Amid global adoption reckoning, adoptees fight long-standing narrative they should be 'grateful'
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Cosette Eisenhauer-Epp, a Chinese transracial adoptee with white parents, said she remembers a salient moment after the March 2022 Atlanta-area spa shootings.
"The people he shot look like me, but he's the same ethnicity as my parents, so where do I go from that?" said Eisenhauer-Epp, a 23-year-old master's student at the University of Texas at Arlington.
For Eisenhauer-Epp, the shootings were just another reminder of how complicated it was navigating her identity as an adoptee.
Many adoptees say they have recently been pushing back against a certain narrative they feel is foisted upon them. Amid recent investigations that exposed systemic adoption fraud by the Chinese and South Korean governments, some adoptees have capitalized on the global reckoning with adoption to combat messages from the media and well-intentioned commentators that they should be "grateful."
Many adoptees also say that with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and conservative-backed push to present adoption as an alternative to abortion, the idea that adoptees were "rescued" and should be thankful is woven into America's political fabric.
Eisenhauer-Epp is co-founder of Navigating Adoption, an online platform for adoptees, and also works with Sisters of China, an adoptee-led organization for female-identifying Chinese adoptees affected by China's one-child policy. She recently created a TikTok for the organization that addressed how harmful it is to ask adoptees if they feel grateful.
The adoptee community responded to her video, commenting "Preach," "literally" and "so truee" and that they identified with the sentiment.
By sharing their experiences online, adoptees and adoptee advocates have pushed for a new narrative that decenters adoptive parents and amplifies adoptee voices.
"I can't think of any other groups of trauma survivors who are told to be grateful for that traumatic experience, and especially not with such cultural insistence that adoptees experience," said Adoptee Mentoring Society program coordinator amanda paul, whose name is not capitalized.
This narrative is part of the adoption industrial complex, paul said, a system that "produces" adoptees to meet the demands of governments and adoption agencies more interested in finding "potential buyers" than caring about children.
JaeRan Kim, a Korean transracial adoptee and adoptee scholar, points out adoptees shouldn't be told how to feel.Courtesy JaeRan Kim
Adoptees have long pushed back against the narrative that they should be grateful, but now their message has greater visibility because of social media and the growth in adoptee-led organizations.Eisenhauer-Epp, who was adopted from Zhanjiang in China's Guangdong province at 14 months old, said this narrative is harmful.
"Just because I was adopted and had [a] more positive experience with adoption, it doesn't diminish the negative emotions I did have, the struggles that adoptees have, the feeling of abandonment and random abandonment triggers," she said.
Since China opened its doors to international adoption in 1992, more than 160,000 children have been sent abroad, according to China's Children International, an organization that connects Chinese adoptees with each other. The one-child policy was implemented in 1980 to curb China's rapid population growth.
Most of the infants abandoned under the policy were girls, due to many Chinese families' preference for a son over a daughter. Many adoptees are still reeling after the Chinese government announced on Sept. 5, 2024, that it would suspend all intercountry adoptions.
"It just brings so much unknown with Chinese adoptees. We don't know what the next is going to be, so we don't know if it's going to be harder for us to go back to China — if it's going to be harder for us to start searching for birth parents," Eisenhauer-Epp said. "It truly just adds to the complexity of being an adoptee. I think the complexity of being an adoptee never ends."
At a press conference in early September, China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said exceptions will be made for adopting children or stepchildren of blood relatives in China, up to the third degree of kinship.
Similarly, news about South Korea's adoption system has shaken many Korean adoptees.
What initially manifested as a deep prejudice against biracial children in a nation ravaged by the Korean War soon became a booming business. Korean adoption agencies charged anywhere between $4,000 and $6,000 per child, according to an Associated Press investigation.
In a frenzy to export as many children as possible, Korean officials often cut corners, pulling children off the street or telling parents their newborns were dead, only to ship them off to orphanages. Children were assigned identities that belonged to someone else, leading to reunions with supposed parents they were unrelated to, the AP found.
But for some adoptees, like paul, the investigations exposed nothing new and were a reminder of how adoptees' stories are only viewed as important when made "mainstream."
"I know that adoptees have been sharing their own stories and archiving these experiences and processes for a really long time, and in the Korean adoptee communities specifically for generations," paul said.
Paul, who uses they/them pronouns, was born in Korea in 1990 and raised in Chicago by two white parents. Their parents spent no time with other people of color, and that damaged paul's ability to form a healthy understanding of their identities, they said.
For them, the narrative that adoptees should be grateful is "more of a culturally pervasive expectation than an option" for adoptees. "We should stop telling others how to feel about their own experience because that is really dehumanizing," paul said.
Dr. JaeRan Kim, a Korean transracial adoptee, adoptee scholar and the author of the Harlow's Monkey blog, said that while some adoptees are certainly grateful, pressuring every adoptee to feel that way diminishes the fact that everyone has their own experience with adoption.
"At the heart of adoption, for anybody to be adopted, they had to have lost the first family," she said. "To tell somebody they should be grateful for the loss that they have experienced is really insensitive, and nobody should be told that they should be grateful for having experienced a certain loss, especially one as profound as their family."
Maya Cederlund
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What the hell? What fraud? Did she say what the fraud is? It's being investigated so if fraud is determined THEN talk about it. What happened to innocent until being proven guilty? This is the kind of bullshit that creates racial hatred. First of all, China ended the one-child policy 9 years ago, and even before that farm families could have more than one child. And secondly, most of what she is saying is her own speculation. I do have to say I don't know anything about what Korea does about adoption and "Frankly, my dear I don't give a damn." As well, I don't see what is illegal, immoral or improper for China to have become more restrictive of international adoptions. This woman is just trying to get her 15 minutes of fame.
Adoption fraud was widespread for many South Koreans adopted into Western countries, AP finds
For Chinese Adoptees In The U.S., Identity Comes In Layers - Worldcrunch
Chinese adoptees say they feel conflicted after China announces end to international adoptions
The article isn't about you. It's about the scars of what happened to these kids and the lies they were told.
For many, they were simply stolen and then sold to foreigners.
Am I not allowed to be critical of it?
You are but the article is correct there was fraud and a hell of a lot of it. These adoptees deserve help by the respective governments and all their records released to them.
Sorry Kavika, I looked again at the article and maybe it's my eyesight, but I couldn't see examples of actual fraud being committed by China. Maybe I missed it. Would you please quote the actual fraud that China committed on the adoptees that is recent, and is not opinion or what "others have said" or something speculated by the author?
Sure, as certainly as you can be critical about Canada's treatment of its indigenous people and what the government and RCC did to them, we would hope that you can be as open minded about some of the culturally questionable acts committed throughout the Pacific Rim post WWll, post Korea and post Vietnam.
You seem to be extremely sensitive to the word fraud.
Here is a great article on Chinese international adoptees searching for their birth parents.
Letting Her Go: Chinese Birth Parent Search and Reunions | Adoptive Families
In every case, the daughters were taken away because they "violated" family planning rules by the government.
in each of the seven studied cases the birth parents were shocked to find out that their children were sent overseas often to non Asian adopters.
Feel free to use a different word that covers breaking up a family and lying about what's going to happen to your daughter.
Do you mean THIS article? Adopted children have historically had problems finding their birth parents, even in America, but civilized nations change their tactics when they have realized that they were wrong. China ended the one-child policy and such family planning rules years ago, as I already said. Awful things happen even in civilized nations, like Indian Residential Schools, but then they are stopped, aren't they? Why do you think China has now passed a law against international adoptions? Some nations even STILL have archaic laws about abortion.
Canada's residential schools, SAME AS AMERICA'S, have been terminated and at least in Canada public apologies were rendered and huge reparations are being paid. But the schools were HISTORY and maybe we should talk about what is happening NOW rather than in the past.
If you don’t heed the past you will repeat it, China did it, Korea did it Romania did it Russia did it as well. The list is long and there is no avoiding it.
America did it and so did Canada
Sorry , I reinstated the link so everyone could see it.
So defensive, and angry...
smh
IMHO The indigenous population and anyone with a trace of indiginous blood has every reason to be angry.
Not you or I.
Got to admit that George Santayana was SO right.
That may depend on how close you have been throughout your life with indigenous people, starting with being babysat by them. You don't know my history.
And you don't know mine.
That's okay with me - why else do we use pseudonyms on this site?
Many countries have over the years taken children from their parents and given them to others. The residential and boarding school of the US and Canada were mentioned but during the 1960/1970s thousand of Indian kids in the US were taken from their parents and given to white people, The Indian adoption era that has left permanent damage to all concerned. We call them the “lost birds”.