Who is the Villain in My Adoption Story?

It is human nature to make sense of the world by creating stories. Where did we come from? Why are we here? For most, the fundamental questions of our own origins are already answered. I come from my mother and father, who came from their mother and father, and unto perpetuity.

But as an adoptee, I had to construct my own origin story. That story has evolved over time to accommodate my changing understanding of the world, and as I gradually comprehended the enormity of what it meant to be adopted. This compulsive arrangement and rearrangement of the scant few facts of my birth into a coherent narrative is, I am convinced, the reason I became a writer.

Most children have photo albums, scrap books and keepsake journals of their first days, weeks, and months of life. The proud parents showing off their newborn for the camera. The tiny, inky foot print. The official birth certificate adorned with a seal. The birth announcement reporting the precise details of weight, length, and time of birth.

As an adoptee, I have The File.

The File contains documents related to my parents’ effort to adopt me, from their initial correspondence that began shortly after the birth of their third child to my U.S. naturalization papers issued when I was four years old.

The File also offers the earliest photo of me, a big-headed baby with a handsome shock of hair, staring with trepidation into the camera, and into a future that would take me far away from my birth mother and her home country. When I look at it, I see an Asian baby, but my fellow Koreans saw only the Caucasian in me. On the Korean Social Services, Inc. (KSS), case-study intake form, it is noted that I’m big for my age with a fair complexion and eyes that are “large and Caucasian-shaped.”

Tell that to all the kids who pulled their eyes at me while screeching nonsensical sounds they thought sounded Chinese.

Everything I know about my biological parents and the circumstances of my birth is in that three-page document. But there is a hot-blooded, human story that lay underneath the cold, clinical statements.

Adoption stories are unreliable. One must depend upon official records, which are not always accessible, and hearsay, vague rumor and word-of-mouth. The first version of my adoption story had me abandoned on a doorstep, a simple way to communicate to a very young me that my birth mother had relinquished me. I spent years picturing myself as a baby curled up in a cardboard box on a crumbling concrete doorstep, waiting for someone to discover me.

Actually, as the case-study form in The File makes clear, my birth mother didn’t leave me outside, vulnerable and helpless like Oedipus on Mount Cithaeron, but handed me over to KSS in person.

It must have been humiliating to submit to the KSS interview, enduring the social worker’s judgment of her as a cheap bar girl stuck with the just consequences of her shameful livelihood. But she acquitted herself well—the social worker described her as “a talkative, sociable and cheerful woman.”

Everything I know about my biological parents and the circumstances of my birth is in that three-page document. But there is a hot-blooded, human story that lay underneath the cold, clinical statements.

Other things I know about my birth mother from the case-study form: her name, hometown, and physical appearance (condescendingly described as “rustic”). The middle child of three, she married a school teacher when she was 22 and left him four years later because he abused her, a courageous act of defiance in patriarchal Korea. She held on to me for two weeks before surrendering me for adoption.

Here’s the reason why she felt obliged to give me up: “Recognizing her difficulty in providing care for the baby because of her limited financial situation and the baby’s different coloring and appearance, she has decided to release her baby for adoption abroad.”

She very rightfully feared for me as a mixed-race child in a society that considers themselves their own glorious, distinct, pure-blooded race. Discrimination against multi-racial Koreans is well documented, and I would have likely endured a life of bullying, social ostracism and diminished economic opportunities.

Defying the strict conventions of a rigid, male-dominated society that preferred she stay with a husband who beat her, she was no coward. She was a survivor, and she wanted me to survive too.

She was 35, an advanced age for a bar girl, and was not local to my birthplace of Uijeongbu, the village that had grown into a city thanks to the Cold War. Her family was from Gwangju in the south, but she fled from there to a place where a disgraced woman could make a living. The case study says, “Accordingly she began to associate with American soldiers and met the baby’s father.”

As The File attests, even official documents can bear false witness. In order for me to be given up for adoption, the South Korean bureaucracy demanded that I be declared an orphan, entering me in the hoju (official family registry) as the head—and sole member—of my own family, as if I had sprung from the earth whole, instead of from the womb of a Korean woman. The File holds the “Application for Certificate of Orphanhood” and a carbon copy of my hojukdunbon (family registration) which declared that my Father and Mother were Unknown, even when my mother’s seal was stamped on the “Statement of Release for Emigration and Adoption Overseas.”

Every adoption story has a villain. There was a reason why a mother, against the laws of nature, would give up a baby she has nurtured and sheltered with her own body for nine months. The most obvious culprit is the man who put her “in the family way,” without offering her the family to go with it. By refusing to recognize his paternity, he turns the mother of his baby into a social pariah, preyed upon by mortified relatives, disapproving religious officiants, cruel gossiping neighbors and insurmountable bureaucratic obstacles. Society demands nothing less than the sacrifice of the fallen woman’s baby on the altar of an unknown future. Total abandonment. Complete abdication of all maternal rights,

Most adoptees are told that they were surrendered as an act of love. In tacit acknowledgment that the birth mother is a victim of unjust social, legal and biological laws, adoptive parents typically depict her decision to give up her baby as one of reparation, not to be condemned but to be celebrated and cherished. Her sacrifice brought you to us, to your life of privilege and plenty. She may be pitied, but never reviled. I never thought of my birth mother as the antihero of my story.

From the sparse details presented in The File, it was my birth father who was the obvious villain. He enjoyed the privileges and pleasures of living with a woman who cooked, cleaned and let him have his way with her, which resulted in pregnancy, as sexual relations are known to do.

They lived together for 13 months. Common-law marriage, it said on the form.

Fully aware of her condition, he returned to the United States, likely promising to send for her. Why else would my birth mother hold on to me for two weeks?

Every adoption story has a villain. There was a reason why a mother, against the laws of nature, would give up a baby she has nurtured and sheltered with her own body for nine months.

I imagine my mother during that time, desperation mounting as the months passed with no news from him. He just left her to wait and wonder as her belly grew bigger and her savings smaller. She never heard another word from him.

He was the colonizer, she the colonized. And I am American hegemony in the flesh.

If my father had only faced up to the consequences of his actions, I would not have been separated from the woman who gave birth to me. I would be calling her Mom, instead of my birth mother. He could have saved us the anguish of separation.

If I felt anguish at the time, I don’t remember it. (Never mind, the anguish came later. Not as a toddler or those golden years of early childhood, the much loved youngest child of four, the indulged baby of the family. But later, when I began to question my place within the society that I had always thought of as my own, and realized that I’d forever be on the outside looking in.) What does a baby know? One minute the warm, radiant center of your universe is holding you in the crook of her arm as you drink of her body, and the next she is gone.

Did I wail when I realized it was not she who held me but a stranger? I was put in foster care for nine months as my case wended its way through the bureaucratic labyrinth of two nations’ migration and family laws. Did I balk at the unfamiliar arm that cradled me with a no-nonsense grip, and at the strange rubber nipple that was thrust into my mouth instead of soft, pliant flesh? I think I must have. That part of my story has never changed.

And I must presume that my mother missed me. From her life, came mine. We shared the most primal human connection possible. It must have been heartbreaking. Giving me up to save me. Not because she wanted to, but because she had to.

Here’s what the form tells me about my villain: nationality, marital status (single), age (24), army rank (SP/4), and brief physical description (dark brown eyes and hair, fair complexion, sturdy, glasses).

And then, the story of their relationship in two brief sentences. Co-habitation, the date of his departure, and this: “After his return to the United States, she did not hear from him.”

As The File clearly shows, my birth mother did the right thing and my birth father did not. He behaved in a contemptible and cowardly way. He used her up and threw her away. And he threw me away too.

A person can get a complex from that kind of shit.

Perhaps he joked about it with his army pals, taking the silver bird escape, getting the fuck out of Dodge at just the right moment. Of course he said he’d send for her. She was washing his underwear, cooking his meals, and saving him money on whores, so why wouldn’t he lie to her up to the very end?

The year was 1967, the height of the Vietnam War. A working class boy, he enlisted in the army to make a better life for himself. By enlisting, he saved himself from combat duty.

Even though he was from a poor family, he had never seen poverty as it existed in South Korea in 1967. After decades of colonialism under the Japanese and a devastating war that literally tore the country into two, the fledgling nation was undergoing rapid industrialization but people still led mean, hardscrabble lives.

For the first time in his life, he felt rich and powerful, the White Conqueror among a bedraggled, hungry populace. Here, his army paycheck could stretch far; he could live like a Big Man, rent himself a house, find a comely woman willing to take care of it—and him—for nothing more than free room and board, a few baubles, and whispered promises of life in the Land of Opportunity.

Maybe he even felt a twinge of sorrow as his tour was ending. In the States, women wouldn’t fawn over him as they did in Korea, where a guy goes to a bar and is instantly surrounded by a bevy of beautiful women, all begging for his attention. At home, you had to court a woman, she didn’t court you. But that regret turned into relief every time he tried to tell her a joke but she didn’t get it because her English wasn’t good, or whenever she cooked with too much red pepper and garlic, or the times she scolded him for coming into the house with his shoes on. At night, as she welcomed his embraces, he really did mean it when he promised to send for her. But in the light of day, he knew he’d never send for her, despite the baby. Because of the baby.

He couldn’t take them back home. His family wouldn’t welcome them. Mother and baby would stand out in his small, redneck town. He couldn’t face the shame.

And after all, he told himself, that was life during wartime. He took his manly spoils and what happened in Korea stayed in Korea.

But as I learned more about history, the responsibilities of government, and the deeply ingrained biases that shape national laws, I began to feel a strange sympathy for my villain. He was but a product of his time (and I the byproduct). He was a shining white knight in a sea of yellow, the conquering hero who took his small rewards for his patriotic sacrifice for his country. His villainy was but a microcosmic example of his country’s villainy. He was just doing his bit for American expansionism.

Perhaps, too, my birth mother shared some of the blame. Desperate to go to America because at 35 she was aging out of her career as a bar girl, she may have become pregnant on purpose as a last ditch bid, an all-or-nothing gamble.

She lost that gamble, and was left with nothing, not even her child. Her society would not allow her to keep it. Her government conspired to get rid of it.

And here I discovered another, more implacable, villain. Since the Korean War, South Korea has exported over 200,000 children, mostly to the US. Instead of promoting changes that would result in less unwanted babies and a cultural acceptance of illegitimate offspring, the government set up meticulous regulations that imparted a veneer of careful oversight into what was, essentially, baby trafficking. Not for profit, but simply as a convenient way to get rid of the unwanted dregs of society in a tight economy.

But if South Korea is to be blamed, so must America, who waged war in countries that were entitled to their own sovereignty, and didn’t do enough to prevent their troops from leaving behind their bastard children.

It was almost inevitable that my birth father would do what he did. It would take a real hero to claim his half-breed baby and bring her and her mother home. He was no hero, but he wasn’t a dastardly villain either. He was just an ordinary man.

After taking a DNA test, I must now amend my origin story once again to incorporate yet another twist in the plot. The only truth I know for sure is that my life is a fiction. Yours probably is as well.