Hi! Welcome ^^
(Inter)National Adoptee Awareness Month 2025
With NAAM ending, what do you hope to see next?
November 30
I hope we will find ways to move forward, understanding we each have different histories, opinions, feelings, and none of these differences need be in opposition to each other.
I hope we will not judge others - in our community or not - for what they do not yet know and have not yet experienced, remembering for ourselves those tender first moments of uncovering each new stone of truth.
I hope we will take care of ourselves, putting ourselves first with boundaries, settling the restlessness, tapping the brakes on any self-imposed urgency, and being careful not to take on too much of what others cannot hold themselves.
I hope we will recognize and honor the giants in our community who have made discoveries and provided resources for all of us. Let’s hold the research, the art, the expressions, and the words the way they were intended, taking our time to absorb everything at our own pace, making use of what informs our own stories, and setting aside what doesn’t in a gentle way, passing it along to others who it might serve better.
I hope we will not perpetuate behaviors and cycles that impede on our progress as individuals and as a whole by swinging too far in opposite directions. Let’s stay nimble, open, and compassionate in our hearts and minds, holding each of our experiences and stories with compassionate hearts and actions.
I hope we know the community is here for us when we need it, and may only take each of us so far. And that’s okay.
I hope our governments and those who say they serve us will learn from the past, take care of us and our stories for the future, and operate openly, honestly, with transparency, and integrity.
I hope - for myself - that I will never compromise myself for anyone or anything ever again. That I will always do the next right, difficult thing for my one precious life. I hope I will stay balanced, honest, and cultivate relationships with people who challenge, inspire, and support me.
If you could explain adoption in one feeling, what would ibe?
November 27 - 29
Yearning.
What do you wish your adoptive parents (or others) understood better about your experience?
If I had any sense what I was getting myself into when I signed up for a motherland tour to Korea that included assistance on a birth family search…
It’s easy to look back now and tell myself what I could have done to prepare.
If only…
… I would have…
… then I could have avoided… and this wouldn’t have happened… and I could have…
If only… If only…
The reality is, if someone had said: “Jenna, your world, and outlook, and the very core of who you “know” you are is about to change. Forever. You’d better tell your loved ones to brace themselves. This will impact them, too.”
Ha! I mean, that’s a pretty lofty and dramatic statement.
Would I have listened? Would I have been able to grasp the concept of a reality that I could not have fathomed, let alone understood how to pass along in order to prepare those closest to me?
Truthfully, nothing could have prepared me. Or them. I wasn’t ready to hear or absorb the realities awaiting me on a journey I didn’t know I was starting.
Hang in there with me as I unpack this:
One major piece of understanding my Self after realizing adoption actually has - and does - play a role in my life, has been recognizing my own coping skills: ones that used to serve me but now only stand in the way of a personal freedom to live life fully. Now, I seek to embrace every day as it comes rather than brace myself in efforts to fend off possible threats, which used to look like this:
Plan. Stay busy. Overexplain. Think ahead and anticipate others’ needs. Do it efficiently. Do it without giving it another thought, even if it means doing it at the expense of your own happiness or peace. Seek external validation. Work hard for approval. If you receive it, you’ll find the much-anticipated approval of yourself. Heh.
I spent most of my life and much of my daily energy putting up barriers to protect myself again any threat to the emotional stability I’d manufactured and the impressive, confident exterior meant to safeguard me from every single thing that could come along and put a dent in that carefully curated and shiny armor… I believed the lie: the lie that said if I planned enough, those around me could never be hurt and neither could I.
So. To admit to others that I might need help. That I didn’t, in fact, have it all “together.” That parts of my Self were falling apart, ugly, or imperfect. That parts of THEIR worlds and realities and what they’d always told themselves about me would also change. That no amount of planning, overexplaining, or guidebooks could have prepared any of us. That the validation and approval I’d been seeking my entire life was not, in fact, where I should have been putting my energy…
If I’d known any of this ahead of time, would I have had the courage to tell them, especially when I was (and am) still figuring it out, especially when I had (and have) the most to lose with them, especially when the relationship(s) I had with my partner, parents, and closest friends was built on years of me believing one thing, when many other things were true?
What I wish my parents and others in my life understood about me is that parts of my Self were hidden - even from me - for a very long time. That as I’ve discovered them, I spent too much time attempting to hold on to the former me, scrambling to keep control of a train about to go off the rails, overcompensating in order to figure it all out for my self first, to save them from any hurt or confusion.
It was bad enough that I was going through something I couldn’t understand myself. It wouldn’t have helped to allow others to go through it, too.
And as a result, we were all blindsided.
I didn’t bring those closest with me along on the journey because I didn’t understand the journey, myself. As I write this now, it’s not blame I mean to place on past Jenna. She was doing the best she could. I write this to sort out some of those pieces that were lost along the way.
As I reflect now, for the future, I wish there was an understanding that, though my life looks different now, and I’m not the same person I was before, my heart still yearns for the same things: to be understood, accepted, and loved. That:
me accepting new realities doesn’t mean I am dismissive of the ones that built my life.
a future with new people, in different locations, with new beliefs and outlooks doesn’t mean the old ones are any less valid or meaningful. I honor them still.
accepting new truths isn’t personal, an indictment of the past, or a questioning of anyone’s love or intentions.
there are factors and forces that were out of everyone’s control that led to an impact on all of us.
all of us have had to contend with hard things. That we’re not in opposition to each other when we’re dealing with those hard things.
the fear of us tackling them together only hinders our ability to move forward as individuals.
my heart is big enough to accept and take in many people, places, and possibilities, because I have the capacity to embrace a future with everything and everyone from my past and present.
I want everyone who is willing to understand, accept, and love me to be here beside me on my journey.
That I want to understand, accept, and love them, too.
And.
The people on this journey must be brave enough to challenge their own beliefs and assumptions, doing the work to evolve and be open to new information that may go in the face of what they believed before. I wish people in my life would accept all of the parts of the girl from their past and the woman in front of them.
This means accepting all of her pieces: The pretty ones. The ugly ones. The ones that fell apart. The ones that need to be held and supported as she spends the rest of her life figuring out how the pieces go back together.
I wish they understood that the energy I used to spend making everyone else happy has been turned inward, and that I’m living daily where the most important person in my life is me. That I no longer want to sacrifice her for the sake of others. Because if I do, I can’t be the best mom, partner, daughter, or friend to those I love the most.
If only… I would have… I wish…
… And we may have still been in the same place.
I went from believing I knew everything to understanding I know nothing at all. Rebuilding has meant recognizing the farse of thinking I had everything under control. That planning would eliminate hurt or uncertainty.
The truth is, the only thing we have control over is our Selves. If we can ever hope to truly understand one another and be close, vulnerable with our truths, and accepting of each other’s, we all have to do the hard work. I’ve been doing my best to do mine.
I wish they understood that, in the end, I had to begin the very difficult process of understanding myself, first.
November 24 - 26
If you’ve searched or thought about searching for birth family, what emotions came with that?
Recently, someone asked about my decision to maintain and cultivate a relationship with my birth family.
… It had never once occurred to me that not doing so was ever an option.
When I received a phone call one winter evening to inform me a.) I have a birth father b.) The information to find him has always been available, had I only known to ask, and c.) He probably wanted to meet me…
… the foundation of my world crumbled into pieces, some of which I’ll never find again.
I remember asking: “I’ll be in Korea in 4 months. Is that enough time to find him and make arrangements for us to meet?”
It was.
Two weeks later, an email arrived with a translated letter and two ID pictures with his face.
I laid on the couch with the phone on my chest, unable to move. My heart thumped quickly in my ears and my breath stopped. The world was quiet and still. My body felt the weight of the moment: those seconds prior to me seeing the face of a birth parent, something I never sought out, never thought was possible, and was suddenly at my fingertips.
Forever more, there will be the time before and the time after that moment.
When we met, we wore masks to cover our noses and our mouths, but it’s the shape and expression of our eyes that match one another. The video someone took of us shows how we looked at one another, each of us nodding in wordless recognition and acceptance before being distracted by someone interrupting the moment.
Mine is a rare story of unexpected discovery, connection, and finding answers. There’s been a lot of luck and circumstances involved like having a liberal, progressive Korean family on both sides who was open to finding and knowing a child - now an adult - embraced and welcomed as if she’s always belonged. Mine is not a story of kidnapping or deception, but one of sadness and misunderstandings, heartache, and eventually opportunity and now, all the time in the world to rebuild.
I once asked a fellow adoptee - one who has been wondering and searching her whole life - if it was better or easier to have been on this journey forever, and not blindsided when information about biological family came her way at middle age.
Not easier. Not better. Just a different kind of struggle, she said.
I’ve carried those words with me ever since. Our stories are not ones that are necessarily better, or easier, or more difficult.
Our stories are ones of straddling the line of lives we’ll always wonder about, possibilities that we can only imagine, and alternatives we can never quite grasp.
I only speak from my own experience: having information about my story dropped into my lap - over and over and over again - sounds like luck and good fortune. It is.
And I’ve experienced every emotion imaginable, including the ones previously buried beneath the shadows. The ugly ones I struggle with daily. It’s only now that the shattered pieces of the foundation, along with the bits of brittle fragments that have fallen from the sky, are coming together, forming a shape and a future that I choose. In discovering my family, I lost myself, but eventually found my emotions and my voice. Eventually, perhaps I’ll even find my own way.
November 21 - 23
November 18 - 20
What’s something you’ve lost through adoption?
I’ll never know the extent of what I lost due to adoption.
I know I lost relationships with my Korean family members that will never be possible to fully develop because of time, language, and circumstances now beyond our control.
But had I not been adopted, my brother and my sister may never have been born and their lives, and the people they love may never have come to be.
I know I lost language. The ability to speak and write and express myself in Korean as a native speaker will never be a reality for me.
But had I not been adopted, I would likely never have known English, a language I find to be natural and lovely to craft and build thoughts, emotions, and communications to others.
I know I lost a chance to have a childhood and young adulthood in Korea, playing Korean games, knowing this culture’s music, food, and everyday customs in an inherent way, instead of having to learn them now as an adult.
But had I not been adopted, I wouldn’t have the memories, skills and personality building blocks, education, relationships, and personal history in America, where I learned to recognize the names of flowers, play instruments, go to camps and proms, know 90s grunge, and New York style pizza and Philadelphia Italian hoagies.
Something someone said to me once has stuck with me throughout this journey. The alternative would have been different, but it doesn’t mean it would have been better.
Loss implies sorrow. Perhaps when we lose something, in looking for it, we can weigh the loss with what also has been gained, a tedious and temperamental scale to balance, for sure.
Through adoption I lost an entire life. Now, I can move forward understanding what those losses mean to me, I can pick and choose what I focus on to regain, and I can explore with those closest to me how those losses can also be seen as opportunities, advantages, and gains.
November 15 - 17
Write about a time someone’s comment about adoption stuck with you (positive or negative)
When I was about 14 or 15, I worked at an upscale restaurant just down the road from my home. In a community where nothing and no one was close, the Cascade Lodge was actually convenient, within a 10-minute drive. After a long week of work himself, my dad picked me up well after midnight each Saturday so that I could make $5.15 an hour under the table being a bus girl. We wore black skirts, tights, shoes, and a white, button-down shirt with little back bowties.
The servers were generally kind. My friends and I would sneak dinner rolls from the warmer, dipping it into the leftover mustard and garlic flambé sauce from the steaks that were cooked at the sides of people’s tables on carts wheeled over by older high schoolers making not much more than us, but at least getting tipped.
One day, one of the younger servers, a blonde gal named Bridgette, was chatting with me as I rolled up silverware in cloth napkins. She was asking the typical questions that I was used to and didn’t particularly mind.
“Wow, you were adopted. How cool. From where?"… “North or south?” …. “When did you know?”
“Well,” this question always amused me. “I’ve always known. My parents are white.”
Well-rehearsed, I learned early which answers to give that made the other person feel at ease and comfortable with the Asian girl they were asking questions to.
But my usual, canned response didn’t deter Bridgette.
“But,” she replied with tact and reason in her tone. “They could have told you that you were a birth defect.”
Guffawing under my breath, I looked up and saw in her face that she was serious. And though my mom and I laughed about her comment and ignorance for years to come, it signaled to me another moment when the world was telling me I was different, that my face and my existence were something that needed to be explained, and therefore, I was perhaps not someone who should be entirely accepted. Or even loved.
November 12 - 14
What’s something non-adopted people often misunderstand about adoption?
There are a whole lot of people doing a heck of a lot of work related to adoption education, advocacy work, lobbying for legal changes, education, therapy, research, community-building, coaching, support, systemic and systematic changes, storytelling, and identity development modeling.
Here’s what I want everyone to know about adoption:
It’s so much more complicated than you could even imagine.
There is more to someone’s story than what you saw on that TV show or heard from your neighbor’s friend’s cousin.
There are adoptees walking among you who have never shared their story, because it’s not a topic they think about.
There are adoptees you work with who had to spend extra time reaching the same place because they didn’t have a supportive foundation to get them financial support for higher education, something so many of us take for granted or hardly give a second thought.
There are adoptees who are former foster care youth. Who have been re-homed. Who had abusive adoptive families or abusive birth families, and childhoods rooted in family separation.
There are adoptees who had and continue to have the best relationship with their adoptive families (who they simply call “mom and dad”), period. And their childhoods were happy ones. And their lives are full, accomplished, and rewarding.
There are adoptees who can’t figure out why they have such low self-worth or an ability to be in a healthy relationship, who spent their lives people-pleasing attempting to prove themselves and why they belong to be in a family who doesn’t look like them.
… All of this - and so much more - in a society that often vilifies birth mothers, makes adoptees the butt of the joke, shows us as an emotionally unhinged menace, the passive point in a storyline, and uses “orphans” as an origin story to create immediate sympathy for a main character. (Look no further than Disney for examples.)
You don’t have to memorize any of this.
I write all of it to make a point:
Non-adopted folks: when you hear that someone is adopted, all you have to do is think, “Ahh. I bet there’s a lot to that story.”
That’s it. For me, if we can move the needle that much in my lifetime, all of the work will have been worth it.
November 9 - 11
Describe the word “family” from your perspective
In Korea, titles are important. Your relationship to someone is defined almost immediately based on age and where you rank in someone’s orbit (teacher, boss, elder… student, employee, youth). When you’re especially close to someone, you refer to them as “older sister” or “older brother,” indicating a type of kinships based on respect, a feeling of adoration, a term of endearment - a declaration within a typical title devoted to “Family” worked into a culture that is so rigid in its view of bloodlines and family registers.
It’s a curious thing.
When I met my Korean family, I was meeting strangers even though we were related by blood. I have relatives in the States I have known my entire life who I will likely never speak to again. I have siblings in two countries I don’t interact with often, but for different reasons.
There are expectations associated with family that we must each contend with in our own way, especially as our families grow and change. People are born. People die. We go through legal systems to combine or break ties with them. All the while we must work to understand what each relationship in our lives means to us, regardless of formal title, government form, personal or societal expectation.
I do look at family as the people who are related to me in some form or fashion - through blood, history, or legal ties.
But anyone can be family. A title alone doesn’t give you full access to my heart and my time, especially if either or both are not reciprocated in meaningful ways.
Over the years, as my family has grown, I’ve begun to shift my thinking to prioritize individuals who show a reciprocation of unconditional love and support, staying alongside me on the journey, and demonstrating ways to prioritize me in meaningful ways. These factors are more important to me than history, titles, or expectations.
It means my “family” continues to grow - now with sisters, brothers, and cousins who look out for me all over the world.
This is the type of kinship I want in my life. Other qualifications will no longer automatically get you in the door or ticket to my time, energy, or heart.
November 6 - 8
What’s a question people ask you about adoption that bothers you?
I’ve spent much of my life unbothered by questions because to me, questions are a love language. They show interest, curiosity, and I’m wired to accept them as well-intentioned (read: I’m a classic people-pleaser).
Mostly, as a person who has a tendency to crave attention and to be center stage - I’ve never minded being the perceived authority on something.
This is not a fun thing to acknowledge about myself, but there it is.
What bothers me most about questions now is my inability to sum up all of the nuances and gray areas, binary opinions and perspectives (plus the sliding scale of everything in between), historical context, cultural impacts, and the 400+ stories I’ve listened to from adoptees over the past 4 years.
Instead, I have to offer tidy, one-sentence answers. At most, I get a paragraph of time’s worth before someone' loses interest, because they don’t really want to hear about how international adoption was rooted in war, racism, extreme poverty, patriarchal practices, and governments who were complicit.
They don’t want to try and understand the both/and of having a loving family and happy childhood and grappling daily with the grief and longing I feel for the Korean life I could have had… that acknowledging both in an equal way make my heart and head feel heavy.
… That I question my life and the decisions I made every day as a result of not growing up with an understanding of how my race, origin story, attachment wounds, and identity shaped my insecurities and resulting impulses and decisions: Was it too soon, was I too late, did I mess it all up? How can I move forward, how do I honor the past, how has this impacted my kids? Can my four parents love me for who I am, where I am going, and the decisions I will make? Will I ever find true peace? Can I ever accept real love, will I ever stop feeling in-between?
It’s not the questions that people ask. It’s the questions I now ask myself and my inability to answer them in a way that brings honor to my life and the lives of everyone who’s been impacted. Remember that people-pleasing thing I mentioned? There’s a weight of always thinking about my two families, my friends and their families, and cultures, systems, and people all over the world who, for the past 70 years, who have been impacted.
It’s not the questions that bother me. It’s the answers people aren’t ready or willing to hear.
November 3 - 5
Describe something ordinary (a holiday, birthday, school event) that felt different because you were adopted.
My parents did a good job at making me feel grounded when I was a growing up.
You’re our daughter. We love you. The end.
The thing is, though I wasn’t consciously considering it when I was a child, other people I knew didn’t have to be given an explanation for their existence. They didn’t have to have their mom put a protective arm around them while their mom said with a firm voice, “This is my daughter,” after a stranger demanded “where she got an Asian baby.”
When your world is small and safe, and it’s all you know, you don’t understand when something is unusual compared to other peoples’ experiences.
You don’t understand how many hours you spend explaining your face, your name, and why you don’t look like your family… All of that feels… Ordinary.
Unbeknownst to me - or perhaps I became very skilled at ignoring it - people who didn’t know me thought I was unusual.
For decades, ordinary was a feeling I was simultaneously afraid to face, rejected in order to feel unique and therefore special, and longed for to seek acceptance… until the day everything became flipped on its head and I began to see how my ordinary was something that made me extraordinary… With all of its challenges, corners to explore, assumptions to unpack, and mirrors I’d been avoiding my entire life.
I suppose that it’s safe to say, for my entire life, every day was ordinary. Until the day I realized just how un-ordinary it was.
November 1 - 2
Introduce yourself
My name is Jenna Lee Kim.
I reclaimed a lot of things these past few years including parts of my name, two birthdays, a new relationship status, and the fact that I am a daughter to two sets of parents. This is all within the past 3ish years... In 2022 my life began to slowly unravel after unexpectedly discovering information about my birth father... Meeting him... Moving to Korea with my young family... Finding myself in a situation to move out on my own, in a foreign country...
You get it. It hasn't been easy.
And it's led me to the best possible place, figuratively and literally.
I live on Jeju Island in Korea. It's pretty darn good. It's forced me to be quiet. Still. Present. And to appreciate so many things.
I'm a mom, foodie, writer, former mayor and college administrator, in dual reunion (I also met my birth mother), struggling daily to make conversation in Korean, living in the gray while a recovering perfectionist, and someone who is learning to love herself for the first time. I love meeting adoptees. I've made a side hustle of it here on Jeju.
My personal mission is simple: no one travels this journey alone.
Follow me this month during #NAAM205. I have a guest writer every Monday (or Tuesday), Instagram lives every week with my guest writers, a book club to join, and my friend @deepsouthkorean is hosting a Korean Drunk History night during Korea standard Time this coming Saturday, November 8th.
Email me for details on any of this: jenna.tae.hee.kim@gmail.com
I'm happy you're here.