While South Korea has required adoptions to go through family courts since , screening and monitoring remain weak. The death of a month-old girl in October following abuse by her jailed adoptive parents prompted soul-searching in a country that had long discouraged single mothers from raising their children.
Sections U. Science Technology Business U. Korean adoptee films pain of mother-child separations. She ended up with a raw and unsettling documentary about how a deeply conservative sexual culture, lax birth registration laws and a largely privatized adoption system continue to pressure and shame single mothers into relinquishing their children for adoption.
Connect with the definitive source for global and local news. The Associated Press. All rights reserved. Because it is human nature to seek the origin of their existence.
Most human stories of minority groups in various parts of the world begin with the firm understanding of their own origins and identities. This grounding in their roots is necessary for diversity to flourish in their own lives. From the late s, the Korean government began to provide adoptees with programs such as motherland tours, Korean culture camps, and Korean language programs.
However, the government did not intend to begin the dialogue with adoptees for the purpose of mutual understanding, with a genuine heart and a serious mind. For more than six decades, Korea has been sacrificing the norms of essential human rights in order to facilitate the adoption business and to keep adoption within the private realm and outside of the provenance of government responsibility. It will not be an easy task to overcome such a legacy.
In many surveys regarding the policy needs of adoptees, the right to know one's origin was selected as the highest priority. The origin of a human being encompasses one's true family name, one's own name, birthdate, and birth place, as well as one's nationality, ethnic background, race, culture and language.
There are of course other factors. The knowledge of one's origin is the source of one's sense of belonging and the foundation for establishing one's identity. People build their life upon the fundamental foundation of this sense of belonging and upon knowing their identity.
I had also been one of the people who, before I talked with adoptees, did not understand that this knowledge of one's origin is a fundamental human right, nor why it is so important. Adoptees, especially from Korea, are deprived of the means of knowing their true identity. Through the systemic adoption procedures of this country, the government deliberately erased the biological family relationships and original names of the children, and issued false birth certificates classifying children as abandoned orphans, omitting any identity of their parents.
Local government officials even signed papers that certified that the child was a "legal orphan," so that he or she could be adopted abroad. These false papers were the essential visa documents for Korean children to facilitate their immigration to western countries. After all, why should I be able to speak Korean? I am German! So, when it comes to studying Korean there is always the sense that somehow, I should be able to learn it.
After all I was able to speak Korean in my first five years before my adoption. But at the same time there is that sense of shame or failure and I am catching myself apologizing all the time to people for the fact that I do not speak Korean well enough.
In the search for one's origin, one of the biggest challenges that adoptees face is the language barrier. Having the ability to communicate in Korean not only is relevant in the direct search for one's origin, in other words, being able to read adoption papers, communicate with orphanages, the police, or the general public to ask about the circumstances of being found or relinquished, but also in the search for one's lost cultural heritage.
As a transnational adoptee it is nearly impossible to access official Korean resources without Korean language skills. Translations are poor or incomplete, government programs that are even targeted to the Korean diaspora are often time only available in Korean, and even cultural events in one's adoptive country are in Korean.
Cultural nuances are oftentimes communicated through language. More profoundly it appears that without deep knowledge of the Korean language, the keys to Korean culture will not become available. So, where do I go from here? Anders Ericsson wrote in his article, "The Making of an Expert," It takes a minimum of 10 years or 10, hours of intense training to master a skill.
I still have a long way to go, but I am confident that I will persevere. Does serving spicy food to young children violate human rights? What should be done to protect K-pop stars' mental health? More than 97 million K-pop videos created on TikTok.
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