon congressional representatives have co-sponsored so far - your call or email can make a difference! You can find prepared templates for email or phone advocacy at Adoptees For Justice - please take a moment to contact your US Representatives and Senators, and reach out to your family in other states to ask them to do the same.

Thank you for supporting this important cause and helping to raise awareness around the complexities of adoption.

Whitney Handrich is a Certified Postpartum Doula with Bridgetown Baby, Licensed Massage Therapist, and Studio Manager for Ready Set Grow, a prenatal and postpartum movement center. She was born in Daegu, South Korea and adopted and raised in Wisconsin. After several years abroad in South America, Europe and Asia, she has found home in Portland. She is a co-founder of the Humans of Color Movement Alliance, a collective of BIPOC healers, as well as a member of Yeondae (meaning “solidarity” in Korean), a collective of Korean adoptees working toward racial, social, and economic justice.