Spam — the culture of Korea and Minnesota
all rolled into this little can.
So Spam comes from Minnesota, but Korea,
after Hawaii and Guam, are the second-largest consumers.
This is the story about a recipe
with a blend as unique as the combination in this meal.
So, yeah, cooking food is no small thing. It's-
it means a lot to me as a Korean adoptee.
It's like my body remembers this food,
and so cooking it for myself is actually
nourishing me and my body in a way
that I did not have readily growing up.
And it means a lot that I can do that for myself.
To digest how I ended up in this kitchen making a kimchi stew with Spam,
you must first understand how some Korean American adoptees meld cultures.
Cheers. [Laughing]
I am Korean,
Korean American, Korean Minnesotan.
Learning all those things is actually deeply connected
to my loss as an adoptee.
Adoptees help flesh out what it means
to be Asian American.
I'm in ZIP code 55108 in St. Paul, Minnesota's state capital.
This Midwestern state
has the largest concentration of Korean adoptees in the nation.
And this building I'll visit later houses an organization that's facilitated
many of those adoptions, including Margie Andreason's.
- Speeding. [Claps]
I feel like I just like powdered myself. [Laughing]
Margie's hosting a group of her fellow adoptees, and they're teaching me
how to make dumplings on a frigid day in mid-April.
- You can also take it and fold it in the middle, like here,
and then push this in. - Mm-hmm.
- Close it.
Push this in. Close it.
And you have it like that. - [Laughs]
I have actually never made dumplings.
Ooh, what a magical experience for you.
- I know. I'm so excited.
These women are all members of an organization Margie co-founded in 2011
called Network of Politicized Adoptees.
And there's an important commonality in their adoptions.
By a show of hands,
how many of you are in transracial families?
And of these hands,
how many of you have white parents?
OK, so that's everyone.
I don't think that there's any way
for white families to ethically adopt children of color,
because white people will never understand the experience of children of color.
So they'll never have the tools, no matter how much education
there is available, how many resources,
they'll never really understand how to raise their child of color.
Who here is the only person of color in their immediate family?
So that's almost everybody.
Sorry, I raised my hand 'cause everyone was raising their hand. [Laughing]
- I have one sister who is also a Korean adoptee, not biologically related.
She is one year older than me.
They wanted a second child
who was closer to my sister's age when they adopted me.
Transracial is the term used to describe families like Margie's, where
adoptive children are a different race than their adoptive parents.
And Margie, like all the other Asian adoptees here,
expressed to me an underlying tension rendered in that family dynamic.
I think my parents see me as their daughter,
but maybe don't see me as
an Asian American woman.
I think my parents didn't know how to support me when I did deal with,
um, racism.
And so the common response was to just ignore it.
So I don't know if that's assimilation, but I really had to figure out
how I was going to navigate and deal with that myself.
When a March 2021 shooting spree killed six Asian women
and two others at Atlanta-area businesses,
some transracial adoptees like Margie felt
a distinctive space between themselves and their white parents.
When I see the women,
I see myself and
being a target of
Asian violence in a racist and sexist America.
But I also see my birth mother.
And I think it's really important
to actually hone in on what made those women vulnerable.
And what I saw with
the Asian women in Atlanta
is that these were
good mothers that-
they were working so hard
to support their families.
To keep their children.
And so, as an adoptee, that's part of the nuance.
About one in every 50 kids in the United States is adopted.
Nearly 84% of Minnesota's population is white,
and it has some of the highest adoption rates per capita.
This place, which is nicknamed the Land of 10,000 Lakes,
has also been called the land of 10,000 adoptees.
- I can see you're really touched and emotional, and I'm wondering
if you can tell me what you're feeling and what is bringing up
those emotions in you.
I didn't want to cry.
I think, to be an adoptee
means
not having agency
for most of our lives.
The dominant narrative around adoption is that it is a win-win-win
for all those involved.
And I think that dominant narrative deserves
some complexity and a critique,
because the only reason why I am here
is because I lost a family.
And that family lost me.
[Outdoor sounds]
- Let me find it first - that wasn't the right one. [Papers rustling]
Here it is.
So this is the day that we took custody of Kit.
The reality was starting to set in
that Kit will be with us in a few short hours.
We don't know what to expect.
The unknowns were, and still are, difficult, but this is what-
[Papers Rustling] we wanted
and have worked towards for and waited for over two years.
Korean adoptee Chris Wendland is reading me journal entries
he's keeping for his son, just in case one day
the 5-year-old has any interest in learning more about his adoption.
- Then the final moment arrived, where the foster mother left us.
She snuck out as quickly and quietly as she could.
Kit noticed her absence almost immediately.
What followed was 45 minutes of pure grief and sadness.
Kit was inconsolable and cried hard for his umma [mother] and appa [father].
He kicked, stiffened and bellowed until he was red in the face.
And then my overriding memory after that is we were- he was just resigned.
He just looked like he'd been defeated and
just had a forlorn look on his face.
And then about halfway through the trip to the- to our hotel,
he grabbed ahold of my thumb.
Chris and his wife, Becky, adopted Kit from South Korea,
using the same agency Chris adoptive parents did
when they added him to their family as a 4-month-old
in the early 1980s.
As Becky listens to Chris recount the moment their youngest child
came into their lives, her emotions seep out.
How are you feeling?
- Oh, I cried. - Because- no, I see,
I see you crying.
You know, you felt like you were ripping him away,
'cause we literally were, you know?
And I just feel that sadness and that loss for him.
When the Wendlands decided to grow their family,
they already had a biological daughter, nicknamed Maeby.
Today, she's a 7-year-old big sister,
eager to practice gymnastics with me and her little brother.
- One, two, three, four, five.
Round off. Bam. Nailed it. - Hey, wait!
Did you see I...
- But then you rolled over? OK, let me see.
Chris is raising his kids in the same mostly white community
where his white parents reared him and his Korean adoptee sister.
How much connection to your Korean culture did you have growing up?
- I had very little.
I would say almost zero.
Besides my sister, I knew of one other Korean adoptee growing up.
She was in my grade all the way from kindergarten through
graduating high school.
How do you identify now, today?
I predominantly identify as, first, a Rochesterian,
because I've lived here most of my life.
But then secondly, as a Minnesotan, because just by virtue of the fact
of looking in the mirror, I can see that I'm Korean.
But other than that, I don't think about it that frequently.
And when I do, it's not anything that's real substantive.
Though Chris says he doesn't feel a strong connection to the culture
he was born into,
Korean ornaments adorn many areas in his home.
- I want him to know his history.
I want him to know his culture.
Or at least have the opportunity to know it and to embrace it,
and we try to embrace it in other ways as well as a family.
- OK, you want to do three things or questions?
- No, questions. Questions. - OK.
What's your favorite type of animal?
- Oh, that's a good one.
- Cheetah! - Cheetah. OK. - Cheetah. Good one.
It took two years and somewhere between $40,000 and $70,000
for Chris and Becky to add Kit to their family.
The couple self-funded the adoption with help from their parents.
How has adopting your son affected how you engage with your own Asian identity?
It's made me think about it a lot more.
I would say that
it hasn't changed a lot in the way that I think about myself
or my race, my ethnicity.
But it has made me more aware of how I want
Kit to be able to have the option of- he can identify any way he wants.
[Soft music]
So in our international program, we've placed about
60 children a year in recent years.
The numbers had been higher for many years but
COVID has certainly affected the number of families
that have been able to travel to complete the adoptions.
Therese Bartlett has worked with Children's Home for 17 years.
The agency facilitates international adoptions.
Its current president is a Korean adoptee,
and this place is one of the reasons there's so many Korean
adoptees in Minnesota.
Since the Korean War ended, more than 120,000 adoptees
have joined U.S. families. What started as a way
to promote providing homes for children affected by war
continues because of increasing Western demand for adoptable children.
So the Korean program is our longest-standing and most stable adoption program.
We worked with a wonderful woman, named Mrs. Han,
who helped us to build the program in Korea,
and it very quickly became one of our largest placing programs.
Therese says Mrs. Han, who died in November,
was instrumental in building the agency's Korean adoptee program,
one in which the overwhelming majority of adoptees
end up in white households.
How well do you think in the past,
the agency has prepared white parents who adopt children of color?
I think our- I think our agency worked very hard
with what was known at that time about adoption. Thirty, 50 years ago,
it was, "love is enough," and we now know love is not enough.
There is a lot that goes into preparing a family
for the challenges that children will face.
Therese, who is a mother to two Vietnamese adoptees
whose adoptions were facilitated through Children's Home, says
there was never any policy that parents should assimilate their children.
You know, we often say in our our training that when they're in your home,
they are just a part of who you are as a family.
When they leave the door, the world sees their race and has certain
expectations about this child that may or may not be accurate.
So we had one Chinese adoptee say to us
she felt it was unethical for white parents
to adopt children of color because they would never be able
to understand the experience of a person of color.
I'm saddened to hear that.
I certainly don't believe that I, as a parent, ever set out
to do something unethical.
I think- I think I probably have a similar feeling to many parents
who think: "I would like to parent a child.
I think there's children in the world that need a parent.
And if I can help with that process, I would like to do that."
[Conversation]
Would you rather drink a whole cup of this
or Sriracha?
- This or Sriracha? Yeah.
- They would both be really hot.
I'd maybe do Sriracha.
Chris believes the adoption agency prepared him very well.
I don't know the level of education that my parents had about
transracial adoption in the early 80s.
Now we have so many more resources.
One of the mottos that our social worker gave us
at the very beginning is, "Prepare for the worst and hope for the best."
So part of our training was really talking about
really difficult situations that we could encounter.
Chris says conversations
about race with his parents were sprinkled throughout his upbringing,
mostly in correlation with the rare negative interactions he faced.
Chris says he's not been the victim of anti-Asian hate or violence in adulthood.
Today, Minnesota has reported more racially motivated
hate crimes in 2020 than in the previous two years combined.
- It's not something that we have really talked much with the kids about.
In fact, I don't think we've really talked to them about it at all.
It's just not in their- it's not in their worlds right now.
They're still at ages where
I don't think race has come up.
[Conversation]
We're incredible. So incredible.
[Laughing]
- [Counting in Korean] Il.
Il.
- I.
I.
- Sam.
Sam.
- Sa.
Sa.
- O.
O.
- Il, i, sam, sa, o.
Il, i, sam, sa, o.
Whoo! [Cheering]
- That's how we should have done our sound check. Yeah.
- I've been trying to relearn Korean
for so much of my adult life,
but it's really difficult.
The language is deeply tied to my loss
and grief around losing it in the first place.
- Are you saying in that that you think you're finding it
more difficult to learn and pick up because you're associating it with loss?
I think that's part of it.
It's not some intellectual exercise.
Instead, it's deeply connected to my loss
of when I was taken
away and given away from
my birth country.
There's a reason you don't meet Margie's white parents in this story.
It's because discussions about race
are difficult for Margie and her parents to have.
How likely are you to either consider or recommend for yourself
or your friends or family an international adoption?
Or a transracial adoption?
For me, it would be very hard to
support that and reinforce that.
And just adoption, like any systems, is really embedded
with racism and white supremacy,
the white saviorism.
So many issues are rooted
in war and crisis
and relies on the demand of
Black and brown children.
There's so many of us really
figuring out how we can impact these systems that continue
to really impact us in
many ways and to do something about it.
Sammy, last time.
Come on, let's do it.
Yay! [Cheering]
OK. I'm sorry, I have a cat.
[Laughing]