Kudos: Jane Jeong Trenka

From time to time, REFORM Talk will offer our kudos to particularly insightful posts or articles.

Two items to share today:  The first one is Jane’s ideas about birthfamily searches in Korea. See  here

Excerpt one: “I have come to believe over the past few months that the amount of services that 200,000 adoptees need is enormous beyond imagination. The fact that KAS has only one worker on this project is the worst joke in the world. We need a full building with the physical records, an army of full-time trained staff who can research, do detective work, develop infrastructure and also give emotional support, and we need the knowledge of the adoptees to shape that institution, and we need adoptees who care to work there.

Accountability starts with the adoptees. The law has no teeth in it. We were naive enough to believe that if we revised the law, it would be followed by the agencies and KAS. I think that all the adoptees have to help each other by writing online and talking about their search experiences. We need to visit our embassies in Seoul and tell them that this is how they treat adult adoptees. We need to write to the newspapers both in Korean and English and bear witness to our experience. If we don’t speak up, no one will know this is happening.”

Excerpt two: “It would also be great if adoptive parents of our generation could bear witness to the suffering of their adult children. (And I realize that many parents, like mine, are no longer in touch with the adoptee, are deceased, or are incapable of writing letters.) I’m sure that no parents adopted kids thinking that this kind of emotionally draining birthfamily search and the ongoing pain of not knowing one’s origins would be the outcome. But it is for many, and it would be so helpful if parents would speak about it especially because many countries are rethinking whether or not they would like to continue working with Korea for ICA. When adoptees uncover systematic abuses, I think our parents owe it to us to say that although they did not mean to participate in harmful practices, they may have unknowingly done that, and that does not make them feel good. (It is actually really sad to me to see old white people with high school educations suffer and squirm over this stuff that they cannot fully understand. ) Moreover it is the parents who have the most power because they are the ones putting the money into the adoption system. If the parents of our generation would speak out, I think that would help make people pay attention to what is going on.”

The second one is her story in the June 28, 2013 edition of the New York Times.

“ALL her life, Jane Jeong Trenka struggled to belong.

Born in South Korea in 1972, she and her sister were adopted by an American family and raised in a Minnesota town populated by the descendants of German and Scandinavian immigrants, where Lutheran churches rose above the cornfields.

In elementary school, Ms. Trenka says she was taunted by boys who spat racial slurs at her, causing her so much anxiety that she began throwing up during the bus ride to school. Later, after she brought a boy home for the first time, a Laotian from the only Asian family in town, she said her father made a joke about his name that she considered racist.

Smoldering with anger — and consumed by “self-loathing” for her Asian heritage — she scratched her Korean name, Kyong-ah, into her bedroom wall with a thumbtack. Then she covered it with a bulletin board so her parents would not know. When it came time for college, she checked “white” on all her college forms in what she now calls an act of self-deception.

It was that emotional conflict over identity that eventually led Ms. Trenka to upend her life, move back to South Korea and help lead a successful campaign with fellow adoptees to fundamentally change the way Koreans think about adoption. The landmark legislation they championed for the first time takes concrete steps to deal with the root causes of South Korea’s longstanding reputation as one of the world’s leading “baby exporters” — society’s deep prejudice against single mothers and against domestic adoptions thought to sully all-important family bloodlines.

The law stipulates for the first time that the government should reduce overseas adoptions of Korean children. It not only provides child-care stipends to encourage more Koreans to adopt and to support single women who want to keep their children, but it also requires mothers to live with their babies for a week and receive counseling about the option of keeping them, before they relinquish custody.

“I spent the first 40 years of my life as an adoptee, and Korea really hasn’t changed much about its adoption system,” Ms. Trenka, 41, said recently. “Do I want to spend the second half of my life letting these people get away with the damaging practices that created the first part of my life?”

Her struggle continues for more transparency in adoption proceedings that have been opaque for decades, in large part to protect unmarried women who have often faced the stark choice of secretly giving up their babies for adoption or enduring a social stigma. But experts say that wall of protection also allowed some abuses, including putting some children up for adoption whose parents might have only sought temporary shelter for them in orphanages.

Ms. Trenka’s long road from international adoptee to activist began, she now believes, with a lie.

SHE says her adoptive parents, who had no children, were told that her birth mother was an irresponsible unwed woman who had abandoned her and her sister. She was only an infant, and her sister was 4.

She was in her 20s when she finally met her birth mother and her family, she said, and they told a radically different story. The main reason she was put up for adoption, they said, was that her impoverished birth mother’s husband suspected that she was not his child and tried to smother her with a blanket before demanding that she be sent away. (It is less clear why her sister was given up.)

But once the two girls were gone, relatives said, Ms. Trenka’s birth mother became so distraught, she began carrying a dog the same way Koreans carry children, by securing it to her back with a blanket. She was so bereft, she managed to get the adoption agency to give her the name and address of the family that had adopted the girls.

Less than three months later, she scraped together what little money she had to send traditional dresses, or hanbok, for the girls and their adoptive mother. She later sent at least two letters, which Ms. Trenka believes did not reveal the real reason for the adoption but asked about the girls’ well-being.”

 

Read the rest at An Adoptee Returns to South Korea, and Changes Follow [New York Times 6/28/13 by Choe Sang-Hun]