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[Freemason Government Stealing Children at Secret Family Courts - Bill Maloney]

Freemason Government Stealing Children at Secret Family Courts - Bill Maloney

[Jackie Kay: How I met my real father]

Jackie Kay: How I met my real father

My mum and dad met in Christchurch in the South Island of New Zealand, though my mum comes from Lochgelly in Fife, and my dad from Townhead in Glasgow. I've often wondered if they would ever have met had they not both ended up on the other side of the world, in the southern hemisphere, enticed by the completely free fare, in the days when Australia and New Zealand were determined to increase their working population, and by the adventure of the journey. They met in 1952 in a place called the Coffee Pot, where my mum had a waitressing job. "I think he liked me because I gave him big portions. Isn't that right, John? Then he asked me out on our first date."

They married on the day after April Fool's Day in 1954. My mum joined the Communist party in New Zealand at the same time as my dad. She liked pointing out that her Maori friend Tam took them to their first meeting. Years later, back in Scotland, my dad gave up his work as a draughtsman in 1965 and started working as the Glasgow secretary for the party. "We'd have been a lot better off if he'd stuck to being a draughtsman and not worked full time for the party. Still, he had to follow his passion."

My mum and dad returned to Scotland after spending their first years of married life in New Zealand. By this time they desperately wanted children. They tried and tried but had no luck. This was in the days before IVF. They had tests done and still no luck. Eventually, it was my dad who suggested they might try adoption. It took ages before they found an adoption agency that would accept them despite their politics. In those days, the late 1950s, adoption agencies were mostly run by religious organisations. There was the Glasgow social services, who wanted to know how often my parents went to church and how close they lived to a church. My parents wouldn't lie about this. After they finally got accepted by the Scottish Adoption Agency, and found a lovely woman who they felt was on their side, they went to a meeting where they were asked more questions. On the way out, my mum said, and it was an almost throwaway remark, "By the way, we don't mind what colour the child is." And the woman said, "Really? Well, in that case we have a boy in the orphanage; we could let you see him today." And if my mum hadn't thought to say that, my brother might have remained in the orphanage for the rest of his life, and so might have I, because having one "coloured child" they decided to adopt another, to keep him company, which was forward-thinking, I see now, for the 1960s. "To think they didn't even think to mention Maxie to us," my mum says, still outraged at this, "that he wasn't even thought of as a baby."

Shortly after they brought my brother home, a minister arrived at my parents' door. "'I've heard that you've done a kind act and adopted a coloured child,' he says to me," my mum said. "'We at the church just wanted to know if we could be of any assistance,' as if he were thinking of you both as noble savages. I sent him packing," my mum told me. "I'll tell you what's savage, the Scottish Presbyterian Church!"

A couple of years after they adopted my brother, my mum had a call from the same woman at the adoption agency. "There's a woman [Elizabeth] who has come down from the Highlands, and the father of the baby is from Nigeria. We thought we'd let you know since you told us you wanted another child the same colour." So, months before my birth mother gave birth to me, my mum knew that she was going to have me. "It was the closest I could get to giving birth myself," she's told me often. "I didn't know if I'd have a girl or a boy, if you'd be healthy or not, the kind of thing that no mother knows. It was a real experience. I remember waiting and waiting for news of your birth and phoning up every day to find out if you'd been born yet. Finally, I was told you had been born, you were a girl, but you were not healthy. And they advised me to come in and pick another baby, because you weren't expected to live. The forceps had caused some brain damage, and also left a gash down your face. The brain damage still shows," my mum said, laughing. I like hearing this fairytale; I've heard it often.

My mum wouldn't pick another baby; she'd become attached to the idea of me in the months of ghost pregnancy. She already felt like I belonged to her. She visited every week, or every month, depending when she's telling the story, driving the 40 miles from Glasgow to Edinburgh, with my dad, and she had to wear a mask, so as not to infect me, and got to pick me up and hold me. Perhaps this interest, this love, is what made me survive against the odds. The doctors were apparently amazed at my recovery. Then after five months she was finally allowed to take me home.

I often wonder whether or not I'd have been that interested in being adopted if my mum hadn't been so fascinated by it all. "Maybe your father was an African chief," she used to say, and, "Maybe you are an African princess." I liked that. In my imaginary princess picture, I am wearing a traditional African dress, purples and oranges and yellows. "Maybe you will own land," my mother said. I liked that too. I pictured the plots of my land in the African landscape of my imagination. It was flat land, not like the Highlands of Scotland. The earth was dark and rich. There was a red-dust road. I couldn't really get much further than that.

My mum told me that my mother had been forced to give me up because of racism in the Highlands. My birth mother, according to my mum, had been brought up by her grandmother who disapproved of her being with a black man and had sent my mother to Edinburgh to have me, to one of those appalling and judgmental mother-and-baby homes. "Just imagine that!" It was a heartbreaking story and it was mine. In a way my mum and I loved it, the story of me. It was a big bond. I wonder if my mum gave us these stories because she thought they compensated for being given up for adoption. There were the stories of my original parents having no choice, and the stories of my mum and dad having choice. "We chose you; you are special. Other people had to take what they got, but we chose you." I will always be thankful to my mum for giving me that way of seeing, for stopping me from seeing myself as somebody who was rejected. Instead I saw myself as somebody who had been chosen.

There are essentially two kinds of adopted people: the ones who never trace, who never want to, are not interested, or who are frightened of hurting their adoptive parents' feelings; and the ones who want to trace, who are curious about their origins, who think that in tracing their original parents they will understand themselves better. In a way I would have loved to have been one of the ones who wasn't bothered, who had never set the ball rolling and who wasn't now in the position of the ball rolling all the way to the bottom of the hill. You and me, baby, all the way to the end of the line. The end of the line is where you finally realise that the imagination was not so bad at all. But in another way I can't understand the lack of curiosity. Those people who are given various little snips of information about themselves and deliberately choose to take it no further are a mystery to me. Are they cowards? Or are they quite sensible?

Others, like me, turn and walk back up the road to their past in search of themselves. I met my birth father, Jonathan, for the very first time on a Sunday, a Sunday in Nigeria with Jonathan. For some people, tracing turns out to be a wonderful experience, a bit like an exhilarating love affair. They describe the feeling of meeting a birth parent for the first time as akin to being in love. For others it is pretty disastrous. But no matter whether the experience is positive or negative – it churns you up. It turns your life upside down. It is something that should not be done lightly.

Nicon Hilton Hotel, Abuja. Jonathan is suddenly there in the hotel corridor leading to the swimming-pool area. He's sitting on a white plastic chair in a sad cafe. There's a small counter with a coffee machine and some depressed-looking buns. He's dressed all in white, a long white African dress, very ornately embroidered, like lace, and white trousers. He's wearing black shoes. He's wired up. My heart is racing. "Jonathan?" I say. "Yes," he says, standing up and turning slowly to meet me. "Can we go straightaway to your hotel room?" he asks me. "Can we go to my room?" "Yes, I would like to go to your room now."

And now we're in the room. I'm about to have a conversation with my birth father for the first time. "Ask me anything," Jonathan says, staring at me, "I will try and answer it." "First," I say, "I'll give you a gift." I get his present out of the hotel safe. He opens the wrapping paper, slowly, with some enjoyment, and peeps in the box. "This is very generous of you. This is very kind," he says looking at the silver watch. He tries it on. It is too big. His wrist is thinner than I'd calculated back in Arthur Kay's jeweller's in Manchester. I'm sad it is not exactly right. Jonathan says, "No, it fits perfectly! It is a very nice watch. How much did it cost?" I try to shrug this question off politely, but he pushes. "How much, tell me. I'm curious to know what a watch like this would cost." He is still staring at the solid silver bangle, loose on his arm. "A hundred pounds," I say, giving in. "A hundred pounds!" he whistles.

Then he says, "Now I have a question for you. Would you mind very much if I gave this watch to my wife?" I'm stunned. "Yes, I would mind," I say. "I bought the watch for you. It is a gift for you. I like to think of you wearing it and that you might sometimes think of me when you look at the time." "I don't need to wear your watch to think about you," he says. "That's nice," I say touched, "but I'd still prefer you kept the watch." "It's only that I have a watch already and my wife doesn't have a watch," he says. "Well, why don't you give her the watch you have and keep the watch I've given you?" "This is a good solution," he says. "I didn't think about that. This is what I'll do. But now you must make up a lie for me to explain the watch. How would I get it? How would I have come across such a watch?"

I feel oddly flattered by this. He has told lies to come and meet me and now needs more lies to return home with the unexplained Seiko watch ticking on his arm. Perhaps all lies are fixed to some timing device that will eventually explode. "Who did you say you were going to meet in Abuja? Religious people? Students? Whoever it was, tell her that somebody who admires your work had been given this watch from a friend in England as a present and they wanted you to have it." He nods sagely and says, "This is a good lie."

I shrug. I'm not sure if it is or not. The face of the beautiful watch looks nonchalant on his hairless arm. "Now," Jonathan says, "I have a gift for you too." I feel thrilled. "You do?" "Yes," Jonathan says and pulls from his plastic carrier bag four born-again Christian leaflets. "Save the orange one for last," he beams. That one is entitled 'Now that you have received Christ'. "Thank you," I say as graciously as I can muster. I still have my four different-coloured leaflets. They are the only things my father ever gave me. "I think I'll put them away somewhere safe," I say and pick the leaflets up gingerly, and put them in the front flap of my suitcase.

I sit in the chair next to him and give him the letter my son Matthew has written for him. "That's nice," he says, scanning it without much interest. I ask him to tell me as much as he can remember about his days in Aberdeen in the 1960s, about how he met my mother, whether he fell in love with her, how he found Scotland then, what it was like, and if he had to return to Nigeria because he was betrothed. Although he has said I can ask him anything, he seems perplexed about the idea of himself in the past, as if he was so totally somebody else then, he can hardly understand or remember himself, or hardly even believe that Jonathan existed. It seems the younger man belongs to the fog of the pre-born-again days; this one exists now; and now is the moment of the Lord. Now has total clarity. The past is a pea-souper. He is bored by the distant, hazy memory of himself.

He recites tiny facts, dutifully, to try to please me. He tells me that he went to Dundee University and to Oxford, and then to Aberdeen as a postgraduate. He played bongos in a band called Los Latinos; the bongos made him popular with the women. He says he met Elizabeth when she came one time to hear him play, though she says they met in a ballroom in Aberdeen. Jonathan can barely remember anything about Elizabeth, not even what she looked like. He tells me he saw her for a couple of days after she returned from Edinburgh when I was born. Elizabeth had told me that she'd spent two weeks with him in Aberdeen and that he'd been very kind to her after my birth. "Two weeks? No, no, no. Two days more like."

I ask him if he had ever thought about me at all over the years. "No," he says. "No, of course not, not once. Why would I? It was a long time ago. It was in the past." In those days, he says, he was a sinner and enjoyed having a lot of fun, a man who loved his beer, his women and his drums. I wish I'd known him then! When I ask him again to tell me what he remembers of Elizabeth, he falls silent. He can't really remember her.

Earlier, I'd had a greedy swig of cold white wine and now I wanted to drink again, out in the open air. The claustrophobia of the hotel room was getting too much for me. I led Jonathan down to the outside swimming-pool area to order some food and wine. Once out of the bedroom, I felt better. Part of me felt happy, euphoric even. I looked into Jonathan's eyes and he looked into mine and for some moments I felt electrified and high. Here I was in Nigeria for the very first time at the age of 42, meeting my father. Meeting a birth parent stirs up such a strange mix of emotions; I wanted to fling my arms around Jonathan and run away from him at top speed.

We sat down and ordered some food. I ordered a chickpea soup, smoked salmon and a salad. Jonathan ordered hot pepper fish soup, Uncle Ben's fried chicken and chips. I ordered a bottle of cold white wine. Jonathan was about to order a Malt, a non-alcoholic drink, but then he paused. "How much percentage of alcohol in a bottle of wine?" he asked me. "About four per cent, do you think?" he said to me, nodding, wanting me to confirm. "Something like that," I lied.

I thought, frankly, he might be more fun drunk than sober. And that turned out to be true: with a drink down him, he was more himself, and less like a messenger sent from the Lord. His habit of quoting incessantly from the Bible eased. He told me he was a healer as well as a preacher. I said, cynically, and under my breath, "Heal me, Jonathan!" And to my astonishment, he bounced into action, rushing across to my side of the table, putting one hand on my head, shaking my head back and forth with his fingers spread out all over my hair. "You are a bundle of joy. All the people love you. You bring love into this world. O God Almighty, heal this woman. Take her to your bosom and clear her of any pain. Be with her and…"

I closed my eyes. His fingers were now covering my face. I peeped out through the opening of one of the bars of his fingers into the bar area. A few sophisticated Nigerians drinking cocktails looked on bemused. Some looked a little irritated. Jonathan was not whispering. His voice gathered and carried around the swimming-pool bar area as if it were a Greek amphitheatre. He was praying for me now very loudly and enjoying the fabulous spectacle that he was creating. In some strange way, he was intensely charismatic; perhaps he imagined that, like Jesus Christ, he was immensely attractive to the people.

I found his hand crushing down on my head, and shaking it back and forth too tight, too strong. He was practically crushing my skull. I hoped to God he would heal me, though, that I'd suddenly have a clean, good life, with a pure, good heart. I hoped for once in my life to experience something miraculous! When he stopped, nothing felt any different. I was simply more acutely aware of people staring at us. I felt flushed, embarrassed, and grateful that I didn't know a single soul in the swimming-pool bar at Nicon Hotel, Abuja.

Jonathan sits back down at the table, quite relaxed, happy, the ceremony is over. Suddenly, the waitress who took our food order appears back at our table without the food. "Father," she begins, politely, "I saw you healing the sister here. I am barren, Father. I wonder if you can heal me, please." She is a very beautiful-looking woman, perhaps in her late 30s; perhaps she has been trying to have a baby for years.

Jonathan is overjoyed. He springs to his feet and stands very close to her. He places his hands over her womb and starts the chanting. The people in the swimming-pool bar area, trying to enjoy a pleasant Sunday dinner, look on aghast. Jonathan pats the waitress's stomach softly at first, then more vigorously, drumming on her stomach with both hands, as if playing the bongos. He asks God, in his mercy, to take away her barrenness and make her fertile. He says to her, "You are a bundle of joy. All your family love you. You bring love into the world." The same words he said to me; except for All Your Family Love You. I can't quite believe it, my father is a charlatan! Jonathan finishes his chant, opens his eyes and takes the beautiful stranger's hand in his. "You will be pregnant by Christmas," he says to her quite pragmatically, his voice dull and flat now, exhausted by the massive effort of it all. "It will be a boy. Call him Jacob." "Thank you, Father," the lovely woman says, tears in her eyes. "Excuse me," she says to me. "I will go and bring your food now." I wonder if the belief itself will be enough to end the barrenness.

Jonathan sits slurping his soup. "So," he says, "you said in your letter that you didn't want to answer to a man. That is an odd thing to say." He laughs his high laugh which is a bit like my laugh. "So – if you are not married, and do not have a boyfriend or such, how do you cater for your sex drive?" The question flies straight out of the blue African sky and flaps around me like a rare bird. I blink and knock back some more cold and indifferent white wine. I think to myself, What have I got to lose? I imagine that he'd think my lesbianism deviant, disturbed even, perhaps the sly work of Satan, but by this hour in the long day I have a devil-may-care attitude. What the hell, I think to myself, slightly inebriated, bring it on!

Still, I hesitate a little longer. "You can tell me. I am your father," he urges, winningly. It is the first time he has said this simple sentence. "I am your father; you can tell me anything. I love you and I accept you because I am your father." It is the first time too that he has appeared really interested in anything about me. Just my luck. Not in my son, not in my childhood, not in my university days, not in my books, not in my parents, but in my sex drive! Fucking brilliant. "Well, you know the woman you spoke to on the telephone?" "Yes, yes, yes." "Well … she's my partner." "What do you mean?" "She's my partner." "How so?" "She's my lover. We've been together for 15 years." (I don't bother telling him that just before I flew to Nigeria, Carol Ann told me she didn't love me any more and wanted our relationship to end. Too complicated!) "Oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh you mean you are lesbian?" He credits the word with three syllables with the emphasis on the last. Les be an. "You mean you are les be AN?" "Yes, that's right. I'm a lesbian." Despite myself, I'm agog to see how he will take this news. "OK-OK-OK-OK, OK-OK-OK-OK." He says a string of OKs like prayer beads. Then very quickly he says, "OK, OK. Which one of you is the man?" "Sorry?" I say. "I've often wondered about this," he says. "And I have never understood. How does it work? Which one of you is the man?" His eyes have acquired a sleazy shimmer. He is clearly having more fun than he's had all day. "How is it possible for two women to have sex?" he asks me, asking me perhaps the most un-fatherly question I've ever heard. "Neither of us is the man. It doesn't work like that," I say, embarrassed. I down a whole half of a glass of wine. "It's not like that."

I look at the turquoise blue of the pool with some longing. I would love to take a beautiful, breath-taking dive into the pool. Not a belly flop. Not a lesbian belly flop – a beautiful fish arc of a dive. Jonathan seems to sense that he is not going to get more salacious details out of me. Strangely enough, though, he has not been at all judgmental in the way I'd feared. Quite the opposite. He says to me, "When you get home, get out the Bible and say a prayer for each other in front of God, and God will recognise your relationship. I don't mind the women. God doesn't mind the women. It is the men he minds," Jonathan says, screwing up his forehead in disgust. His face smooths out again. "Anyway, it is better for you not to go with men. God intends you for higher purposes. It is better you are with women. Stay away from men. They will only give you Aids, and God wants you for himself. God has a unique plan for you." Heavens, I think, now God is even involved in my sexuality! What a turn-up for the Book.

I suddenly remember the man on the flight from Manchester to Abuja, who told me that when I met my father he would give me an Igbo name. I say to Jonathan, "I've heard each Igbo child should have an Igbo name." "Ah yes," Jonathan says, not nearly as interested in this custom as he is in lesbianism. He tries to feign interest, to perform some outmoded African duty. "OK, OK, OK, you could have one of two, which would you like? Either Ijeoma or Obioma. One means good journey and the other means good, kind heart. Which would you like to have?" he asks. I pick the one that means good journey and check the pronunciation with him, repeating it while he wraps up some of the bread buns and some of his chicken to take back to his friend's house. "Ijeoma," I say out loud, thinking about good journeys, from Manchester to Abuja.

It is now nine in the evening. We have been together for seven whole hours. I tell him I have to be up the next morning to do my first workshop and reading for the British Council in Abuja. I call the soon-to-be-pregnant waitress over and ask for the bill. "I should be treating you," Jonathan says. Then he says, "Please do not make this into a negative thing. I don't want you to meet my children or to tell them about you. I have to keep you secret for my own reasons. But I have come here from my village and I have travelled on a bus for eight hours. I could have not come to see you. I have acknowledged you between us and God. That is the most important thing. I can see you are my daughter. You have a kind face. Make this a good thing. A happy thing."

I promise myself to try, to try and make it a happy thing. I go to reception and ask where Jonathan can get a taxi. I know I probably won't see him ever again. I'm not sure I really want to anyway. Once is enough, I think. You can't have two lives, just one. I shake his hand and try to hug him a little, but he's uncomfortable with that. He shakes my hand firmly and says, "Remain blessed. God will have his eye on you. You are protected now." I think of rare birds, rare trees, of sanctuary. I think of secrets and lies and lives. I don't feel bitter or angry. I feel spent, exhausted. The skin on my face is tight like a mask. My head is buzzing. I stand waving at him as his taxi drives him away, until the black car carrying my father has disappeared altogether and I realise that I'm still standing waving at nothing.

[Book Review: 'The Red Thread: A Novel' by Ann Hood]

Book Review: 'The Red Thread: A Novel' by Ann Hood

Destiny is tricky in fiction. In real life, destiny's best quality is clarity — the cleared path, the right decision, the way things are. So I'm told. But in fiction, destiny can seem forced, Hallmarky. The omniscient narrator looks forward and backward, weaving a clumsy pattern among seemingly disparate people and events. The trouble is, the omniscient narrator is only a false god, only an author. The real God has had a lot more practice moving pieces around the board. The real God is far more graceful, more subtle. So I'm told.

Ann Hood finds a way to negotiate this dilemma. Her main character, Maya Lange, believes in destiny. She runs an adoption agency in Providence, R.I., called the Red Thread. The name comes, she explains to her clients who come to her hoping to adopt babies from China, from the Chinese belief that people who are destined to be together are linked by an invisible thread. Maya has placed more than 450 Chinese babies — all girls — with families; in many cases, she has seen a kind of magic at work in the pairing, a magic that works in spite of bureaucracies, the cruel realities of life in China and the nervous passion of the parents who desperately want a baby.

Maya's unshakable faith in the process is fueled by pain. She was responsible for the death of her own baby daughter years before the novel opens. She was drying the baby after a bath; she had many things on her mind. She accidentally dropped the little girl, whose head hit the bathtub. In her desperation, Maya left her husband. She found a new life; started the Red Thread.

Hood's characters are connected: The hopeful families who begin the process one September and the mothers in China who are forced — by family, culture and government — to give their babies up. Each couple embodies a different vulnerability when it comes to adoption: the fear that you will lose the attention of your partner; the fear that the baby will carry a genetic disorder; the fear that one's partner will value a previous child, a prior family more than this one; the myriad imbalances that occur when two people are expected to want the same thing at the same time. Each character glitters from several vantage points — from inside his or her own mind, through Maya's experienced eyes and through the eyes of the omniscient narrator. All these perspectives help flesh these people out, which is especially important in a novel in which the characters are seen through the lens of a very specific point in their lives. Seeing the control freak, Nell, for example, from several angles helps soften her — she becomes more than a cartoon character with a big problem; more than the sum of her parts.

The mothers in China have more terrifying problems, it is true. Some find a way to say no when they are expected to give up their precious girls but most do not. Ni Fan, Chen Chen, Li Guan and the others suffer deeply at the hands of a ruthless policy. Their stories are difficult to read and make a mockery of destiny, until they are attached, by one of Maya's threads, to a family who wants and needs them.

But there is another way that Hood surmounts the tawdriness of destiny. She understands Maya's suffering. Empathy, even between an author and her character, is a conduit to grace. Hood and her husband lost their daughter Grace to a strep infection in 2002, when she was 5. Three years after her death, they adopted Annabelle from Changsha in China's Hunan province.

A reader who knows this about Hood might struggle with the impulse to allow her to write a story that is not autobiographical, but Maya's suffering drives the story forward; it is the force that binds all of the characters together, in China and in Providence. And its vividness has a base in reality. In her acknowledgements, Hood details their adoption; the agency they used, the woman who runs it and the families they got to know in the process.

Toward the end of "The Red Thread," after Maya has decided to adopt a baby that will not be coming home with one of the couples in her group, she goes into her attic to look, for the first time in years, through a box of her daughter's things. "How does a mother choose what to keep to best remember her dead child? The little leopard booties that she never even wore but that Maya had bought her for her two-month birthday? The cotton blanket that smelled slightly of spit-up, so ordinary in its appearance and usefulness?" This scene and these details have an undeniable heat — their provenance lies in Hood's own experience. Her pain is the red thread between fact and fiction, it sets the fiction on fire, it animates like God.

Terrible, but true. That pain allows the author to write about destiny without the tinny sound it so often has in fiction. She has seen the threads at work. She knows what she is talking about.

Salter Reynolds is a writer in Los Angeles.

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

[Tears, joy flow after mother and son reunited]

Tears, joy flow after mother and son reunited

Linda Blake will be hard pressed to find a happier new year’s celebration following the Jan. 1 she experienced this year.

Blake, a retired teacher residing in the Comox Valley, received the call of her life at the start of this year, beginning with the question, “Hello, is this Linda Tarbet from Thunder Bay?”

What she didn’t know was that the voice on the other end of the line belonged to her son Daniel Michael, whom she had given up for adoption when she was 17 years old living in Thunder Bay, Ont.

“Yes, it is,” she answered.

“I don’t know how to say this,” continued the man’s voice. “But I think you’re my mom. I can hang up if you like.”

“I burst into tears,” recalls Blake. “I immediately told him not to hang up, because I’ve been looking for him for 46 years.”

Little choice was given to teen moms, as there was minimal support in 1963, said Blake. “There was no support from society or from family, so I had to give him up for adoption. I had been registered with the province’s adoption records agency for 30 years, but at the end of last year, the province of Ontario opened up the adoption records ... I re-registered and he was spurred on by his sons to register.”

Over the years as Blake changed her last name two times, she noted Daniel “sleuthed his way through the Internet” to find her. She admitted she searched for him, too, which produced 14 matches, and later found out none of the 14 leads were related to him.

“(During the first call) we talked for about two hours. Halfway through the call I told him I needed a beer and he laughed and said, ‘Now I know you are my mother,’” she said.

During the initial conversation, Blake found out her son was adopted to a mother 25 years older than her, and grew up about six blocks away from where she lived in Thunder Bay.

“We e-mailed right away — that was a Friday — and I stayed up almost all weekend to e-mail back and forth. We must have e-mailed each other at least 100 times during the next few days; we worked through a lot of the anger and frustration,” she noted.

Following 14 weeks of e-mail and phone conversations, Blake and her son met in Waterloo, Ont., where he works as a corrections officer and lives with his wife and two sons.

“We took a week and explored, laughed, cried. It was almost like instant bonding,” she added. “Now it’s ‘mom this’ and my ‘mom that’ — we e-mail all the time. He tells me he loves me every day, and I of course, do the same.”

Despite the reconnection with her son, Blake does admit not every adoption reunion story may work out the same way.

“Everyone’s experience is so different; ours is very unique.”

Blake and her son have plans to meet again this summer for a family reunion in Thunder Bay, so he can meet family and walk through their old neighbourhood.

In addition to spending time with her son, Blake says she would like to help other parents reconnect with their adopted children, with help through the Comox Valley Women’s Resource Centre.

The centre is seeking to form a New Beginnings Support/Discussion Group for birth moms who have surrendered a child to adoption and adoptees. The group will deal with topics such as the pros and cons of seeking reunion, to respond or not, dealing with guilt and shame and more. To pre-register for the group, call 250-338-1133.

photos@comoxvalleyrecord.com

[Dana Sachs]

Dana Sachs

[Biological brothers find each other across the street after 30 years]

Biological brothers find each other across the street after 30 years

The world can seem like such a big place when you are searching for someone missing in your life, but then again sometimes that person turns out to be right before you.

Stephen Goosney, 29, and Tommy Larkin, 30, were born a year and a half apart. They were both adopted and began life knowing they were missing vital pieces of their personal history.

The two men told the Corner Brook Western Star they began the process of finding out who they were several years ago, both citing medical history as their primary reason behind the search.

They soon uncovered their past — just across the street from one another.

The pair discovered from an adoption agency that they had been within shouting distance for seven months.

“It was a good feeling, knowing there was actually someone looking for me too,” Mr. Goosney said in an interview with the newspaper.

There was hope they would be living close together, but an understanding that, even if they were adopted by Newfoundland and Labrador families, there is a good chance they could be far apart.

However, it turned out they have spent the past seven months living almost directly across the street from each other on Wheeler's Road in Corner Brook.

In addition, for more than two years, they have lived on the same street. Mr. Larkin moved to a different residence seven months ago.

They say their reunion was a simple matter to arrange.

Mr. Larkin just had to look out his living room window, wait for his brother to come home, make the call, and invite him over.

“She gave me his name and asked me four or five times if I knew him,” Mr. Larkin said, referring to the person at the adoption agency who assisted the search.

“I said I didn't, and she kept asking me, if I was sure I haven't met him.”

“She told me, if I got the paper signed and back to her right away, she was sure she could have us meeting by the end of the week. I was like, ‘OK, well he is in Newfoundland.“’

Then, as he was pacing the living room, talking on the phone, he was given the address.

“I said, ‘No ... I am looking at the house right now,“’ he said.

Unfortunately, Mr. Goosney was out of town, but the next day, March 25, the brothers finally met.

“It was all pretty overwhelming,” Mr. Goosney said. “It's been good. We have been seeing each other pretty much everyday, just hanging out and trying to catch up.”

The unusual thing was, despite living across the road from each, they couldn't really ever remember seeing or speaking to each other.

However, there was an encounter just days before where Mr. Larkin was looking at Mr. Goosney's snowmobile. There were no words exchanged, but they did look at each other.

There has been no shortage of conversation ever since. The brothers say they had an instant connection, helped by the fact they have so much in common.

They were both adopted into families who informed them at a young age they were adopted, and both have an adopted younger sister.

Mr. Goosney grew up in Woody Point and Larkin in Cook's Harbour, two small outport communities on the Northern Peninsula.

They both enjoy the outdoors, snowmobiling and other activities, while both flourished as hockey players in their youth.

Mr. Goosney is a transport truck driver, something Mr. Larkin also did before attending school to be a truck and transport mechanic.

They are both continuing the search to locate the rest of their family.

It may be a little more difficult making those connections, because neither of the others have been officially looking for them.

However, they remain hopeful, and have faith the adoption agency will come through eventually.

They do have some information to go by.

They were born at the Grace Hospital in St. John's and their birth name is Smart. They know their mother's name, but didn't want to publish it.

They are hoping to eventually meet all of their family.

For Mr. Goosney, their union was extra special because he also met his niece, Chloe, who is already calling him uncle Stephen.

“It feels different, having someone I can call a brother,” he said. “It is the bloodline. We both have families, but this is as close as it gets.”

[Structural Violence, Social Death, and International Adoption Pt 1]

Structural Violence, Social Death, and International Adoption


Structural Violence, Social Death, and International Adoption Pt 1


Structural Violence, Social Death, and International Adoption Pt 2


Structural Violence, Social Death, and International Adoption Pt 3


Structural Violence, Social Death, and International Adoption Pt 4


Structural Violence, Social Death, and Int’l Adoption: Part 1 of 4

    Outside Eastern Social Welfare Society’s front door in Seoul: “Domestic Adoption Consultation. Unmarried Parent Consultation.” In 2008, 98% of the 336 babies sent overseas for adoption by Eastern were from unwed mothers, and 80% of those mothers were over the age of 20, according to government statistics. It sent 38% fewer children (208) for domestic adoption international adoption in the same year.

I.  Disappearing Koreans and the Ministry of Hypocrisy

It has been estimated that there will be no more Koreans left in South Korea by the year 2305; there are not enough babies being born to replace the elderly who are dying.(1)

In order to address the lowest birthrate in the OECD, as reported by The Korea Times this March, the minister of Health, Welfare and Family has been trying to increase the birthrate within her own office building. The minister spearheaded a “Wednesday Lights Out” program, allowing workers to go home early and spend quality time with their spouses. The officials privately called the program “procreation night.” More recently, the minister started a matchmaking program called “Love Studio” for 60 single workers willing to start families. Among other activities, they will listen to lectures from Professor Song Jin-gu of Juseong University on the “value of choice.”

The Korea Times quoted the minister, whom it dubbed the “Minister of Ingenuity,” as saying, “It is obvious that my primary and ultimate goal as family minister is to lift the birthrate.” Yet this is the very same ministry responsible for sending up to 200,000 children overseas for international adoption (2), with 90 percent of the 1250 Korean babies sent for international adoption in 2008 being the children of unwed mothers.

It seems that the ministry is not interested in raising the birthrate by simply allowing the children who are already born in Korea to live there, or by extending the “choice” of raising one’s own child to everyone. Even while she talks about adopting the model of family-friendly policies used in France (where people no longer find it necessary to marry to have and raise children), the minister is interested in encouraging only married people to have children. Children who fall outside the “norm” of Korean society have been systematically shipped out ever since the end of the Korean War. (3)

Although there may be up to 1 million Korean family members directly affected by international adoption, these family members are rarely heard from(4); the adoption program that presumably “saved” children from miserable lives in Korea and that now “saves” unwed mothers from raising their own children has also rendered them socially dead in the process. These social deaths, accomplished by dis-embedding children from their families, exiling them from their country, and changing their names, birthdates, hometowns, and social histories, have been facilitated by the “justice” ministry and the ministry of health, welfare and “family,” as well as the adoption agencies’ web of orphanages, unwed mother’s homes, and the Korean healthcare providers who pressure women into relinquishing children and who have the power to cover up the adoptions. (5)

How sad is this in a culture where a woman was traditionally called not by her own name, but by the name of her child — not “Pil-rye” or “Anne” but “Joo-seob’s mom” or “Danny’s mom.” With the few exceptions of those of us who have returned to Korea, the international adoptees have literally disappeared from Korea, and it seems that the identities of our mothers are lost in a sea of shoddy paperwork and excuses about “mistranslation.”

“Even my dog,” one adoptee friend told me, “knows his pedigree.”

Notes:

1. Youngsook Park made this statement about the low birth rate and aging society  in her lecture “The Current State of In-Care Children and the Role of the Korean Foster Care Association for Multi-culture Single Mothers” on May 8, 2009, at a conference titled “Alternatives to Adoption: Building a Movement for Change” hosted by Adoptee Solidarity Korea at the Human Rights Building in Seoul.

2. While the official statistics from the ministry show that the total number of children adopted from Korea from 1953-2008 was 162,756, the real number may be as high as 200,000 because of the many unrecorded adoptions, according to Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link in Seoul and reported by Tobias Hübinette in his definitive text, Comforting an Orphaned Nation: Representations of International Adoption and Adopted Koreans in Korean Popular Culture.

3. According to the Korean Unwed Mothers Support Network’s booklet All Mothers Have the Right to Raise Their Own Children, the South Korean government’s budget for supporting unwed mothers increased from 1.6 billion won in 2009 to 12 billion won in 2010. With an eye toward solving its population problem, the budget fell under the category “Supporting child care and countermeasures for low birth rate.” Mothers must be below the poverty line and between the ages of 18-24 in order to receive support, which comes in the form of a learning voucher to earn a high school graduation certificate, child care and medical care support, deposit support for renting group home, and a Hope Bank Account. KUMSN states that while this money is an improvement, it is still not enough because it excludes many mothers, citing the probable lack of the national and local governments to cover all the qualified families and the Korean system of national health insurance registration, which may allow government workers to dispense benefits or not according to their individual discretion when encountering a young unwed mother who is technically still under the care of her parents, but in reality has no relationship with them because of her pregnancy.

4. If we consider that each of the 200,000 adoptees has birth relatives, including two parents and four grandparents, we can estimate that at least 1 million South Koreans, or nearly 1 in 48, have been affected by the international adoption program.

5. In South Korea, children do not need to be registered at birth. Rather, parents report births later at city offices. Because of this, even an adopted child can be officially registered as a biological child, and in the case of a domestic adoption, the child may never know that s/he is adopted. This is called a “secret adoption.”

Structural Violence, Social Death, and International Adoption: Part 2 of 4

Korea has been known as the “Cadillac” of international adoption for its supposed ethics and legality. However, as adult adoptees search for their birthparents and are reunited, it becomes apparent that Korea’s system has been riddled with abuses. This video is of a Korean reality television show that helps Korean adoptees find their birthfamily.

II. Fresh off the Global Baby Farm

International Korean adoption is dependent on the relationship and infrastructure built up between Korean and foreign governments and agencies. This hierarchical relationship that exists on a political level also extends to the very personal level, between an American woman who adopts the child of a Korean birthmother. (Perhaps this is an ugly example of “global.”) At the source of the adoptions, however, is the Korean system, which seems to willingly provide the supply of babies to meet the demand of the Western adopters.

In an article about Korea’s comfort women, who are also estimated to number around 200,000, Chunghee Sarah Soh defines “structural violence” as “chronic large-scale economic, political, and cultural oppression that historically is entrenched in everyday lives …” She goes on to write:

    Structural violence is manifested in exploitative or unjust exercise of power that is customarily practiced (and implicitly sanctioned with societal indifference) by one category of social actors and/or groups against another – such as fathers against daughters, husbands against wives, or power elites against ethnic minorities – in situations of hierarchically organized social relations.

    In the case of unwed mothers today, this structural violence is enacted in the family, in the workplace, in the neighborhood, by so-called service providers, and by the South Korean government itself in a program that at its peak sent over 8,000 children for adoption per year and is now notoriously called “baby export”  in South Korea, referring to the country’s export-driven economy.

However, the program did not make headlines until 1988 Seoul Olympics. In “Babies for Sale: Koreans Make Them, Americans Buy Them,” American journalist Matthew Rothschild said that South Korea’s adoption program relieved the government of the costs of caring for children, and that the adoption agencies’ methods of procuring babies for adoption were “efficient and well-established.” He went on to write:

    Korean adoption agencies support pregnant-women’s homes; three of the four agencies run their own. One of the agencies has its own maternity hospital and does its own delivery. All four provide and subsidize child care. They also support orphanages, or operate them themselves. Along with advice from ‘counselors’ at the agencies, this system not only makes the process of giving up a child easier, it encourages it.

    Payments are routine to maternity hospitals, midwives, obstetricians and officials at each of the four agencies acknowledged. The agencies will cover the costs of delivery and the medical care for any woman who gives up her baby for adoption. The agencies also use their influence with hospitals, and with the police, to acquire abandoned children.

Rothschild did not describe how that “influence” manifested or how it was exercised. However, David Smolin, a law professor and internationally adoptive parent of children from India who coined the term “child laundering,” writes:

    In societies with a high incidence of corruption, public officials, from petty clerks to police officers to high government officials, become accustomed to demanding and receiving payoffs. Bribes are required simply to obtain legitimate approvals and services, but also can become a means of acquiring illegitimate approvals and services. Under these circumstances, the prospects of creating a “clean” inter-country adoption system are slim.

Meanwhile, in Korea, news stories of corrupt politicians are the norm. The acceptable and common Korean practice of giving cash in white paper envelopes to younger family members as a token of love or to friends for special occasions can be easily extended into the bribery of public officials. Chan Sup Chang and Nahn Joo Chang write in “The Korean Management System: Cultural, Political, Economic Foundations”:

    Sometimes it is hard to distinguish whether the money presented is for appreciation or for bribery, since the money may serve both purposes. Some Koreans hand out cash or white envelopes with money inside to most government (federal, state, or local) officials for permits, licenses, and other businesses.

While the white envelopes may never be traceable, the Korean government does keep tabs on the supply chain for international adoption, which has only become more developed and interlocked in the 20 years since the Seoul Olympics. In 2008, there were 27 unwed mothers’ facilities in Korea. According to information provided to TRACK from the Ministry of Health Welfare and Family via the 2009 National Assembly Audit, thirteen of them were run by the international adoption agencies Holt, Eastern, and Social Welfare Society. A small majority of the mothers were staying in facilities run by adoption agencies, at 251, while 203 were staying in facilities not run by adoption agencies.

Also in 2008, there were 23 adoption agencies in Korea. All but four of them have hospital connections. (The ones that do not use hospitals are domestic adoption-only agencies.) These hospitals include well-known, large hospitals such as Korean University Anam Hospital, Seoul National University Hospital and Severance Hospital, as well as small local hospitals. The Ministry of Health and welfare says that Holt alone uses 27 different hospitals. Eastern lists six, Social Welfare Society uses six, and Korea Social Service uses two.

Note:

At the time of this writing, the first and only female (former) prime minister of South Korea, Han Myeong-Sook, was on trial for allegedly receiving a bribe from a businessman. Former President Roh Moo-hyun committed suicide in 2009 while his close family members were being investigated under such allegations.

Structural Violence, Social Death, and International Adoption: Part 3 of 4

Why International Adoption From Korea Doesn’t Make Sense (and Why Korea Does It Anyway)

Let us ignore for a minute that no international convention states that poverty is in and of itself is a good reason to separate children from their parents, communities, or countries. Let us play along for a minute with the rather simplistic and reductive argument that international adoption is a good way for children from poor countries to start new lives in rich countries. In those terms, its easy to see with a few facts that international adoption from Korea to the U.S. no longer makes sense.

1. The global trend in international adoption has been going down over the past five years as the U.S., the world’s top adopter, is forced to lower consumption amid widely reported abuses and sending countries putting tighter regulations on their adoption programs. In fiscal year 2009, the number of adoptions fell to 12,753 – a decrease of over 80% from the peak of 22,990 in 2004.

2. Of the top sending countries (China, Russia, Guatemala, South Korea, Ethiopia), only Ethiopia and South Korea have increased their adoptions to the U.S. over the past three years. In the case of South Korea, it sent 938, 1065, and 1080 to the U.S. in 2007, 2008, and 2009, respectively.

3. Countries with a similar GDP per capita to South Korea, around $27,000, are Slovenia, Israel, and New Zealand. Of those countries, only South Korea has an international adoption program.

4. While certain countries are sources of mail-order brides for Korean men and cheap manual labor for Korean industries, Korea sends more children for adoption to the U.S. than any of those countries.  According to the U.S. State Department, in U.S. fiscal year 2008, South Korea sent 1065 to the U.S., more than Myanmar (0), Camobdia (0), Pakistan (59), the Phillipines (292), India (308) or Vietnam (748).

5. Child poverty is higher in the U.S. than in Korea (20.6% vs. 10.7%) and the overall poverty rate is also higher (17.1% vs. 14.6%), according to OECD statistics in the mid 2000s.

6. Hunger also exists in America. During the recession of 2008, 1 in 5 households with children experienced “food insecurity,” according to the  USDA Economic Research Service using Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement data, via the online magazine Amber Waves.

7. American children are four times more likely to end up outside family care than Korean children. According to the CIA World Factbook in July 2009, the U.S. had a population of 307,212,123, and of those, the population of children aged 0-14 years was 61,944,831. According to the Child Welfare League of America in 2006, there were 518,174 children living in foster care and facilities under the age of 16. That means about 0.85% of American children live in care. Meanwhile, the total population of South Korea was 48,508,972 and of those, the population of children aged 0-14 years was 8,166,097. According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare in 2007, there were 18,426 children under the age of 18 years living in facilities, or 0.22% of the children’s population.

In a call-in program of Wisconsin Public Radio in a broadcast on March 9, 2010, in which the international adoption of foreign children to the U.S. was discussed in light of Korea, Guatemala, and Haiti, American Lisa Marie Rollins wrote via Facebook:

    As one who has been involved with child protective services in the US, I am saddened that children in our country don’t seem to be afforded the same level of concern as children overseas. Not that children from any given geographic location are more or less valuable, more or less important, more or less deserving of care, than any others, but some children living in the US – HERE, OUR COUNTRY – are subject to “third-world conditions,” too. What about them? Why aren’t the “Brangelinas” of the US stepping forward to foster/adopt them?

On the same program, Karen Dubinsky, Professor of Global Development Studies and History at Queen’s University in Kingston (Ontario, Canada) and the adoptive mother of a child from Guatemala discussed the corrupting force of money in adoption, adding, “At a certain point, adoption was the fourth-largest earner of foreign currency in Guatemala, just after coffee and foreign remittances.” She went on to say, “That’s why it took adoption reform advocates years … to try to push against the entrenched interests in the government in Guatemala and you know, this is a story that gets repeated in other places as well. Absolutely.”

No one seems to know how much money the South Korean government has made from the adoptions of its children, though it is worthy to note that while Guatemala sent nearly 33,000 children out of the country from the 10-year time span of 1999-2009, South Korea has sent at least five times more children over a time span almost six times longer. How significant the income from “adoption fees” and “donations” has been for South Korea, particularly during the period of its industrialization, is something that deserves full investigation. The total amount of money that the adoption industry has brought into the economy, however, would have to also include the white envelopes, fees for adoptee tourism such as the “Motherland tours,” adoption agency “guesthouses” that cater to returning adoptees, revenue earned from adoptees who are for searching for birthfamilies, language classes, and the entire cottage industry that has sprung up around charging adult adoptees for services that they would never need if their Korean families had only been empowered to keep and raise them in the first place.

Although the complete economic history of Korean adoption has yet to be researched, we can verify and prove some recent statistics. For instance, we know that an unwed mother’s baby increases overseas. Viewed as nothing more than a burden and a social threat in Korea, the child, if sent overseas for adoption, suddenly becomes worth 9,500,000 won to the facilitating agency.

On the American side, we are able to get a glimpse of the adoption industry’s finances, albeit piecemeal, through their Web sites. Holt, for instances, charges American adoptive parents $20,215 for the “adoption fee” alone, which excludes travel for an escorted Korean child, postplacement fees, and various other costs. The adoption fee that American parents pay for a Korean child through Children’s Home Society & Family Services (CHSFS) is $17,350 for a healthy child or a discounted $14,350 for a disabled child, plus a “coordination fee” of about $5,000 and “fees associated with adoption study and post-placement fees.

In addition to the agencies’ Web sites, we can trace the money through agencies’ federal non-profit organization tax returns on Web sites such as Guidestar. (www.guidestar.org seems to be under construction currently).  To put together the whole puzzle on just the American side would require examining scores of records from each Korean agency’s partner agency in the U.S. that is authorized to take children from Korea, and those U.S. agencies’ partners as well. It should be noted that the term “non-profit does not mean that all the workers are volunteers, or that paid workers are not paid high salaries. Non-profit or not-for-profit simply means that the organization should try to balance its expenses and income every year to zero, and that they are exempt in the U.S. from federal taxes. (Agencies that are not authorized to take children from Korea can get them from the agencies that are.) Despite that research being beyond the scope of this paper, a few numbers are readily apparent after a cursory glance:

In 2007, CHSFS earned over $26 million in revenue and claimed over $27 million in expenses. Of its “income-producing activities,” it listed the vast majority of its $21.5 million in revenue from two sources: “service fees” ($8.6 million) and “international adoption” ($7.7 million). Its president and CEO earned a package worth $257,616 in one year. In addition, it sent Eastern Social Welfare Society $1,106,015 and Social Welfare Society $500,900. (It sent more money only to Ethiopia.)

More familiar to Koreans is the Holt agency. From its origins in South Korea, Holt has become a multinational corporation with offices in South Korea, Bulgaria, China, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Nepal, the Philippines, Thailand, Uganda, and Vietnam. It also has operations in Mongolia, Kazahstan, and Romania, South Africa and North Korea, where it sent $107,368 in 2007.

Like CHSFS and every other adoption agency, Holt earns its revenue almost exclusively from adoptions themselves, with a little money coming in from fundraising activities and investments. In 2008, it earned over $11.3 million combined from “adoption fees,” “transportation fees,” “tour fees,” and “adoptee services.” Second only to its vice president of social services, who made over $155,000 in 2007, the vice presidents of marketing and public relations were the most highly paid people. The vice president of marketing made almost $142,000 in 2007, while the vice president of public relations, Susan Cox, who is herself an adoptee, made $95,410. Further showing the emphasis that Holt places on advertising and image, it spent over half a million dollars in one year on a Christian rock band that performs all over the world to promote the adoption business and attend to the positive image of Holt.

Structural Violence, Social Death, and International Adoption: Part 4 of 4

This broadcast (online in six parts) aired in Korea in 2009 and uncovered many irregularities in Korea’s adoption system. This mother relinquished her baby because the baby was born prematurely and she did not have the money to care for her. You can see how the mother is treated by the adoption agency when she starts to search. The program reveals that the daughter had actually started searching two years before, but the agency failed to contact the parents at that time. The adoptee is eventually contacted by the TV station, which tracked her down in the Netherlands using the internet.

IV. Sweet False Generosity Makes “Bitter Adoptees”

Adoptive parents and adoptees — and perhaps even the Western adoption agencies themselves, which operate based on the information that Koreans give them — have been led to believe that the high rate of relinquishment of these children is because of unwed mothers’ individual choices. “Your mother made a choice for you,” adoptees are told. I have been told, very sincerely, that “big people make choices for little people.” For frogs that can’t see outside the well they live in, this sweet logic is enough. For people who think, it is not.

The testimony of individual mothers, when seen as a group, does not show a picture of women making personal selections out of a menu of equally viable and healthy choices. The more realistic picture that emerges is one of vulnerable women navigating a web of misinformation created by a highly developed system driven by the adoption agencies’ economic need to secure children for adoption. The unwed mothers have emphatically stressed that in Korea, the most encouraged and easiest choice for an unwed mother is to relinquish her child; the least-encouraged and hardest choice is to responsibly raise her child.

Writes Choi Hyong-Sook, an unwed mother who once lost her child to adoption, but who fought to take him back and is now raising him as an unwed mother:

    Just as five years ago — when I first got a consultation — or now, adoption agencies advise unwed mothers before they give birth to sign a written consent for adoption and relinquishment of parental authority. However, the consultation or education regarding a single mother’s child custody is barely undertaken if at all.

    The biggest problem is that it is very hard to get “proper” information about adoption or rearing children through adoption agencies.

    Recently, most unwed moms are using the internet to find information about pre-delivery or consultation, and when they search the web with the term “unwed mother,” they can see the list of unwed mothers’ facilities run by adoption organizations.

    Furthermore, it is almost impossible to get information from adoption agencies or from consultations about how to raise your children, while it is not hard to get much information about adoption.

To many Americans, these coercive tactics are reminiscent of the U.S. situation 40-60 years ago, before abortion was legalized in the U.S. and before the widespread use of oral contraceptives. Ann Fessler in her book The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade gives an excellent account of this history. The long-term negative effects of this practice of separating children from their mothers under the guise of the best interests of both mother and baby have since been revealed. If it was not good for American women then, why should it be good for Korean women now?

As Paulo Friere writes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

    Any situation in which “A” objectively exploits “B” or hinders his and her pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression. Such a situation in itself constitutes violence even when sweetened by false generosity.

    In order to have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity,” the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this “generosity” … That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.

In this era, adopting an infant from Korea whether domestically or internationally is equivalent to enabling the behavior of agencies and their business partners, which punish unwed mothers by taking their children away through coercion and relentless pressure. This very unjust, anti-feminist regime of discrimination against unwed and economically disadvantaged mothers and their children will continue to perpetuate itself, with the help of the advertising of adoption agencies, as long as relatively wealthier prospective adoptive parents do not bother to ask what is what made these children “available for adoption,” as long as prospective adoptive parents use ignorance as an excuse to unquestioningly swallow, whole, the sentimental advertising of adoption agencies.

Writes Ms. Choi, the unwed mother:

    Adoption agencies often say that adoption is “giving birth to an abandoned child through one’s heart.”

    What kind of mother in earth can send her child easily? Our hearts are broken when we hear that.

Lest anyone think that the South Korean government’s current emphasis on polishing its overseas image is new for the G-20, or that reports on the link between money and adoption is new, I’d like to share this editorial from a time when South Korea was sending troops not to Afghanistan, but Vietnam. In a Korea Herald article from 1968, Yo-in Song, a professor at Dongguk University, wrote an editorial called “Mendicant Mentality,” which detailed the police investigation of a local representative of a U.S. adoption agency, who escaped the country after being charged with embezzlement:

    But there are some agencies, particularly those involved in aiding orphans, whose reputation has been less than favorable. Some have been known to exist here for the sake of their own existence.

    It is usually one of these agencies that runs advertisements in U.S. magazine(s) soliciting donations to help alleviate the misery of orphans …Such advertisements add a jarring note to the favorable image now being created of this country in the United States, what with her economic development and dispatch of troops to Vietnam.

    It is about time this nation shake off its mendicant mentality. The government should take some action to put an end to this type of panhandling. Preferably, those agencies in Korea with orphans should be phased out at the request of the government…Korea is coming of age. She should learn to do without the services of foreign charity agencies in caring for her orphans.

I’d like to end on a personal note. Many adoptees, including myself, who have been critical of the adoption industry and who have demanded real justice for our Korean families have faced years of backlash in the form of hatemail sent over the internet and physically to our homes, infantilizing comments on blogs, gatekeeping behavior in the publishing world and academia, and threats of physical violence and even death. I believe that the goal of these actions — even on the petty level of name- calling that evokes the stereotype of the “bitter,” “ungrateful,” and “angry adoptee” – is to discredit, dismiss, and intimidate us because we are a threat to an unjust social order.

The topic of backlash is a fascinating one that deserves to be methodically unpacked in a separate paper for the benefit of the younger generation of activists. For now, though, I just want to quickly quote a popular American bumper sticker. It says, “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.” Compared to even a year ago, it seems that many more adoptees are now paying attention. We should be not angry, but righteously outraged, that we have been deceived and lulled by false advertising for so, so long. We must wake up not 40 years from now, but right now, because the exchange of babies for money and silently consenting to the exploitation of vulnerable mothers — treating them as nothing more than hens laying eggs in a factory farm — steadily erodes the humanity of all of us.

Note:

The English-language excerpt of Choi Hyung-sook’s essay is translated from a paper titled “Counselling Services of Adoption Agencies Experienced by Unwed Mothers” presented Feb. 24, 2010 at the 60th Women’s Policy Forum hosted by the Korean Women’s Development Institute (KWDI) and sponsored by the Korean Unwed Mothers Support Network (KUMSN), both located in Seoul. The paper describes the experiences of five unwed mothers who participate in Korea Unwed Mothers & Families Association, formerly known as “Miss Mamma Mia.” Their organization, launched officially in June 2009, now claims over 250 unwed mothers as members nationwide, while the most active members of the group are a handful of mothers raising their children in Seoul. More of Ms. Choi’s article is forthcoming on the Conducive blog.

[Syracuse mom reunited with son she gave up for adoption more than 40 years ago]

Syracuse mom reunited with son she gave up for adoption more than 40 years ago

In a senior citizen apartment building outside Eastwood, a family reunion that’s unfolding is easing a loss Pat Gable has lived with for 40 plus years. She’s getting to know the son she gave up for adoption.

Michael Brown, of Florida, arrived in Syracuse recently to meet his mother and half sister for the first time. They say the bond was immediate, as if it had always existed. “There was one stare he gave me at the bus station, we both glanced, looked at each other for a second, and everything was still. And that’s when a lot of my pain left,” said Gable, 67.

When Gable gave the baby up, he was the only family she had, which made a difficult decision even more difficult. Gable says she lived the first 21 years of her life in institutions in New Jersey. When she was 3 days old, she went from the hospital to a Catholic orphanage. Years later, she says, she found her mother, an alcoholic dying in a nursing home.

She began to get in trouble in her early teens, was deemed “incorrigible” and was moved to a Catholic facility for girls that was almost like prison, she said. From then on, she said she was bounced from one institution to another, without ever being charged with a crime, and getting in trouble along the way. She was sent to the state reformatory for women in Clinton, N.J., and then, finally, the Hudson County Jail. When she was 21, she says, an educated inmate helped her get a court hearing and win her release.

She says it was raining the day she got out. A secretary gave her an umbrella, the warden gave her $10. It was all she had. She was on her own in the world for the first time.

The institutions and her own behavior left her with a fourth-grade education and few skills to cope with life on her own, she said. She got pregnant at 24 by a man who turned out to be married. He left her when he learned she was pregnant.

Gable named the baby Frank after his father and put him in foster care from day one. She was single, unemployed, broke and homeless. She said she tried to find a job for almost a year. Brokenhearted, she signed the adoption papers with Catholic Charities and told herself the baby’s new family might send her a picture or let her see him someday. She says she didn’t know it was a closed adoption.

Through homelessness, tough times and another baby — a girl she was able to keep — and then through better times, Gable never stopped missing the boy she gave up.

“She’d always talk about it. And cry. And wonder,” said Gable’s daughter, Kathleen Vogelsang, 41. “And every year for his birthday we’d have a little birthday celebration and just pray that he was doing well.”

Gable created a more stable life for herself and for Kathleen. She married. Her husband died in 2002 and she moved to Syracuse, where Vogelsang had relocated. Vogelsang is a teaching assistant at Huntington School and has three sons.

In 1998 or so, before the move to Syracuse, Gable asked Catholic Charities in New Jersey to try to find the son she had given up, but she didn’t have the $1,000 the agency charged. When she tried again in 2008, she says the agency helped her for free because she was a low-income senior citizen.

That’s how she found her son, who was in state prison, serving a one-year sentence for felony drug possession, according to prison records. Her son said Catholic Charities left it to him whether to share that information with Gable and Vogelsang as they corresponded by mail, through the agency.

“I was very worried, but I had to be honest with them so I wrote them a letter and I told them how much I loved them and I explained my situation, why I was incarcerated, and I asked them not to think bad of me. Which they didn’t,” Brown said.

“All my life I was in these institutions, so it was like nothing to me,” Gable said.

Brown says he was arrested for having a couple of prescription Vicodin in his pocket. He said he was trying to prevent his ill girlfriend from taking them. He said he went to prison after he violated parole by living out of state. He was released Jan. 31, about three months after he learned about Gable.

He grew up with a new name and the youngest in a family of five kids, all adopted. He describes his parents as wonderful people who gave him the life any child would want, first in New Jersey and then Florida. He has two sons and is a grandfather. He always wondered about his biological parents.

“I just wanted to have some kind of closure in my life, knowing who I am, why I have feelings the way I do, who do I look like,” he said.

Vogelsang said as an only child she always wanted a sibling. “Finally getting him in my life, joy just doesn’t do it justice,” she said.

Two days after Brown’s arrival, there was sorrow, too. Vogelsang’s husband, Christopher, died unexpectedly at age 38. Brown said he will do what he can to help his new family through that loss.

He said he “kind of sensed it” over the years that his mother and sister were thinking about him and that family bond will hold now that they have met. “I have this deep love and compassion for these people I’ve always kept in my heart,” Brown said. “There was never no hatred or ‘Why me?’ I always thought good things why I was put up for adoption, that my mother loved me so much she did the right thing.”

Contact Maureen Nolan at mnolan@syracuse.com or 470-2185.

I'm so glad that the articles were able to help in some way    I'm in exactly the same position as him with my natural mother and I don't think she's going to budge.  She has two other children, older than myself, who are totally unaware of my existence and she is terrified of telling them, of telling anybody.   So I've been in a stalemate situation for many years.  I truly hope your husband will have a different outcome!! Good luck to him, and his mother!

My husband and I are both adopted in very different circumstaces, I in 1980 having already lived with my natural mother who was mentally ill and incapable of caring for a child (now deceased). My husband was adopted in the 60s after his unmarried mother relinquished him.

I have always suspected much of his angst could be contributed to his feelings of abandonement and identity issues and after he read your articles Stephen he was enlightened in a dramatic way. He too saw just how much of his self loathing and doubt were a consequnce of this seperation from his natural mother. We were already searching for his natural mother when we read your work but i cant express how much your words have had a positive effect on Nick and have encouraged him that finding his natural mother is his right.

He has spent his life apolgising for his existence and has huge issues with guilt he also frequently spouts how wonderful his adopted mother is. I always thought he exaggerated this point and i couldnt agree more with your point that overgratitude for your adoptive family is usually a sign of deep loss and longing, you were spot on!

Mu husband is 48 years old and had his first child at age 45 and this prompted exploration of his genetic roots.  He has now found his natural mother who is only 64 years old he is in the process of awaiting her reply. Unfortunately she has other children who have not been told of Nicks existence and she is naturally frightened of the upset this may cause (indicated in 4 sentences via email). She has kept him secret for 48 years from everyone. I only hope decency is in the genes, as my husband is the most decent, loving and beautiful person I know. Hopefully his natural mother will welcome him into his life, she has nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Thnank you again Stephen for the words that have helped Nick to understand over 40 years of angst. Incidentally his natural mother gave him the name Stephen!



Tez