Korean adoptees 1

There are three kinds of foreign teachers: There are the non-Koreans (like me), those of Korean descent (second-or-beyond generation), and those who are Korean but were adopted (like my roommate).

My roommate came partly because she wanted to contact her birth family, and this past weekend she met up with her birth sisters for the first time. She was pretty concerned about it, but apparently it worked out all right. Though she has spent a lot of time on the phone with her friends recently, I think that's normal -- that's how girls "process" stuff, or so I understand.

Anyway, it started me thinking a lot about what this experience must be like for adoptees in general. Most of what I know comes from what RK tells me, some from what I learned from an acquaintance who did her thesis on Korean foster care (or lack thereof), and some from the Kathy Robinson book "A Single Square Picture."

Check out this link to a book called I Wish for You a Beautiful Life. It's a collection of letters written by the single mothers at Ae Ran Won (a "colony" for women with unwanted pregnancies) to the children they're about to give up. If nothing else, read the comments at the bottom. There's some powerful stuff there.