A Korean Adoption Primer From A Critical Perspective

AKAPFACP (this is the sound you might make if you don’t like critical adoption perspectives - fair warning).

A Korean Adoption Primer From A Critical Perspective

AKAPFACP (this is the sound you might make if you don’t like critical adoption perspectives - fair warning).

*Please Note: Because some of the information below is very heavy, you will have to excuse us for trying to keep parts of this light. If dark humor is a trigger, you probably shouldn’t read this.


Certain building block concepts have to be understood about Korean Adoption in order to understand both the bigger picture of Korean Adoption, and the individual stories of Korean Adoptees. The following is our attempt to address this need. You didn’t know you had this need, did you? Good. Let’s get started.


Please note that parts of the content below may be triggering / controversial, especially for someone new who knows nothing or very little about Korean Adoption. If this kind of content upsets you, we suggest not reading further.  I mean, “Love is Blind” Season 5 is coming out, amirite??

As individual Korean Adoptees, we don’t own the truth; but we do own our own experiences and our own viewpoints of them. We are very aware that there is an enormous range of valid and deeply personal feelings and viewpoints regarding Korean Adoption within the Korean Adoptee community. We like to think we respect all points of view (unless you don’t like babies, because that’s just weird), and certainly do not consider our own point of view to be the only one which is “correct”. After all, our viewpoints are continually shifting and changing with time and as new information becomes available. 

The following is written with those in mind who are willing to examine Korean Adoption critically, and who are willing to question the face value of what society has typically told us about adoption in general. 

Edit: We highly recommend reading this article, which articulates the relationship of US colonialism in S. Korea and it's relationship to adoption: FROM STOLEN LAND TO RICHES: US NEO-COLONIALISM IN SOUTH KOREA / January 8th, 2020 / By Riley Bove

The following is a VERY short and grossly over-simplified summary of some basic things which one should know in order to begin to understand the complex and sprawling topic of Korean Adoption. Please note that this is written with the beginning Korean Adoptee or beginning student of Korean Adoption in mind, and that each of these topics have been written about to a much greater degree of depth and complexity (and let’s face it, intelligence) by Korean Adoptee scholars and researchers over the decades. There may have been a copious amount of Soju (apple flavored, yum!) consumed during the writing of this section. Please see the “Resources for Adoptees” section of Paperslip for links to more in-depth information, in the forms of books, academic papers, articles, films and videos, podcasts, etc. For a more in-depth plunge about the history of Korean Adoption and Korean Adoptee community, we cannot more strongly recommend that you read “Adopted Territory” by (non-Korean Adoptee) Eleana J. Kim.

A Korean Adoption Primer From A Critical Perspective:

  • The Korean War

    • In the beginning was the Korean War (1950-1953). But before that:

    • Korea was liberated from Japanese colonialism in 1945. Ironically this is “thanks” to the atomic bombs dropped on Japan by the US, which effectively ended WWII and released Japan’s colonial hold on Korea. The Japanese were beyond awful to Koreans, and this bad blood between Koreans and the Japanese continues to this day. The fact that the Japanese treated Koreans in inhumane ways is inexcusable and will never be forgotten by Koreans. However, it doesn’t mean that we enjoy the thought of Japan - or any country - being nuked. Sadly Korean adoption is born of this period of violence…it’s hard to say anything adequate regarding the ways in which human beings can mistreat and abuse one another to such a vicious extent.

    • Korea was a pawn in the proxy Cold War between the US and its allies on one side, and China and Russia on the other. Korea was divided at random at the 38th parallel in 1953 at the “conclusion” of the Korean War, causing thousands of family separations which persist to this day. The Korean War has never formally concluded, and technically still continues.

    • You could say that S. Korea herself was geopolitically separated from her family and orphaned by world events and adopted by the US and the West. This geopolitical relationship / alliance with the US and the West continues to the present.

    • Post-war Koreans commonly considered the US a “paradise” as compared to the war torn conditions of Korea. Certainly many Korean social workers viewed their work in sending Korean children overseas as an act of “saving” them. On the flip side of this equation, for Korean Adoptees, there is no more loaded a concept than that of being “saved”. Many - though of course not all - Korean Adoptees who have looked at their adoption critically see the reality of their adoption as being very different from their having being “saved”.

    • The Korean War is referred to as “The Forgotten War”. As compared to the Vietnam War, most people outside of Korea know very little about the Korean War and the enormity of suffering that it caused in Korea. 

  • Adoption waves: 

    • The earliest adoptions were of mixed race (Hapa) Korean children who were fathered by US or other Western soldiers. 

    • Mixed race children were a reminder of the war and considered shameful due to Korea’s emphasis on the purity of bloodline. (Not to excuse this, but before getting too judgemental, let’s remember that basically every other culture on earth has historically placed an emphasis on racial purity. The “American Experiment”, in which people from different ethnic backgrounds now intermarry - with varying degrees of “freeness” - is only a few hundred years old). While this does not make the poor treatment of mixed race children in Korea any less terrible, racism is unfortunately an age old, equal opportunity facet of societies across the planet. And let’s not forget that mixed race children were often the product of unequal “relationships” between foreign soldiers and Korean women who were impoverished due to the war. Rape was of course common. US soldiers were sometimes known to simply break into Korean family homes and rape women at will. For this reason too, mixed race children were considered by Koreans to be a shameful reminder of the war.

    • Mixed race children, like all Korean children, were considered the responsibility of their fathers, which was another motivation for the Korean government to remove mixed race children from Korea - because their fathers were in the West. 

    • When Korean adoption agencies ran out of mixed race children to send abroad for adoption, they turned to full blooded Korean children. Kaching.

    • What began as a humanitarian response to the post-war conditions of Korea became a business - and then it quickly became a highly profitable racquet. 

    • As a well regarded AP reporter has said to me: Korean Adoption Agencies could have gotten children from anywhere.

    • After the 1997 Asian Games and the 1988 Olympic Games brought intense worldwide negative media exposure (just one example is here) to the Korean Adoption industry, Korean international adoption drastically plummeted. This was directly due to the Korean government’s response to being shamed internationally by foreign press: the Korean government simply cut off the number of available exit visas, and as a result, the number of Korean children sent for overseas adoption sharply declined. There are some helpful tables which show the official statistics about Korean adoptions per year on Wikipedia’s page about Korean Adoption here. Please note that anectdotally, many Korean Adoptees feel that the estimated number of Korean Adoptees sent around the planet from the 1950s-2000s - 250,000 - is likely a low estimate. We don’t know exactly how many Korean Adoptees were adopted worldwide, but the estimate is generally 200,000 - 300,000.

      • What happened to all of the thousands of children who were in the “care” of Korean orphanages and adoption agencies when the Korean government decided to curtail overseas adoption in 1988? Once there was no way to sell these children abroad for great profit through adoption, what incentive would these “child welfare centers” have had to feed, clothe, and house these children? How many Korean children who were in “care” died in the wake of the 1988 Olympics? Or how many were allowed to simply age out of the system, without further social support by the Korean government? We’ll likely never know.

  • Proxy adoption 

    • From the earliest days of Korean adoption, and persisting throughout the decades from the 1950s-1988, prospective adoptive parents rarely went to Korea to meet / select Korean children for adoption in person. Instead, the Korean and Western Adoption Agencies acted as a “proxy” (intermediary) for the adoptive parents in the process of adopting Korean children from abroad. 

      • This accounts for the experience of many Korean Adoptees who disorientingly feel that they were “born at the airport”. 

      • For many Western adoptive parents, the first time they may have ever seen a Korean in person was when their Korean adoptive child came off of the plane.

    • Proxy adoption from Korea was pioneered / fought for by Harry Holt - it was opposed by much wiser US social workers who understood the potentially devastating issues which could accompany proxy adoption. Of course, their sage advice was ignored, much to the detriment of basically all Korean Adoptees who wish to search for their origins.

      • Most of the falsification and identity issues associated with Korean adoption are directly a result of the widespread use of proxy adoption for the adoption of Korean children to the West. 

        • Since most Western adoptive parents never saw the child they were adopting in person in Korea, this made it easy to falsify the identities of children in a myriad of different ways.

      • Korean adoption agencies and government officials could easily fake documents in order to “orphanize” a child for adoption. As a result, most Korean Adoptees - particularly those from the 1960s and 1970s - are rarely able to find their birth families through the adoption paperwork route, since so few of their documents contain any real information regarding their origins. 

    • Some 1970s Holt social workers didn’t even screen the adoptive parents at all. As seen in a 1970s BBC Panorama documentary about Korean adoption, a pair of early Holt social workers who are interviewed admit that they never met or conducted any formal home study on prospective US adoptive parents - saying only that they had a “good feeling” about the prospective adoptive parents because these people were Christian. The BBC derisively refers to these glib, reckless and clueless social workers as “human storks”. Good job, BBC. 

    • Even if a US / Western adoption agency did conduct an official home study with the prospective adoptive parents, there is no way that they could effectively screen for things like: 

      • Racism by the adoptive parents or extended adoptive family members

        • If an adoptive white parent had never even seen a Korean child or adult in person, how could she or he even know if they held racist views of Koreans or not? 

      • Possible future abuse by adoptive parents or other adoptive relatives, including the non-biological siblings of the Adoptee 

        • Many Korean Adoptees report having grown up in physically and sexually abusive environments. While certainly this was not everyone’s experience, it unfortunately does not seem like some form of abuse was uncommon.

        • In the worst cases, children were illicitly re-homed.

      • Mental health issues or personality disorders of the adoptive parent/s 

      • Favoritism for the adoptive parents’ own biological children over the Adoptee 

        • We know anecdotally of some Korean Adoptees whose white adoptive parents paid for the college tuitions of their white biological children, but not for the college tuitions of their Korean adoptive child/ren. Ouch. 

  • Korea’s lax birth registration system:

    • Korean Adoptees, and even Koreans who are not adopted, have fallen victim to Korea’s lax birth registration system. Even up until 2023, Korean children have not been required to be immediately registered with the Korean government upon birth. As a result, children who died or were sent for adoption before they were registered by their birth parents with the Korean government simply do not exist on paper within the Korean system.

    • As a result, likely the majority of children who died within Korea’s orphanages and adoption agencies prior to being adopted simply disappeared, and their deaths were never officially / publicly recorded (at least, not that we know of). We believe that likely thousands of children died in Korean orphanages and adoption agencies during Korea’s adoption boom years from the 1950s forward to the 1980s. Their deaths are likely never going to be known about by their birth families, or their siblings - some of whom who may have been adopted internationally. As Korean Adoptees, we mourn the loss of these thousands of disappeared, nameless Korean children who died without their deaths being properly recorded and without proper acknowledgement by the Korean orphanages, adoption agencies, or Korean government in whose “care” they were placed.

    • International adoption still continues from S. Korea, but the numbers are very low in comparison to the past.

      • There are many vocal Korean Adoptees who would prefer to see a stop to all adoption from Korea to the West. This is one of the most controversial and explosive topics within the Korean Adoption community - whether or not Korean Adoption should be stopped entirely. There are merits to both sides of the argument.

  • Orphanization

    • Most Korean Adoptees were Orphanized, meaning that their English facing adoption paperwork commonly stated that they were “abandoned” with “unknown birth parents”. A key document of Orphanization is the Orphan Hojuk, which ridiculously placed the child at the head of her or his own family, as her or his own “Family Chief”. 

    • Orphanization as it applies to Korean Adoptees from any of the 4 major Korean Adoption Agencies: 

    • Orphanization as it applies to Korean Adoptees from the specific Korean Adoption Agency Korea Social Service (KSS): 

  • Korea’s non-democratic leadership after the Korean War

    • See this List of presidents of South Korea on Wikipedia

    • Since Korean history is not commonly taught outside of Korea, many Korean Adoptees are not aware that from the end of the Korean War in 1953 up until the late 1980s, Korea was run by a series of authoritarian dictators. Most Korean Adoptees, having grown up in the West, have no idea what it means to grow up under dictatorial rule. The vast majority of Korean adoptions happened during the long period of time when Korea was ruled by dictators who held little regard for human rights. Often when Korean Adoptees first begin to undertake a birth family search, they do not know what they will be up against in terms of the lingering issues related to adoption records which are a direct product of that time period. Many Korean Adoptees are stunned to encounter the labyrinthine nature of birth family search and the myriad barriers to birth family search, both in their Western countries of adoption, and in Korea.

  • Optics of the Vietnam War 

        • When most Americans think of the 1960s and 1970s, they think of the Vietnam War. Most Americans don’t remember what is aptly called “The Forgotten War”: the Korean War. Many Americans and people around the world were horrified at the images of war they saw on national television as the war in Vietnam raged. On a nationally subconscious level, adopting Korean children in the 1970s may be seen in some ways as having been a national “mea culpa” for the damage inflicted across Asia by the US, with Americans (and other Westerners) conflating Korea with Vietnam. Through adoption of Korean children by white Americans / Westerners across the world, a narrative of Western destruction could be converted into a much more palatable narrative of American / Western saviourism. This was the ultimate PR (public relations) stunt for the US, which during the time of the Cold War, needed for itself to be seen as a world leader.

  • The systematic movement of children out of Korea through international adoption in the era of Korean dictators:

    • Korea moved 1% of its population out of Korea in the 1980s through international adoption.

    • From the top down, the entire country was mobilized to move children out of the country. 

      • The Korean government wanted to reduce the number of mouths to feed in an era during which social services were not typically provided. Birth control in Korea was not common and adoption was encouraged in order to reduce population.

      • The Korean government wanted to establish geopolitical ties with the West in the wake of the Korean War. North Korea was still very much a visceral threat at this time and the recently liberated Korea needed allies, situated as it is between the much larger countries and hostile (to S. Korea) countries of Russia, China, and Japan. 

      • Korean doctors and midwives across the country were incentivized to provide children for the Korean Adoption Agencies through monetary compensation. 

      • Korean police routinely took children who had been lost almost immediately to orphanages or Adoption Agencies, instead of attempting to locate the child’s parents. They were likely financially compensated for each lost child they procured for adoption.

      • Kidnapping appears to have been common. Children were kidnapped and taken to orphanages and Adoption Agencies and often sent overseas.

      • If Korean parents came to orphanages or adoption agencies looking for their lost or kidnapped children, these parents were often told that they had to pay to get their child/ren back, or told that their child/ren had already been sent overseas for adoption.  

      • Korea is not a country where mental health is a commonly discussed subject - it is taboo. We cannot even imagine the extreme mental suffering of thousands of Korean birth parents who may have lost their children to international adoption through no fault of their own. 

        • In the Korean adoptee community, one hears anecdotal stories of birth family members who drank themselves to death in the wake of relinquishing a child, or who engaged in other extreme behaviors to cope with the magnitude of their loss or actions. 

  • Korea’s patriarchal society and emphasis on purity of blood line 

    • In Korea, there is an ongoing stigma against single unmarried mothers and divorced mothers, even in an era of extreme population decline. 

      • The intense pressure on single Korean birth mothers to relinquish their children for adoption persists to this day. 

      • Korean Adoption Agencies were connected to a network of:

        • Hospitals

        • Midwife / Birth Clinics

        • Single Unwed Mothers’ Homes 

        • “Feeder” Orphanages - orphanages which routinely fed children into the Korean Adoption Agencies

        • Police Stations

        • Etc.

    • Korea, like most cultures, has a strong preference for boys. Ironically this has shifted over the years as Korean parents have come to realize that their male children do not tend to care for them in their old age (insert snarky chuckle). As a result, the relinquishment of boys over girls has risen in recent times. 

    • Korean culture (like many cultures) regards twins with superstition, seeing them as unlucky.

    • In cases of divorce, Korean children were automatically considered to be in the custody of the father - if the father remarried, often the children were sent for adoption. Often the birth mother was not even informed by the birth father that their child/ren have been relinquished for adoption.

    • Koreans do not typically adopt domestically due to the cultural emphasis on the importance of blood line purity.

  • Western demand for children / Western pressure on Korea to supply ever more children

    • It’s tempting for Westerners to believe that they are always “good” and anyone from the non-Western world is always “bad”. However, the reality is not so simple. US and European governments put intense and repeated pressure on Korea to continually supply them with children for adoption.

      • The recent Danish TV2 documentary about Korea Social Service (KSS) Adoptees shows pages from a recently procured 6,000 page document which illustrates the gross financial agreements between KSS and KSS’ Danish Partner Western Adoptin Agency, Adoption Center (AC). Denmark was demanding a certain quota of children per month, and KSS was promising to fulfill it. If KSS fulfilled its quota, then Denmark would send KSS extra money and gifts. It shows how much of a racquet the international adoption industry was, and illuminates the mechanisms of child trafficking. 

    • There’s much more to say on this topic which will be added later.

  • Most Korean Adoptees were adopted by white families in countries which were allies of S. Korea during the Korean War: including the US, European countries, Australia, and Canada.

    • It was no accident that to the victors of the war went the spoils: and Korean children were sent en masse via international adoption to those Western countries which had been allies of S. Korea during the war: the US, European countries, Australia, and Canada. “Adopted Territory” Author Eleana J. Kim aptly refers to Korean Adoptees as “biodiplomats”. For South Korea, geopolitical ties, monetary agreements, and national security were bartered through the sale of S. Korean babies and children to the West.

    • Historically there have been many close ties between sponsorship for Korean orphanages and adoption agencies by foreign Western allies of S. Korea.

    • Because most Korean Adoptees were adopted by white / non-Korean adoptive parents, most Korean Adoptees are considered Transracial, Transnational Adoptees. For this reason, it is not common for many Korean Adoptees to be “Late Discovery Adoptees” (LDA) as if you grew up as a Korean Adoptee with white parents, and you didn’t notice, something was likely wrong with you (snorts).

    • However, there are cases where some Korean Adoptees were adopted domestically in Korea by Koreans, or who were adopted by Koreans or other Asian adoptive parent/s in the US, Europe, Australia, or Canada.

  • “Adoption is Beautiful” 

    • There may be nothing greater which an Adoptee has to battle within themselves and within the wider culture than the “Adoption is Beautiful” mythology. What is seldom understood is that whether or not an Adoptee was adopted into a “good” adoptive family is irrelevant to whether or not the Adoptee’s adoption was or was not a case of child trafficking. An Adoptee could have grown up with a wonderful, loving and caring adoptive family - yet still have been trafficked as a child from Korea to the West, without her or his adoptive parents knowing. This perspective may indeed be a hard pill to swallow, and is, for many, a controversial viewpoint, given that it flies in the face of the “Adoption is Beautiful” mythology which has grown up and gained a chokehold around the concept of adoption since time immemorial. Many Korean Adoptees who think critically about adoption often express that the prevalent and pervasive view of adoption as “beautiful” is one of the toughest things which they have to face when discussing their Adoptee experience with non-Adoptees. The insistence by non-Adoptees (and many Adoptees themselves) that adoption is “beautiful” is persistent and likely will be with us for the duration of time. 

  • The Gaslighting of Korean Adoptees 

    • Because so many Korean Adoptees have grown up believing they were “abandoned” with “unknown birth parents”, thanks to their widespread Orphanization, many Korean Adoptees do not realize until late in life - if at all - that they have the possibility of doing a birth family search through their relevant Korean Adoption Agency. 

    • This gets into the topics discussed in the Barriers to Birth Families Search page. Please see that page where the fun continues…