Category: Korea
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The Best Possible Immigrants: International Adoption and the American Family
by Rachel Rains Winslow
Prior to World War II, international adoption was virtually unknown, but in the twenty-first century, it has become a common practice, touching almost every American. How did the adoption of foreign children by U.S. families become an essential part of American culture in such a…
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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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Too Much Soul: The Journey of an Asian Southern Belle
by Cindy Wilson
Join Cindy on her journey from being adopted in Seoul, Korea, by an African American couple to growing up in the Dirty South–Jackson, Mississippi! See how she fights and loves her way through life as she searches for her identity and discovers her place in…
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Through Adopted Eyes: A Collection of Memoirs From Adoptees
Edited by Elena S. Hall
Through Adopted Eyes explores the world of adoption from the viewpoint of adoptees. Russian adoptee Elena S. Hall shares her own story and thoughts on the subject of adoption in addition to interviews from other adoptees of different ages, heritages, and perspectives. Whether you are…
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Season of Dares
by Leah Silvieus
Season of Dares leans into fragments of the scriptures, narratives and mythologies of a Korean adoptee’s childhood in the rural American West. Fearlessly, it revisits and explores the physical and spiritual landscapes of those communities and the tensions between the impulses that shaped them–violence and…
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Desire: A Haunting
by Molly Gaudry
Traumatized by the events of We Take Me Apart, the unlikely heroine of Desire: A Haunting leads a silent life in the cottage that has been in her family since Hester Prynne first bequeathed it to Pearl–whose endearingly cranky spirit remains. So begins this strange friendship between “dog”…
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We Take Me Apart
by Molly Gaudry
Shortlisted for the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry Nominated for the McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns First Novel Prize “There is no more perfect place to be than in Molly Gaudry s tender, dirt-floored novella, We Take Me Apart. Oh cabbage leaves, oh roses, oh orange-slice childhood grins: this…
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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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Famous Adopted People
by Alice Stephens
Lisa Pearl is an American teaching English in Japan and the situation there―thanks mostly to her spontaneous, hard-partying ways―has become problematic. Now she’s in Seoul, South Korea, with her childhood best-friend Mindy. The young women share a special bond: they are both Korean-born adoptees into…
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Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
by Patrick Cottrell
Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, childless, college-educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. She’s accepting a delivery from IKEA in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helen’s adoptive brother is…
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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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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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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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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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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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Black Anthology: Adult Adoptees Claim Their Space
Edited by Susan Harris O’Connor, MSW; Diane René Christian; Mei-Mei Akwai Ellerman, PhD
People who identify as Black adoptees are vaguely known within both adoption circles as well as universal discussions. We are just beginning to be introduced to one another. This anthology allows for the opportunity to see the rich diversity of a people; the uniqueness within…
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Cooper’s Lesson
by Sun Yung Shin, illustrated by Kim Cogan
Cooper caught his reflection in the window. Brown hair, fair skin, and some freckles. Grandmother Park always said, “Such white skin!” and Grandmother Daly always said, “What brown skin!” One cousin always teased him about being “half and half.” Cooper has had about enough of…
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Unbearable Splendor
by Sun Yung Shin
Finalist for the Believer Poetry Award Sun Yung Shin moves ideas—of identity (Korean, American, adoptee, mother, Catholic, Buddhist) and interest (mythology, science fiction, Sophocles)— around like building blocks, forming and reforming new constructions of what it means to be at home. Adoptee Author: Sun Yung Shin…
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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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The Translation of Han
by Hei Kyong Kim
The Translation of Han is a collection of poetry and prose about the spiritual, psychological, personal and political aspects of historical and intergenerational trauma amongst a people; it explores issues of race, adoption, culture, gender, lateral oppression, violence, love, family, and grief and loss. It…
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Flip the Script: Adult Adoptee Anthology
Edited by Diane René Christian, Amanda H.L. Transue-Woolston, and Rosita González
Flip the Script: Adult Adoptee Anthology is a dynamic artistic exploration of adoptee expression and experience. This anthology offers readers a diverse compilation of literature and artistry from a global community of adoptees. From playwrights to poets, filmmakers to photographers, essay writers to lyricists—all have…
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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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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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Cries of the Soul: The True Story of a Korean Adoptee’s Fight to Survive
by Khara Niné
In 1970, shortly after the death of her mother, and without the consent or even the knowledge of her father, a barely one year old girl is put up for foreign adoption in South Korea. She ends up in an adoptive family where she spends…
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The “Unknown” Culture Club: Korean Adoptees, Then and Now
Edited by Janine Myung Ja, Jenette Moon Ja, and Katherine Kim
This collection serves as a tribute to transracially adopted people sent all over the world. If you were adopted, you are not alone. This book validates the experiences of anyone who has been ridiculed or outright abused, but have found the will to survive, thrive…
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To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption
by Arissa H. Oh
To Save the Children of Korea is the first book about the origins and history of international adoption. Although it has become a commonplace practice in the United States, we know very little about how or why it began, or how or why it developed…
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Ten Thousand Sorrows
by Elizabeth Kim
“I don’t know how old I was when I watched my mother’s murder, nor do I know how old I am today.” The illegitimate daughter of a peasant and an American GI, Elizabeth Kim spent her early years as a social outcast in her village…
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Dust of the Streets: The Journey of a Biracial Orphan of the Korean War
by Thomas Park Clement
Autobiography of a half and half Korean boy born in the middle of the Korean War found at age 5 on the streets of Seoul, post war, adopted into the U.S. who eventually grew up to be a medical device inventor with over two dozen…
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After the Morning Calm: Reflections of Korean Adoptees
Edited by Sook Wilkinson, PhD, and Nancy Fox
Korean adult adoptees speak out in this anthology. Through memories, reflections, and poetry, adoptees speak to the range of issues that accompany adoption: feelings of belonging and difference, self and other, culture and accomodation, love and loss. We now know that it is in late…
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Songs of My Families: A Thirty-Seven-Year Odyssey from Korea to America and Back
by Kelly Fern with Brad Fern
In 1971, Lee Myonghi, aged five, was taken from her family and placed in a Korean orphanage. Six months later, she was flown to the United States, where she and two other Korean girls were adopted by a Minnesota couple. They renamed her Kelly Jean.…