UNKNOWN - Adoptionland: From Orphans to Activists

Adoptionland:

From Orphans to Activists

Compiled by the Vance Twins

Edited by Janine Myung Ja, Michael Allen Potter , and Allen L. Vance

Copyright 2014: Against Child Trafficking USA

All Rights Reserved

Kindle Edition, License Notes:

This eBook is licensed for your personal use and may not be re-sold or given away. If you would like to share this eBook, please purchase an additional copy. If you're reading this eBook and did not purchase it, then please return to Amazon and purchase a copy of your own.

ASIN : B00JK4TXA0

No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the contributor and/or the editors.

Acknowledgements:

The Vance Twins would like to give special thanks to our contributors for granting reprint permissions: Casper Andersen, Lily Arthur, Trace DeMeyer, Peter Dodds, Arun Dohle, Darelle Duncan, Erica Gehringer, Jeffrey Hancock, Bob Honecker, Cameron Horn, Tobias Hubinette, Sunny Jo Johnsen, Khara, Kristina Laine, Lakshmi, Tinan Leroy, Georgiana A. Macavei, Marion McMillan, Colette Noonan, Cryptic Omega, Vanessa Pearce, Michael Allen Potter, Paul Redmond, Lucy Sheen, Joe Soll, and Daniel Ibn Zayd.

Disclaimer:

The purpose of this book is to give validation to, and to voice concern for, families who have been separated by adoption. Read at your own risk.

Adoptionland:

From Orphans to Activists

Dedication:

This collection is dedicated to Joseph Tae Holt (19521984) and Hyun-Su Kim (20112014) from South Korea and to Hana Alemu Befekadu Williams (19972011) from Ethiopia.

May they be remembered by the adoption community and their stories be heard by the world.

Contents:

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

Disclaimer

Title Page

Dedication

Contents

Introduction

Part 1: Saved

, Janine Myung Ja (South Korea/The United States)

, Erica Gehringer (South Korea/The United States)

, Georgiana A. Macavei (Romania/The United States)

, Tinan Leroy (Haiti/France)

, Vanessa Pearce (India/Canada)

, Khara (South Korea/Norway)

, Cryptic Omega (The United States)

Part 2 : Unknown

, Jeffrey Hancock (The United States)

, Trace DeMeyer (The United States)

, Michael Allen Potter (The United States)

, Peter Dodds (Germany/The United States)

Lucy Sheen (China/The United Kingdom)

, Sunny Jo Johnsen (South Korea/Norway)

, Bob Honecker (The United States)

Part 3 : Abandoned

, Darelle Duncan (Australia)

, Joe Soll (The United States)

, Marion McMillan (Scotland)

, Lakshmi (India)

, Cameron Horn (Australia)

, Lily Arthur (Australia)

, Kristina Laine (The United States)

Part 4 : Protected

, Colette Noonan (Australia)

Jenette Vance (South Korea/The United States)

Casper Andersen (India/Denmark)

, Paul Redmond (Ireland)

, Tobias Hubinette (South Korea/Sweden)

, Daniel Ibn Zayd (Lebanon/The United States)

, Arun Dohle (India/Germany)

Additional Resources:

Introduction

An awakened mother is a formidable force. She will not be railroaded. She will not be silenced. Granny Alice Allen

We are proud to introduce a group of amazingly courageous individuals who have either been adopted or have lost a loved one to adoption. Most people, when they think of adoption, only think about how families have been created and they tend to narrow the focus on the adoptive family. Little attention has been given to the original family, and, if attention is given, the parent-child unit or the childs birth culture is usually presented through a pessimistic and distrustful lens.

My twin and I were shocked to learn that adoption is not always a win-win for all , like we had assumed while growing up, but can be considered a win-lose situation. In fact, according to separated family members, adoption might also be seen as a lose-lose situation! Until 2004, my sister and I were only given one side of the adoption story. But, after digging around under the surface, weve noticed that too many voices have been ignored. The problem is that those who have built the industry, and those who perpetuate it, tend to resist anyone who dares to question the happily-ever-after-story that promotes the practice and validates the facilitators agenda. This has caused parents (of adoption loss) and adult adopted people to feel unacknowledged and continuously devastated. We believe that families of loss, and anyone who did not have the so-called win-win experience, deserve to be heard need to be heard if humanity wishes to correct itself. Some people might claim that these stories are negative .

We disagree.

We see courage at work in these narratives. We started this project hoping that it would highlight the strength of the human spirit.

We believe it has.

We want to thank the contributors who generously shared their experiences and perspectives within the pages of this anthology. After reading each account, we were excited to learn that like-minded and like-hearted adopted people and first parents exist all over the world.

We are not alone.

And neither are you.

The Vance Twins

Part 1: Saved

Somebody Cares

My Journey into Truth, Transparency, and Adoptionland

As of this writing , it has been ten years since my twin sister and I first traveled to Seoul, South Korea, to attend the 2004 Korean Adoptee Conference. It would also be the first time we intermingled with other Korean adoptees who had been sent to various Western nations. From the more than 160,000 children flown overseas by agency facilitators, 400 of us arrived in our motherland as adults intending to celebrate and contemplate fifty years of intercountry adoption. We made friends for life over the course of the trip. Like many others, we decided to use the opportunity to look for our Korean family.

My time in South Korea was the catalyst that led to a decade of research into the practice of intercountry adoption. I shared my initial thoughts and feelings inspired by the trip in a book titled The Search for Mother Missing: A Peek Inside International Adoption . It detailed how I became aware of emerging and divergent adoption perspectives.

The first surprise of the trip was when we discovered the street we were found on, according to the adoption documents, did not exist. Was the street name a fabrication? The Certificate of Orphanhood placed in our file gave the impression that we were orphans, but could we still trust the accuracy of this paperwork? Later, we learned innumerable children were not actually orphans, but came from Korean families, families who would come back to the orphanages (or to the agencies) to retrieve their children. Because of the way the facilitators had set things up, however, Korean babies and children had already been flown overseas for profit.

Because we were not given satisfactory answers, numerous questions arose. Were we merely manufactured (or paper ) orphans generated by lines of text? Were we labeled "orphans" in magazines and in advertising campaigns to make the transaction appear ethical? Even the definition of orphan , I later learned, had been manipulated to include children of single and/or poor parents. Did this allow facilitators to finagle more children from vulnerable parents? My sister and I were raised with the dogmatic belief that Korean babies were typically abandoned on street corners. Almost fifty years into the future, Korean-born adoptees are discovering that they actually came from loving families. My sister and I have also heard that the adoption industry targets children and abandons the mothers (some mothers were merely given a bus ticket home in exchange for their babies). Weren't the mothers, then, the abandoned ones? And how many other mothers were treated with the same disregard? Is this a normal practice in Adoptionland? (And why is it still acceptable today?)