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This book examines the representations of transnational adoptees in South Korea in official discourses and media as well as the impact of adoptees on their birth families and on their birth country more generally. Drawing on the author's personal experience as an adult adoptee and her two years of ethnographic research in Seoul, this book explores the social facts of adoptee reintegration from the perspectives of South Korean individuals, families, society, and nation. It traces the history of transnational adoption from Korea and considers family meetings as a social service organized by the state on behalf of both parents and children. This book is divided into two parts. Part 1 discusses the national, public, and collective aspect of the return of Korean adoptees to their birth country and Part 2 analyzes the more private and interpersonal aspect of adoptees' reintegration within their birth families. This introduction presents vignettes that relate in chronological order the author's encounters with the adoptee–birth parent meetings phenomenon in South Korea. It also provides an overview of the chapters in this book.

This chapter examines how South Korean society undertakes symbolic actions to integrate international adoptees as an ambiguous group that stands in between cultures. Focusing on Holt Children's Services' Holt International Summer School (HISS) of 1999–2004, it considers how adoptees' potential positive attributes are maximized and their negative attributes minimized through special education programs and ritualized performances. It also scrutinizes the television program Ach'im madang: kŭ sarami pogosip'ta (Morning talk show: I want to see this person again) to show that transnational adoptees occupy a middle-ground sociological status in Korea. Finally, it explains how transnational adoptees not only become members of the Korean diaspora through initiation and reeducation but also reproduce the diaspora by tacitly approving and taking part in the transnational adoption system.

This chapter examines the shift in South Korean policies toward Korean adoptees and in public opinion about transnational adoption in the country since 1954. It begins by tracing the history of transnational adoption from Korea, with particular emphasis on the work of one of the four main adoption agencies in South Korea, Holt Children's Services. It then considers how South Korean representations of transnational adoptees changed from negative to positive over time in official discourses owing to the globalization of Korea and the construction of the Korean diaspora. It shows how globalization has paved the way for Korean babies and children, who were sent to transnational adoption on the basis of their invalid family ties that denied them the status of person, to return to their birth country.

This chapter examines the construction of Korean adoptees as members of the all-encompassing diaspora in relation to everyday life when adoptees encounter South Koreans in the streets. Drawing on a series of impressionistic vignettes, it analyzes the pace of change in transnational adoptees' everyday reactions, opinions, and prejudices relative to political discourses in the national and international spheres. It also considers discourses on all categories of ethnic Koreans that include transnational adoptees, orphans, and emigrants and form a hierarchy based on their degree of Koreanness. Finally, it explores how the positive official discourse about the Korean diaspora is reflected in people's attitudes toward either transnational adoptees or emigrants' children.

This chapter examines how Korean adoptees are reintegrated in their birth country by focusing on the Korean Broadcasting System's television program Ach'im madang and its narrative on family separation—and by extension on transnational adoption. In particular, it considers the televised family meetings and shows that even if some participants cannot find their relatives after their appearance on Ach'im madang, they are still somewhat reintegrated within South Korean society via the program hosts' discourses on physical resemblances. The chapter suggests that Ach'im madang's organization included transnational adoptees in a hierarchy South Koreans could relate to and conferred on them a social status superior to that of Korean orphans or domestic adoptees.

This chapter examines the significance of the Korean War in the overall biography of South Korea's transnational adoptees and how television made it possible for transnational adoptees to be integrated in the greater history of the nation and into a narrative of loss and sadnesss. More specifically, it considers the role played by Ach'im madang in the meeting of the divided families separated by the war and by the partition between South and North Korea. It first discusses the Korean Broadcasting System's production of Ach'im madang based on some techniques used in a 1983 telethon organized for the purpose of reuniting relatives separated during or after the Korean War. It then explores Ach'im madang's historicized interpretation of family separation based on the number of the “divided families” and concludes by interpreting the television program's family meetings between orphans or adoptees and their long-lost relatives as a symbol of national reunification.

This chapter explores the possible meanings of family meetings that do not lead to sustained relationships and why birth parents decide to meet their children even if their familial configuration is not conducive to the maintenance of such ties. Focusing on Ach'im madang and its emphasis on meetings between transnational adoptees and their birth families, the chapter asks why such meetings are considered the “best” meetings and why people separate after meeting. It argues that helping separated relatives to find one another and to meet properly is an important element of social welfare in South Korea. It also explains how the television program managed the emotions of adopted children to relieve Korean parents' uneasy feelings.

This book has explored a crucial aspect of the transnational adoption process: the moment of recognition and reaffirmation of ties between children and their birth families. It has shown how transnational adoptees who return to South Korea are given the means—by both adoptive and birth countries—to create relatedness with their birth families; this relatedness is made possible by globalization. This concluding chapter ties together the themes laid out throughout the book and broadens the scope of the study beyond the South Korean side of transnational adoption as it relates to kinship and media. It considers other scholarly works that focus on other countries and common themes such as the globalization of kinship, the politics of reproduction, and the idea of return—in the hope of inspiring further research on transnational adoption in birth countries.

This chapter explores how the search for ancestral “roots” differs between transnational adoptees and the descendants of immigrants. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in France, Ireland, and Québec, this chapter constructs an anthropology of genealogical practices. Given that reclaiming the culture of origin does not hold the same meanings for members of each group, the two groups construct distinct relationships to genealogical memory and knowledge. The chapter examines what hides behind these “routes to the roots” projects by exploring questions of who owns the rights to investigate their ancestry. Furthermore, it looks into the ways in which adoptive parents and even state institutions can benefit from exploring the genealogies of adopted or emigrated citizens.

This chapter explores the relationship between birth parents and adopted children in the context of transnational adoption and the return of transnational adoptees in the birth parents' lives. Focusing on the narratives of Ach'im madang participants who look for their parents or who seek a lost sibling on behalf of their parents, it considers how transnational adoption became the rule after the Korean War. It also examines how the older participants were separated from their parents in a few different ways known as “practices of separation,” which are related to what social anthropologists referred to as “child circulation.” Finally, it discusses family ties involving transnational adoptees and their birth parents within the context of Confucius's notion of kinship.

This chapter explores the similarities between feelings for the lost and feelings for the dead to show that the televised family meetings in South Korea between transnational adoptees and their birth parents represent a cathartic moment of potential closure for all parties. It considers how the meetings create relatedness, leaving open options of relationships—including the cessation of contact—but never reconstitute families according to the ideal model of biological kinship. It suggests that the convergence between a lost child given up for adoption and a dead child is analogous to the real wish to reintegrate the child in the family. It also discusses three options available to adults who have to deal with unwanted children in large families and children outside of the patriline: infanticide, child abandonment, and child circulation.

This chapter presents ethnographies of first meetings between transnational adoptees and their birth families in South Korea via Ach'im madang, with particular emphasis on the outcomes of the family meetings. It considers the socioeconomic situation of the birth families as well as the future of the relationships in terms of sustained modes of relatedness. It suggests that transnational adoptees' subsequent meetings with their biological parents often take place without the knowledge of the spouse or the legitimate children. It also examines the kinship configurations of each birth family, and especially the status of birth mothers, as a determining factor of whether ongoing relationships are possible or not.

In this chapter, the author reflects on her ongoing relationship with her birth family, from 1999 to the present, to illustrate the types of family that favorable conditions may allow, years after the initial meetings between transnational adoptees and their birth families. In particular, she examines possibilities of relatedness for transnational adoptees and their birth families. She shares how a comfortable routine set in within her paternal family each time she returned to South Korea, even though it was not the case with her maternal family. She cites the uneasy exchange of gifts with her maternal relatives, compared with the carefree generosity and constant giving and receiving on her paternal side. The author also recounts her relatives' strong interest in her marriage prospects and plans and concludes by discussing the difficulties encountered by transnational adoptees and their Korean birth families.