275 Sara Docan-Morgan, Ph.D.
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/275
AO E275 Sara Docan-Morgan
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.
You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's guest is Dr. Sara Docan-Morgan. Professor of Communication Studies and author of the brand new book In Reunion, Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Communication of Family. Sara shares some of her personal story with us and then we dig into her qualitative research from multiple Korean adoptees who have been in a relationship with their biological families for over a decade. There's a treasure trove of reunion wisdom in this episode, including a new term that so perfectly encapsulates the weight adoptees carry [00:01:00] through the search and reunion experience.
Before we get started. I just want to say, I know I'm sick. My voice is sick right here, but it's not in the interview. So if this is bugging you, it's going to go away almost immediately. And I want to invite you to join our Patreon Adoptee Community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website adopteeson.Com. Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Dr. Sara Docan-Morgan. Welcome Sara.
Sara Docan-Morgan: Thank you, Haley.
Thanks for having me.
Haley Radke: I am so excited to get to talk to you today. And I would love it if you would start by sharing some of your story with us.
Sara Docan-Morgan: Sure. I am a transnational Korean adoptee. I was adopted at four months old [00:02:00] from Korea and raised in North and South Dakota by my white adoptive parents and two older sisters who are six and ten years older than I am and not adopted, I was contacted by my birth family in 2001 and corresponded with them a little bit by letter and then email and then finally felt ready to meet them and met them in 2009 and have really developed what feels like a close relationship with them. I have three biological children and I'm a professor of communication studies and that's the Cliff Notes version but obviously there's always more to the story
Haley Radke: [00:03:00] Absolutely, there's so much more I know that you have been delving into the world of Korean adoptees for many years.
I have, I literally have your dissertation pulled up over here.
Sara Docan-Morgan: Oh my goodness.
Haley Radke: From 2008. I know you've talked to a lot of Korean adoptees. How common is it to be found?
Sara Docan-Morgan: It isn't super common, although it's probably more common than one might expect. I think that the subjectivity of social workers and adoption agencies in Korea really influences What people are going to find and whether birth families contact Adoptees or not.
So if I think about the 18 Korean adoptees that I interviewed I believe there were only one or two who [00:04:00] were contacted by their birth families first, but I think also and Shannon Bae who's a Korean adoptee researcher. She's also doing some research on the DNA databases, and so has said that's going to change the game as well, because people who are doing DNA testing, DNA matching are, perhaps, Korean American who was raised in the U. S., maybe matching with a Korean adoptee, but the Korean American who was raised in the U. S. is like, oh, I didn't know I had a third cousin who was sent for adoption. And so people tracing their way back that way. So I think the game is changing too. But yeah, I haven't spoken to that many who have been found.
Haley Radke: What was it like for you to be [00:05:00] contacted? I'm reading into this and I'm going to make a gross generalization. But it sounded to me like when you shared part of your story in the book that you were we'll say it, happy adoptee. And it seemed like quite a shock to you to be contacted in this way.
Sara Docan-Morgan: Yes, definitely shocking, definitely bewildering, that's the word I keep using to describe it because it's almost like the way that I viewed the world was turned on its head. My family, my adoptive family, just made it seem very simple like you were found on the doorstep of the police station it says birth parents unknown on your records so there's gonna be no way to find them and of course, this was all pre internet.
And so I just took [00:06:00] that at face value, and I, on one hand, don't think that they were trying to hamper my curiosity or my, thoughts about my birth family, on one hand, and on the other hand, I also think it felt pretty comfortable for them to assume that my birth family was out of the picture. And I just assumed what they had told me was the truth.
I think the other thing that I think about when I think about this time and when I think about all adoptees and reunion is that your reunion or your contact or your search or whatever always happens within the context of whatever else is going on in your life at that moment. And so when my birth family contacted me in 2001, this was right after my adoptive mom had gone into a nursing home and was, I don't know if it [00:07:00] was specifically dementia, but she wasn't quite herself, like I would have to repeat myself within the span of the same conversation and she had multiple strokes since I was 16. And so I also felt pretty protective of her.
So it's not just that I was like a happy adoptee, although I think people could definitely ascribe that label to me, but it was also that there were things going on within the context of my adoptive family to that limited my capacity to delve into another family at that time. So it was to answer your question in a succinct way.
It was shocking. It was bewildering. It was almost like being contacted from another planet. Because I had been to Korea once in 1999 with a Korean [00:08:00] adoptee group of 25 of us who went there and in 2001, I think I had the impression that okay, I've been to Korea maybe I'll go back again someday, but it really wasn't central to what I was thinking about at the time.
So then it was almost and I assumed that my birth family was unknown. So it's yeah, somebody reached through this kind of gap in reality. I'm not really into science fiction or know much about it, those kind of ideas of somebody from another, somebody found a portal, is how it felt.
Haley Radke: What did you have to do to process that in order to be open to meeting them later on?
Sara Docan-Morgan: I think that I needed time. I needed support of friendships. And I think what happened [00:09:00] for me was that studying Korean adoption gave me more exposure to various Korean adoptee stories. And I remember one interviewee from my dissertation who said something like, just because you're not just because you're searching that doesn't mean that you're not happy with your adoptive parents or that you don't love them that you can do both things. And it sounds really simplistic now looking back on it but at the time I think that she articulated something that I hadn't really given much thought to that it was really difficult to hold both of those things at the same time. And you know that makes a lot of sense giving what a lot of people are taught that you can only have one [00:10:00] air quotes, real mom and one real dad and so it did feel like you had to choose and there have been communication researchers and adoption researchers like Barbara Yngvesson who have said, there's this idea of exclusive belonging that you can only belong exclusively to one parent and even people who study, there have been people who have studied children of divorced and remarried parents who will say, oh, I felt caught between my step mom and my mom.
And I think that sentiment is pretty similar that you feel this conflicting loyalty. And so I had to work through that. I think that my mom who died in 2003, my adoptive mom, in some ways, she freed me, and not that the grief didn't almost totally consume me, [00:11:00] because it did. And my dad then died five years later, 2008, unrelated motorcycle accident.
But I think that in a lot of ways, that allowed me to navigate these relationships with more freedom. I don't recommend that as a strategy, but I think that helped me. The other thing that I think was also helpful, was that my sisters, my American sisters have been really supportive through it all and just saying, yeah, of course, you'd want to do that.
Of course you want to explore that you should. I think also for me having my partner by my side who I met in 2004 was also helpful and not that people need to have a significant other to navigate reunion. But for me, because my parents here had died, it gave me an extra anchor to hold on to if [00:12:00] things felt rocky therapy was very helpful.
So there's all these things. I think that yoga was helpful. I think that there we have to dig through the various tools in our toolbox and see what helps us to navigate whatever situation we might be facing at any given time.
Haley Radke: I appreciate you sharing those things. It is so complex to be, again, quote unquote, ready. Like, when are you really ever ready? One thing I really appreciated you pointing out in your book, In Reunion, is that several researchers have pointed out this shift. So previously, if you were an adoptee, who was searching for biological family, you were pathologized as there's something wrong with you and now there's like this shift of if you don't want to search, there's something wrong with you.
Can you speak to that a little bit? [00:13:00]
Sara Docan-Morgan: Yeah, I think that there is, because things are more open now with internet, social media, DNA testing, all of the things that there is more sense of it's available. Why wouldn't you try? And so I think that there is, and I think within the Korean adoptee community specifically, but maybe within the broader adoptee community, the sense that there is a right way to be an adoptee.
And I think it gets really bifurcated into you can be the right type of adoptee by being a perfectly devoted child to your adoptive parents, or you can be the right type of adoptee who is, searching and or in reunion and politicized and active and in those ways. I think that [00:14:00] we do a disservice to adoptees when we say this is the right way to be adopted.
It's hard enough to be adopted in the first place, and so to ascribe a certain way of enacting that identity, I think is really damaging. I also think that adoptee identity and others have said this and it's nothing new, but is something that's really fluid. And so maybe you don't want to search at, 18 years old, but maybe you do want to search when you're 40 and, given various things that happen in one's life such as death of a parent or having one's children or things like that can mark those changes, but I think that we need to honor the fluidity of people's trajectory and to be [00:15:00] okay with it being non linear and cyclical at times.
Haley Radke: I really appreciate your candor in sharing parts of your story in the book, and I'm curious if you felt this need to be a little more open because of how candid your interviewees were with you and or this. I know this push pull, right? If it's in academia, like to add your personal story into something that can be used as an academic text, I think is frowned upon even though the other thing I'll just mentioned an offhanded thing, but disclosure statements in research papers that are often put out like we see adoptees disclosing their adoptee status and then oftentimes adoptive parents are not disclosing that their adoptive [00:16:00] parents.
So anyway, that's like a mishmash, but can you talk about weaving your story in and what that was like for you? How that felt personally? Did you want to do it?
Sara Docan-Morgan: Yeah, I, so I think if we think about social scientific research that is aimed at understanding human behavior, it was historically modeled upon the scientific method, people studying bacteria in labs.
And so it was thought that if we can bring that same objectivity to studying humans, then that would be the most accurate way of predicting behaviors and certainly a lot of great research and generalizable research has come out of that and at the same time, people who were, I was just talking to my best friend about this morning that people who, developed that model were not from marginalized identities, right?
So it's like [00:17:00] historically white and male. And what comes along with that? Probably a disinclination toward vulnerability and, public sharing of struggles. So I think that there is becoming a shift where people are saying, if you're studying people, there's no way to be objective.
And I once heard a researcher say, all research is semi autobiographical. So if you study fish in a lake, that's semi autobiographical, that's gonna somehow connect to your personal story. Now, do biologists need to put disclosure statements in their research, not necessarily for me when I was thinking about the book, I was thinking a lot about what type of books do I like to read and what will be resonant to people reading [00:18:00] this book and I love memoir and I like, I've always liked essay based writing and I remember in my master's degree being told, you use some creative and descriptive language in your writing, but we don't do that. And you're very explicitly taught to not do that as a social scientist. But I think that I've seen over time more and more of the research that is social scientific or interpretivist go in that direction and certainly the type of research that I Enjoy reading has that component oftentimes and if it doesn't sometimes I go looking for it so if it's a book, I will look I will read the acknowledgments first because that gives you a little window Into how the author is coming at this topic with regard to that experience of [00:19:00] actually writing it and sharing it.
In some ways, it was great because it allowed me to or forced me to sit and process things about my reunion and my family. In other ways, it has been hard. I think that it's been hard in the sense that I just had to pause once in a while and maybe I would cry for a few minutes and then get back to it.
Or maybe I would work on something that was a little less emotional at times. And then, the fact that the book is out in the world, and that it has my story in it, when I've been doing interviews or talks, then my story inevitably becomes a part of the conversation, which I knew would happen, but it's also, I feel a little bit like I'm walking around with an open wound right now because of the book coming out.
And that's [00:20:00] scary, and it's made me feel vulnerable in a way that I don't know that I anticipated. I think, it's all a process and nothing's ever closed or finished when it comes to adoption and emotion and family.
Haley Radke: Yes. And I imagine you have a new found respect for the people you interviewed who really went there.
Sara Docan-Morgan: Yes, for sure. And yeah, being interviewed for podcasts, certainly I found that actually I feel more nervous for a podcast than I do a public talk because I feel. Yeah, in the hot seat in a different way, and I appreciate it so much because it gives me all the opportunity to articulate some things about the book and my perspectives, and at the same time, it does force you to think about things that,[00:21:00] you might not have the time or space to do when you're grading papers or planning class or picking your kids up or whatever it might be so in some ways, it's wonderful. And then in some ways it's whew, here we go again.
Haley Radke: It's totally, it's the unspoken emotional labor and okay, we're going to get to that. We're going to get to it really soon. You have this really great thing you talk about in your book. I don't want to spoil it yet.
Before we go there, I was wondering if you could talk about, I'm sure when talking about bringing about painful things. I'm sure you've reflected on this a lot and in your research coming into consciousness of really what adoption has meant to you and has, how it has impacted you. If you can share a little bit about that and also intertwined, I know you wanted to talk about your mom. And so she was diagnosed with MS when she, when you were 12, is that right?
Sara Docan-Morgan: Yes.
Haley Radke: And I'm really [00:22:00] sorry for her loss, an early passing in. And how has that impacted your adoptee journey, as seeing a mom, losing a mom sooner than you should have, and your first mom, just like all adoptees, losing your mom when you're, very young.
Sara Docan-Morgan: Yeah I think that in some ways that my mom getting diagnosed with MS when I was 12, then she had a stroke that paralyzed her completely on the left side when I was 16, which brought me into becoming a caretaker when I was a sophomore in high school. And so things like helping her get into the shower or helping her do her daily injections for her medicine or making sure that I was home so that I could help with dinner, those things became really normalized when I was really young.
And I think that [00:23:00] in some ways it made me mature quickly. I think that in some ways it was beneficial in the sense that I realized very early on that people you love can die really at any moment because we were just sitting at the dinner table when all of a sudden she put her head hand to her forehead and was like, my left side feels numb.
And then she got up to stand and she couldn't really stand and so she's put her arm around my shoulder and I walked her to the couch and she was laughing actually, she was like, oh, my gosh, what's wrong with me? And then it just became progressively more serious as the days and weeks went on.
I think that in a way, it was a gift because I don't take people for granted in the way that I might have had she been healthy my entire life. [00:24:00] So I think it made me grow up faster. And I think it also gave me that gift. And at the same time, there wasn't really ever space for me to, or at least I never felt space.
To do regular teenage things like explore who I wanted to be that was separate from them or to express my independence and rebel or any of those normal developmental things. And so I think that did keep me and you know what Susan Branco and JaeRan Kim and other colleagues have said, you know the status quo perspective of adoption.
I think that the more I studied and read about adoption in graduate school and also studied and read about race, those two things coalesced, but it was really to move me in a different place with regard to seeing adoption [00:25:00] more critically in my story as a reflection of a larger phenomenon of transnational adoption and whiteness and all of these things.
But that was painful for me, and I don't know, I think it really taught me the importance of being able to hold multiple truths, right? This idea that my adoptive family loved me, and I loved them, and it's genuine, and it's ongoing, and it shaped me in many ways. And I also think that, adoptees don't like the word lucky.
Despite everything, I feel lucky that I always knew that I was loved. And that my family really emphasized that they wanted me and that my sisters, no matter what stage of life I've been in, have always been on my team. And so I think that shift from that kind of status quo to a more conscious state when it comes to the [00:26:00] stakes of adoption was slow because of my mom's illness, but also yeah, I think it is challenging I think we when people say coming out of the fog, it sounds lovely but I think it's I think it's difficult I think it's difficult because you have to challenge everything that you've thought before about what it means to be adopted and how you came to be in your family did that answer your question?
Haley Radke: Absolutely.
Sara Docan-Morgan: Okay.
Haley Radke: Beautifully. It is this world shifting event and I find it's so fascinating to, for a lot of my listeners, if they're new here and they'll listen to an episode and they'll be like, wait, I relate to that, but also what? And they'll start listening to a bunch of episodes.
And so they come into consciousness very quickly because once you see the problems in adoption, you can't unsee it. It's, you can't, there's no going back. [00:27:00] And so personally, though. It's this very painful journey. If you've always been, enveloped in love and in the gratitude narrative and all of those things that we know the stereotypical parts of
adoption.
Sara Docan-Morgan: And I would say it's probably not unlike when people go from thinking that they're not racist to realizing that we all operate in a system of racism and that we, people who are non black benefit from this system. And so that's painful as well. So I think that anytime we're grappling with our complicity or the complicity of people we love in systems that are dehumanizing and for profit, that's going to be painful. [00:28:00] So it makes sense.
Haley Radke: Yes well said. Okay. I want to talk about your book. It is so good. Thank you. I loved it. I devoured it. I'm going to show you now how many sticky notes I have in your book. Okay.
Sara Docan-Morgan: Oh my gosh.
Haley Radke: No one else is going to be able to see this, but I just want you to.
Sara Docan-Morgan: Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. That's incredible.
Haley Radke: There's quite a few just so people know.
Sara Docan-Morgan: There's a lot.
Haley Radke: So when I interviewed Kim McKee last year, she recommended your book and was like, oh my gosh, people are really going to love it. And there's this term and I don't want to say it. But people are really going to resonate with it, and I'm not quoting her verbatim, but she really hyped this up.
And so when I opened the book, I was ready. I was like, I'm looking for this term that Kim says that Sara talks about, and it's really important. And I think it's discursive burden.
Sara Docan-Morgan: Yes, and Kim was so kind to[00:29:00] recommend my book in that way, so I so appreciated that.
Haley Radke: Oh, I'm glad she hyped it up. This totally, it lived up to the hype. Okay, Sara, so you are an expert in communication and in particularly in family communication. So can you give us a little professor talk? About what is discourse mean? And then what is discursive burden? Because man, does it nail the adoptee experience in reunion perfectly.
Sara Docan-Morgan: Oh, thank you so much. I think that when we think about communication and specifically in the US, people say, oh, communication. That's an easy major. But when we think about what is one of the hardest things that we have to navigate in our entire lives and throughout our lives, it's communication, it's relationships.
And so when we think about something, a term like discourse, which [00:30:00] you can find a million definitions for discourse, but I like to think of it as meaningful talk, and it occurs or meaningful messages, and it can occur at the cultural level, so I recently saw the movie Wonka, and I don't know if you saw it, but there's an orphan in the movie, and it's just okay she's an orphan, but then at the end of the movie, spoiler alert, she meets she finds out that her birth mother is alive and they meet each other and the music swells and the light comes up and it's this beautiful moment and her birth mother is beautiful and everything is lovely and the cultural level this is the discourse of reunion that it's a happy ending. And then, at the interpersonal level there's also discourse surrounding adoption, like people saying things like my adoptive parents are my real [00:31:00] parents. And at the same time, this contradictory discourse where people say have you met your real parents referring to the birth parents?
And so these kind of meaningful messages or messages that people exchange in the context of relationships really contribute to how we view adoption and family and reunion. And so when I think about discursive burden, I think a lot about communication. And by communication, I think of messages and meanings.
So when people think what is communication all about its messages and meanings, and these messages constitute our relationships, meaning we can't separate the messages from the relationship, the messages are the relationship. So if people say, oh, we have a close relationship. That means that the messages that are exchanged in that relationship are intimate, they're vulnerable, they're supportive listening, or if people say, I don't have a [00:32:00] relationship with my mother, usually that means they don't communicate with one another or they don't communicate meaningfully. And so when I think about discursive burden, I think of this idea that in reunion, adoptees bear a lot of responsibility, this communicative responsibility, and some of this is communicated really directly.
When people say, when birth parents, Korean birth parents have said to adoptees, hey, you should learn Korean, I'm too old to learn English, so you need to learn Korean. That's putting a responsibility, a discursive or communicative responsibility on the adopted person. There are other discursive burdens that adoptees in reunion experience, starting with, for most adoptees, if they want to find their birth family, they are the persons who have to initiate search.
But then when it comes to other types [00:33:00] of discursive burden, they might have to explain to their adoptive parents why they want to search. They might also have to reassure their adoptive parents that, hey, I'm going to search, but you are my real family. I know that one person in my study, she told that she told her adoptive parents that she was searching and her adoptive mother who they had a really close relationship burst into tears and this adoptee said, I felt terrible, right?
I felt like I was breaking my mom's heart and then she also said that her brothers who are not adopted also felt threatened by this and so she said, she had a few weeks leading up to her reunion and she said that she really felt like during that time she had to reassure all the members [00:34:00] of her adoptive family that she wasn't gonna leave them that she wasn't replacing them that she felt thankful to be in the family and she wrote handwritten notes, she wrote blogs, she communicated it verbally. And that's a lot to put on somebody who should be thinking who, in my opinion, should have the space to prepare for this event, this reunion, that is not focused on her adoptive family and she says she said she didn't. They didn't want that from her, her adoptive family didn't necessarily ask for that, directly, but she felt really compelled. So it did feel like a burden.
For the actual reunion itself there were our other discursive burden. So things like the adoptees often feel compelled to bring an appropriate gift but that requires research into what would constitute a gift other things like birth families often feel guilty so [00:35:00] adoptees often feel compelled to express forgiveness for the birth family to tell the birth family that they had a positive and happy life and oftentimes, if they're trying to maintain a relationship over the long term, a lot of the people in my study said I'm the one who has to reach out and I'm the one who has to maintain that relationship.
So all of these things, and this is always in addition to the logistical planning of a reunion, which for people who have or haven't traveled abroad, it's a lot, right? Like, how do you find a place to stay that's in the right location? How do you get time off from work? How do you afford the expenses of this trip?
Once you're in this foreign city, how do you get from one place to another? Which places should you go to? So there's all this logistical stuff. On top of the emotional stuff, which is very connected to the [00:36:00] communicative tasks that are asked. It's no wonder that adoptees often find reunion overwhelming and tiring, too.
Haley Radke: It's no wonder.
Sara Docan-Morgan: It's no wonder. It makes sense. Yeah.
Haley Radke: It totally makes sense. Just our internal processing would be enough to carry, but as you name all those things, and there's even more than that, then we have time to talk about, of course, like it makes so much sense. And we have talked our way around this in so many podcast episodes, it's all on us. This is on us. We've talked our way. And so I love that you've named this for us. And so we can say now that's the discursive burden of being an adoptee in reunion.
Sara Docan-Morgan: It is. And there's discursive burdens on a daily basis, too, for visible adoptees. Even when people say, hey, Are you adopted? Where were you born? Do you know [00:37:00] your birth family? This idea that it's, it's the discursive responsibility for an adoptee to respond and just like everyone, adoptees just want to go about their daily life, but there's always this discursive burden. And I think that other discursive burdens that are important to mention include things like if an adoptee wants to learn about their history they have to ask those questions to the birth family and if those questions don't get answered or if the answers are unclear, then it's up to the adoptee to continue asking. And I would say that. Most adoptees don't feel like they go to a reunion, they ask their questions, all of those questions get answered, and then now they know the full story and it's done.
But rather that those questions generate more questions, and the answers generate more questions, and so the continual asking to make one make sense of [00:38:00] one story is also on the adopted person in addition to the restoring adoptive families when adoptive parents come with adoptees to reunion, which can be a great thing because they can offer support and do tasks and be there for the adoptee in a lot of ways. It can be great. On the other hand, adoptees said when my adoptive mom or dad was there, I also felt like I couldn't ask as many questions or I shouldn't be as affectionate with my birth family. And so then that's another discursive burden that even in the moment they have to communicate in ways that preserve other people's feelings, even in this moment, that is and I would argue should be about their own journey and again, it's not because adoptive parents are saying you have to protect my feelings, but I think as an adoptee, you also have a really sensitive social antenna for how you're making your adoptive parents feel and so [00:39:00] that gets extra activated I think during a reunion and that's another discursive burden.
Haley Radke: Absolutely. Thank you for naming those for us. One thing I've read a lot about adoption over the years, including Korean adoption. And one thing that I was like, okay, this feels like a benefit to have been from a country who has exported a couple hundred thousand children for economic profit.
And I don't often say there's benefits to adopt. But because Korea has, this culture of transnational adoption, it also has some adoption reunion rituals that you name, and I was like, this is amazing that going into reunion, you can assume that [00:40:00] one or a few of these rituals will be taking place.
And I don't know, what do you think about that? Do you think that's a benefit? And can you talk a little bit about those? Because I was unaware, really, they're very common these few things.
Sara Docan-Morgan: Yes, I think that the benefit is due to the strength and resilience of the adoptee community and their willingness to tell their stories and their bravery and courage in reuniting and in going back to Korea.
And I think especially the early wave of adoptees who went back in the 80s and 90s before there were trans, electronic translators or phones or they were using paper maps to navigate and English was much less prominent. So I think we owe a lot to adoptees who have been willing to tell their [00:41:00] stories, my participants included. When we think about rituals, we think of birth mothers wanting to hand feed their child or wanting to sleep together. These aren't necessarily rituals that are common in Western countries. Having some touch point for adoptees so that when these kind of things happen, perhaps in their own reunion, that they aren't totally taken off guard.
I think even some things like visiting graves and knowing that might be a common thing for someone to do during reunion can also be helpful because again reunion is an inherently uncertain experience by nature. It is uncertain and out of one's control and if we think of [00:42:00] experiences that adult Westerners don't like, they don't like uncertainty and they don't like not being in control.
And if we think about reunion, it's like choosing these circumstances. And my goal with the book is to provide a little bit of a resource so people feel a little less uncertain and it's possible that some of these things may happen. It's certain that not all of these things will happen, but just a little bit of predictability I'm hoping will ease that experience for people.
Haley Radke: Even something you mentioned before exchanging gifts and all of those things I thought, oh my, I would never have thought of. I was really young when my first reunion, and I was in my early 20s, and I never would have thought of oh, bringing something, but my reunion with my birth mother was like, very fast.[00:43:00] We met, I think, within a day or two of an email connection.
Sara Docan-Morgan: So fast.
Haley Radke: Yeah. So fast. So yes, I absolutely want to recommend people pick this book up. So for Korean adoptees in particular, it will be so valuable and helpful. You have stories from your participants of positive and challenging situations they faced in reunion.
And I love that you have interviewed these folks. All these folks have had been in a relationship with their Korean families for at least 10 years or more. So this is not just the the first meeting. This is like, how have you or lack of, maintained a relationship with these folks from a distance. I know some people you included, right?
I've lived in Korea for a little bit and come back and forth and those kind of things. It is just so valuable, especially for Korean adoptees. But [00:44:00] myself, I don't have that experience. I thought you really beautifully laid out so many different things to watch for in reunion. Even this little note I have.
You wrote, before the reunion, I had told myself to avoid having unrealistic expectations of my birth family, but I hadn't considered my expectations of myself. Just those things when you're going into the meeting, like the first meeting and like you're picturing everybody else, but you don't think about, oh my gosh, what is my face gonna look like? Am I gonna cry? What's the, all of those pieces?
Sara Docan-Morgan: Definitely, and there were several people who said, I thought I was going to cry, but I didn't cry, and I think that really speaks to that cultural discourse of reunion that, oh, it's supposed to be this heartfelt, emotional meeting, and then when people don't experience that emotion themselves, then they feel like maybe something is wrong with me or something's wrong with the reunion and rather to say [00:45:00] this is, and maybe not even having realized that they had that expectation going into it.
So tempering one's own expectations and saying this might happen, this might not happen for my own personal, reaction to what's happening and all of it is okay, all of it's okay.
Haley Radke: You have a whole chapter on your concluding recommendations for transnational adoptees. And you have multiple pieces of advice.
And I think it's all so helpful. I really think, I took away a lot from those things too. I really think it'll be super helpful for folks. And I mentioned before, it's academic, but it absolutely doesn't read that way. It is such an easy read, and I took a ton of notes. And I thought, God, this is one of those books where I wish I [00:46:00] had that when I was going in.
I wish my eyes could be open. And and so I'm so glad that you And this is so many years of work, Sara. Oh my gosh.
Sara Docan-Morgan: Yeah.
Haley Radke: When did you start your interviews? 2010?
Sara Docan-Morgan: 2010, yeah. I started them when I had, when my twins were about five months old, and so now they're 13 and a half. So a long time, I am just so thankful that people wanted to be interviewed again, 10 years later, and I had written a number of academic articles based on those initial interviews.
But when I wrote the book, I took an intentional turn away from not entirely away, but to some extent writing for an academic audience because I really want this book. I wrote it for Korean [00:47:00] adoptees. I didn't write it for journal editors. And so I want it to be useful and helpful. And even if somebody has chosen not to reunite or chosen to reunite and then not continue that relationship, to give them insight onto the complexity of family.
And I think that's part of the message of the book, too, is that, yes, it's about reunion, but also family is a complicated thing for us to define and that we have some agency in how we define it and enact it.
Haley Radke: I love that. I have. You wrote a chapter in a book a couple years ago that was called Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Discursive Burden of Establishing Individual and Family Identity.
And so now to have it really fleshed out and you explained it so well, I [00:48:00] appreciate you doing that on the show for folks. But In Reunion, Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Communication of Family. Oh my gosh, Sara, what a treasure. Love it. I know folks will pick it up. So excited for them to have it in their hands.
What did you want to recommend to us today?
Sara Docan-Morgan: As I had a really hard time recommending, I had a hard time, not because there weren't things that I wanted to recommend, but because I was having difficulty narrowing it down. The first piece I'd like to recommend is the movie Resilience. And this was directed by Tammy Chu, a Korean adoptee filmmaker.
It follows the story of Brent Beesley, who is a Korean adoptee in his 30s, who was raised in South Dakota, as he reunites with his birth mother and some extended family in Korea. And what I like about Resilience, [00:49:00] And also the other resource that I'm going to recommend is that it really speaks to the politics of Korean adoption, Korean transnational adoption, Resilience does, because it tells really intimately the story of Brent's birth mother, Myoung-ja, and the circumstances that led to her losing him and the pain that she has experienced. So it really humanizes her. It also really beautifully and painfully evidences their disconnect. That she just wants to love him and take care of him and be a mother to him. And he articulates things like, we're basically strangers to each other and he feels bad because he knows how much she wants to mother him. He doesn't know how to let her [00:50:00] do that and in addition, as the film goes on, it also shows that Brent is also juggling fatherhood in the US and a marriage relationship that is unstable and aging parents and so really displaying the fact that, our life context really influences how engaged we can be in our reunion relationship. So it's a really beautiful film. It's a sad film. It's an, it's a profound film. I wish it were more widely accessible, but if people have access to Canopy through their public library or their school or university library, they should be able to request it and be able to watch it.
Haley Radke: Amazing. Thank you. I know you have one other thing that we can get for sure.
Sara Docan-Morgan: Okay. Yes. I also want to recommend All You Can Ever Know by Nicole [00:51:00] Chung, and I'm sure a lot of your listeners have read it. Again, even though Nicole was born to Korean parents who are living in the U. S. at the time, but I really liked about her story is how she really navigated the reunion on her own terms that she developed a really loving relationship with her Korean sister, but she really because of some of the family history that she learned of, she really kept her birth father, but especially her birth mother at a distance that felt comfortable to her, but also wrestled with those decisions too and I think that she really, it's Nicole Chung she's a beautiful writer, but she really articulates some of those push pull emotions and phenomena and a really beautiful way that really will resonate with anybody [00:52:00] who is in reunion. And that's one thing that I think is important to know is that a lot of the people in my study found that their most meaningful connection and relationship was with a birth sibling and not necessarily a birth parent.
And so when we think about birth family reunion, oftentimes people focus on the birth mother the most, the birth father, maybe secondarily, but it's really seems like the siblings who are able to identify with adoptees more and maintain relationships and give insight into the family history that maybe the birth parents are unable or unwilling to do and that's certainly the case for Nicole as well. I want people to also think of reunion as just, as something that is beyond just the birth parents.
Haley Radke: Yes. I love that book too. Great [00:53:00] recommendation. Thank you so much, Sara, for sharing with us, teaching us a whole bunch today. I really appreciate it.
Where can people grab In Reunion and follow you online?
Sara Docan-Morgan: They can order from Temple University Press or wherever they buy their books. They can follow me online @in.Reunion on Instagram. And that's where I usually post events and other things. I'm not a super active social media person, but I will try to keep that updated.
So and thank you so much for having me and for the work that you do with facilitating all of these meaningful conversations. It's really a gift to everybody and speaks to your ability to ask good questions. So thank you.
Haley Radke: Thank you so much. Friend. Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again soon.[00:54:00]
