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Searching in Intercountry Adoption by Adoptee Experts

On April 23, ICAV will be providing a webinar on some of the complex issues involved in searching in various birth countries, but with specific knowledge of Colombia, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Greece, Korea, and Sri Lanka.

Our webinar will be unique in that we are not only bringing our lived experience as individuals, but also presenting as a global resource, highlighting the adoptee led organisations who provide a formal search and support services. Our panelists hold the dual role of knowing intuitively how complex searching is as individuals having done their own searching and also having decades of experience in providing formal search and support services to the community.

ICAV knows intuitively what the latest research (p231) conducted within the Korean adoptee community shows – i.e.,, that intercountry adoptees find their peers and adoptee led organisations to be the most helpful in their searches. There’s nothing better than those who live it knowing intuitively how to best provide the services we need as a community.

If you’d like to be part of our audience, click here to RSVP.

Our 8 panelists are:

Marcia Engel

Marcia is the creator and operator of Plan Angel, a nonprofit human rights foundation currently based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Her organization has a powerful mission: helping Colombian families find their children who were lost to child trafficking and adoption.

For fifteen years now, Plan Angel has grown a strong community with over 1,000 families in Colombia. The foundation helps these families search for their missing adopted children all over the world, hoping to one day reconnect them with each other. Marcia and her foundation have reunited hundreds of families and continue to support them after their reunion.

Linda Carol Forrest Trotter

Linda is a Greek-born adoptee, adopted by American parents and found her biological family in Greece five and a half years ago. She is the founder and president of The Eftychia Project, a nonprofit organization that assists and supports, free of charge, Greek-born adoptees searching for their roots and Greek families searching for their children lost to adoption.

In addition to its Search and Reunion program, the Eftychia Project, in collaboration with the MyHeritage DNA company, distributes DNA kits for free to adoptees and Greek families. To date, The Eftychia Project has facilitated the reconnections of 19 adoptees with their Greek families.

The Eftychia Project also actively advocates on behalf of all Greek-born adoptees with the Greek government for their birth and identity rights, including transparency about their adoptions, unfettered access to their birth, orphanage and adoption records, and the restoration of their Greek citizenship.

Kayla Curtis

Kayla is born in South Korea and adopted to South Australia. Kayla has been searching for her Korean birth family for over twenty years. She returned to Korea to do ‘on the ground’ searching using posters, newspapers, local police, and adoptee search organisations. In the absence of having a reunion with birth family, she has built a meaningful relationship with her birth country and Korean culture and proudly identifies as Korean-Australian.  

In her professional life, Kayla works as a Senior Counsellor for the Intercountry Adoptee and Family Support Service (ICAFSS) at Relationships Australia.  

Kayla is a qualified Therapeutic Life Story Worker and has a Master’s in Social Work as well as extensive experience working in the area of adoption both in government and non-government, providing counselling, education and training, community development and post adoption support.  In this role, Kayla supports intercountry adoptees with searching and navigating this uncertain and complex process between countries, as well as offering therapeutic support to adoptees, on this journey. 

Trista Goldberg

Trista Goldberg is an international DNA influencer, DNA consultant and founder of Operation Reunite after finding her Vietnamese birth family in 2001.  Trista used DNA to verify her family’s biological connection and verified that she was half Vietnamese and half American.

Over the last 20 plus years she helped make DNA mainstream. Operation Reunite became the beta pilot group that launched the autosomal DNA test in 2010. The miracles she has seen in her lifetime has been magnetised with DNA.

Trista believes there are so many blessings when you really know who you are and where you came from. She understands the value of expanding the adoptee network, sharing and educating how we can harness the technology of DNA to help our community.

Benoît Vermeerbergen

Benoît was born in Villers-Semeuse, France under “Sous X”. This means that his parents and especially his mother did not want to be known or found. His birth certificate literally only shows X’s as parents’ names. Growing up Benoît had a lot of questions trying to understand all of this. After his studies, he purposely began working for the ‘Population Services’ in the hope of discovering more information about his birth mother. 

During this process and the years that followed, Benoît helped so many other people in their search (for example, trying to find their biological birth parents), that he made genealogical research his main source of income. It has always been and will always be his greatest passion in life! 

Genealogy and adoption therefore are his field of specialisation. In the past couple of years he has also started working in the field of ‘DNA’. In 2019, he found his biological mother through this method. Today, he cooperates with a lot of genealogical and adoption related authorities (for example, he works at Afstammingscentrum in Belgium) and helps to invent and build many adoption related platforms. Although Belgium is his home country, he also has experience in doing research abroad, i.e. Australia, Mexico, and The Netherlands.

Rebecca Payot

Rebecca is the founder of the association Racines Naissent des Ailes and co-founder of Emmaye Adoptee’s Family Reunion. Adopted in Ethiopia at the age of 5, Rebecca is a graduate in early childhood psychology specialising in adolescents in identity crisis. She has worked for 20 years in international adoption in France as a consultant and speaker on quest of origins. She is the author of her first book entitled “The Quest of Origins, a Miracle Remedy for the ills of the adopted?”

Hilbrand Westra

Hilbrand is a Korean adoptee raised in the Netherlands and has the longest track record, working with and for adoptees in the Netherlands since 1989. Internationally, his name is well known and disputed at the same time by the first generation of intercountry adoptees because he dared to oppose the Disney fairytale of adoption. He is also the first adoptee in the world to receive an official Royal decoration by the King of the Netherlands in 2015 and is Knighted in the Order of Orange Nassau for outstanding work for adoptees and in the field of adoption.

In daily life, Hilbrand runs his own school in systemic work and is a renowned teacher and trainer nationally and his work has sparked great interest in the UK. He spends time bridging the work in this field between the Netherlands and the UK. Hilbrand is a confidant and executive coach for leaders and directors in the Netherlands and also works partly with the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

Celin Fässler

Celin is adopted from Sri Lanka to Switzerland and is the Communications Manager and Board Member at Back to the Roots. Back to the Roots is a Swiss NGO founded in 2018 by Sri Lankan adoptees. Its main goal is to raise awareness of the complex search for origins and to support adoptees in their searching process. Since May 2022, Back to the Roots has been funded by the Swiss government and the regional districts in order to provide professional support to adoptees from Sri Lanka to Switzerland.

Sarah Ramani Ineichen

Sarah is adopted from Sri Lankan to Switzerland and is the President of Back to the Roots and may present jointly with Celin in this webinar.

The webinar will be recorded and made available at ICAVs website.

If you have questions you’d like to see addressed in our webinar, please add your comments to this blog or contact us.

Huge thanks to the Australian Government, DSS for funding this event via our Relationships Australia, Small Grants & Bursaries program.

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Dear Korea, About Mia*

*Name has been changed to protect identity

by kim thompson / 김종예 born in South Korea, adopted to the USA, Co-Founder of The Universal Asian

This article was written for Finding the Truth of 372 Overseas Adoptees from Korea published in Korean

Artwork: Gone But Not Forgotten by Amelia Reimer

Dear Korea,

I want to tell you all about my friend Mia, but I am limited in how I can tell you her story as she is no longer here and cannot give consent to my re-telling of what is hers and hers alone.

And so, Korea, I will tell you about my experience and observations of her and of our friendship.

Mia was a fellow adoptee and my friend. We met in your city of Seoul around 2013 or 2014. I was in my fifth year of living there. Mia was, as is the case for many adoptees in Seoul, trying to learn your language and doing various freelance jobs related to writing and teaching English, as well as working as a journalist for publications in the country she had been adopted to and raised in. She was an immensely talented writer and photographer.

Mia was quirky. For example, she loved marshmallows more than any child or adult I have ever met. She loved them to the point of ecstasy–we used to laugh at how deliriously happy it made her to roast a marshmallow on a rotating spit over hot coals where we’d previously been cooking our 양꼬치 (lamb skewers). Mia was her own unique self. When it came to your food and cafes, Mia loved everything about you, but the fact that you could get marshmallows from 다이소 made her love you even more, even if they weren’t (according to her) quite the same as she could get in the country where she’d been raised. She laughingly said it made her life with you that much easier.

Mia was funny, kind, thoughtful, and incredibly generous both with her time and money. She once hunted down and gifted my then-partner and myself with two specialty sakés from Yoshida Brewery because we had told her how much we loved the documentary The Birth of Saké. She cared deeply for others, freely and easily expressed gratitude, and was just an all-around fun person to hang out with. She had a laugh that I can still easily recall.

Mia loved the band 넬(Nell) and used to, needlessly, thank me constantly for “introducing” them to her. “They’re sooooooo good~~~” she’d earnestly exclaim when talking about an album of theirs she’d been listening to on repeat. She was an intelligent, articulate, and creative mind who had a delightful hunger for life, art, travel, new experiences, and good food… and marshmallows.

Mia also had a very deep awareness and understanding of her mental health struggles and was as proactive as one could be about working to be healthy. She sought out the professional help she needed. She used her very real diagnosed depression as a positive in that she allowed it to make her an even more empathetic being, which was so evidenced in her professional career as a journalist and how she conducted her personal relationships. Mia had lived through traumas and tragedies that are all too common for adoptees and had profound sorrows and losses.

Korea, I am writing to tell you that Mia was such a good friend to many, including myself. She was genuinely interested in and curious about the lives of those around her. When one was with Mia, one felt seen, heard, loved, and cared for.

Four years have passed since she took her life, and I still and shall always love and miss her.

Something else I can tell you, Korea, with as much certainty as possible, is that if the adoption agency through whom she was exported from knew of her suicide they would quickly blame her adopters, her circumstances, her environment, her traumas, her mental health, and Mia herself. They would never think to own their responsibility in being the root cause for all of the “reasons” for why she felt she could no longer stay in her life or this world.

Korea, chances are, the agency would tell you that while it’s an unfortunate reality that “every so often” “bad” adopters manage to get through their system–that it’s a “rarity.” They would dig their heels in, feigning willful ignorance and dismissal over the well-researched and known statistic that adoptees are four times more likely to attempt or commit suicide than non-adoptees. They would tell you that they are not to be held accountable for Mia’s mental health, and that she should have gotten the help she needed. They would say that what happened to her is too bad, and I do not doubt that they would mean it, but they would in the same breath tell you that none of this is their fault.

And yet, Korea, it was the agency that placed Mia in the family she was raised in via a system that has been empowered and enabled on both societal and governmental levels to prioritize and value financial gain over keeping children with their ummas and appas. Mia’s physical and emotional safety and support she needed were not prioritized, nor were they valued.

The responsibility for her mental and physical wellness was placed directly onto her shoulders. The responsibility for her surviving her childhood; learning how to thrive; and later, as an adult, trying to adapt to life in Korea; to explore and embrace her cultural and racial identity; to try and learn the language; and to search or not to search for her first family were also all placed directly onto her shoulders. Mia’s birthright to family, culture, and identity had been sold right from under her without her consent when she was a baby, and she was then left to pay the price for someone else’s immense financial profit.

Dear Korea, I want… I need you to know that Mia, like so many adoptees including me, had to constantly navigate statements from the agency, adopters, and non-adoptees like: “You sound so bitter and angry. You should be more grateful.” “Your life is so much better than if you’d grown up an orphan in South Korea.” “You don’t know how poor South Korea was.” “You’re so lucky to have been raised in the West. Your life is so much better.”

I need you to know… to feel… to somehow understand that no matter how emotionally or mentally strong or proactive we as adoptees are in advocating for ourselves, no matter how “perfect” some of our adoptive parents might be, these kinds of statements, which embody attitudes and perceptions of denial, dismissal, and diminishing, take a toll on our mental health. They are forms of what is now known as “gas lighting.” They can cause us to question our sanity, goodness, love, gratitude, self, and sense of worth. They make us feel like we really might be ungrateful, unloving human beings who should be good with not knowing our parents, our ancestral roots, language, or culture because: “We got to grow up in the ‘rich’ West.” These are things that no adoptee I have ever known, myself included, is truly equipped to handle, and yet the responsibility to do so, is always on us.

I think about how all of this must have worn Mia down. I think about how even though she knew on an intellectual level that her traumas were never her fault, she bore the emotional toll.

Dear Korea, when Mia took her life, your citizens did not wail aloud in the streets wearing black and white. The adoption agencies operating on your soil that to this day export children to the West for financial profit did not fall to their knees asking the gods and Mia’s soul for forgiveness. 

The ones who were wailing, the ones left falling to their knees under the gut-wrenching sorrow and ache of Mia’s suicide were and remain the same ones who also live as survivors of adoption–us adoptees. You see, when any one of our 200,000 is lost to suicide or addiction or abuse, the loss is deep and the loss is a collective and a permanent one. Four years later, and I still feel the absence of her presence not just in my life, but also in this world.

I am writing you Korea, because it is imperative that you always remember that Mia’s decision to end her life was not her fault. Yes, she made that choice at the very end, but in so many ways that choice had been made for her the day her agency got their hands on her and sold and sent her away from your shores to her adopters.

Yes, it’s true that chances are, Mia would have always struggled with aspects of her mental health even if she’d been able to grow up in the family and place that was rightfully hers. But, I am also confident in saying that her taking her life in her late 30s most likely would not have happened because she would not have had any of the traumas inflicted by coerced abandonment and adoption to carry in her heart that was too big and beautiful for this world.

When Mia died, not only did I lose a dear friend, we the collective of adoptees lost yet another of ours, and whether one can or wants to see this or not–you, my beloved South Korea, you lost a great woman, a great creative mind, a great friend, a great daughter, a great sister, a great aunt, a great partner, a great heart, and a great Korean who had all the potential to significantly contribute to the richness of your literature, arts, and culture.  

But more than anything dearest Korea, when Mia lost her life to the wounds and traumas of adoption inflicted on her by her agency, you lost one of your children.

Resources

Intercountry Adoption and Suicide: A Scoping Review

International Conference for Verifying and Guaranteeing the Human Rights of Overseas Korean Adoptees (English – Korean translation, Research Overview of the largest study done on Korean intercountry adoptees)

Intercountry Adoptee Memorials

Research on Adoptees and Suicide

Adoptees and Suicide Risk

R U OK Day? – It’s time to talk about adoptees and attempted suicide

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Adoptee Grief and Zen Meditation

In Indianapolis, I recently started practicing Zen meditation with a sangha in the lineage of Mahayana Buddhism from the Kwan Um school of Zen, started by Zen Master Seung Sahn. I started my studies with sitting with a community of practitioners at the Indianapolis Zen Center. Practices consist of sitting and walking meditation, listening to Zen dharma readings and participating in light-hearted dharma discussions in the waiting room.

What has been a game changer in meditation practice has been meditating with my eyes open. I decided to try and have been struck by its functions and usefulness. I’m fully alert rather than traversing in various sleeping, subtle stages of meditation that I usually find inner peace with. I’m awake in the mindfulness I gain with my eyes closed, and what advances my meditations, is that I develop a mindfulness in my waking life instantly rather than closing my eyes, doing all this work in the dark, and later integrating it with the world.

What’s come up since my recent move in this new city is the living grief that I’m immersed in when I close my eyes. I feel it as a ferocious, all-consuming ocean in my mediations. And from it, there is a heaviness in my mind. And I look through that heaviness like fog or dirt on a window. But it does clear, which I’ve achieved in split seconds of temporary clarity. And then I feel exact vividness in the present moment, and I have no mind at all. I’m just awake in the room I’m sitting in.

During a Zen retreat I had yesterday, I was able to have an Interview with a teacher. I brought up my grief in mediation and my experience when it clears.

“Where does it go?” The teacher asked.

“It disappears,” I said.

“Then you have a choice,” he said, smiling.

I described the grief and the heaviness, the way it can pull at me and makes me sleepy, and how the feelings of sadness and this heaviness can obscure my clarity, seeking Zen advisement on meditating with these difficult sensations revolving almost like a circle. I described that I have a strong attachment to it, that I might have been making it even bigger by focusing on it in my mediations throughout the years, unknowingly concentrating my mind in it and feeding it, but now see how it lingers in me with eyes open, and I can only imagine how it could also influence my waking life unconsciously. So, I was troubled because all of this is like taking on my lifelong karma as an adoptee, which the teacher knows a little about thankfully.

“Learn from it,” he said, “And when I experienced it, I would thank it. I thanked it for the lesson.” He described his own life experiences in grief, mentioned a book titled, How to Be Friends With Your Demons, and said it did go away for him.

I felt a sudden burst of hope in this conversation.

“So I can try appreciating its presence and continue with practicing,” I confirm to him.

“You have to feel it,” the teacher said to me towards the end of my Zen interview. “You have to own it.” I stared at him, now understanding that there is a way to practice Zen even with grief. And that there is a way to own it and to not let it have control over my life.

In my new apartment in Indianapolis, I’m seeing the grief in my life as it is today and the heaviness that it creates, with eyes open, and I’m journaling about what it teaches me. I’m asking critical questions in myself from what I observe even though it’s hard. Instead of focusing entirely on my grief, I’m giving space to thank it and appreciate its presence in my life and waking world, and all that it teaches me. From my experience with grief, it’s a wounded, intoxicating companion to me especially with the death of my Filipino American brother last year. But I also realized that I am not abandoning my grief by appreciating it and connecting it back to the love inside me.

Read Desiree’s previous blog: Moving on in a new city

Resources

Trauma in adoption resources

Your grief is your gift

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Learning to Grieve as a Child

by Paul Brian Tovey, a UK domestic adoptee and talented artist, adoptee advocate, creator of the 2022 Global Anon Adoptee Survey

I was filling in the shades of another line picture yesterday of the “Dogpache” dancing with two Dogohawks and later noticed inflammation coming through my body and arms …

I do several iterations of images and they often yield a deep trek of Adoptee feelings .. In my case a core trauma is being child abused and used after Adoption ..

Slowly the trek of images echoes my feelings and also shows new angles and prisms which I use to resolve pain .. In my type of  therapy I can do at anytime I please now, as I am retired, I am trained to allow the feelings to be what they want to become .

So my arms went up in the air and into claws and then pictures of my birth mother came into my mind ..I felt like a child scratching her face. And I did that in my “image-spheres” and into the airs .. I am quite rationally,  crazy, and it’s all fine.. I have a well developed creative mind ..

Birth mom  left me at 3 and that core area is surrounded by later misuse of my body .. She knew the person she left me with as far back as 1940 when Birth mom was aged 7 ..Anyway,  I felt the pained feelings, but another prism returned of a stuck mouth .. Muffled languages. Stay safe … SAY NOTHING……Pressure to speak though ..

Finally the pain burst out of the howl-mouth-child-hole of me into resolving cries which were like a ghost child howling for mommy … It’s just another prism in the massive fragmentation field of early childhood mending for me  .. How does it mend ? By being and becoming itself ..By finally allowing being, to be inside being as itself .. To grieve as that child part … It is truth delayed for sure but able to be therapeutically re-experienced…..

Does it hurt ? When it’s in the stages of inflammations yes … You bet, because the body is hiding an old “lie” of the early mind which nonetheless tried to protect me from the horror..I don’t need protecting now (poor auto-brain) in fact I need to be all of me .. Held as me by me .. That’s all ..



Now I am finally old enough to be young again and feel things from the various pasts of me because I have a brain developed that can hold everything ..It’s a slow road back to feeling-connection and that form of internal integrity. I note though it’s necessary to let out the grief of: “Who should have been there and was not” …

That’s the point in reducing the unmet need (for mommy) into resolvable grief and crying …”Mommmmeeeeeee”… “HOwlllll”.. I’ve been on a slow road to acceptance of what happened, but what happened was over many pain distorted years .. It’s why I still befriend monsters in Art and make them cry and landscapes howl too ..

OWWWWWLLLL OWWWWOOOOOO …. I love howls they free my early primal soul that was chained to dissociative emotional prisons..I have learned to grieve as a child who was stopped from grieving…. I am here in myself … I have arrived .. I am home in my skin better and it is  sad in a more positive way simply  because tragedy is ..  

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New Goals as an Adoptee in a New City

Greetings! I made it to Indianapolis, Indiana. To recap: In my recent ICAV blogs, I was blogging from Oahu, which has been my home for half a decade. After my fellow Filipino American brother, a previous Honolulu resident, unexpectedly passed away last year, my life changed for me. And after that summer, I knew I had finished my time in Hawaii. All in all, I was ready to settle down. It was time to grow roots of my own as an adoptee.

After a lot of research and recommendations, I chose Indianapolis because of its affordable cost of living. This city was in the Midwest and I missed the Midwest since I grew up in Wisconsin. I missed the trees of the Midwest, and the four seasons, especially after living in Arizona and Hawaii most of my life.

To transition to the mainland, I moved from Hawaii to Southern Arizona to be near my adoptive family so that I could make visits with my grandparents. For one, rough school semester, I substitute taught, made visits to Phoenix and experienced my grandmother’s passing. After this loss, I gained more clarity on relocating to Indianapolis. Offhandedly, I secured a few part-time teaching gigs in the city. I found and contacted a Zen Center for residing in and practicing Zen downtown. It was the last days of my lease when I started driving to Indiana. Because somehow by then, I was able to secure a full-time job at the Indianapolis Public Library.

Taking a leap of faith, I drove with all of my possessions packed into my new Kia Soul. After living at the Indianapolis Zen Center for a week and starting my Zen studies, I found a cute apartment a few miles away in a quaint, walkable area called Broad Ripple, and made a permanent move. Old trees surrounded my patio. I furnished my place with enough furniture for one and settled in with Pualani, my cat that I brought from Hawaii. After a few more days, I brought in tropical plants. I re-started my junk journaling and letter-making, bought food from local Farmers Markets, and even started making friends with the Filipino and Asian adoptee community here.

My Goals For Next Year in Indianapolis: I hope to purchase a small, basic house where I can have a wood stove. I want to be able to burn wood and make fires everyday for myself. I envision having a small dog so that Pualani will have company. In this small house, I’ll have mostly re-used furniture and plants. I will be forever solo, just working full-time until I retire. I will have vacations where I can travel and teach English in other countries. I will take pictures and maybe publish my visual journals one day, from the collaging that I’ve been doing therapeutically. And lead a simple, peaceful life.

Wish me luck! And please follow my life journeys, meditations, mixed media and letter making at http://www.instagram.com/starwoodletters.

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UK Intercountry Adoptees Webinar

On 30 January 2023, a small group of intercountry adoptees in the UK participated in a webinar panel event to share their thoughts and experiences with adoptive parent organisation, AdoptionUK.

In this webinar you’ll meet Sarah Hilder adopted from Sri Lanka, Joshua Aspden adopted from Ecuador, Emma Estrella adopted from Brazil, Meredith Armstrong adopted from China, and Claire Martin adopted from Hong Kong. Together we answer some questions that adoptive parents at AdoptionUK ask.

Watch the webinar and below is a timecode, key messages and relevant resources.

Webinar Timecode

00:20 Intro from AdoptionUK
01:03 Intro from Lynelle from ICAV
02:44 Sarah Hilder
03:35 Claire Martin
05:34 Meredith Armstrong
07:39 Emma Estrela
09:39 Joshua Aspden
12:17 How to protect myself from scammers while searching for family – Lynelle
17:23 Tips for approaching life story work – Meredith
20:54 Do you feel life would have been better if you’d been adopted by a family in your birth country?
21:27 Joshua
24:56 Emma
28:00 What would we want adoptive parents know when starting out on an intercountry adoption?
28:24 Claire
32:25 Meredith
35:12 Sarah
38:24 Emma
40:24 Joshua
43:34 Lynelle
45:30 What connects you most to your heritage?
45:45 Sarah
48:23 Claire
49:30 Joshua
51:07 Planning on visiting foster family, any tips or hints to manage the big emotions that will come up for adoptee?
51:30 Meredith
52:24 Emma
54:25 Lynelle
56:24 Jo ending and thanks

Summary of Webinar Key Messages

Click here for a pdf document

Relevant Resources

Can we ignore or deny that racism exists for adoptees of colour?

Connecting with people of colour is not automatic for transracial adoptees

Race resources for adoptive parents

Culture resources for adoptive parents

Global list of post adoption support specific to intercountry adoptees

The importance of pre and post adoption support

Search and reunion resources

Thoughts for adoptive parents

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Olivia Atkocaitis is not just a tabloid headline

by Maya Xian Hewitt, adopted from China to the UK.

I’m sure that most reading this will know and understand the “story”of Olivia Atkocaitis.
I’m sure that it’s triggered emotions and feelings that are too heavy and difficult to think about and process. Or in other people’s minds, perhaps it’s far too removed from their reality and from their experiences in adoption to even consider. I know that when Lynelle asked me for this article, I really didn’t have the emotional capacity to sit and think about this, let alone, write about it. But I realised that she wasn’t asking for a news report and the headlines, as aforementioned, are enough to understand the gravity of what Olivia went through and it’s not just a story for her, it’s her life. As intercountry adoptees, the bigger picture and the call to platform our voices are ever more important, because look at who is platforming this narrative, look at how these “stories” are being headlined. Our voices, our experiences, our narratives, they deserve more to be than just part of a tabloid story that’s going to sell astronomically as a one-hit wonder. And the attention these stories get, they’re provoking the wrong questions, directing the outrage towards the microscopic lens of specificity, that these tabloid articles afford.

The issue with sensationalism in journalism is that it doesn’t just fall short on accuracy, precision and detail, it extrapolates from a larger picture, takes a story from the wider context and makes it seem so far-fetched that it becomes almost a one-hit wonder in terms of a news story. And much like those artists that rose to fame with their catchy tune, they’re memorable, they occasionally resurface for air and then they become a household note on “where are they now”. The very nature of adoption is transactional and I’ve written extensively on the subject, yet with every journalist I’ve come across to ask me about my experiences, whether it be my reconnection to my birth country, searching for my biological family, my experiences as British-Chinese in the United Kingdom, they’ve never offered financial compensation for my emotional labour and they don’t want to hear the authenticity, they want a news story. And so I decided in 2018, no-one was going to write my narrative for me, I’m perfectly capable of writing my own.

Calls to action, calls to anger, calls to highlight the failures of the adoption system, they’re not enough. As intercountry, transracial adoptees, there is enough content out there to be noticed and heard but why bother talking when no-one is listening. Lynelle is correct, Olivia deserves her place in our community, a space to advocate, a space to frame her own narrative and I’m not going to sit here and frame that for her. And I’m not going to call for action, call for anger or call for change, this is a call for empathy. A call for you to sit here and listen to intercountry, transracial adoptees. The issue is that the words ‘adoptee’ or ‘adopted’ alone already connotate the infantilisation of adults and people talk to us like we don’t know what’s best for us. Or the words ‘lucky’ or ‘gratitude’ get thrown around and we get told that “it could have been worse!” How could you push gratitude on people like Olivia, people like Huxley Stauffer or Devonte Hart? How can you assume a full picture without knowing any of the details? And that’s the power that White Supremacy plays in adoption. These systems weren’t built for people like us. The headlines of Olivia Atkocaitis, Huxley Stauffer, Devonte Hart are purposefully sensationalised and designed to exclude any real detail or any real information because who can you hold accountable for the people who fall through the cracks when the reader has descended into chaos, outrage and burning anger?

I could sit here all day and talk about the flaws of the system and the flaws of intercountry adoption. I could sit and bring about controversy, just like the tabloids are spark-noting but this isn’t a call to outrage or anger, this is a call to empathy. Behind the news stories, behind the anger, behind the broken systems, there are people like Olivia who deserve better in their lives and how can you have compassion for people if you reduce them down to a news story? How can you listen to someone when your inner monologue is already framed and narrated by the sensationalism of tabloids, profiting out of these experiences? The primary sources are there, they just need to be heard, not just when we’re the flavour of the month because something sensational has happened. Representation isn’t just about seeing our faces on screen or in spaces we haven’t been afforded. It’s about taking up that space and reclaiming it for ourselves; people like Olivia don’t need advocacy, they don’t need over-compensation. They deserve a place.

References

Chinese-born woman sues adoptive parents for allegedly locking her in basement, forced slavery and racist treatment

Woman accuses adoptive parents of starving, beating and locking her in basement dungeon that reeked of human waste

Woman, 19, sues adoptive parents for ‘keeping her in a dungeon and using her as a slave

Olivia Atkocaitis – held against her will for 12+ years by adoptive parents (video)

New Boston police say they rescued girl who says she was enslaved

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Sensitively Responding to Fears of Abandonment

by Lyla M, Chinese adoptee raised in the USA

“What’s that key around your neck?” – I get that question as much as I get questioned about where I’m from.

I wear a golden key around my neck. I’ve been wearing it that way for ten years.

It says, “Togetherness is love, 10.02.62” on one side and “M. T.” on the other.

My mom, being a rebel, decided to skip school with a childhood best friend. They wandered the streets of New York City. They found the key. They tried to find the owner/place it went to. However, it had been thrown into the middle of street, so they were unsuccessful. My mom and best friend always thought it was a lover’s quarrel. Key thrown away in anger.

Fast forward to when my mom adopted me.

When I was little, I had a fear my parents would not come home to me after a date night.

My mom would say, “Take this golden key from this tower, keep it with you. We’ll be home when you’re sleeping and you can personally give it to me in the morning.” It gave me a sense of security. Like my mom and dad were with me and would return.

When I graduated high school, I had chosen to attend college out of state. As a gift, my mom had the golden key strung and gave it to me as a gift, as a promise to always be with me, that my mom and dad would always be there, at home, waiting for me to come home, key in hand (or around neck, to be precise).

A little story about a key shaped like a heart in honour of Valentine’s Day.

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A Privilege, Not a Right

by Kamina Hall, a black, transracial, late discovery adoptee in the USA

They say it’s their right, their right to create and own a life,
Interestingly enough, this is a perception as old as buying a wife.
Are we nothing more than cattle, to be traded and sold?
Or we are the light of the Universe, sent through her womb, more precious than gold?

Interesting the amount of studying and toiling that goes into obtaining degrees,
Yet, when forming life any and everyone is allowed to do as they please.
Change your mind, wrong color, or simply too young? 
With the swipe of a pen, that new soul changes hands, and their life comes undone.

I knew your heartbeat, your voice, your smell, all before I ever saw your face,
Though their arms might have attempted to replace you, no one ever took your place.
There was a dark empty yawning void in my soul I never knew existed,
Drugs, sex, alcohol, and self-sabotage; still the madness persisted.

Firmly we declare, you can’t own a life, and creating it isn’t your right,
The soul is simply in your care, on loan from the Universe, until it can fight its own fight.
Take seriously the implications and ripples you drop into the pond of life when creating,
Children we are for only a moment, adulting sees us with mounds of trauma sedating.

You can follow Kamina at her Youtube channel – Kamina the Koach
Read Kamina’s other guests posts at ICAV:
Healing as a Transracial Adoptee
Your Grief is Your Gift

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Your Grief is Your Gift

by Kamina Hall, a black, transracial, late discovery adoptee in the USA

It was never about you, my dear sweet child, 
Your soul has always had a purpose, though you have feared it defiled.
She relinquished you, the grief is valid and oh-so-real,
But this is not forever, this isn’t your forever, feelings are there for us to feel.

Thus, grieve, dear soul, my sibling in love and light,
Let the sadness and pain wash over you, but don’t wallow too long in wrongs and rights.
Treat your emotions as visitors, welcome them with open arms and attend to them kindly,
Then, bid them farewell, thank them for coming, and never submit to them blindly.

Look at your pain, hurt, sorrow, rage, and fear,
Ask them what lessons they have for you, but refuse to allow them to interfere.
Your soul chose this path, this very journey, for a purpose,
So look to your feelings with curiosity, not identity, as they only exist to alert us.

Everything you are yearning for resides inside you at this very second,
You are not incomplete or faulty; so stand strong and refuse to feel threatened.
The family, the mother, the love unspoken,
Nothing and no one holds love for you like you becoming, with arms wide open.

So grieve beautiful soul; grieve what was lost,
Remember that you chose this path, though it comes with the most precious cost.
You chose this most difficult of paths to share your love, your light, and soul,
You are here to shine your light for the reckoning and to take part in making us whole.

You can follow Kamina at her Youtube channel – Kamina the Koach

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