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NPR is running a series called “Adoption in America” during Morning Edition this week, and yesterday’s interview was especially interesting.
It was a profile of Susan Soon-keum Cox, who was adopted from Korea herself in 1956 and is now a vice president of Holt International, which (if you haven’t run into the name yet) is a modern adoption colossus.
I can’t really do justice to her story in a short summary, so I encourage you to head over to the NPR site to listen to her tell it, or at least read the summary. (Of course, I was comparing it the whole time to Jane Jeong Trenka’s memoir, Language of Blood, which is a good, important read.)
The most important part, to me, was when Cox said (in effect), “Growing up, my parents always treated Korea as this wonderful, magical place because it was the place that I came from – so I was always comfortable with that part of myself.” This may be a bit of selection bias on my part, because I’m into China (the same way I’m into South Africa and Scotland and Danger Island, but as it turned out those aren’t the places that my kids came from). However, I still think it’s a thing worth turning over in one’s head from time to time – how much your American (or British, or Australian, or whatever country) kid is going to identify with this romantic land far away that produced them.
And how that romantic image can affect your kid’s life, for bad or good.
Cox, like Trenka, wound up going back to Korea and meeting her birthfamily – and, well, you really should read how that went. She has birth-brothers. She thinks of herself as an amalgam of four parents.
Oh, and the other important thing: she sees her grandparents in her own children. Her adoptive grandparents. Their postures, their attitudes and – although she didn’t use the word I use, she meant it – their memes.
For me, it’s nice to read news like this at a time when Ethicanet is reporting on problems with Guatemalan facilitators (or, well, “facilitators”) who were operating not too far from my home town and making me feel generally depressed about this strange adventure that has become my family.
I enjoy NPR, thanks for the link!