Korean Schools in U.S. Teach Language, Culture to Adoptees : Lifestyle: ‘They wear Korea in their faces every day of their lives, and I think they should have it in their hearts,’ one parent said.

About 30 Korean children stand in rows, punching and kicking to their martial arts instructor’s count.

Later, they cool down with a Korean folk song about a rabbit hopping across a field.

After class, they’re whisked into cars by a flock of parents--almost all of them Caucasian.

Albany’s Korean Language School, like dozens of others around the country, was established by the immigrant community as a way of passing on its traditions to an American-born generation.

But by the end of its first year in 1989, the majority of students were adopted children whose American parents wanted to help them learn about a heritage they themselves couldn’t teach.

“They wear Korea in their faces every day of their lives, and I think they should have it in their hearts,” said one parent, Barbara Randall.

With the rise of adoptees’ rights groups and less-restrictive attitudes toward adoption, it’s becoming common for adoptees to research their birth histories.

Experts also believe it’s healthy for children adopted from other countries to learn about their native cultures, said Susan Freivalds, executive director of Adoptive Families of America and herself the mother of a 19-year-old Korean daughter.

Ethnic events and cultural groups are available for children from many countries, but the network of language schools, cultural camps and support groups for Korean children is the oldest and most widespread.

In part, that’s because Korean children have been adopted by American families since the 1950s. They now number about 80,000, more than two-thirds of all international adoptees, according to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Korean adoption agencies and the South Korean Embassy have also supported the schools and camps with teaching materials and funds and helped arrange trips back to Korea.

The schools also have enjoyed strong support from Korean immigrants, trying to preserve a culture foreign to this country and once under attack even in Korea. Annexed by Japan in 1910, Koreans were banned from speaking their own language from 1937 and 1945, when Japan surrendered in World War II.

“The language is our culture,” said Yoonju Park, an immigrant and the director of the 20-year-old Korean Institute of Minnesota in Minneapolis. “If you lose your language, you lose your heritage, your roots. You lose your identity.”

Park believes the adoptees need the schools even more than the immigrant community.

“As soon as the adopted children recognize the differences of their faces, they ask the parents, ‘Why was I adopted? Did I come from Korea?’ ” she says. “I hear more and more, ‘I don’t feel I am complete unless I learn who I am.’ ”

In the first Korean adoptions, parents were encouraged to Americanize their children. Susan Cox, adopted in 1956, grew up knowing almost nothing about her native country.

Her interest was piqued when she was elected to the board of directors of Holt International Children’s Services, which had facilitated her own adoption, and visited Korea.

She learned a little Korean and took back the name her birth mother had given her; Soon Keum, meaning Pure Gold. She traced her family and found two half-brothers.

In the process, she says, she has come to a new understanding of her identity.

“I feel very connected to Korea,” said Cox, 41, of Eugene, Ore. “I am much more American than Korean. However, that doesn’t take away from the fact that I’m also very Korean.”

As adopted children joined the Korean schools, American and Korean parents found they had different expectations. Korean parents wanted traditional disciplinarian methods to teach children fluent Korean. American parents wanted to expose their children to a wide range of Korean traditions, and didn’t approve of the rigid Korean teaching techniques.

“The Korean families bring them to learn the language, but the adoptive families bring them to learn self-esteem,” Park said.

As a compromise, both the Minnesota and the Albany schools teach the language, folk tales, history, martial arts, paper-folding and other subjects in American-style classrooms.

In Albany, Pat Shoemaker says she never expected to have an interracial family. But she and her husband, Tom Fletcher, happened upon an agency able to place Korean children quickly, with pre-adoption training and a minimum of hassle.

Now Korea has become something of an extracurricular activity for the whole family. Shoemaker, a computer trainer in the state Department of Social Services, decided to study the language and soon became one of the directors of Albany’s Korean Language School.

Amanda, 5, has memorized dozens of Korean folk songs. Jeremy, 8, is an enthusiastic, if undisciplined, student of the martial art called tae kwon do.

Among their bedtime books are Korean folk tales, including the story of Pat-jee, the beautiful young woman who escapes from her evil stepmother and stepsister to meet and marry a young nobleman.

Shoemaker and Fletcher, who don’t maintain any traditions from their own English, German and Polish roots, sometimes experiment with Korean cooking, fixing rice and vegetable dishes, or a tangy beef barbecue called bul-go-gee.

They’ve even developed a taste for the country’s trademark food, a fiery cabbage relish called kimchee--though Jeremy won’t touch it.

Korean traditions are a way for the family to have fun together, and they also give Jeremy and Amanda something to be proud of, their mother says.

“I think it provides self-esteem for the children,” Shoemaker said. “It’s good for them to learn as much about their culture as possible so they can know how beautiful it is.”