Olympics draw Korean adoptees
Many who are attending will be confronting their South Korean past
When Megan Olson lands in South Korea for the Winter Olympics next week, she’ll feel something that is both surreal and vivid.
An intoxicating sense of belonging.
A deep sense of loss.
Pride, for the motherland she barely knows after being secretly adopted away.
The 33- year- old social worker from Minnesota is joining dozens of fellow South Korean adoptees who are returning to their birth country for the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang.
Many endured cultural, racial and national identity issues stemming from an international adoption phenomenon that peaked in the 1980s. Now, the once- in- a- lifetime Olympics experience will satisfy an internal pressure for some adoptees to justify being where they came from, even though it won’t erase the fact that they were once sent away with shame and en masse.
“I think I really wanted to go back. It feels like it’s home but at the same time, when I get there, I’m not home. I don’t really know where I belong,” Olson said.
The Olympics will also reconcile a part of their life journey that has been book- ended by an era of complete economic transformation for South Korea.
Much of that rise happened at the same time the small Asian country, lacking a solid social welfare system, dispersed an estimated 200,000 of its Korean- born children, according to Richard Lee, a University of Minnesota professor who studies adoptees.
The cultural diaspora reaches more than a dozen countries around the globe, including in western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. But for South Korea, the timing of the adoption boom coinciding with their costly 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul is still a subject of criticism among some.
No longer in the shadows of the devastating Korean War era, the country over the past half century has become a powerhouse on the world stage, thanks to its fortunes in tech, cultural reach from pop music, and famously rigorous education system.
All the while, a majority of those South Korean orphans landed in the U. S. They grew up largely with white parents in the western world where adoption is seen as a humanitarian endeavour. Now adults, they’ve come of age and some have risen in the worlds of politics, fashion and entertainment.
That such orphans are now successful enough to afford an elite experience like the Olympic Games has surprised some of the locals in a patriarchal society where adoption is taboo.
Keziah Park of the International Korean Adoptee Service called it a “slap in the face” for status- driven South Koreans. The Seoul- based non- profit since the 1990s has organized trips and birth- search pilgrimages for adoptees.
“When they left, they were orphans and they were abandoned. No could take care of them. But when they come back, it’s a symbolic journey to Koreans observing them,” Park said.
The pressure to justify being there can also be distressing if they have already gone back to find their birth stories as a practical matter: to learn about their genetic health, or find out what happened to them as young children. And even if their adoptive families are supportive of their pilgrimage back, it can be difficult to reconcile their identity and feelings for the country when they lack Korean family ties.
Park organized the week- long Olympics tourism trip hoping to ease that internal conflict. It will include the opening ceremony and sporting events. They’re also hoping to meet Marissa Brandt, an adoptee raised in America who will play for the Korean women’s hockey team.
More than two dozen adoptees are expected on the trip, including those now living in Norway, Denmark, Italy, France, Australia and the U. S.
Ella and Tony LeVeque are two other adoptees who found the Olympics to be the perfect reason to go back to their birth country. The couple met at another adoptee gathering in Seoul before marrying in 2014.
“We obviously really like watching the Olympics. We tally up America versus Canada,” said Ella LeVeque, a 31- year- old recruiter who was adopted as a baby to Ottawa. “And just being able to be there and represent South Korea, too, we’re going to be able to be proud of all of it.”
The two now live in Galesburg, Mich. Neither has found their birth families.
Tony LeVeque, a 35- year- old hospital administrator, was adopted to Central Michigan when he was four years old. He didn’t feel much of a connection as a child when his adoptive parents showed him recordings of the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul. Like many others, he also struggled with his identity before connecting with his roots in adulthood.
“It’s difficult trying to find your own way,” he said of the Korean adoptee experience. “What type of man or woman am I supposed to be in America?”