The Children Money Can Buy

by Anne Moody

  One couple I work with, Lucia and Scott, has been doing a fabulous job of communicating with their children’s birth parents for the past nineteen years. Every six months since her now almost college-aged children were born, Lucia has sent a packet of pictures and a long letter to the four birth parents of her son and daughter. The twelve or so pictures are always arranged in order so that you easily see how the child has grown. They are also numbered and come with an attached sheet of paper detailing exactly when the picture was taken and what is happening. The letters are five or more handwritten pages that go into a lot more detail about the children’s interests and activities. They are well written (Lucia is a teacher), but they aren’t overly elaborate. Mostly, there are fun and interesting things to report, but there are also times when the letters share news that a child is struggling in school or with health problems. Lucia writes these letters exactly as though she were writing to a friend. And she keeps writing them despite the fact that she has heard back from only one of the birth parents, on only one occasion.

  Lucia and Scott’s adoptions took place before email and various photo-sharing websites made it a simple thing for adoptive parents to share information with a child’s birth parents. These days, most people who have ongoing contact do so through texts and photo websites. Most families adopting now likely will end up sending far more pictures than Lucia has over the years, but I doubt any of them will do it with more care and goodwill. She could have switched to email a long time ago and saved herself a lot of time, but there would not be a handwritten “hard copy” record had she done so. There is something special about handling the actual piece of paper on which a letter was written. I feel certain that Lucia has created a family treasure for the birth parents, for her and Scott, and, most importantly, for the children. The letters make it abundantly clear that these children are well loved and that Lucia and Scott have done a wonderful job of honoring their commitment to the post-placement contact agreement. The relationship they have with their children’s birth parents is right there in black and white, and there will never be any confusion about how honest, respectful, and caring toward everyone Lucia and Scott have been. What an amazing job they have done of talking to their children about adoption.

  17

  A Homeland Tour

  Honoring Your Child’s Heritage

  When Jocelyn was thirteen, our family was able to take a trip to Korea. I told the girls ahead of time that this wasn’t going to be a vacation (our vacations were typically weeklong stays at a hundred-dollar-a-week cabin on the wild Washington coast, extremely rustic and relaxing). This was going to be an experience.

  What an understatement. There is so much to say about that trip, and my husband and middle daughter said most of it in articles they wrote for The Seattle Times shortly after we returned home. They did such an amazing job of capturing our “experience” that I decided to share some of what they wrote rather than recreate the story in my own words.

  Here are excerpts from the article my husband wrote in October 2000.

  Jocelyn’s Family: A Journey

  As our group of sixteen families made its way through our two weeks in Korea (looking almost constantly for faces that looked like our children’s), a theme, of sorts, emerged: The more emotional and sentimental the parents grew, the less moved the children seemed to be. To judge from their outward demeanors, the kids were on a lark, their parents on a crusade. On our bus, the kids would sit in the back listening to music and chattering while the parents would be staring lugubriously out the window, memorizing the environment that had yielded their children.

  We were driving, at one point, through the outskirts of Taegu, birthplace of Jocelyn and three other kids in our group, and I was lost in trying to imagine the lives and struggles of the people there when I heard a boy’s voice from the back of the bus say brightly, “I’m really into Wu-Tang . . . hey—there’s the bridge I was abandoned under . . . I’m really into Wu-Tang because. . . .” On several evenings, the families gathered in the hotel bar in Kyong-ju to take in a lounge act—two Asian singers singing American country and pop standards in English—and on one of those nights the kids were horsing around near the stage, while the parents sat at tables talking among themselves. Thirteen-year-old Julia Strang went up to the singers, requested a song, and rejoined the kids’ party. No sooner did “Somewhere Out There” (the song her mother would listen to as she danced with Julia’s referral picture and waited for her arrival) begin than her parents, Elaine and Bryce, and all the parents around them burst into tears as Julia resumed cavorting with her coevals.

  It seemed that the Koreans we encountered often were as emotional as we adoptive parents were. Many of us were approached by Koreans asking us to tell the stories of our families, and explain why we had come to Korea. The story of Korean adoption is widely known—and widely debated—in Korea, largely viewed there as a national tragedy, part of the misfortune that unfolded after the nation’s division in 1953. Those in Korea who believe that a stable, loving home, no matter where it is, is the most important thing you can give a child view Korean adoption as enlightened social policy; others in Korea view it as a shameful loss, akin to the forced separation of families in the wake of the Korean War. We were walking through an open-air market in Cheju City one afternoon when a woman with a little shoe stall looked at us, then turned to my wife, Anne, and asked, pointing at Jocelyn, “Daughter?” When my wife nodded, the woman ran over to Jocelyn, hugged her, and said in English, “Welcome back!”

  By coincidence, we had arrived in Korea two days before one hundred people from South Korea, and one hundred from North Korea, were allowed to fly over the Demilitarized Zone and meet with family members from whom they had been separated since 1953, the year the Korean War ended and the border between the two halves of Korea was irrevocably sealed. For the next three days, Korean television broadcast reunion footage around the clock. It reminded me of the United States in the wake of the Kennedy assassination—every television everywhere was tuned into the reunion. It was a powerful context in which to be staging our reunions with Jocelyn’s roots; we felt as if we were part of the same national story. And indeed, we were to find out later, we were: Calls to our adoption agency from birth parents seeking information on the children they had relinquished over the years increased by several hundredfold during the reunion days.

  It was with considerably higher than expected emotion, then, that we boarded a bus one day for Taegu to meet a social worker from Holt Children’s Services, the agency that had arranged Huh Ok-Kyung’s adoption. Our guide was scheduled to take us to the clinic where Jocelyn had been born. She met us at the Taegu bus station, introduced herself as “Mrs. Kim,” loaded us into a waiting taxi van, and took us on a long drive through the city that culminated in a district called Bong Buk Dong. It is a broad, busy street lined with little shops and sidewalk vendors, with a cavelike labyrinth of an open-air market.

  Mrs. Kim led us into a narrow alley and past a tiny restaurant, a tailor’s, a beauty parlor, a dry cleaners and some other little shops, and brought us to a halt outside a tiny temple with a little metal gate. Here, she said, is the site of what had been a small obstetrics/gynecology clinic in 1986. It was here that little Huh Ok-Kyung had been brought into the world. I stared at the gate, then looked up and down the alley, videotaping, photographing, memorizing the sights, and trying to conjure the sounds of the clinic thirteen years ago, when the noises of traffic and marketing and bustling had been suddenly punctuated by our new baby’s louder-than-life cry. I stood there stupidly, almost numb, not sure what it was I was feeling. Then I turned and looked at Jocelyn; she was blushing deeply and sporting a massive, hilariously outsized grin. It’s the look she gets only when she is tremendously moved: a smile so much bigger than her face that it looks like something she’s trying to hide behind.

  By the time the day came for us to visit Holt’s Seoul office and view Jocelyn’s
files, we all started coming down with the jitters. One of the older girls in our group had found her birth family and the reunion had been intense, to say the least. At the Holt’s office we were ushered into a little room where we looked through Jocelyn’s files, which turned out to contain nothing we hadn’t already known. We added an album of pictures of Jocelyn and a letter for the birth mother to the file, in the hopes that someday she would be able to learn what had happened to her daughter, and might be reassured at finding what a happy and healthy girl she had grown up to be.

  Then it came time to meet Jocelyn’s foster mother, Shin Hae Soon, who had cared for her in her home for the first three months of Jocelyn’s life. Huh Ok-Kyung had arrived in Seattle a clearly healthy and well-loved baby, and we had been anxious to meet Shin Hae Soon ever since we first laid eyes on our new little girl. When she walked into the room, Shin Hae Soon proved to be a tiny, shy woman who was clearly excited and moved at the prospect of seeing our Jocelyn. We noticed that she was carrying baby pictures that we had sent eleven years ago, and that she had kept them in pristine condition, like treasured relics. She came in and sat down, hugged Jocelyn, and began babbling and stroking and studying her hand as if it were the most amazing thing she had ever seen. Jocelyn had weighed only five pounds at birth, and now towered over her foster mother.

  As she sat there fondling Jocelyn’s hand and wiping away tears, we were told that only two percent of Korean adoptees ever return to Korea, and only one percent of them while still children. And Shin Hae Soon told us that Jocelyn was only the second to return among the scores of babies she had nurtured over seventeen years. When we gave her a photo album of Jocelyn’s life, she hugged it as if it were Jocelyn herself.

  Note to American adoptive parents of Korean children: Write to your foster mothers!

  We were to spend the afternoon with Shin Hae Soon, first at the Holt offices, then during lunch at a nearby restaurant, then visiting her and her family in her home, where Jocelyn had spent her first three months. Jocelyn and Shin Hae Soon kept looking at one another and smiling fondly as if they’d spent the better part of Jocelyn’s life pining away for one another.

  The day proved to be an amazing, moving climax not only to our trip but to the journey we all had commenced the day Jocelyn was delivered to our home.

  Back home a few days later, I found myself wondering what would stand out in Jocelyn’s memory. Watching video of the trip that evening, we viewed again the face of the foster mom, Jocelyn’s mother and sisters in tears, and Jocelyn with that massive double-decker grin. I looked over at her, covertly watching her watch the tape, and saw that same grin again. And I saw it then not only as an appropriately grandiose expression of her emotions about the trip and its revelations, but as a symbol as well: She is an American adolescent, rife with outsized emotions that she won’t be able to articulate until she grows into them. Her heart and soul, like that great grand grin, are simply too big, at the moment, for the rest of her.

  * * *

  Jocelyn did change after that trip. It’s not easy to be self-confident at thirteen, but she suddenly exuded a calm and self-possession that we hadn’t seen before. Of course, part of it was the result of articles that appeared in the newspaper, her week as “cover girl” of Pacific Magazine, and the resulting “fame encounters,” as she called them, when people she didn’t know would tell her they had enjoyed reading about her trip. But I think her new attitude was more a result of her pride in discovering that Korea was an amazing country and that she had strong roots there.

  Jocelyn’s pride in her heritage was perfectly timed to correspond with her school’s culture fair. She came back from Korea with a wealth of information and was eagerly looking forward to sharing it. We had been through the culture fair with Erin and Caitlin, each of whom had done a project on one of their great-grandmothers, and I had been extremely impressed not only by the presentations I had seen but by the fact that they seemed to have such a positive effect on the kids’ self-esteem.

  Jocelyn decided to do her project on her foster mother, Shin Hae Soon, and use this woman’s story to talk about the Korean War and Korean adoption. Imagine her dismay when her teacher told her that she couldn’t do it because Shin Hae Soon wasn’t her relative. The teacher said that part of the project involved interviewing the subject (something our older daughters had never done with their long-dead relatives) and that Jocelyn wouldn’t be able to do this with Shin Hae Soon. The teacher suggested instead that Jocelyn write about her mother, me, and my adoption experience. When Jocelyn told me about this, I decided there must be a misunderstanding and told her to go back and try again. When the second request was unsuccessful, I called the teacher to explain just how much this project meant to Jocelyn and why I felt it met the parameters of the culture fair. It was, after all, called Culture Fair, not Family History Fair or Appreciate Your Relatives Fair. The teacher still wasn’t convinced, but did agree to discuss it with the department head. Incredibly, that woman agreed with the teacher and the answer was still no.

  Finally, I wrote a detailed letter to the principal and school counselor explaining why it was so important for Jocelyn to be able to honor her foster mother and her own Korean heritage, and they gave her the go-ahead. We were relieved and happy but were also thoroughly dismayed by the fact that it had been so difficult to accomplish something that seemed so obvious and desirable. Jocelyn’s project turned out to be a beautiful tribute to Shin Hae Soon and Korean adoption, and her report, along with the heartfelt comments people wrote to her about it, are among our most precious family treasures.

  School projects that focus on genetics and heritage issues are often viewed as complicated for adoptive families, but they certainly don’t need to be seen as embarrassing or confusing or in any way negative. Children who have been adopted don’t relinquish their heritage in the process. These children and their parents should be encouraged to value and celebrate the “input” they have gotten from both their birth and adoptive parents. I suspect Jocelyn’s teachers thought that her desire to do her project on her foster mother somehow dishonored her true family (us)—a sadly antiquated view of adoption that is still held by a lot of people.

  People who adopt children from different cultures need to help them develop a positive identification with their country of origin. This isn’t easy for the average American family because most of us have little opportunity to experience the child’s original culture. As I explained in my letter to the school, “Our family was hugely blessed this summer by being able to take a trip to Korea. We were further blessed by meeting Jocelyn’s foster mother and her family. Jocelyn fairly exudes pride in her cultural heritage these days. . . . We are absolutely thrilled that she wants to share her foster mother’s story (and by extension, her own pride in having been part of such a wonderful family) with her classmates. What possible reason or benefit could there be for denying her this opportunity?”

  No one at the school made any attempt to answer that question. I hope that the experience served to educate those two teachers, but I suspect that because we ultimately were forced to go over their heads, they were unhappy with us, and unmoved.

  We encountered only a handful of awkward and/or frustrating situations over the years in dealing with our schools. Teachers and staff were virtually always helpful and reasonable—with one exception that is in retrospect, comical. When Jocelyn was going into first grade, we requested that she be assigned to a Japanese American teacher. Caitlin had been in this woman’s class, and we knew she was a wonderful teacher, but that wasn’t our most important consideration; the fact that she was Asian trumped everything else about her. Erin had been all the way through the relatively small elementary school by this time, and Caitlin was in the fifth grade, so our family was well acquainted—and extremely happy—with almost everything about the school.

  I knew that requesting a specific teacher was a touchy subject, and that you had to have a good re
ason if you wanted to do this. You also had to phrase your request not by using the teacher’s name but simply by describing the qualities in your child that warranted this special request. To me, the opportunity for an adopted child in a different-race family to have a teacher who shared her racial heritage was about as good a reason as any that I could imagine. So I wrote a letter saying that I wanted my child to have an Asian teacher. In response, the school social worker called me in frustration, saying, “Anne, you can’t request a teacher by race!” The implication was that I was somehow gaming the system or perhaps was politically incorrect. I tried to explain how important it would be to Jocelyn to have a same-race teacher and how this was a rare opportunity for her to establish a meaningful relationship with an Asian woman at an especially impressionable age. Assigning Jocelyn to this woman’s class seemed obviously and enormously beneficial, but the social worker wouldn’t commit.

  I suspect I would have taken this battle all the way to the governor if need be, but Jocelyn finally was assigned to the requested classroom (there was a one-in-three chance anyway), and nothing more was said about my inappropriate request. The following year, I requested another Asian teacher, by race, not by name, and Jocelyn was put into her classroom without comment. There weren’t any more Asian American teachers in the following grade-school years, but those two women had done a fabulous job of being Asian at a time when that alone did Jocelyn a world of good. They were also wonderful teachers.