Amy and her daughter Aubrey, 2008.
By Amy Anderson
My daughter is 2 and she is the most amazing human being on the planet. Sure, I’m a little biased, but she is pretty awesome. I have been blessed with a healthy, beautiful and intelligent child. I love her more and more each day. And while all mothers feel a special bond with their children, I should take a moment to mention that my daughter is the only blood relative I have ever known.
All that I know about the beginning of my life was that I was abandoned at the Yongsan train station in Seoul on September 2, 1972. I was estimated to be only a day old. After a passerby found me and took me to the police, I was adopted by my American family through Holt, an international agency known as the pioneer of overseas Korean adoption. No information about my Korean birth family has ever surfaced. The love for my adoptive family is sincere and they are indeed my “real” family, but as you can imagine, the special bond I have with my daughter is undeniably visceral.
I cannot fathom living without her.
That said, raising a child is tough. And sometimes, I feel really alone. And it’s because I’m a standup comedian who spends a lot of time traveling, working late hours, and managing an unpredictable schedule. It’s because I’m a single mom.
In my case, I have shared custody of my daughter with her father, which offers some relief, but it also presents a whole bevy of communication challenges that, at times, make the situation feel more stressful. And I’m not saying that raising children within a marriage is easy either, but at the end of a difficult day, I have to believe there is some peace in knowing you have another person in your corner to help pay the bills or lend an extra set of hands. (Anyone who has gone to Costco alone with an infant knows what I’m talking about.)
Just a few short years ago, as I was living my dream of being a comedian and actress in Hollywood, having a baby was not a planned event for my 34th year. Splitting with her father when she was an infant was also unplanned, but I decided to roll with the punches.
The struggle to establish a new life for my daughter made 2008 the most difficult year of my life. It took me months to get us on our feet and just now, I feel I have finally hit my stride. My daughter is thriving, my career is moving forward faster than ever before, and I have a wonderful new boyfriend. At 37, I actually have a life again that I really love.
Last month, just when I was thinking single motherhood was not such a bad gig after all, a friend forwarded an article to me from the New York Times, titled “Group Resists Korean Stigma for Unwed Mothers.” This article, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Choe Sang-hun, details a small group of Korean mothers who are banding together to protect their rights in a country that not only discourages, but also shuns, single moms.
Abortion is widely used in Korea as a way to avoid the shameful and ostracizing title of “unwed mother.” For the women who simply cannot terminate their pregnancies, the second most popular option is relinquishing the child for adoption—usually overseas. These birth mothers often lose all contact with their children.
Deception is rife in Korean adoption due to societal pressures and while adoption files are more accurate than they were in the past, untruths of orphanages burning down, names being concealed, identities being switched, and more, are all too common. The few women who choose the unpopular option of raising their children as single parents risk a life of poverty and social ostracism—for themselves and their children. These mothers are trapped in a no-win situation in a culture that doesn’t value them as the heroes that they are.
Korean women deserve the right to raise their own biological children with dignity and respect. Married or not.
While some American women, known as “single mothers by choice,” are now opting to bear and raise children alone (the clock is a-tickin’, Mr. Right never came along, and the sperm bank is just down the street), I don’t think any woman would describe that path as her ideal. Single motherhood is booby-trapped with emotional, financial and time management difficulties. No little girl dreams of growing up and doing it all by herself.
But as an American, I at least have the perk of being praised as somewhat of a societal hero. In South Korea, that’s never the case.
In 2008, I was selected to take an all-expense paid trip to South Korea to search for my birth family. While the trip yielded no family members for me, it did change the way I understood Korean adoption and my place in the world as a mother and adopted Korean American.
As part of this trip to Korea, which was sponsored by the Overseas Koreans Foundation, we visited babies at the Holt offices in Seoul. These were all infants who were going to be sent overseas, mostly to the United States. To say this was an emotional event would be an understatement. Holding these babies and realizing they were about to embark on the same journey that I had, more than three decades earlier, was overwhelming. Not just because I knew what they were in for, but also because as a mother, I knew how much the women who gave birth to them longed to keep them.
A few days later, I visited a city-run orphanage in Seoul: the Hae Sim Orphanage. Approximately 12 children, both boys and girls, lived in this home under the loving and firm supervision of a small staff. The children, infants to age 7, clearly loved and respected their caretakers. Even the toddlers bowed politely and greeted me with smiling annyeonghaseyos. The older boys were excited to have visitors, and didn’t want us to leave. The children were beautiful—perfect, actually—and I just could not understand why nobody wanted them. I already knew that South Koreans rarely adopted domestically but these children in the city-run orphanages had even slipped through the cracks of overseas adoption. Why?
A few days later, I visited yet another orphanage outside of Seoul. This one, in Anyang, was a much larger facility with at least 40 children. We were greeted by rows of tiny shoes, lined up neatly in the hallway entrance. With volunteers and two fellow Korean adoptees from Denmark and Canada, I arrived to make dinner (spaghetti and meatballs with kimchi) for the children.
After dinner, we played. The little ones, infants through toddlers, clung to us and cried as soon as they were set down, but the older ones, ages 5 to 7, wanted to engage and interact. Perfect children in a tragic setting. It was during a talk with one of the Korean volunteers that I finally learned the truth about these city-run “orphanages.”
She told me, “The children in these homes have Korean parents. They are mostly the children of divorced couples and very poor couples.” Another ugly truth about Korea’s highly Confucianist society is that custody is almost always awarded to the father in the case of a divorce, no matter what the circumstances. If the man does not want to raise the children, or has no relatives who will take care of them, he will often leave the children at one of these homes and the mother has no rights. The misnomer of “orphanage” is widely accepted because Westerners don’t want to hear the truth, but they are simply dumping grounds for innocent victims of an archaic cultural practice. These children are not even available for adoption because they have legal Korean parents, and while the mothers long for their children on the outside, the children languish on the inside.
These children are not orphans; they have parents that are healthy, functioning and alive. That, along with the fact that Korea is still exporting its children when they have the lowest birthrate amongst all industrialized nations, and can boast the 11th largest economy in the world, is disturbing. During a conversation with Dae-won Wenger, a Swiss-raised Korean adoptee and Secretary General of Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link, he pointed out that, “The more advanced Korea becomes, the more [Koreans] are devaluing their children.”
America’s rescue mentality towards foreign children is nothing new and, in the case of Korea, stems from a legitimate history of humanitarian aid after the Korean War. But few people seem to question why overseas Korean adoption peaked in 1985, decades after a cease-fire was signed in 1953. These numbers show that Westerners who now adopt from Korea are participating in a very profitable operation, whether they know it or not. In the majority of cases, they are adopting a single woman’s child. A child like my own.
As a single mother and Korean adoptee with a sketchy adoption file, you can imagine that I have strong feelings on the issue of single mothers’ rights in South Korea. I realized that if I lived in Korea, my own daughter probably would have been adopted out or placed in a group home, and that the choice to keep her would be intrinsically attached to a life of poverty and shame.
But a movement in Korea, though small, has begun. Brave people are finally stepping forward and with advocates like Richard Boas, founder of the Korean Unwed Mothers Support Network, and allies like adoptee filmmaker Tammy Chu, birth mothers and single parents in Korea will finally have a voice and eventually be able to enjoy the rights they deserve—not just as mothers, but as human beings.
Tonight, I am writing in a hotel room in Pennsylvania, over 2,600 miles away from my little girl in Los Angeles. My upcoming performance is a very important one and may determine how much work I book over the next year. No matter how much I miss my daughter when I travel, I am proud to show her what a woman can do and I am grateful to have the right to do it.
In two nights, I will be home to bathe her, read to her and tuck her in with hugs and kisses because I am her mother and this is how it should be.
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I have to say, your story hit home with me. I was also abandoned in a Korean train station in January 1972. Adopted and grew up in the US. When I became a mother, that’s when it all hit home for me.
I am now starting my search for more information and have tried to put together a local group of adoptees.
Hope you stay strong and have a beautiful life with you gorgeous daughter!
That’s a shame you were adopted by Americans instead of being raised in Korea. Overseas adoption is a shameful chapter in Korea’s history. I mean even if you had just been raised in an orphanage without any family or parents it seems lke that would be better than being raised by a bunch of people who aren’t even Korean!!
I heard about this, when I was volunteering with an expat group at an orphanage for girls, on Saturdays, during my year trying English teaching in Korea . It’s very sad. Can’t there be DNA tests done on kids and women who think their child was orphaned, as long as the dad abandoned their daughter (does this happen with sons?)? It’s upsetting what some selfish parents can do to their kids.
I have no comment about those who adopt them, as most don’t know most these kids are not without a parent. I think Korean war orphans, as I heard about on a tape of an old radio broadcast at the nursing home I work at, likely were more often than not, true orphans.
Wonderful Amy! What heart, eloquence and intelligence…
Hey- I wasn’t very brief at all was I? Sorry!
Hi Amy-Quickly I must say that I enjoyed your article but I questioned a couple of things. As a Westerner who adopted two Korean babies, I wouldn’t say that I tolerate the misnomer of orphanage for the place you visited that cared for Korean children of divorce who have two Korean parents living, but whose parents don’t or can’t raise these children. That place, and the children marooned there through no fault of their own, breaks my heart. I never would have swooped in and cut any legal corners in any adoption ever.(For cripes sake, I’m a Catholic \Republican. I LIVE to follow rules! Goody two shoes is my game face.)
And I’m not sure what profitable situation you refer to when Westerners, whether knowlingly or not, participate in when they adopt from Asia. If someone is getting rich within the adoption system, that would be abhorrent. When we saved, then spent the equivalent of a new car for each adoption we completed, we assumed (ok-maybe we are trusting idiots-but we are like that) that we were carrying expenses for people involved in the administration, the transportation, the caretaking and the healthcare aspects of our babies’ lives.
I’d love to meet you some day. You and your daughter both. If you do or don’t want to hear about our imperfect marriage, our overwhelming ordinariness, our supremely harrowing decades of raising and then stepping up to salvage one VERY feisty child’s future when they went way off the rails…we don’t care one way or the other. I’m just trying to tell you that we were just tap dancing as fast as we could to the agency rules when it came our turn to become parents. We never wanted to swoop in and steal some poor girl’s baby and skulk off. We always wondered so much about her circumstances. I’ve always told my kids we did not know much really. I said I’d help my kids search if that’s what they wanted some day. It’s what Moms do. You know that-I see it in your story. Write if you want. Thanks for listening. Don’t tell my kids I wrote..they’re still in the everything mortifies them years. Good luck with your career. We’re in the book if you ever come to Raleigh NC area. Prawdzik, Wake Forest. Thanks Peggy P
Wow, made me cry. So inspiring.
Amy, thank you for sharing your own worthy reflections on single motherhood and adoption while continuing to bridge the korean adoptee divide through heart-warming laughter… and just plain, showing up!
[...] KoreAm on-line magazine of the Korean American [...]
Thanks for the moving article, Amy. Glad to hear that in addition to making people laugh, you’re informing them as well!
Thanks Amy for writing such a meaningful and moving article. I really admire you for all that you do and for speaking out so eloquently.
i feel thats how it should be…
cuz a child has the right to connect
with both their mom AND dad…
unless of course the other half
is like totally abusive or something..
i’m a korean adoptee…
and the parents that adopted me
ended up divorcing…
after the divorce,
all 3 of us kids actually ended up
primarily living with our dad…
just cuz we ended up living w/ our dad
didnt mean our mother stopped having
the responsibility of being a mom…
it didnt mean, our relationship w/ our mother
as being the other half of the parent
needed to stop.
when two ppl end up having a kid
but decide not live together anymore…
sure it can be more difficult…
but in my opinion…
both parents can still take on
shared responsibility when it
comes to raising their kid
even after a divorce/seperation
Bravo for this post. There are a variety of circumstances that would lead to a mother raising her kid(s) alone — sometimes by choice and sometimes not. Whatever the case may be, it’s unfair that society shuns or devalues both the single parent AND the kids that are raised in a single parent household. Same goes for kids of divorced families. I can’t tell ya how many times I experienced that knowing, disappointed look when I tell Korean adults my parents are divorced. You are courageous for speaking out.
just cuz a couple may divorce or seperate after having a child…
that doesnt necessarily mean, that raising a child has to be
done by only one parent…
i think in the case of divorce or seperation…
adults should put their difference aside
and still work together in raising their kid
even if they are not together anymore…
cuz a child has the right to establish a relationship
with both the mother and father…
despite the fact the parents may not be together anymore…
i’d like to see more men take
on the initiative in taking on the responsibility
of still raising their kid
even if they decide not to be
together with the mother of their child too…