About

Where adoption, identity, and systems collide

For transparency, I use a pseudonym here. I do this to protect my privacy, the privacy of my family, and to separate my opinions and perspectives from my professional affiliations. If you’d like to connect with me, email me.

I am a Korean American transracial adoptee but my adoption story isn’t typical of most Korean adoptees. First, I was born in the United States to two Korean nationals. Second, I was domestically adopted by two Americans at age 10. This meant that prior to nine, when I went to live with my adoptive parents, I lived with my birth/first parents, other various family members, and a close family friend. Some of these years were spent in the United States and a portion in Korea.

I am also a professional with over 15 years in the social work, public health, and child welfare fields. I bring both a clinical therapy lens and a population and community health perspective, alongside a systems-level approach to child and family wellbeing. From that vantage point, I have seen both the downstream effects of child welfare systems and policies and the evolution of upstream efforts. My current role is focused on primary prevention of child maltreatment, meaning addressing the conditions and the systemic barriers and challenges that keep families from thriving. The goal of this work is moving upstream to prevent these families from unnecessarily entering the child protection system. As an adoptee, I seek to center the experiences of children in, and touched by, the system to ensure it truly serves them and their families to reduce family disruptions.

This blog explores the various intersections of my identities as I navigate life, parenting, and work as well as what it costs to be the child the adoption system moves. I write about reclaiming culture and language as a heritage Korean speaker, and about the particular challenge of rooting my children in that same culture while still finding my own footing in it. I also write about reunion and the complexity of relationships that don’t follow a script. I hope to share, not only the beauty and challenges of these layers, but to also lean into my professional knowledge and experience to lay bare the systemic context and implications. Throughout I aim to situate personal experience within the broader systems and policies that shape it, because individual stories don’t exist outside of context.