Public Intimacy and Kinship in the Korean Adoption Community

Abstract

Abstract:Korean children represent the largest group of international, transracial adoptees in the United States, and the majority of these children enter white families. Since the 1980s, adoptive families and children have become engaged with one another through culture (or heritage) camps, local and national adoption organizations, adoption agency postadoption services, adoption list-serves, and adoption-related Facebook groups. The emergence of an adult adoptee community coincided with these connections between adoptive parents and their children. Yet these communities—adoptive parents and adult adoptees—do not exist in isolation from one another. To better understand how the two communities operate in concert and conversation together, this essay examines the role of the annual Korean Adoption Conference (KAC)—operated by a national organization dedicated to supporting the Korean adoption community—in the lives of Korean adult adoptees and the adoptive parents of Korean children. Drawing from survey data of adult Korean adoptees and adoptive parents of Korean adoptees and a collection of oral histories of those involved in the KAC as attendees, speakers, and/or leaders, this article explores the implications of forging community across the adoption constellation. By placing these voices in conversation with one another, this essay contributes to new knowledges concerning the value of listening and learning from one another as a mechanism to engender change in mainstream conversations and debates concerning adoption. I elucidate how the KAC is a site for adoptees and their adoptive families to contest what it means to be in community or kinship with one another through the development of public intimacies. In doing so, I explore what it means to cultivate an intentional space for adoptees and adoptive parents to engage one another and disentangle assumptions that there is a monolithic adoptee or adoptive parent experience.