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Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea
by Jane Jeong Trenka
Trenka’s award-winning first book, The Language of Blood, told the story of her upbringing in a white family in rural Minnesota. Now, in this searching and provocative memoir, Trenka explores a new question: Can she make an adult life for herself in Korea? Despite numerous…
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Gardening Secrets of the Dead
by Lee Herrick
Memory, history, family, the future: these are the preoccupations of Lee Herrick’s Gardening Secrets of the Dead. Adoptee Author: Lee Herrick Publication Year: 2012 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: All Bookshop and Amazon links on this site are affiliate links. We earn a small commission to…
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Ghost of Sangju: A Memoir of Reconciliation
by Soojung Jo
Ghost of Sangju takes readers through Soojung’s childhood in Kentucky filled with joy, family, friendship—and the loneliness of being marked as an outsider even in her own home. Alternating between humor and heartbreak, she offers a glimpse into a life foreign to most: that of…
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Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America
by Catherine Ceniza Choy
In the last fifty years, transnational adoption—specifically, the adoption of Asian children—has exploded in popularity as an alternative path to family making. Despite the cultural acceptance of this practice, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the factors that allowed Asian international adoption to flourish.…
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Heart and Seoul
by Jen Frederick
As a Korean adoptee, Hara Wilson doesn’t need anyone telling her she looks different from her white parents. She knows. Every time Hara looks in the mirror, she’s reminded that she doesn’t look like anyone else in her family—not her loving mother, Ellen; not her…
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How to Greet the Mother Who Bore You (A Short Story)
by Matthew Salesses
Before Teddy and his parents moved to Korea, the adopted nine-year-old knew almost nothing about his birth mother. But once they arrive in Seoul, the boy begins to scan the face of every passing woman, wondering if she might be the one who gave him…
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I Wish for You a Beautiful Life: Letters from the Korean Birth Mothers of Ae Ran Won to Their Children
Edited by Sara Dorow
A collection of anonymous letters written by Korean birth mothers to the children they relinquished for adoption. The mothers were helped by the Ae Ran Won agency in Seoul, Korea, which provides a temporary home to unmarried pregnant women before and after they give birth.…
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In Praise of Late Wonder
by Lee Herrick
In his most personal collection of poems to date, California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick writes with openness about his adoption from Korea in more than 25 new memoir-like prose poems. This expansive collection also includes a section of new poems, as well as highlights from…
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In Reunion: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Communication of Family
by Sara Docan-Morgan
“Do you know your real parents?” is a question many adoptees are asked. In In Reunion, Sara Docan-Morgan probes the basic notions of family, adoption, and parenthood by exploring initial meetings and ongoing relationships that transnational Korean adoptees have had with their birth parents and other…
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Inconvenient Daughter
by Lauren J. Sharkey
Rowan Kelly knows she’s lucky. After all, if she hadn’t been adopted by Marie and Joseph, she could have spent her days in a rice paddy, or a windowless warehouse assembling iPhones–they make iPhones in Korea, right? Either way, slowly dying of boredom on Long…
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Interrogation Room
by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs
In Interrogation Room, award-winning poet Jennifer Kwon Dobbs’s second collection, poems restore redacted speech and traverse forbidden borders to confront the unending Korean War’s divisions of kinship, self, and imagination. Adoptee Author: Jennifer Kwon Dobbs Publication Year: 2018 Critical Reviews: Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: All Bookshop and Amazon…
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Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism
by Kim Park Nelson
The first Korean adoptees were powerful symbols of American superiority in the Cold War; as Korean adoption continued, adoptees’ visibility as Asians faded as they became a geopolitical success story—all-American children in loving white families. In Invisible Asians, Kim Park Nelson analyzes the processes by…
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It’s Not About You: Understanding Adoptee Search, Reunion, and Open Adoption
Edited by Brooke Randolph, MA, NCC, LMHC
The title of this book can be both inflammatory and comforting; different people need to read it different ways. The reality is that the desire for information has nothing to do with parenting or personality, but an innate desire. It’s Not About You is an…
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Keurium
by JS Lee
Shay Stone lies in a hospital bed, catatonic—dead to the world. Her family thinks it’s a ploy for attention. Doctors believe it’s the result of an undisclosed trauma. At the mercy of memories and visitations, Shay unearths secrets that may have led to her collapse.…
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Kids Like Me in China
by Ying Ying Fry (with Amy Klatzkin)
In this first view of China adoption from a child’s perspective, eight-year-old Ying Ying Fry returns to her orphanage to remember what it is like and to write a story so that other adopted children will understand where they came from. Kids Like Me in…
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Kimchi & Calamari
by Rose Kent
There are worse things in the world than being adopted. But right now Joseph can’t think of one. Joseph Calderaro has a serious problem. His social studies teacher has given him an impossible assignment: an essay about ancestors. Ancestors, as in dead people you’re related…
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Korean Adoptees and Transnational Adoption: Embodiment and Emotion
by Jessica Walton
This book investigates the experiences of South Koreans adopted into Western families and the complexity of what it means to ‘feel identity’ beyond what is written in official adoption files. Korean Adoptees and Transnational Adoption is based on ethnographic fieldwork in South Korea and interviews…
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Landlock X: Poems
by Sarah Audsley
Sarah Audsley’s debut poetry collection, Landlock X, joins a growing body of adoptee poetics. By examining the consequences of the international transracial adoptee experience–her own–Audsley’s collection finds more questions than solid answers. Employing a variety of poetic forms, co-opting the pastoral tradition to argue for belonging…
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Litany for the Long Moment
by Mary-Kim Arnold
The orphan at the center of Litany for the Long Moment is without homeland and without language. In three linked lyric essays, Arnold attempts to claim her own linguistic, cultural, and aesthetic lineage. Born in Korea and adopted to the U.S. as a child, she explores…
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Little Fires Everywhere
by Celeste Ng
From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You, a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives. In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned – from…
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Lost Daughters: Writing Adoption from a Place of Empowerment & Peace
Edited by Amanda H.L. Transue-Woolston, Julie Stromberg, Karen Pickell, and Jennifer Anastasi
A collection of writings by the authors of the Lost Daughters blog. The Lost Daughters mission is to bring readers the perspectives and narratives of adopted women, and to highlight their strength, resiliency, and wisdom. Editors: Amanda H.L. Transue-Woolston, Julie Stromberg, Karen Pickell, Jennifer Anastasi Adoptee Authors: Jennifer…
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Lucky Girl
by Mei-Ling Hopgood
In a true story of family ties, journalist Mei-Ling Hopgood, one of the first wave of Asian adoptees to arrive in America, comes face to face with her past when her Chinese birth family suddenly requests a reunion after more than two decades. In 1974,…
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Marilyn
by Amanda Ngoho Reavey
Amanda [Ngoho] Reavey’s first book, Marilyn, began as an exploration through somatic experiments on what it means to stay and became a fragmented map of the immigration system, the international adoption process, and family. How do you articulate disenfranchised grief? How does a person who…
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Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love
by Xinran (translated from Chinese by Nicky Harman)
Following her internationally bestselling book The Good Women of China, Xinran has written one of the most powerful accounts of the lives of Chinese women. She has gained entrance to the most pained, secret chambers in the hearts of Chinese mothers—students, successful businesswomen, midwives, peasants—who,…
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Mixed Korean: Our Stories
Edited by Cerrissa Kim, Sora Kim-Russell, Mary-Kim Arnold, Katherine Kim
From the struggles of the Korean War, to the modern dilemmas faced by those who are mixed race, comes an assortment of stories that capture the essence of what it is to be a mixed Korean. With common themes of exclusion, and recollections of not…
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Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story
by Sarah Myer
Sarah has always struggled to fit in. Born in South Korea and adopted at birth by a white couple, she grows up in a rural community with few Asian neighbors. People whisper in the supermarket. Classmates bully her. She has trouble containing her anger in…
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Not My White Savior: A Memoir in Poems
by Julayne Lee
Julayne Lee was born in South Korea to a mother she never knew. When she was an infant, she was adopted by a white Christian family in Minnesota, where she was sent to grow up. Not My White Savior is a memoir in poems, exploring what it…
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Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.: A Memoir
by Jenny Heijun Wills
Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada. In her late twenties, she reconnected with her first family and returned to Seoul where she spent four months getting to know other adoptees, as well…
Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!
