Extinction

On the day after Christmas in 2025, the South Korean government announced it would be ending its Korean adoption program by 2029. They made this announcement following a United Nations investigation into adoption fraud and abuse in the adoption program, especially in the 1970’s and 1980’s, when I was adopted. This investigation, along with the South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was in response to the advocacy work of adult adoptees. 

This news felt like a long time coming. International adoption from Korea has been significantly decreasing over the years, especially after the Special Adoption Law in 2011, under which both my sons were adopted, and after the pandemic. Still, I had always hoped we adoptees would get a more empowered ending. Not a result of arm twisting or public embarrassment. Not an ending without a resolution for adoptees or without support for their attempts to reconnect with their families. Instead, I hoped for something that exposed the truth of adoption loudly and boldly, with adoptee voices at the forefront. 

Originally published in The Lumiere, which has since closed, the following story is my imagining of the end of Korean adoption. It is the kind of ending we adoptees deserve. 

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The message read, “August 15th. Come home.” It was finally happening. The announcement ricocheted around the world, bouncing from satellite to satellite, a chorus of electronic alerts on our phones. We had prepared. We had waited. And now over a hundred thousand of us would return on the ultimate heritage trip for the Korean adoptee diaspora. 

We were not always a “we.” For too long we were individuals tucked into different communities around the world, living parallel lives as brown babies in white families, as charity cases that made heroes of our adoptive parents and made us into sponges of our saviors' cultures, sponges that wrung out gratitude every time we were squeezed. As more of us came of age, we began traveling back to Korea searching for a place to belong, but we were devastated when it felt just as unwelcoming, just as foreign as the countries we grew up in.

Drawn together by our grief, our individual experiences were stitched together by the fraud of adoption in Korea, with its erased birth histories, separated siblings, and manufactured orphans. Our sense of loss turned into rage at having been pawns in Korea’s quest for societal purity paired with profit. So we formed a plan- first of infestation, and then of colonization. 

We sent our best and brightest first, the one’s the Korean government could not deny were success stories of its mass exportation– the doctors, the lawyers, the professors. We quietly campaigned for and won the right to restore our Korean citizenship. Now, armed with legal viability, we scurried up the hierarchies of the government, military, and chaebols, first cowing on our hands and knees for acceptance, and then eventually rising up, outstretched and powerful. When we had infected all of the Korean institutions with our virulent mix of Eastern faces and Western attitudes, we made the call for everyone else to come home. 

Of course, not every adoptee joined our crusade. Many felt safer ensconced in their adopted world, unwilling to risk security for freedom. Others had already passed away, many having taken their own lives rather than enduring the ones gifted to them. Some adoptees would not speak to us at all. We understood. Survival requires sacrifices by each of us. But for those who wanted to come, we ensured they could. We paid for their tickets, included their children and grandchildren who also bear the generational losses of adoption, and we cared for our older members, the first of our kind, the ones who were taken from actual war ravaged streets and who’s deliverance inadvertently modeled how Korea could turn their unwanted children into a line-item on their budget: Intercountry Adoption. 

We arrived in Seoul on August 15th, a day when Koreans celebrated their liberation from Japan and the establishment of their country. The han Koreans thought they reserved for themselves, that melancholic resentment perpetually swirling in the wake of their own divisions, remained alive in us and erupted that day. Dressed entirely in black, we marched like an invading army, row after row, the years of military service we evaded by being deported still pulsing in our blood. Our chants of “this is our home now,” infected the sanitized chambers of the airport with the sounds of adoptees- English accented with our European, Australian, and American upbringings. 

We filed onto the subway to Seoul, bloating train after train, finally taking up the space we deserve. Mini-Korean flags waved around us in honor of the holiday, the same flag given to every adoptee before they left Korea, the same flag that our adoptive parents tucked away in a memory box as a memento of a life that never was. The locals gawked at the sheer brazenness of our group of ragtag exports returning to haunt a society that wanted to forget us. Yes, the citizens knew that in their race to the top, they sloughed off the bottom layer and sold it away. Their standard pity for adoptees was now replaced by fear. 

We scuttled out of the underground stations like cockroaches, fanning out across the asphalt streets, interrupting parades, and overrunning traffic. We knew our mission. We headed straight to the Blue House, encircling the area around it, and refused to move, to leave, to be invisible ever again. We captured the attention of the entire world, unlocking the worldwide humanitarian crisis of intercountry adoption from the cage of its adoption fairy tale. Our comrades in high places came out to welcome us, to join us, to make clear for the entire world that these voices, these faces– foreign, but domestic - belonged here. 

In the days that followed, the remnants of the old regime clutched to its power, stoking fears, telling non-adopted Koreans to report us, to export us once more. They issued pamphlets on how to identify us by our too-tan skin, our freckled faces, and our bloated bodies. They said the economy, the culture, the Korean-way of life could not sustain this many foreigners. Unfortunately for them, we were an invasive species- resilient and cunning. It was too late to eradicate us. We had become the next set of colonizers to inhabit Korea, but this time, we were of Korea’s own creation. 

Most of us stayed in Korea, in the home built by us and for us, working to fulfill our pledges to end intercountry adoption, to reunite and support families, and to shutter any agency involved in the violation of our human right to know who we are. Others of us returned to our adopted countries with the  satisfaction that we would be the last batch of Korean human goods mailed out to the world. In either case, we would always be united in the revolution we created, the revolution that allowed us to finally live in peace, the revolution that forged our own extinction.