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Reflections on the 2004 Conference
These reflections were written by Mark Hagland and published in Korean Quarterly's Fall 2004 issue. To learn more about
Korean Quarterly visit www.koreanquarterly.org
KAAN reflections
On the Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network 2004 conference
By Mark Hagland
When I try to describe what it felt like growing up as a Korean adoptee in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the 1960s and 1970s, and then what it felt like when I attended my first mini-gathering in Minneapolis in 2000, what I usually tell people is that I felt like a Martian who landed in a spaceship the entire time I was growing up; and that when I attended my first mini-gathering four years ago, in a room full of adult Korean adoptees like myself, it was as though I’d stumbled upon a whole convention of Martians in spaceships. It usually gets a good laugh, and also a kind of “aha” expression of recognition.
And that, also, in an amplified and nuanced form, is how it feels for me to attend and participate in KAAN conferences. The KAAN conferences have a rather different atmosphere from the mini-gatherings; they are more open and diverse, of course. Where the mini-gatherings feel like a massive, Martians-only, weekend-long group hug, the KAAN conferences feel like an interplanetary banquet, where one will also meet Venusians and Jovians, in a congenial and sharing environment.
The great thing about KAAN for me again this year, as in past years, is the embrace of all my identities, all my realities, that I feel at KAAN. Here, I need not hide or downplay any aspects of my multi-layered identity, as is so often the case in the outside world.
The fact that I, an Asian-American a transracial adoptee, a gay man, a parent, and even a journalist, is simply accepted as a fact about me, and the dialogue moves on. It’s hard to overstate the profound sense of belongingness and the ease that creates for me, someone whose life has been defined by unusualness. One thing I can assure anyone who is thinking about attending a KAAN conference: If you think you have an unusual or challenging life-story, you’re bound to meet someone with a more unusual or challenging one there.
And it’s weirdly fascinating to be an adult adoptee at KAAN, as the adoptive parents are very often around the same age as me, yet they are looking to me and the other adult adoptees for our experiences and perceptions as grown adult adoptee children, and, of course, wondering, “Is that how my kids will turn out?!” But it’s also wonderful, as we adult adoptees have the opportunity to take the intense, overheated soup of our emotional lives, and offer it up in doses to today’s generation of adoptive parents as a (hopefully helpful) giving-back from our own experiences. For me, it is a terrific opportunity, and I love doing so; in fact, it speaks to a sense of mission for me in my participation in KAAN conferences.
After all, if I can bring forward or facilitate the bringing forward of one insight for one family, and thereby enhance the life of a young adoptee, won’t that be a positive contribution I can make as an adult adoptee of the first generation?
Of course, not all adult adoptees feel as I do. I think for the majority, the main appeal of KAAN is to meet and hang out with other adult adoptees, and attend discussion sessions, especially the adoptees-only kind. Some actually avoid extended encounters with parents, a choice I respect and understand, even as I find myself enjoying the mutual reflection I experience with the parents. Of course, I also love the adoptees-only sessions, where we share with one another the scars, the hurts, the anxieties, the longings, and the revelations of our lives as only an in-group whose in-groupness has been forged by social isolation and extreme differentness can.
But it is the kaleidoscope of KAAN encounters that ultimately, for me, produces a rich, tiered banquet. Among other wonderful experiences this year, I met another gay man who, with his life-partner, is happily raising two girls they adopted from China in a beautifully diverse and nurturing social and cultural environment in San Francisco’s East Bay; I was solicited for advice by an adoptive mom who was struggling with the issue of whether to do preliminary birth research for her young child, based on information that had dropped into her lap; and I had a fascinating reunion-conversation with a now-famous adult adoptee who continues to produce groundbreaking documentaries about the adoptee experience in general and her experience in particular.
Where else but at KAAN could all these conversations and connections occur? I’m already ready for the next interplanetary confab next year in Detroit: Beam me up, Scotty.
KAAN 2004
More choices, more variety, more in general
By Mark Hagland
The Sixth Annual KAAN Conference, Building Connections, Honoring Differences, held in San Francisco July 23-25, achieved a number of firsts this year.
To begin with, it was the first KAAN conference to sell out and have to offer a waiting list to prospective attendees. More than 400 people attended the conference, presented for the sixth time, by the Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network (KAAN), an organization that continues to grow and to expand its mission of providing education, support, fellowship, and networking for Korean adoptees, adoptive parents and families, and Korean-Americans.
Among other firsts, this was the first KAAN conference to offer a separate program for young adult adoptees. KAAN’s organizers say they are committed to expanding the conference offerings to meet the needs the many subgroups within the spectrum of its target group of Korean adoptees, adoptive families with children from Korea, and the Korean American community.
KAAN 2004 also saw more participation by the larger community of Korean Americans, both individually and through San Francisco Bay Area organizations. And, because of the presence in the Bay area of the adoptive families’ organization Families with Children from China (FCC), dozens of parents of children born in China also attended and participated in this year’s conference.
Partly because of the large showing of FCC parents, and perhaps also because KAAN was held within two weeks of the large Gathering of adult adoptees in Seoul in August (KQ’s coverage of The Gathering is on page 46), the participation by adoptive parents was greater than that by adult adoptees. This year, said Chris Winston, KAAN’s board chair, 50 percent of attendees were adoptive parents; 25 percent were adult adoptees and young adult adoptees; 15 percent were teenage and younger adoptees; and the remaining 10 percent were Korean Americans.
A lot of good things happened at the conference, Winston reflected. “This year, we were fortunate to have every significant adoption-related group in Northern and Southern California participate in some form in the conference. And we had the opportunity to be in San Francisco, which has a significant Asian American population.” A hotel arrangement that included seven breakout rooms was an added benefit, allowing more specialized sessions to address specific topics for various subgroups, something that hasn’t been financially or practically feasible in past years, she added. And, she notes, “We received excellent support from the local Korean American communities.”
Conference attendees were able to select sessions from a very wide range of offerings this year. There were sessions that were open to all adult attendees, on topics such as Racial and Ethnic Identity, The Emotional Challenge of Dual National Connections, Benefit or Burden: Making and Sustaining Korean Community Connections, and But Where Are You Really From??? Dealing with Racism, Ignorance, and Misunderstandings in Everyday Encounters.
There were sessions for parents only: Redefining Ourselves: How to Parent from an Empty Nest (for parents of adoptees over 17 only); and sessions for young adults only: Freedom at last! Living away from Home (high school through age 23) and for young adult Korean adoptees and Korean Americans (What Does It Mean To Be Korean American?).
As in the past, there were several sessions for adult adoptees only, including Family Dynamics and Korean Adoptees, and Navigating Racism and Whiteness as Adult Adoptees. There were breakout discussion groups for adult men adoptees, adult women adoptees, and adoptive fathers.
Amid this welter of choices, there were many connections made within and across all the groups. Peggy Scott, a Berkeley resident and one of the founding members of the Bay Area Chapter of Families with Children from China, and the mother of Abby, 11, thanked this writer and the other panelists and adult adoptees at the Sunday morning session for all adults, The Top Ten Things Adult Adoptees Would Like Adoptive Parents to Know about the Adoptee Experience, for sharing our experiences and perspectives openly with parents.
Said Scott “I think people everywhere should learn from their mistakes and others’ mistakes. And no matter how well-meaning the parents of Korean adoptees were at the time” of the first wave of Korean adoptions in the 1950s and ‘60s, she says, “there were things that their children didn’t get that they needed. And we need to try very hard not to make those mistakes. If I’m going to make mistakes, I want to make whole new mistakes, not ones I can see coming!”
Like many parents of adoptees who are still children, Scott sees the experiences of the first wave of Korean adoptees, now in their 40s, as touchstones for parents of today’s transracial adoptee children, whether Chinese, Korean, or of other ethnicities. Scott says she knows she and her daughter, and the other FCC families, are very fortunate, in living in the Bay Area, where their children can grow up surrounded by Asian culture and Asian people (and, for their Chinese children, specifically, Chinese culture and people).
For her, the KAAN conference was an opportunity to share experiences with other adoptive parents, to hear the perspectives of adult Korean adoptees, and to check her perceptions against those of others.
Veteran participants also say they continue to get a lot out of KAAN. Maggie Dunham, a resident of Saratoga Springs, New York, who has one adult daughter (adopted domestically as an older child) and two college-age daughters (both born in Korea), said that when she attends a KAAN conference, “I see my children in a different light, and we talk about things that we don’t usually talk about. And I really see them ---- just seeing them with other adopted Asians, and talking about things they never talk about, and seeing how comfortable they are.”
For Dunham, attending such sessions as Giving Our Children Custody of Their Own Lives: Parenting Young Adopted Adults, moderated by Terra and Eva Trevor, and Carolyn Scholl, was “wonderful.” “What I got out of that session,” she said, “was how, …as a parent, you kind of have it all planned out. Your kids are going to go to college and marry somebody very successful, and you have this little plan, and then the kids don’t do that. But it turns out even better.” The post-conference conversations with her daughters, she said, have opened major doors to communication and sharing that would not otherwise have opened.
Adult adoptees, too, find the newly open doors to be very meaningful in their lives. “What makes KAAN unique is that cross-networking of having parents and adult adoptees in one place,” said Carolyn Scholl, a San Diego adult adoptee and the coordinator of adult adoptees-only sessions this year, who also led and participated as a panelist in several sessions. “As an aside,” she said, “it was a really positive thing for me, in terms of my relationship with my mother. We didn’t have a whole lot of contact during the conference, so we were able to process things independently, and then we had a really good discussion afterwards. This was the first contact my mother had had with adoptive parents. She learned things about adoptees that helped her understand me” she added.
Both of Scholl’s parents, who live in Northern California, attended, and both her mother and father, Scholl said, expressed satisfaction and told her they found the sessions they attended very helpful. Meeting other adult adoptees for the first time in this type of context was also a revelation for them, she said.
KAAN’s leaders know that the identity of the conference, and its offerings will continue to evolve. “The primary change” in the past couple of years, Winston reflects, “is that KAAN is more well-known and people understand what the conference is, and what to expect. The only changes I see are planning farther out into the future. We will be selecting future sites earlier and planning the program soon enough, so that our outreach and fundraising can be more effective. As to the nature of the program and attendees, that evolution will come from the adoption community itself.”
Next year’s conference, to be held in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Michigan, will inevitably have a different “flavor,” because it will be in the Midwest, Winston said. “I think when we talk about differences from year to year it is a good thing,” she remarked. “It allows us to keep the conference vibrant and interesting because each location has something different to offer.”
KAAN has already evolved significantly from what it was during its first few years, into something more complex and sophisticated. Concludes Winston, “The best that I can hope is that KAAN will remain relevant to the growing adoption community. It should be a place where all the varying voices of our community are represented. We should continue to listen well, and learn from each other even when we disagree,” she said, “with the benefit of honest and open sharing of experiences, concerns and perspectives we can build a stronger adoption community. l
Next year’s KAAN Conference, “Seoul Searching: The Life of Adoption,” will be held July 22-24, 2005, at the Westin Southfield Detroit.
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