Korean Adoptees Raised by White Families Seek to Reclaim Heritage

Raised by Caucasian adoptive parents in a white, Midwestern community, Thomas Manvydas tried for years to ignore the unmistakably Korean facial features he saw every day in a mirror.

“I thought I was white,” said Manvydas, a 29-year-old financial analyst now living in Glendale. During his teenage years, he said, his identity crisis grew so severe that he routinely used racial epithets when referring to people of Asian heritage.

About 350 adoptees, parents, researchers and community leaders from throughout the United States and South Korea shared and listened to such stories in Koreatown on Saturday during the first national conference on the phenomenon and consequences of the adoptions of Korean children.

In a practice driven by war, poverty and culture, more than 200,000 Koreans have been given up for adoption over the past 50 years, mostly to the United States.

Nearly all were raised in non-Korean families because of a deeply rooted Korean aversion to adoption.

In recent years, many of the grown-up children and their adoptive families in the United States have begun fighting the stigma attached to adopted children, their birth mothers and their adoptive parents by Koreans and Korean Americans.

Sprinkled throughout the nation, many Korean American adoptees grew up feeling isolated from one another and alienated from their ethnic heritage, participants said.

“One of the main goals of the conference is to form a community and foster a sense of belonging,” said Manvydas, co-chairman of the conference sponsored by the Korean American, Adoptee, Adoptive Family Network.

South Korea until the late 1980s exported more orphans than any other country. Those adoptees have come of age, constituting more than 10% of all Korean Americans in the United States.

“If you consider their extended families and friends, this is a resource of 3 million people who share the interest of the Korean American community,” said Christy Winston, adoptive mother of two Korean children and co-chairwoman of the conference. “These people need to have Korean connections so that their children can be raised with a strong ethnic identity and positive self-esteem.”

Discrimination against racially mixed children and those born out of wedlock in the conformist, Confucianism-steeped South Korean society has kept adoptees largely ignored.

In the past decade, however, adoptees have become more vocal as they search for their identity and, in some cases, their birth parents. They have been helped by a small group of activists in South Korea and in the Korean American community.

“I keep telling Korean Americans that these are our children and we have to help them and their adoptive parents,” said Grace Kim, a retired schoolteacher who has been active in trying to connect adoptees and their Anglo parents with the Korean American community.

Cultural bias and ignorance, she said, have hampered the effort, but the situation is improving.

Kim Jee-Hwa, 59, is among a handful of biological mothers who spoke at a panel discussion Saturday. She recounted to a standing-room-only crowd of more than 300 how she gave up her daughter in 1961 amid poverty and family troubles.

After she spoke, she beamed at a younger, familiar face across the room. Just two days before, she and her daughter, Cindy Anderson of Sacramento, had been reunited for the first time in nearly 38 years.

“I’m so happy,” she said through a translator, hugging her daughter.

“Your whole life you dream about finally meeting your birth mother,” Anderson said. “It’s just wonderful, wonderful.”

Kim--who works as a cleaning woman--wondered whether her daughter would forgive her for sending her away--a decision she made when she was 20. She had left an abusive husband and walked three days to Seoul with Cindy on her back to start a new life.

“I am full of guilt and remorse,” Kim said.

Anderson, 39, who works as a computer analyst for the state, said she hopes their reunion will ease her mother’s guilt.

“All my life, I always thought that she had a very good reason for placing me into adoption,” Anderson said. “Now, it’s been confirmed.”

Trans-racial adoption of children from another country is difficult because of physical and cultural differences between adoptive parents and their Korean children.

Buyne Seal gave up her daughter in 1970. For the past 17 years, she has been unable to locate her daughter, Mary, whose father was American. Seal said she put Mary up for adoption to spare her a life of discrimination in South Korea. She showed the audience several photos of a little girl, asking for help in finding her.

With tears streaming down her face as she stood near the back of the room, 25-year-old Lisa Ochoa of Lovington, N.M., said the women’s stories were helping heal her lifelong wounds. Though raised by a loving family, she sometimes felt “angry, resentful at having been abandoned,” she said. Now, she feels she has a better understanding of the birth mother she has never met.

Identity issues become acute when children leave home as adults or begin college, setting off a painful, sometimes prolonged identity crisis, said Dr. Luke Kim, a retired professor of psychiatry at UC Davis.

But overall, experts say, Korean adoptees have done well in the United States.

In a study of 370 families, researchers found that Korean adoptees functioned better in emotional, developmental, social and academic areas than white adoptees. Korean adoptees, however, had more discomfort about their appearance than white adoptees.

In two studies comparing adoptive children with biological children, psychiatrist Wun-Jung Kim of the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo found no such differences between Korean adoptees and the biological children of their adoptive parents.

David Nakase, 44, a computer analyst who was adopted by a Monrovia couple in 1957, said his journey to South Korea 25 years later made him feel much more comfortable about himself.

“All the things that made me an oddball [in America], I realized were my Korean traits,” Nakase said. “People used to say, ‘What’s the matter, why don’t you smile?’ Koreans aren’t supposed to walk around like an idiot, smiling. I just fit right in in Korea.”

For decades, South Korea, in conjunction with adoption agencies, had a policy of solving domestic orphan problems through international adoptions.

That policy came under considerable international scrutiny during the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. In response, the government launched a campaign to persuade more Koreans to adopt orphans, but it has not been very successful, largely because of the Korean emphasis on family lineage.

Childless couples adopt in secret, said Park, a researcher with the Hae Song Child Welfare Center in Seoul.

But in the United States, especially among the younger generation, the shame of adoption is fading, conference participants said.

An Orange County Korean American woman, who asked not to be identified because she and her husband are about to “come out” to their Korean church about their adoption of a Korean baby girl, said their families and close friends have been supportive.

They have talked at least two other Korean American couples into adopting, she said, grinning from ear to ear Saturday. “We want to end the stigma.”

After the conference closes, an exhibition of art by adopted Koreans will open today at the Korean American Museum in the Mid-Wilshire district. It will run through September.