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Why I am against intercultural adoption |
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Why I am against intercultural adoption
Written by Iris van de Looij,
This year I decided to visit Korea, the country in which I was born and had left when I was 4 years old. When I arrived, I expected to recognize it. A friend of mine told me that she did, so I thought that I would also be able to do that. To my disappointment I did not recognize a thing.
Later I went to a shop and the shopkeeper would talk to me in Korean, so fortunately I still looked Korean. After telling him that I could not understand a word he was saying, I could see him thinking: Okay, she is Chinese or Japanese. This made me feel like a foreigner . I am back in Korea expecting to blend in and I discover that I do not. So I am not a real Korean.
So where do I belong? This is one of my objections of sending children abroad. As a child I did not fit in with my kind of eyes and black hair (how I longed for the fair hair and blue eyes) and people would call me Chinese. Now I am still regarded as a foreigner in the Netherlands, because of the way I look and I have to explain that I am adopted and Korean. In Korea they think I am a foreigner, because I do not speak Korean and again I have to explain that I am adopted. The point I want to make is that an adopted person will never feel him- or herself fitting in wherever he or she is living. When he or she visits the country of birth, the country in which he or she is was brought up will not ever be the same. I think it is important to believe that you fit in somewhere. Maybe you will not live in that country, but the feeling of belonging is very important to be happy. In my case I do not think I will ever be happy again wherever I live. Not in the Netherlands, not in Korea. Still I am glad that I came to Korea and I will never regret doing it.
Another reason why I am against intercultural adoption is because of the harm you cause that child. You put the child in a country which has a different culture, in which they speak a different language, the food differs from what it is used to and there is no one it knows from its former life (there is no one it can trust). In my case I was put on an airplane and at arrival in the Netherlands, I was told to go with 2 strangers who were waiting. They were my parents now. My parents also thought that from that point on I should be a real Dutch girl so they changed my name. My name was Iris now and no longer Jung Sook. I had to learn a complete new language and new customs. Memories of that time I do not have. The shock must have been so hard that as young as I was, I decided that for my mental health it was better not to think about them anymore. For me it was very important that these parents would not want to get rid of me like the parents I could not remember, so I was very obedient, hid my feelings and did study hard. My adopted mother really appreciated that. When I was younger (I don’t know exactly my age, but I should have been 5 or 6), my mother was very nice to me. So nice that she took me into her bed and breastfed me. Now I realize that that is very unnatural thing to do and she did because she got aroused by it, but at that moment I thought that she loved me and I desperately needed someone to love me. Also there were no persons in my life that I could trust enough to tell. I just met them. There are a lot of children being abused, I know that, which is very tragic and I do not want to say my story is more terrible than theirs, but I am not only abused, I was also adopted. I also want to say, and I think there are a lot of people will disagree, that I think that for my parents the fact that I was adopted, made it easier to abuse me. Their blood was not running trough my veins so it was not really incest.
I wanted to give you a third reason why I am against intercultural adoption, but the 2 ones I already gave should be enough. When I was younger, I was for adoption, but now I am really against it. A child is better raised in the country of b |
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