Adapted

I sit down with Alicia Soon Hershey, 41, a Korean transnational adoptee now living in Barcelona. Soon Hershey was the very first adoptee interviewed on the podcast back in 2016 and our conversation book-ends the podcast in the 165th episode (!). We get a chance to hear how she has evolved in the past eight years and her outlook for life now that she is a mother herself.

Korean-American cultural anthropologist Eleana Kim talks about her research that went into the seminal imprint "Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging," Duke University Press, 2010. 

Geoffrey Winder (born Jong Ke-Bin) (he/him), 42, of Oakland, CA, shares some of his story as a queer Black Korean transnational and transracial adopted man and about his activism in queer advocacy, adoptee community, and leadership spaces.

Mirae Kate-hers Rhee, 48, is a transnational, transcultural artist and adopted Korean who uses her socio-political artwork and performance to investigate concepts like identity and belonging.

Korean mixed-race adoptee Sarah Harris, 54, of Los Angeles, shares her story of visiting Korea and finding the place where she felt truly rooted.

Korean adoptee Delight Roberts, 52, talks about marrying into a Korean-American family and the challenges and benefits that provided her. Some were surprising – like table eating etiquette – but all of Roberts' experiences from childhood bullying to having future in-laws who didn't approve of her because she is adopted, have strengthened Roberts' resolve to live the life of her choice.

Wyatt Tuell, 45, is a Korean-American adoptee who was raised outside Omaha, Nebraska with a Korean immigrant adoptive mother and a white American adoptive father who was much older than his mother. Growing up in the 80s, Wyatt often felt different from his white school peers around him and was sometimes teased for being Korean. At home, his family was very close and loving, which he credits today for the choices he's made in life. 

Kit Myers, 42, is a transracial Hong Kong adoptee and assistant professor in the Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Merced. In this interview, we talk about Myers' search for his birth mother and feelings he's had of having a 'ghostly' or ambiguous kinship with someone he doesn't know. We also talk about his upcoming imprint, " Violence of Love, Race, Adoption and Family in the United States."

I continue the conversation with Nik Nadeau, 36, a Korean adoptee who is in reunion with his Korean birth mother. He is a secret, unable to meet his half-siblings who are also in their 30s, or be acknowledged by his mother, publicly. His relationship with his mother is qualified by language barriers, time and mutual grief, and love. We start off this episode with Nadeau recalling the experience of when he first introduced his then-girlfriend, a bilingual Korean-American, to his Korean mother. 

Nik Nadeau, 36, met his Korean birth mother 14 years ago. In this episode, he talks about his creative writing process and about how he's unlocked feelings about the reunion and his own identity as a transnational adopted person. 

Leader Yukyeong Kim and her group of neighbors and friends in Korea have been quietly and determinedly helping adoptees search for their biological family since 2018. I sit down with Kim to find out more about how the group got started and how their willingness to make a simple phone call has often times had surprising results. 

Dr. JaeHee Chung-Sherman, DSW, LCSW, has centered her practice and research on decolonizing adoption and mental health for transracial and international adoptees. A transracial, transnational adoptee herself, Chung-Sherman, 47, has been among the first co-hort of TRIA therapists to do this work. She talks about narcissistic colonial adopt systems, and why she ultimately has decided to move on from private practice.

Mia Quade Kristensen, 46, and Jannie Jung Westermann, 45, are on the board of the 34-year old Danish Korean adoptee organization, Korea Klubben. They will share about their own search and reunion stories, including one of them being in reunion with her Korean family for more than two decades. The women will also share about their community in Denmark and what is needed for the future. Besides the US and Korea, Denmark is the third most-downloaded country for the podcast.  Audio is available on Friday, March 15, 2024. 

I talk with Dr. JaeRan Kim and PhD student Grace Newton about the Adoptee Consciousness Model - a framework for understanding adoptee awareness of the impact of adoption. Together with Dr. Susan Branco (not featured), the model is now being discussed and critiqued in academic and adoptee communities. Kim, 55, and Newton, 29, also talk about their earlier years when helming their own anonymous blogs about adoptee identity, 'righteous anger' and the impact of adoption.  Dr. JaeRan Kim:  Harlow's Monkey https://harlows-monkey.com/2022/06/23/coming-to-consciousness/    Journal link https://www.ibpj.org/issues/articles/Susan%20F.%20Branco,%20JaeRan%20Kim,%20Grace%20Newton,%20Stephanie%20Kripa%20Cooper-Lewter,%20Paula%20O'Loughlin%20-%20....pdf    https://harlows-monkey.com/ Instagram @harlows_monkey LinkedIn jaerankimphd   Grace Newton:  Instagram: @redthreadbroken   Facebook: Red Thread Broken Twitter or X: @gracepinghua    Website: www.redthreadbroken.com 

Thomas Haessly, 40, has felt like an outsider ever since he can remember. Adopted from Korea by a Danish mother and American father to Racine, Wisconsin, Haessly recalls feeling like an imposter within his family, of not quite fitting in, and again as an adult at Korean grocery stores and parenting his own children. Haessly's sister, Mia, also an adopted Korean, is featured on Season 7, Episode 8 of this podcast. This interview is the first for the podcast where adopted siblings who grew up together open up about their lived experiences, and illustrate their differences.

Rachel Forbes, LCSW, is a Korean-American adoptee with a psychotherapy practice in Connecticut where she specializes in transracial adoption and trauma-informed care. She is also an educator who speaks about trauma, attachment and healing within the adoption constellation. Forbes, 34, talks about the 4Fs regarding emotion disregulation and provides some good resources too.    **CW: child sexual assault/ incest/ adoptive parent abuse 

Marissa Lichwick, 46, is a Korean adoptee and filmmaker, playwright and actor. She is using her past pain and trauma surrounding her family separation, abuse in the orphanage and in her father and stepmother's home and the haunting loss of a half-sister she's never met in her art, to process the events of her life and to encourage healing and community with others. 

  Sara Docan-Morgan, PhD, 44, is a Korean adoptee and communications professor in Wisconsin. She's also the youngest child in her Korean biological family, with whom she reunited with many years ago. Her research has focussed on experiences of Korean adoptees and their families, and this month she is out with a new book, "In Reunion: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Communication of Family" (Temple University Press).

Mia Haessly, 44, is a working mother and adopted Korean-American who has reunited with her Korean biological father. And while introducing her family to him and seeing her children connect with Korea in a way she never had has been meaningful, the reunion has presented new challenges. Besides the language and cultural barriers, there is the physical distance between Wisconsin (USA) and Korea.  And Haessly's adoptive parents have at times struggled with accepting that her Korean father is back in the picture, especially her Danish mother. 

Helen Noh, PhD., is retiring next year after four decades working in child welfare in Korea, first as an adoption social worker to now a professor of social work, training generations of students to make an imprint on improving the lives of children and families. Noh, 64, has become a leading academic voice in Korea on changing policies regarding adoption in Korea. She talks with Adapted Podcast about her career, some observations working at Holt Korea, the problem with proxy adoptions as well as results of a study she and others conducted for the Korean Human Rights Commission, which found that a third of respondents adopted overseas were abused in their adoptive homes. 

Robert Holloway, 34, and Menzeba Hasati, 40, are siblings who are adult children of a Black Korean adoptee. Their mother is a first-wave adoptee, whose mother was Korean and father an American G.I. She was adopted to Alaska in the 1960s by a Black couple. Her children forged their own identities; one in spite of their mother's strong influence towards Korean culture, and the other, embraced it.  Now as adults, Robert and Menzeba talk about the intergenerational trauma in their family, and how separation, abandonment, longing and love all embody their lives and experience with adoption. 

Korean adoptee Matthew Rodriguez, 43, is trying to make sense of his adoption story. For years, it's been clouded by stories told to him and those he told himself, even if they weren't accurate. It was a means to survive. But Rodriguez, whose adoptive parents are white and Mexican American, has his own memories. And now in his 40s, he's learning how to feel comfortable being himself and with the truth. 

Korean adoptee Jenna Antoniewicz, 40, has been on a whirlwind over the past 24 months since beginning to reckon her adoption history and adoptee identity. While a mayor of a town in Pennsylvania, she found herself speaking for Asian America during the coronavirus pandemic about anti-Asian hate. But it triggered an imposter syndrome for Antoniewicz, who hadn't previously reflected much on her adoption from Korea or what it meant to be Korean-American. Fast forward two years,  and this wife and mother of two is now living on Jeju-do, off of mainland Korea, not far from her biological father, making sense of her experience by connecting to others and blending her past with her future. 

Hollee McGinnis, 51, is a Korean adoptee and founder of Also Known As, one of the longest continuously running international adoptee community organization and based in the New York Tri-State area. In this episode, she discusses her new project, Mapping the Life Course of Adoption, and provides some insights from some of the preliminary findings. 

Lee Herrick, 52, is a poet, author, educator and adoptee. He was adopted from South Korea to the San Francisco Bay area in 1971. Herrick discusses how he uses his lens as an adoptee to observe and write verse about life. He also reads from his 2019 acclaimed collection of poems, “Scar and Flower.”

Dr. Kimberly McKee, 39, currently a visiting Fulbright scholar at Sogang University in Seoul, Korea, is a critical adoption studies researcher. This November, her latest book, "Adoption Fantasies: Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood" (The Ohio State University Press) will come out. We'll talk about her latest monograph as well as her 2019 book, "Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States."   

Imagine a story told to you from childhood, that your biological mother died and your biological father decided to relinquish you? And the people who adopted you rehomed you to another couple, where you found abuse and neglect? Randy Walker, 48, has lived such a life and re-examines his trauma and discusses how negative family experiences can shape one's future relationships.

Sara Jones isn't sure whether she's 48 or 49. That's because the circumstances surrounding her relinquishment are still a bit unclear. What she does know for certain, is that her father never wanted her to be separated from her family or be adopted overseas. But his worst fears happened anyway, and against most all odds she was able to find her way back. Now, she's using her voice to help other Korean adoptees whom the system disenfranchised and left vulnerable. 

Eric Poole, 55, continues his conversation in this second-part of a two-part interview. In this episode, we follow his adoption to the U.S. and adjustment in New Hope, Minnesota, where as a Black Korean boy, he felt like he traded one outsider life for another.    CW: N word

Eric Poole, 55, is a transracially adopted Black Korean who has come a long way from his early days as a mixed-race Korean child in a US military camptown in Korea. He's now a father to three kids, husband, and one of the few Black pilots in the commercial flight industry. But his success story is built on the complicated foundation of being orphaned, outcast, alone and othered. He also shares his experiences being at the Holt orphanage, including being sexually abused by other kids and being groomed for a new life in the US.  (Part 1 of 2 part interview). 

Karen Lechelt, 50, is a mother, wife and a returned East coaster after two decades in the San Francisco Bay area and a few years in Amsterdam in between. Their childhood in New Jersey was marked with feeling not quite fitting wherever she was, and having to always adapt themself. Because of the loss of their first family, Karen says there's always been a feeling of not being anchored. That changed with the birth of their daughter.

Megan Nyberg, 37, was adopted as an infant from South Korea to parents in Minnesota. But ever since her premature birth, she has struggled with medical conditions that have been constant reminders of the mystery surrounding her origins. Now a licensed therapist, Nyberg gives other grace and more recently, has started to give it to herself too. 

Queer Korean adoptee Midnite Townsend, 38, is many things. A large part of her/their past has been as a performer; first training to enter the world of musical theater to realizing her/their real desires were better applied to the art of burlesque and drag king performance. Midnite's throughline has been a quest for authenticity - and the test of whether loved ones around her/them would see her.  Theme music: Jae Jin Other music appears under license with Blue Dot Sessions    

Korean-born French adoptee Laure Badufle's story and search for idenity is now the subject of a new Sony Pictures film, "Return to Seoul." In December of 2021, Badufle, then 37, shared some of that story, including meeting her birth parents in her 20s. The film is now opening to more international audiences this month and is already winning accolades. This is a re-broadcast. 

Michael Jessup of Mountain View, California is a father, coach and adopted Korean. But it's only been in the last six years that the 46-year old has explored his feelings about his adoption and faced his pain about being abandoned and given up by presumably his first family at 13 months of age. He opens up about his life, how tennis has carried him through the years, and shares a touching letter to his eomma. 

Reunion with biological parents can be complicated for adoptees. Relinquishment or losing a child or parent, language, and culture can be traumatic and represent lifelong grief. But whose story is it? Aneyah Elmore, 56, is a Black and Korean adoptee who is balancing the need to tell her own story and the desire of her biological mother not to.  CW****Child killings, racial genocide, suicide, emotional abuse of a child 

Lisa Woolrim Sjöblom, 45, is a Swedish Korean who was adopted at a young age from Korea and grew up in Sweden. The illustrator, comic book artist and adoptee and first families activist shares some deep personal insights about motherhood, attachment and the trauma and grief that is brought up with these life events. 

Samantha Kim Lyons, 41, grew up with racial mirrors unlike many other transrcial adoptees. Her late father was white; her mom is a third-generation Japanese-American. Her childhood was spent in Hawai'i and later southern California. But like other Korean adoptees, Lyons finds herself searching for deeper connection to Korea and to her adoptee identity later in life, for the first time. 

Edward Pokropski, 39, of New York, NY is an adopted Korean-American who has a new one-man show out unpacking that experience. He talks about why not all audiences are comfortable laughing at jokes about adoption and how he approaches the topic while staying true to himself. 

This is the second-half of a recent conversation with Peter Møller of the Danish Korean Rights Group.  The discussion takes place on Dec. 11, 2022 (KST), just days after the Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission decided to start an investigation on Korean adoption by examining an initial 34 cases of the more than 300 submissions.  We also discuss privacy in regards to the Special Adoption Law and threats made by Holt to Møller and other adoptees if they don't  abandon this complaint. 

I sit down and talk again to Peter Møller, one of the co-founders of Danish Korean Rights Group, which has succeeded in convincing a truth commission in Korea to open an investigation into Korean adoption. The group has submitted more than 300 cases representing adopted Koreans in a number of countries, alleging false paperwork and switched identities among other human rights violations. 

Zhen E Rammelsberg, 50, was adopted from Korea by a white couple in Iowa in the US. She grew up without mirrors or anyone that looked like her.  It would be more than four decades later that she would finally return to her native country. But instead of being able to neatly complete her puzzle she realized  the missing piece - herself - no longer fit. 

Allen Majors, 63, is a Korean-American adoptee who has decided to retire in Korea -- more than 60 years after being sent away for adoption to the US.  One could think of it as a kind of reclamation of identity but Majors chooses to not place too much emphasis and burdens on the past. Instead, he looks for 'spontaneous delightful moments' in the everday as he looks forward to embarking on the second half of his life where it all started. 

Christy Zaragoza, 30, regularly spreads joy in the adoptee community as a board member of the Association of Korean Adoptees in San Francisco. She reveals that the reason she is so interested in making others happy around her comes from a dark place. This is the first time Christy has shared her story publicly like this. 

Danish attorney and Korean adoptee Peter Møller is the next guest in the podcast. He and his group, Danish Korean Rights Group, are submitting cases to Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The aim is to encourage the body to investigate Korean intercountry adoption practices during the authoritarian regime fo illegality and criminality on the part of adoption agencies and government agents, as well as for violations of international human rights. We spoke to him on Oct 15, 2022 during his month-long work in Korea, ahead of an important appearance before the National Assembly on Friday, Oct. 21 (KST). 

At last month's AKASF's Bay to LA annual event in Koreatown, there was a booth dedicated to letting adoptees share part of their story on their own. We didn't know what to expect or whether anyone would share. This next episode is a compilation of all the submissions. It's a different way of documenting these histories -- almost like an audio diary. Thanks to all the adoptees who participated. 

Season Six kicks off with a live audience interview with Nick Greene of Association of Korean Adoptees – San Francisco. The Bay-area Korean adoptee group held its annual “Bay To LA” event September 16-17, 2022. More than 70 adoptees from CA, OR, TX, AZ, MN, IL, WA and MI attended. Greene, 40, is relative new to adoptee community spaces and he talks about his role as a leader for one group and what motivates him to get involved.

American writer, poet and educator Sun Yung Shin, 48, of Minneapolis, MN closes out Season 5 by talking about her latest imprint, "The Wet Hex," and its themes of abandonment, survival, evolution and ecosystems. 

Jenny Town, 46, is a Korean adoptee who was one of the first waves to go back to Korea after their adoptions. Now, a foreign policy expert specializing in North Korea, Town recalls her time in Korea as an university student, dating, and what she learned about herself while she was there. 

Korean adoptees Kim Stoker and kim thompson left Korea about five years ago. This time it was their decision. Stoker spent most of her adult life there, and thompson, nearly a decade. They talk with podcast host Kaomi Lee, who also moved back to the States from Korea five years ago, about the tradeoffs, adjusting back to US life, and the belief that in the case of Korea, you can always go home. 

Korean adoptee Corissa Saint Laurent, 48, struggled with alcohol addiction as a young person after she felt abandoned by her adoptive mother. Just before she became a mother herself, she found her Korean mother, miraculously living not far from where she had been adopted to in New England. Reuniting with her eomma has closed a circle of pain for her.