The Journey: A Personal Search
by Kendra Belvins-Barton
Originally Published in TransCultured Magaine Winter 2000-1

My parents have never given me a straight answer to my queries of why I was adopted. Usually their answer goes like this: "Well, we wanted to have four kids and we planned to adopt two and have two." I've never had the courage to press them further, even thought they stopped adopting after me. My guess is that after some problems conceiving they decided to adopt, and at that time international adoptions were quicker and cheaper than adopting caucasian babies. I think it appealed to their religious natures to adopt, and since I acted the role of the good orphan. I was grateful, obedient, quiet and did well in school.. I never wanted attention so I did whatever I could to blend in. I despised questions over my ethnicity or queries over my unusual family situation. It was painful to be singled out. At the same time, I always wanted to know more and feel more connected to Korea but I was afraid to hurt my parent's feelings. I felt so out of place as it was. And I had no other family anyway; this was it.

Until about seven years ago, I never had a desire to meet my birth family. I was satisfied with the thought that if my birth parents couldn't take good care of me, I was better off. I've never been bitter about it since I'd always held on to the romantic notion that it was an act of love. When pushed, I'd have answered that I was curious about them, for medical reasons, of course, but that I considered my adoptive parents my real parents. But when my daughter reached first the age I was when abandoned at fourteen months, and then the age I was adopted, it really hit me what I'd lost. But even then, I assumed that searching would be useless. I was abandoned at Taegu City Hall. There were no records of family members dropping me off at an orphanage. I just suddenly appeared, like Moses in the bulrushes. Whatever story was behind my abandonment, I assumed I would never know. Ironically, it was about this time that my mother became interested in charting her family's genealogy. Suddenly my mother "found" my adoption files in a box in the basement and it was soon after that I found Kim.

Kim and I had first met as six-year-olds at the summer church camp our families attended. For several summers, we would meet up and pretend we were twins, and given the fact that we were the only Koreans at camp, all the other kids believed us. One year, the summer before fifth grade, Kim didn't show up. For the next twenty years I occasionally heard news about her all the time, I never made the effort to look her up. She was the first and only Korean adopted friend I had ever had. One day about a year ago I was reading the current issue of Korean Quarterly and I came across an article about an adoptee who was facing issues of identity for herself and her family of four biracial children. Since becoming a mother myself, this was something I had been concerned about. I worried that I had nothing to teach my children about their heritage since I had never known it myself. As I read through the article I immediately wondered if this woman was my friend from so many years back; her name, the references to her father, and the fact that one of her daughters and I share the same name struck me as too coincidental. I e-mailed her and she responded the next day. It was my friend Kim. As we began to catch up on our lives, I was struck at how similar our paths had taken us - early marriages, children, stay-at-home moms, and now involvement in the Korean adoptee community for the first time.

Kim and I packed a lot of catching up in nine months. It was she who brought me an offer to go to Korea with 6 other adult adoptees. Although my husband and I planned to go to Korea the year before, a new baby and tight budgets had postponed the idea. I wanted to go but was worried. This was to be a birth family search. It was to be adoptees only, so that we could feel free to experience all of our emotions with those who could support us as only other adoptees could. There would be no need to explain why we had felt what we did, no split loyalties between wanted to preserve adoptive families feelings and our own longings for birth family. We all knew what it was like to grow up with those dual feelings. For myself, I had just come to a willingness to want to meet my birthfamily. And now I was given the opportunity to do something proactive instead of just thinking year, maybe someday.