We Contain Multitudes

I moved to Portland in the late 1990s for both adventure and escape. I’m a Korean adoptee who grew up in Michigan, where I was almost always the only Asian person in any given group. As a child, I learned to exclaim “I’m Polish!” whenever a White person commented on my ethnicity. You speak such good English for a Chinese, they told me. Funny seeing an Oriental working at an Italian restaurant. Konneeechiwaaa.

Admitting I was adopted was a party trick to inoculate myself against racism, a defense that almost always disarmed White people. I’d break into a Polish folk song or brag about my grandma’s homemade gołąbki. This told White people I’m just like you!

Moving to Oregon gave me access to more Asian people than I’d ever been around. I studied them desperately, observing their hair, eyes, skin tones, round faces, high cheekbones, and compact bodies. Their features were like mine, but I struggled to connect with them. Even if it wasn’t obvious to them, it felt obvious to me: I was different. I didn’t know anything about Asian food. I didn’t have immigrant parents. I couldn’t speak Korean. I didn’t have the same kinds of stories. I was an Asian with an asterisk: *I’m adopted.

The defenses I had built to survive a life in White communities backfired. With other Asian people, I wanted to say I’m just like you! But how could I when I’d spent my entire life trying to prove I wasn’t?

 

It felt rare for someone from my working-class community to move out of state, let alone across the country to a place I grew up calling “Ore-gone.” I was ignorant of geography and didn’t have opportunities to travel as a child. The one thing I knew: Holt International, the adoption agency that had brokered the transaction of my adoption, was in Oregon.

In fact, Oregon is where transnational, transracial adoption was pioneered. It’s considered the birthplace of the modern adoption industry. In the mid-1950s, Harry and Bertha Holt, evangelical Christians living in rural Oregon, saw a film featuring “Amerasian” children in Korean orphanages. These children had been born to Korean women from American servicemen fathers and were ostracized in Korea; they were seen as symbols of a traumatic war and the subsequent unequal political relationship between the US and Korea. And the devastation of the peninsula after the Korean War left few resources for them. 

The Holts, who had been sending money and clothes to the orphans, came to a decision they believed was divinely inspired: they would adopt these children, even though international adoptions were rare to nonexistent at the time. Through their connections and influence, they got Congress to pass the Holt Bill in 1955, allowing them to adopt eight Korean children into their family of six biological children. 

In her 2013 book The Child Catchers, Kathryn Joyce notes that, as a rural White family with eight Asian children, the Holts became “America’s first celebrity adoptive parents.” Bertha Holt was nominated as Oregon’s “mother of the year” and later won the national American Mother of the Year award. The Holts started a campaign focused on saving Korean orphans, and thousands of White American families flocked to the call, creating a supply-and-demand market for Korean babies. The more babies American families wanted, the more babies needed to be procured, and a proxy system was developed in which, as Joyce explains, “Holt adopted children on behalf of foreign parents, then transported the babies back to the United States to meet their families; ‘order-taking’ that matched children to parents’ desired age, race, and physical traits.” 

The Holts created a streamlined process, ensuring babies could be supplied in a short amount of time with as little paperwork as possible and almost no oversight. The two main qualifications for applicants were to be (1) saved or born-again Christians and (2) able to pay the airfare from Korea. Using these criteria, they approved the applications of hopeful adoptive parents who had previously attempted to adopt domestically but had been denied after home studies proved them unsuitable. Instead, these parents would adopt the foreign children of strangers, basically sight unseen. Often this did not work out. For example, many adoptive parents didn’t bond with or even like their adoptive children. Others weren’t equipped to support a traumatized child. Some tried to return or rehome their adopted children, which still happens today. Such stories are rarely included in mainstream adoption narratives.

For the Holts, adoption quickly became a strategy for salvation and a way to proselytize Christianity. Their most pressing desire was that “every adopted child would become a born-again Christian,” Joyce writes. In an article about the Christian roots of Korean adoption, Soojin Chung notes, “Oregon Senator Richard Neuberger even hailed [the Holts] as incarnations of the ‘Biblical Good Samaritan.’”

But adoption as evangelism was not a new practice. Native children had been forcibly removed from their families and tribes since the late 1800s, then placed into boarding schools and White Christian homes with the explicit intent to Christianize them. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the Child Welfare League of America’s Indian Adoption Project relocated “between 25 and 35 percent of all Native American children from reservations into the homes of white American adopters, orphanages, and foster homes,” Joyce reports.

As a ministry, adoption became a matter of predestination based on God’s will, which was easy to justify within the existing discourse that God’s family transcends blood. God was seen as the ultimate adoptive parent. Renowned evangelical minister Max Lucado writes of adoption, “If anybody understands God’s ardor for his children, it’s someone who has rescued an orphan from despair, for that is what God has done for us. God has adopted you. God sought you, found you, signed the papers and took you home.” 

By the 1970s, Holt, other adoption agencies, and the larger adoption industry had shifted from finding families for babies to finding babies for families. Holt inspired an entire industry around providing foreign babies to American and European parents, and it is still in place today. This system demands overhead: mortgages and rents, office furnishings and supplies, utilities, travel expenses. It employs administrators, staff, social workers, doctors, medical staff, attorneys, counselors, and marketing professionals, all of whom require payment. As insidious as it sounds, in order to keep the lights on, adoption has to be profitable, meaning there needs to be a steady supply of the commodity: babies and children.

Currently located in Eugene, Holt International claims to be the leading adoption agency in the world. In the nearly seven decades since it was founded, Holt has facilitated hundreds of thousands of intercountry adoptions.

 

The first case of COVID-19 was reported in Oregon in February 2020. From there, calamity after calamity came crashing down like waves, one after the other. I spent twenty-one days in isolation, sick with something that didn’t show up on a flu test. My children’s school closed. My workplace went remote. Then I was laid off. My husband’s work dried up. Like everyone else, we were afraid to leave the house.

Earlier that year, I had found my first group of adoptee friends. We were gathering every couple of months to eat Korean BBQ and share experiences. When lockdown began, we started to meet weekly on Zoom, where we’d stay for hours, talking late into the night. These calls were my lifeline to community.

Then, more calamity. On May 25, we watched a viral video of a White woman weaponizing her tears, calling the police on a Black man who was bird-watching in Central Park and asked her to leash her dog. We would soon find out that on that same day, a White police officer had murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck while Floyd pleaded for his mother and his life. The next day, Myka Stauffer, a White YouTuber with around seven hundred thousand followers, publicly announced the rehoming of her adopted Chinese son, Huxley, after she and her husband had monetized his adoption story and used him for social media celebrity.

My heart shattered. Racism had always been painful to face, but this time, I wasn’t isolated. I had a community of people who also occupied the liminal space of being a person of color with White family, who grew up in a White community and who therefore had a unique experience of racism. I had found people who gave me a new sense of family, and I started finding more. 

Adoptee activists had been doing critical, foundational work for decades, but due to the pandemic and the move to online spaces, more adoptees started to find each other and share their stories. Many shared that their White parents were outraged to learn they were protesting police violence. Their parents fiercely defended their own color blindness with “all lives matter” discourse. Families were being torn apart, but being online together gave us a source of support and new ways to connect, share resources, ask important questions, and learn.

Then, even more calamity. Fear of COVID-19 brought spikes in hate crimes against Asians and Asian Americans. In 2020, hate crimes went down by 7 percent overall, but those against Asians rose by 150 percent. In New York City, hate crimes against Asians went up by 1,900 percent. Posts about anti-Asian violence filled our social media feeds. 

I remember a Korean adoptee friend sharing her story about being verbally assaulted while getting vaccinated. A White man yelled, “You chinks don’t deserve this vaccine. It’s for Americans. It’s your fault that we’re in this mess to begin with.” When he discovered she was pregnant, he said, “For fuck’s sake. You even have the nerve to breed more of your own kind?! I hope it dies, you fucking bitch.” A friend of mine in Portland, another Korean adoptee, fought off an attempted kidnapping by a White man who called her a “Jap” and told her to “go back to her country.”

Over and over, I saw posts from Asian adoptees reaching out for help because their White families refused to acknowledge their experiences. “But you’re White!” the parents insisted, which was not only factually incorrect, but was also an admission that they were not, in fact, color-blind, as they’d so forcefully claimed. They clearly saw a racial binary, and they placed their adopted child on one side of it: the White side.

Folks say non-White adoptees are White-adjacent, with proximity to White privilege. Perhaps. But we also live in proximity to White violence: physical attacks, verbal abuse, and the violence of erasure.

 

We all know the quintessential adoption story: A baby is born in [insert: name of third world country] to a mother who is [insert: single, destitute, a prostitute, a victim of sexual assault, dead] and was abandoned [insert: in the trash, on a doorstep, in a box, to the nuns] to be adopted by parents who [insert: offer unconditional love, don’t see race, deserve to be parents]. Ultimately, the child has [insert: a better life, opportunity, freedom, wealth, Christianity]. The story invariably ends with [insert: gratitude, gratitude, gratitude].

One problem with this story is that it’s often untrue—and it’s always incomplete. Another problem is that it excludes the voices and experiences of actual adoptees. Historically, adoptees are a group of people who are written about. Adoption industry professionals, adoptive parents, and policymakers author our stories, which appear on websites, in brochures, and on social media platforms. We play a role in scripts written by others, in which we are always children, never adults. Our stories are endearing or tragic, often both, and they generally valorize adoptive parents. Ultimately, they are simplistic, feel-good stories—and who doesn’t want to feel good?

Adoptees sure do. After all, it’s our lives we’re talking about. But we also know the truth. We understand adoption is not just a private exchange between two families, a win-win for all involved parties. Rather, our adoptions are a product of a much larger sociopolitical context.

When we try to add nuance to the dominant narrative, we face consequences. Aleceeya Rose, a multiracial adoptee who was adopted by White parents, says the hardest thing about telling her story is “handling the negativity and backlash as people hear a narrative that is new to them, doesn’t fit in their worldview. That challenge can make others defensive. It is exhausting to navigate that in a way that is true but also doesn’t make me out to be a villain.”

Inside and outside of our families, we are labeled, infantilized, and attacked. Angry adoptees. Ungrateful brats. But were you fed? people ask us. But did you have a warm bed? They call us stupid and condemn us to rot in an orphanage. They say we should’ve been aborted, and they tell us to kill ourselves. These responses are so common, they’re clichés. Indonesian adoptee educator Erik Antilles often addresses hostile comments on social media—like “No wonder your parents didn’t want you.” 

The repercussions of expressing one’s true feelings can be so extreme that many adoptees choose to hide them. Many wait until their adoptive parents die before they start a birth search for fear of hurting their adoptive family, being accused of ingratitude, or risking estrangement or another abandonment. As Antilles points out, “People understand, so easily, that some people keep [things] like sexuality or gender, or even things like religious or political beliefs, secret for safety reasons, but the same does not apply to adoptees.”

I conducted a survey of adoptees of color this winter, supported by Oregon Humanities; in that survey, Leah Kerbs, a Chinese adoptee, mentions, “It takes a lot of bravery to truly share your experiences without catering to what others want to hear. For example, I get worried that my adoptive family will be hurt and misinterpret what I share, which makes me feel guilty.” Similarly, Julie O’Neal, a Korean adoptee, shares that the hardest part is “the way that simply telling my story can be painful and hurtful and sometimes feel accusatory to others, especially people close to me.” 

Lexi Scanlan, an African American adoptee from Mississippi, comments on how our realities can be outright denied. She emphasizes a common response used to dismiss us: Well, I know an adopted kid, and they don’t feel that way. Scanlan says, “I always have people arguing with me about MY feelings, like I can’t possibly know what it’s like, even though it’s my story.” Many respondents said the same thing—that it feels terrible to have to fight to be seen and have one’s reality validated.

Even when we have a willing audience, it can be hard to know what to say. Vanessa Devin, adopted from Guatemala, says, “It can seem like a big task not to overshare or just sift through my story to make it make sense to an audience.” Similarly, Gina Laff, a Paraguayan-Guaraní adoptee, says it’s hard “just trying to fit all the info in and getting it across. Adoption has so many layers.” It’s not easy to craft “a narrative that’s both authentic and relatable to non-adoptees,” says Vanessa Bloom, who was adopted from China.

Speaking about our adoptions opens doors for the inevitable flood of hard, emotional, and deeply personal questions: Do you know why they gave you up? Are you curious? Are you ever going to go back to your home country? Do you ever want to find your birth parents? Cynthia Landesberg, a Korean adoptee, says, “When it is a non-adoptee audience, the questions can be triggering.”

What non-adopted people don’t understand is how hard these questions are, how complicated and layered they can be, how one question leads to more questions, digging up trauma, unraveling who we are, who we think we are, who we want to be—who we might have been. Answering these questions can involve years of work and potentially devastating outcomes.

For many of us, it has been safer just to smile and stay silent. 

 

I have dealt with my share of mental health issues, including generalized anxiety disorder, an eating disorder, and struggles with addiction. For most of my life, I thought my challenges stemmed from not working hard enough, not being good enough. Despite all the signs, I never considered adoption to be at the root of so many of my challenges. I’d even counseled White parents to “go for it” when it came to adopting Black and brown children, using myself as evidence that their adopted children would be okay, when, in fact, I was not okay.

I hadn’t yet known that my issues aligned with a pattern for adoptees, and it took years to be diagnosed with complex PTSD. Research shows adopted people have much higher rates of mental health issues like anxiety, depression, and eating disorders, as well as gastrointestinal issues, institutionalization, and self-injury. We are almost twice as likely to develop a substance use disorder in adulthood and are four times as likely to attempt suicide than our non-adopted peers. This information is left out of the mainstream adoption narrative.

I don’t mean to be bleak. Many of us have very good lives—despite, not because of, adoption. We’ve grown up; we have agency and our own resources. We’re building our own families, and we’re being included in intersectional justice movements. We’ve gained language for our experiences, and we’re speaking out about harsh realities such as rampant physical, emotional, and sexual abuse in adoptive families; rehoming and estrangement; and deportations.

“Coming out of the fog” is a phrase many adoptees use to describe the process of waking up to the sociopolitical realities of adoption and uncovering repressed feelings like anger and grief. Building on this idea, a group of critical adoption scholars and leaders developed a model of adoptee critical consciousness, inspired by the liberation work of scholar-activists Paulo Freire and Gloria Anzaldúa. Critical consciousness moves past “coming out of the fog” to describe “the ongoing individual and collective movement toward social activism that adoptees may encounter throughout their lifespan.”

For many of us, this move from private to public—from isolation to community—means the world.

 

Personally, it took me until August 2020 to rally enough courage to post publicly about adoption and start my Instagram account. Hitting the share button on my early posts terrified me, even though I had very few followers. Would I say something wrong? Who might I hurt? How much of my own ignorance would I expose? Would I be labeled an angry adoptee? Who might attack me in the comments?

But I kept at it. Post by post, I continued. I started finding other adoptees to follow, some of whom had been doing adoptee work for years and modeled unapologetic advocacy. Soon, other adoptees started following me, and messages started flooding in. My writing resonated with other adoptees, just as their writing resonated with me. Our stories were healing each other.

In a 2024 blog post, activist-scholar Dr. JaeRan Kim writes, “The number of books, films, art, and creative projects that came out last year (and are forecast for the next) feels like what I’ve been calling an adoptee renaissance.” She predicts greater acceptance for adoptee-driven work. Similarly, Ryan Jafar Artes, a transracial, transnational South Asian Indian American adoptee philosopher and poet, calls for collective liberation through “a cultural renaissance, empowering all of us to return to each other through ourselves, and not a cultural revolution, which sacrifices those of us already doing such work.” This focus on creation is encouraging, and despite the challenges we face, many adoptees are up to the task. 

 Educators use the metaphor of mirrors and windows to describe the important way stories offer us views into others’ experiences and also act as mirrors to see ourselves reflected back, a validation and affirmation of the self. Transracial adoptees do not grow up with mirrors—there isn’t anyone who looks like us or shares our experiences. Even same-race adoptees do not have genetic mirrors. This makes sharing our stories critical.

Nearly all the respondents to my survey said adoptee stories help them heal by showing them they aren’t alone, by validating their feelings and experiences, and by reflecting realities that weren’t visible to them when they were young. “They’ve educated me in so many ways,” says JinYoung Kim, a Korean adoptee. “I feel embraced and seen by having my experiences expressed and represented by others.” An adoptee who wants to remain anonymous writes, “I’ve learnt just about everything I now know about adoption through other adoptees sharing their voices and experiences. Without them, I don’t think I ever would’ve been able to fully process what adoption really meant, validate my loss and grief, nor begin a deeper healing journey.”

Lisa Butler, a Black, multiracial adoptee who was raised in a White family, says, “To know there are people out there who get me—even if they haven’t had the exact same experience—is lifesaving. It’s like I’ve found family. It’s an experience I don’t think I believed I’d ever have or deserve. I always felt othered, and now I’ve heard from others just like me.” 

Overall, adoptees want to reclaim the mainstream narrative to reflect our diverse, complicated truths. We are not a monolith. There is no singular adoption experience, and there is no singular adoption story. “Every adoptee’s story is different, and it’s never so black-and-white like society has told us it is,” says Aubrey Kyung, a Korean adoptee. Similarly, Sullivan Summer, a Black, transracial domestic adoptee, points out a gap within adoptee spaces. “Our stories are regularly co-opted by adoptive parents, and others who profit from the industry.… Also, the transracial adoptee narrative is dominated by transnational adoptees.… I feel like it’s important to share the Black, domestic [transracial adoption] experience also, because we have a different history and challenges.”

For many of us, our life stories started with a fiction. We were inserted into an existing narrative and used as evidence to endorse it, and so narrative reclamation can be especially empowering. Cam Wuesthoff, adopted from China, says, “Adoptee voices are wholly underrepresented in the wider zeitgeist that privileges adoption ‘success’ stories.… Storytelling is important to me because it also grants me a level of autonomy and control of my own narrative when most of my life was controlled by my adopters/wider community.”

Adoptees span multiple generations. Many of us now have children and grandchildren, while infants are currently being adopted. There are older adoptees who guide younger adoptees as mentors, role models, and elders. Whitney Handrich, a Korean adoptee in Oregon, reports feeling “hopeful as I hear stories from younger adoptees that seem to be more vocal and open in their process, [which] I wasn’t ready for or didn’t have the opportunity for when I was younger.”

 

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, poet, translator, and cofounder of the Adoptee Literary Festival and the Starlings Collective, discusses the internal and external benefit of sharing our voices. She says, “I feel more seen and connected, less lonely, and I have seen how personal storytelling can change policy.”

It is true. People are listening. Our stories are finding a bigger audience, both within and outside of the adoptee community. In the past few years, a larger segment of society has developed a deeper understanding of structural oppression and how to be more effective allies. We are all better equipped to separate individuals’ experiences from institutional narratives and can understand that, though an adoptee may love their individual adoptive family, the system is still problematic. 

In the US, there is a movement to push back against the adoption industry and instead work to keep families together by supporting and strengthening communities. And rates of international adoption have been declining rapidly. Numerous countries have ended or paused international adoption due to corruption and unethical or illegal practices. Ethiopia has banned international adoption. Adoptions out of Guatemala have halted. The Netherlands recently suspended international adoption, and Denmark has announced the closing of its only international adoption agency. Norway and Sweden are following suit.

Holt International is currently under formal investigation by the Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission for human rights violations such as the falsification of documents, child kidnapping, and birth parent and family coercion. Submitted by the Danish Korean Rights Group, the world’s largest international community of Korean adoptees, the case represents hundreds of adoptees. In a separate legal case this year, Holt was ordered to pay a Korean adoptee about $75,000 in damages for mishandling his adoption, as a result of which he was placed in an abusive home, sent to foster care, and never received US citizenship, which led to his deportation. South Korea is now developing a state-led adoption system to minimize overseas adoption. 

On its 2022 nonprofit tax forms, Holt states that its mission and most significant activity is “expressing Gods [sic] compassion for children through adoption.” They reported $28 million in annual revenue. The compensation for Holt’s three highest paid employees—who focus largely on finances and marketing—totals over half a million dollars. 

 

Oregon plays a significant role in the stories of many adoptees, especially those of us who’ve been severed from our rightful heritage. And because of Holt’s presence in the state, a number of national leaders in the adoptee movement live in our region.

Born in Korea and raised in Oregon, Liana Soifer is the executive director and cofounder of VOICES, a BIPOC Adoptee Community, a nonprofit headquartered in Portland. Much of her work focuses on adoptee storytelling. About the challenges of sharing her own story, she says, “After almost four decades of believing one story about my past, I recently discovered that Holt falsified my adoption papers, providing a false narrative of my adoption. This falsified information has affected not only me but everyone involved in my adoption.” Now reunited with her first family, Soifer is uncovering the truth and witnessing the many ways her story has impacted her family in Korea—and her family here, at home in Oregon.

Home in Oregon. These words mean so much. Despite my displacement, I have found a home in a beautiful state that has given me many things: my husband, who grew up just thirty miles away from Holt’s headquarters; a safe place to raise my children; a diverse group of loving friends; and a community of adoptees who have become a new kind of family. But am I grateful? As many adoptees say: it’s complicated.

As Oregonians, adoption is part of our collective history, and adoptees are shaping a new story. We contain multitudes. Our stories do too.

Tags

Family, Identity, Race, Global and Local, Public