A friend who lives in Korea shared this powerful essay by Min Matson, a transgender, adopted, Korean-American father of an adopted Latino-American son. If you scroll down after the essay, you can read an update on Adam Crapser, the Korean man adopted at age 3 by US parents in Michigan who abandoned him in Oregon, and readopted by an Oregon couple who assaulted him and other children in their care. (Crimes for which they were later convicted.) No one secured citizenship papers for Crapser, and after a felony conviction, he was deported and returned to Korea.

From Min Matson’s essay:

Sure, I had always known that I was adopted from Korea in the way that we know we have a spleen, but don’t really understand what it is, what it looks like, or what it means. I had always understood that my Caucasian parents — of Dutch and Norwegian decent — had chosen my sister and me from a place called Seoul (that’s where babies came from), but I never understood that the child others saw was not the one I saw in my dreams of becoming president of the United States.

When I think back, my heart breaks for my eight-year-old self who, in that moment, understood the reality of the words from my classmates, teachers, and strangers over the years — “g—k,” “ch—k,” “flat face,” “your kind can’t see as well as others” — and other cruelties that my parents unsuccessfully encouraged me to ignore. That moment shaped the years to come of what I understood as my destiny to “stand out” and never truly belong.

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Tags: adoption from Korea, adoptive parents, Korean adoption, Min Matson, transgender adoptees

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