Choosing Ethnicity, Negotiating Race: Korean Adoptees in America

Chapter 3: Family Life and Childhood Experiences

CHAPTER 3 Family Life and Childhood Experiences Emily Stewart was raised in a small, predominantly Dutch community in the state of Washington. In the mid-1970s, “it was a ‘closed on Sundays’ type of community, mostly white, blond-haired, blue-eyed Dutch kids.” With her dark hair and Asian features, Emily was anything but the norm in her community. Her parents, Faye and Gary, decided that the best way to help their daughter adjust would be to teach her that racial and cultural differences did not matter in family or community life. People were people—individuals rather than members of racial groups. Then Emily started dating, and their tune changed. “One weird thing about my mom is, she didn’t want me dating any guys from other ethnic groups. She kind of treated me as if I was white.” Important contradictions and clues to how race is handled in adoptive families are revealed in this excerpt. On the one hand, white parents such as Emily’s aspire to a vision of racial and cultural differences playing insignificant roles in the intimacy of family life. Yet race absolutely matters in relations beyond the family—serving, in this case, as a gatekeeper for sorting appropriate boyfriends for their Asian daughters. Of particular note in Emily’s case was that “other ethnic groups” meant nonwhites, not non-Koreans. As this narrative conveys, how white adoptive parents relate to race and other forms of difference embodied by their Korean children defies easy categorization . Far from being color-blind or not color-blind, racist or not racist, these par- FAMILY LIFE AND CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES 41 ents reveal, upon examination, a more complex picture. Some of the families who bucked social conventions to love children of a different race could also hold rather familiar racial attitudes. In short, Korean adoptive families both challenged and reproduced the existing racial hierarchy through their daily actions and choices. In this chapter, we delve further into an exploration of adoptee experiences in childhood through adolescence, a period we refer to simply as “childhood.” We explore how parents like Emily’s handled issues of difference (race, ethnicity , adoption) within the family and beyond, with a particular eye to the time period when adoptees came of age. We also delve more deeply into two of the central questions guiding this study. First, how do adolescent Korean adoptees learn about their own racial and ethnic identity when their parents and kin are white? And second, what factors lead some adolescent adoptees to pursue racial and ethnic exploration, some to reject exploration altogether, and some to feel indifferent toward exploration?1 NEGOTIATING “DIFFERENCE” WITHIN THE FAMILY The first step in examining how difference is negotiated within Korean adoptive families is to analytically distinguish between adoptive difference and racial difference. Adoption researchers have taken their lead from social work’s concerns about successful or nonpathological placements, and consequently they treat race as an internal tension for adoptees who experience otherwise positive psychosocial and behavioral outcomes (Hollingsworth 1997; Kim, Hong, and Kim 1979; W. J. Kim 1995; Silverman 1980; Simon 1984; Simon and Altstein 1987, 2000). “Difference” in these research designs plays the role of a potential barrier to successful clinical outcomes, especially a permanent adoptive placement. By using the absence of difference—that is, colorblindness —as an indicator of how well adoptive families approximate biological families, the transnational adoption literature has shown a preoccupation with difference as a threat to family cohesion and identity rather than as a social fact to which families might respond in varied ways with consequences more complex than simply success or failure by clinical standards. Instead of viewing transracial adoption solely through either clinical assessments of pathology or political litmus tests for parental competence, we suggest exploring how families make sense of and respond to being not only adoptive but also transracial. We find clues to such an approach in H. David Kirk’s (1964/1984) pioneering book Shared Fate, where he offers a comprehensive theory of how families created through adoption relate to being different from biological families. Developed during a time when adoption was stigmatized and shrouded in secrecy (Benet 1976), Kirk provides a framework for understanding how adoptive parents relate to their unique family circumstances as a role handicap and deal with the inability of others to see them as normal parents with children of “their own” (biological offspring). Some of the key...