South Korean Adoptions

There are a lot of Korean adoptees in the United States. Today’s blog is courtesy of a story in The Guardian about the LINK>Truth Commission investigating foreign adoptions. Some adoptees sent to Europe and the US say they were wrongly removed from their families as the government in Seoul actively promoted adoption. These adoptees suspect their origins were falsified or obscured during a child export frenzy in the mid-to late 20th century.

The adopted South Koreans are believed to be the world’s largest diaspora of adoptees. In the past six decades about 200,000 South Koreans – mostly girls – were adopted overseas. Most were placed with white parents in the US and Europe during the 1970s and 80s.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has decided to investigate 34 adoptees who were sent to Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and the US from the 1960s to the early 1990s. The adoptees say they were wrongfully removed from their families through falsified documents and corrupt practices. The adoptions to be investigated are among the 51 adoptees who first submitted their applications to the commission in August through the Danish Korean Rights Group led by adoptee attorney Peter Møller. There are now more than 300 applications filed.

The applications cite a broad range of grievances that allege carelessness and a lack of due diligence in the removal of scores of children from their families amid loose government monitoring. During much of the period in question, the country was ruled by a succession of military leaders who saw adoptions as a way to deepen ties with the democratic west, while reducing the number of mouths to feed and removing the socially undesirable including children of unwed mothers and orphans.

Most of the South Korean adoptees sent abroad were registered by agencies as legal orphans found abandoned on the streets, a designation that made the adoption process quicker and easier. But many of the so-called orphans had relatives who could be easily identified and found. Some of the adoptees say they discovered that the agencies had switched their identities to replace other children who died or got too sick to travel, which often made it impossible to trace their roots. The adoptees call for the commission to broadly investigate agencies for records falsification and manipulation and for allegedly proceeding with adoptions without the proper consent of birth parents. They want the commission to establish whether the government was responsible for the corrupt practices and whether adoptions were fueled by increasingly larger payments and donations from adoptive parents, which apparently motivated agencies to create their own supply.

Kinship Adoption

Jamie Foxx was born Eric Marlon Bishop (1967) in Terrell, Texas, to Louise Annette Talley and Darrell Bishop, who worked as a stockbroker and had later changed his name to Shahid Abdula. His mother was an adopted child. At just 7 months old, he was is abandoned by both his parents, leaving him to be raised and officially adopted by his maternal grandparents, Mark and Esther Talley. His grandmother had a profound impact on her adopted son and Foxx credits her as being inspirational.

“My grandmother was 60 years old when she adopted me. She ran a nursery school and had a library in the house. She saw me reading early, saw I was smart and believed I was born to achieve truly special things,” Foxx said of his grandmother. He has said that he had a very rigid upbringing that placed him in the Boy Scouts and the church choir and started piano lessons at the age of three at his grandmother’s insistence. Although strict, Estelle undeniably provided Jamie with a loving and nurturing home and was an incredible support to him. He was appreciative that his grandmother was there to give him the care and support he needed to become successful in life but, that never stopped him from wondering about his biological parents and why they left him. It was a constant struggle to comprehend that they never reached out to him. Jamie was only seventeen when his grandfather, Mark Talley, died. Estelle Talley died in October 2004 at the age of ninety-five.

Foxx had difficulty forgiving his birth father, seemingly unable to put his grievances with the man to rest, despite attempts at reconciliation. Foxx did successfully reconcile with his biological mother and also developed a bond with her husband, George Dixon, the stepfather who Foxx refers to as his “pops”. It was interesting to find our that Foxx’s grandparents had also adopted his birthmother. I have long noted that adoption tends to run in families. That is certainly true in my family.

His relationship with his birth mother has progressed quite far since the days when she was unable to care for him. She has been living together with Foxx in the same house for quite a while along with his stepfather. His relationship with his stepfather was an inspiration for the character of Walter McMillian in the movie Just Mercy. His father was incarcerated unjustly for 7 years. It was this that sparked the beginning of their living arrangement. He sent his father a letter while he was in prison promising to rescue him from the situation he was in when he was finally released from prison. That is a promise he has kept even though his mother, Louise and Georg had divorced. They both continue to live with him today.