This is me
I was made an orphan. I was born in Korea and raised in Australia. Like many transracial and transnational adoptees, I find myself caught between identities, families, languages, cultures and nationalities, looking for a place to call home.
It took a long time for me to begin to unravel what I thought I knew about myself, who I am, where I’ve come from, and the future path I wish to walk. I often describe this journey as one of a million tiny awakenings. It is personal and political, which is why I’m bringing it into my research.
It began during my Master’s degree in an Intercultural Studies class. I was in my 30s, and at this point, I had not examined my life. That was until I started to read Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza”.
Theory and Healing
Gloria Anzaldúa is a self-described “chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer, and cultural theorist,” who writes about “borders” as someone who grew up divided by the physical borders between her two homelands; and the psychic borders from her two cultures, that she felt “cast out” of, “split” by, that had left “open wounds”. These borders also create a “border identity” from which the new mestiza consciousness is born.
I felt something powerful rise and overcome me;
As a Korean adoptee, I have no country as my homeland cast me out. As an Asian Australian, I have no race, as both white and Asian Australians reject me. Yet all countries are mine because the orphan in me exists everywhere.
Something deep down had just opened, and it felt like everything I had been holding onto was now flooding out. It felt like a part of me was set free, but something was lingering in my subconscious.
Back in class, I found myself see-sawing between critical development theories and my personal narratives as the cracks began to spread further. One Professor then shared with me Kathryn Joyce’s groundbreaking work, “The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption”, which raised critical questions about adoption as a reproductive rights issue and its inextricable ties to powerful conservative Christian agendas. The Child Catchers revealed how “orphans” have been manufactured en masse through the exploitation of vulnerable “third world” mothers and their children to do “the lord’s work” and “save children in both body and soul”. It also revealed how this dark history first began in South Korea, where I was born.
On being rescued
Did I need rescuing? I did a quick Google search and was confronted with headlines: Indian Adoptions Equivalent to Human Trafficking; The Netherlands’ Proposed Ban on Foreign Adoption and the (Ab)uses of ‘Scientific Expertise’; Children’s Rights Group Demands Urgent Crackdown on Adoption from Africa; International Adoption: Saving Orphans or Child Trafficking? US Woman Charged with Abusing and Starving Two of Her Adopted Children Before Murdering Them; Couple Adopted Vulnerable Children to Abuse; Illegally Adopted Baby Dies After Being Neglected; Children for Sale: inside South Korea’s dark past as the West’s ‘baby farm’; Danish report underscores ‘systematic illegal behaviour’ in adoptions of children from South Korea.
As I went further into the rabbit hole, I realised that the narratives that I had always been told, the ones that shaped how I saw myself as a ‘pitiful orphan’ in need of ‘rescue’, no longer sufficiently explained anything to me. I realised the theories we were learning about were not just theories. These were tools to help me understand myself and my place in the world. To unpick the narrative I was told, the narrative I had been living by, the narrative I helped write in so many ways. I could feel it all rupturing within me.
I was encouraged to unpack this journey in a minor thesis from a reflexive standpoint. I began writing to understand and express all the confusion, to hold onto something as I grieve everything I once knew and will never know, to move towards finding a new meaning, a new consciousness, and a new way to take ownership of myself.
As a Korean and an Australian, as a daughter, sister, and wife; with three names: the one that rendered me an orphan, the one I was given as an adoptee, and the one that represents the life I did not live. As someone with three mothers: my first mother, my foster mother, and my adoptive mother; three families: my Korean family, my adoptive that raised me, and the one I’m hoping to create; and two countries: the one I reside in and the one I am disconnected from; I entered a flow state I’ve never had access to before. Writing became my soul therapy. Writing became my healing.
My PhD: My decolonising
As if by cosmic fate, I was led to Dr Gatwiri online, “are you interested in doing a PhD in ‘belonging here and there: experiences of third-culture kids” are you a student “who is on their own anti-racism journey who is keen to learn and employ decolonising methodologies to frame their thesis & thinking”… “My approach to supervision is relational, Afrocentric and Ubuntu-Led. You are human first-above all else. You Matter”… “In a way, this is a form of mentorship- training each other to be different kinds of academics.”
“You are human first – above all else. You Matter” were the words I didn’t know I needed to hear. I then realised I was living as parts of myself, waiting to be shattered and put back together. Meeting Dr Gatwiri was more than a chance to do a PhD; this was a chance to keep unravelling the colonial contours of my learning, to unpack the enduring everyday impacts and visible continuities of being a transracial-transnational adoptee; to rewrite narratives at the sites of intellectual engagement; and contribute toward a ‘third space’ for adoptees to find healing outside the binaries of Western adoption ideology; it is a chance for me to become fully human, and finally, to find a place to call home.
Bio
Samara is a Research Assistant and PhD Candidate at the Centre for Children and Young People at Southern Cross University, supported by the ARC’s DECRA scheme. She holds a Master’s in International Development and Global Studies from RMIT. Her work explores child welfare, race, and migration, focusing on transracial-transnational adoption from a lived experience perspective. Samara is active in the transracial-transnational adoption community in Australia.
