Outsiders Within is a volume of essays, fiction, poetry, and art by transracially adopted writers from around the world who tackle difficult questions about how to survive the racist and ethnocentric worlds they inhabit. In this episode, Sun Yung Shin, Shannon Gibney, and JaeRan Kim talk about what society often gets wrong about adoption.
Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
I had just thought of myself as a freak in the good and the bad way. So even the language of adoptee was revolutionary for me.
JaeRan Kim:The whole idea about forming families or building families or whatever euphemism you wanna use, we're really, really good at creating all these different words or concepts in order to distance ourselves from the very kind of capitalist way that our society has now kind of governed family making.
Sun Yung Shin:No one but adoptees and people who've been donor reproduced by these third and fourth party technologies can address really the existential anguish of being produced as a human being this way. Hi. I'm Sunyang Shin. I'm one of the co editors of Outsiders Within, writing on transracial adoption along with Jane Jung Trnka and Julia Chinyere Opara. And the uni University of Minnesota Press has rereleased our book with a new preface.
Sun Yung Shin:And I am here with two of the contributors, Shannon Gibney and Jae Ron Kim. I am going to read their bios, and they're gonna introduce themselves and read a little bit from their pieces in the book, and then we're gonna have a conversation. So Shannon Gibney is an educator and activist and the author of See No Color and Dream Country, young adult novels that won Minnesota Book Awards. She is faculty in English at Minneapolis College where she teaches writing. A Bush artist and McKnight writing fellow, her new novel, Botched forthcoming, explores themes of transracial adoption through speculative memoir.
Sun Yung Shin:She co edited with Kao Kalia Yang, What God is Honored Here? Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss by and for Native Women and Women of Color, which was published by the University of Minnesota Press. Jae Ron Kim is assistant professor at University of Washington, Tacoma in the School of Social Work and Criminal Justice. Her research focuses on the intersection of adoption and disabilities, particularly exploring disability, race, and transnational experiences of post adoption stability. Her blog, Harlow's Monkey, is one of the longest running transracial adoption blogs in The United States.
Sun Yung Shin:Welcome, Shannon and Jayron, and thank you so much for being in this conversation with me for the press. And we'd love to hear you introduce yourself and read a little bit from your piece. And, Shannon, if you don't mind going first, that would be greatly appreciated.
Shannon Gibney:Well, it's wonderful to be here reading and revisiting Outsiders Within, which was such a seminal text, not just in its release initially, but also just in the the whole process of, getting it together. Both of you, Sun Young and Jay Ran, are my dear friends, and colleagues for many years. So it's just always a pleasure to be able to, connect with you about these issues that continue to be so relevant in our lives and work. And I just also wanna say that, you know, my piece, and I'm gonna read a little bit from hunger, was my first piece that was published in a book. That's no small thing.
Shannon Gibney:The first, version of outsiders was in, 02/2006, So that's fifteen years ago. I was a wee 31 year old, you know, just, again, to be in a project in a volume that was doing so much work in terms of community building amongst transracial adoptees and also interrupting dominant adoption discourses was really powerful for me. I'm just gonna always be so thankful for that opportunity. Hunger. My brother Ben was fighting.
Shannon Gibney:He was white, and he was fighting to eat a steamed asparagus and garlic mashed potatoes. There was something in his throat. There was something no one could see that was growing in his larynx. He sat at the dinner table and bowed his head while everyone else prayed. He couldn't eat because there was something in the way, and he was my little brother who was white when I was black, who had once kicked in a wall because I wouldn't shut up.
Shannon Gibney:Lately, I've been lying awake mornings imagining the meaty red contours of Ben's throat. The way it must swell from all those things, he never said. I've watched him gag when he swallowed. I've seen him turn away from me after I told him I could no longer stay at my parents' house. This is the whole secret I'm telling.
Shannon Gibney:My parents are white, and they locked me in my room because I'm black and crazy, and that's not changing. My little brother sat outside the door that night shaking because nothing had changed. When he heard me scream, he swallowed, but he was still hungry. You have to decide to be in this family, my my father told me, his solid hips blocking the door. You can't just stop speaking to your brother because of words.
Shannon Gibney:He was talking about my older brother, John, the one who can eat whatever he wants, the one who has married a white woman and has a white baby and a white five year old, the one who makes a hundred and $20,000 a year and told me to stop telling his white five year old about how I was black and how I was adopted. When I was six, John would read me any book I wanted and then sit patiently while my brow furrowed, and I tried to make some kind of sense out of the characters on the page. No. That's hunger, he would tell me. Listen to how it sounds.
Shannon Gibney:Hear it in your mouth before you say it. I wanted to tell my father that Don was the one who had taught me the weight of words in the first place, how they can corrupt silence and therefore to use the landscape of the intangible. And I'll stop there. Thank you.
Sun Yung Shin:Thank you, Shannon. My god. Love this piece so much. Jaron.
JaeRan Kim:Okay. My my piece is quite a bit longer than Shannon's, so I'm going to read a couple of excerpts from it. I'm going to start with the introduction. My piece is called, Scattered Seeds, the Christian influence on Korean adoption. The statue of Mary rises from the ground.
JaeRan Kim:Her arms stretched out, palms upward in prayer. The deep folds of her long gray robes melt into the foliage of a half dead winter garden. It is nearly the March and still jacket chilly. The whole landscape before me seems washed in sepia. The sky and Mary are cold and gray.
JaeRan Kim:The brittle fallen leaves from last autumn gather at Mary's feet and parched brown grass licks up to the garden stone border. The church building surround me in a half circle. Directly behind Mary is the day care that used to be backpack cap, white lily. Once it was an orphanage, my orphanage. Under the blank gaze of Mary, I arrived as a 14 old infant.
JaeRan Kim:One of six kids abandoned that day passed from a city official at Daegu City Hall into the waiting arms of a nun. Once I was Catholic and like all the babies and children of Daegu who came through the doors of White Lily, I baptized myself with holy tears and became a sacrificial lamb of God and an American family. Daegu is a large urban center in the middle of the country, bereft of the southern coastal charm of Busan and the cosmopolitan energy of Seoul. This third largest city in South Korea spreads into suburbs. The night before, I had traveled through the city over hills, and I saw the mountains past the horizon line of modern office buildings and apartments.
JaeRan Kim:Still, to me, they goo seems flat and industrial. I've come to this garden and to the statue to exhale. I have just asked the nun for my file. She looks me up in her computer and prints out a document. It is the same one I already possess, nearly blank.
JaeRan Kim:Sorry. There's no more information, she tells me. Nothing else I can do. We pass by the rows of little red sneakers and black Mary Janes, walk past the drawings on the wall. I pictured the garden in bloom and wonder if white lilies are among those flowers that ornament Mary's robes throughout the spring and summer.
JaeRan Kim:I have never been a good sleeper. My father used to joke that I was still on Korea time because even as a child, I was up late at night unable to sleep. The plane ride home from Korea is no exception. Korean air is much more comfortable than any US airline I've ever traveled on. The meals are tastier and the flight attendants don't look down their noses at you.
JaeRan Kim:Yet I'm almost in shock. A combination of time differences, dry cabin air, and a body completely fatigued but unable to shut down. And I'm unable to read something that usually relaxes me and I barely slept on previous night. My eyes are closed but sleeping is not an option. Through the low level background noise of the airplane, the conversations and flight attendants wishing past, I hear a baby crying and I twist my neck to see where the sound is coming from.
JaeRan Kim:A woman is walking up and down the aisle bouncing a six month old girl at her shoulder. A white woman, a Korean baby. She lives 20 miles from me in Minneapolis. This is her second child from Korea. My friend eagerly fusses over the plump little girl and asks to hold her.
JaeRan Kim:She's lucky to have you, my friend, tells the mother whose eyes moisten. God has been good to us, the mother replies. We're lucky to have her.
Sun Yung Shin:My god. I mean, the presence of Christianity, you know, in all of our stories and across this the development of the industry in terms of transnational adoption starting most dominantly with Korean adoption. Yeah. Just oh my gosh. It really, brings me back to those years of 02/2004, '2 thousand '5.
Sun Yung Shin:I thought I would read a little bit from our new preface, and then I want to ask you a couple of questions. And a lot of the preface is about kind of what we what we missed or some of the things that have happened since and some of the ways in which our anthology doesn't do enough or, you know, what else needs to be what is next? What else needs to be done? So this is cowritten by Julia, Jane, and me for this edition. We came together to dream outsiders within into being over fifteen years ago in response to the infantilization and silencing of transracial adoptees.
Sun Yung Shin:We wanted to rewrite dominant narratives about transracial adoption, and above all, we were driven to disrupt the debate that presented us as either multicultural ambassadors for colorblind love or damaged victims. Rather than staying within the confines of the existing arguments for or against transracial adoption, we chose to reveal and challenge the forces that transform children into adoptable commodities. We conceptualized Outsiders Within as a gift to adoptees who were dealing with feelings of racial isolation and racial trauma on their own and who would find in the pages of this book companionship and community. We were also speaking to a wider audience of adoptive parents and siblings, adoption agency workers, policymakers, and opinion shapers in the hope that our stark critiques of the racism, colonialism, imperialism, and white savior complex inherent in transracial adoption would challenge liberal ideas about saving babies from dangerous and negligent others. Finally, we wanted to reclaim the member of the adoption triad who was most often demonized, blamed, and invisibilized first mothers and imagine the possibility of solidarities between adoptees and our first families based on an understanding of shared histories of oppression and of the stigma and coercion experienced by our first mothers.
Sun Yung Shin:And then I say we say, did we succeed in those ambitious goals? And then we extrapolate a little bit on that. And then I'll just read the last second to last paragraph. As we close this preface, the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor and the subsequent worldwide protests are foregrounding the precarity of black life, creating a sense of urgency and even impatience for the editors, we find ourselves asking, how are transracial adoptees speaking out now that we have claimed our voice? Are we speaking not only about our rights and histories, our families of origin and journeys to reclaim our identities, but also about the anti blackness in our adoptive families and communities?
Sun Yung Shin:Are we taking action to combat police killings and disproportionate infection and death rates in low wage black, Latinx, Southeast, and South Asian, and Native American communities. We hope this book will encourage all members of the adoption community to ask different difficult questions and talk to each other about the things we would rather leave silent. As we do so, we build courageous and self determined communities even as we work to build a world in which people of color have the resources and support to parent their children, and children have a right to their stories, their families and ancestors, and their communities of origin. I'm wondering, if both of you would be willing to I mean, talk about whatever's on your mind, but, you know, in in especially with our press in Minneapolis and with Shannon and me in Minneapolis and Jay Ron recently departing Minneapolis and having grown up in, Minnesota and the Twin Cities, you know, this in the intersectional lens and the anti blackness and the transracial adoption, transnational adoption community communities even. What do you hope for next, or what are you thinking about since then about, yeah, the larger racial violence in this country and beyond and how it intersects with adoption and your thinking about being an adoptee and anything around that?
JaeRan Kim:Where do we even begin? It's such a big question. And I think knowing both of you and knowing Shannon so well, is something that I think all of us have been thinking about and really asking questions and writing about since we first started writing about it in this book. I think, so I just wanted to also note that this was also my first book chapter, that was published as well. So Shannon, when you said that, I was really, excited to hear that because I think it just speaks to the opportunity that this book offered so many of us who were emerging as writers and scholars and activists.
JaeRan Kim:We'd been clearly, all of us had been writing before this, but this book really gave us a chance to to offer some of the important things that we've been thinking about. Maybe in a platform that was gonna get more publicity and more readership than what we had been doing before. So I also just wanna thank you and Julia and Jane for the opportunity. So I've been working more recently. I have a book chapter coming out.
JaeRan Kim:The anthology is called the complexity of adoption, from New York University Press. And in my chapter, I really kinda trace the history of transracial adoption in The United States and the ways that it has been oppressive, how policies and practices have mostly oppressed adoptees of color who've been put into transracial placements and transnational placements. And I advocate for transracial adoption justice and start to develop a framework of some questions and some ideas that I think agencies, adoptive parents, and the broader community need to start thinking about. And one of those is really about the intersectionality of our lives, the way we are people of color, the way our race and ethnic identities and indigenous identities have been pathologized as disability. So I'm really interested in this notion that in, The United States, our child welfare laws, actually categorize race and ethnicity and national origin as a as a special need, which is code coded language for, disability.
JaeRan Kim:The ways that there's hierarchies in terms of who's privileged for adoption, private adoptions largely around white infants, foster care adoptions, largely children of color. And then when you look at how expensive it is to adopt the different hierarchies there, that's kind of where my interest is now. One of the things that I'm also doing is really looking at the post adoption period, which is why I think this anthology is, so powerful to me is because so many of us as contributors are adult adoptees who have the ability to kind of articulate what our experiences have been like. But as an academic, as a researcher, there's very little that expands beyond young adult age, college age in particular. So I'm really focusing my research on kind of the larger developmental identity experiences of adult adoptees.
JaeRan Kim:So what is it like when we become parents and what is it like when we reflect back on our adoption histories and our relationships with our adoptive families or the communities that we grew up in? There's oftentimes a lot of estrangement. We don't really talk about that. It's kind of seen like adoption is something that happens once and then it just we don't talk about it anymore. But when we become a parent, you know, how do we reconcile and navigate our children with their white parents?
JaeRan Kim:But then maybe if we've done a birth family search, reunited with our first families, you know, how do we add in another set of grandparents potentially to that mix? Especially if those if it's a transnational case and they live in another country and there's a language barrier and cultural barriers. I could go on and on. I'm thinking about Asian adoptees in particular, thinking about Black Lives Matters and the ways in which we've been raised to think of ourselves as honorary white. And so do how do we enter those conversations, when we grow up in families that don't talk about these things?
JaeRan Kim:But now we're seen as people of color too. And so what kind of work do we need to do to be supportive of our indigenous and our black communities specifically when we don't have any language or knowledge or history about their experiences? And yet we're so tied together because many of our experiences is displaced from our first families are similar experiences that happens in different ways, but we share that rupture with our first families and our first community. So there is a point of commonality that we can start to build some solidarity on. But how are we having those conversations?
Sun Yung Shin:I am so appreciative of all this work because my consciousness is being raised around disability justice through a variety of sources, including your work. So I'm I'm really excited about that. Shannon, what would you wanna talk about in terms of how you're thinking now about being an adoptee? You know, you you present at at adoption studies conferences, and I'm wondering what keeps you engaged in the work because Jeron and I have changed our names back to our Korean names. Like, we could continue to just pass as non adopted people.
Sun Yung Shin:Right? It's always kind of a choice to, unless we're, like, with our adoptive family, it's a choice to reveal when and why to reveal that. Yeah. I don't know. What would you wanna talk about?
Shannon Gibney:I think for me at pivotal time, you know, I met all met all of you and pivotal time in my my identity development, I guess I should say, you know, in my, mid to late twenties. And so, you know, I was, like, on my own in this new city. In many significant ways, I think I I had come to terms with the fact of me being a mixed black woman and had, you know, embraced that terminology, as meaningful, and important to my identity. You know, I was working in a black newspaper at the time, dating a black guy, living in a black neighborhood, you know, mixed racial and ethnic neighborhood, you know, all very different from where I came up, Ann Arbor, Michigan in the eighties. And, you know, there were there were black folks around, but, you know, not sort of that sense of just, like, permeating every part of your life.
Shannon Gibney:Right? And so for me, it was so transformative to connect with other folks who have been taken from their their home communities, communities of color. And even though, you know, it was other countries, right, and I'm a domestic adoptee, which is different. I don't wanna say that those experiences are the same or those processes or those industries are the same because they're not. But the process that I think Jerome was talking about of structural isolation.
Shannon Gibney:Right? You look in the mirror and you don't recognize what you're seeing because it it doesn't align with everything else around you, which is mostly white. And so, you know, I know a lot of adoptees talk about that experience and and sort of wanting to be white. Like, I I don't think except for, there was a period in middle school where I wanted to, be white because the black kids were were teasing me, and I didn't connect it to being an adoptee. But, yeah, that sort of out of body experiences is really common among adoptees, but I didn't know that until I met all of you and other adoptees.
Shannon Gibney:So now it's been this process. Right? I mean, for so much of my life before those experiences, I had just thought of myself as a freak in the good and the bad way. Right? Like, the good way would be like, oh, I'm so individual.
Shannon Gibney:I'm so you know, there's no one like me. Blah blah blah. Right? And then it's like the bad way is sort of like, oh my god. I'm never gonna fit in anywhere.
Shannon Gibney:I'm never gonna find my people. You know? No one's gonna really understand me. Right? And so even the language of adoptee was revolutionary for me.
Shannon Gibney:Right? Like, coming to that and understanding, okay, this psychology that I have of not being exposed initially to things like black English and then going back, in college and beyond and sort of, like, learning black English. You know, I'm a teacher at Minneapolis College, and I always tell my students, you know, it's not that these other Englishes, black English or Munglish or Spanglish aren't valuable. They're just not valuable in white American capitalism, which is and I'm like, okay. Which is why I'm I'm teaching you this and why you're here.
Shannon Gibney:Right? Like but it is valuable. I'm like, I can tell you because for me, a key part of me feeling whole has been connecting with black culture. This sort of feeling of, like, imposter I hate the word imposter syndrome. Okay?
Shannon Gibney:So I'm gonna use that. But this this it's problematic, the history of it. But, this feeling of shame, I guess, the the deep shame that a lot of adoptees feel around their home communities, our home communities, right, people that look like us. But we can't, you know, perform the culture, whatever that looks like, at least initially. You know?
Shannon Gibney:And just sort of hanging out with you all and sort of seeing that in a completely different way, with Korean adoption, right, and and how, you know, as I understand it, many Korean American communities are very tight knit, and that's around the Korean church and around, the language and around the food. Right? And so it's just sort of like, well, if you can't perform that, then you ain't one of us. And so that was really familiar to me, even though it was a completely different context. Then also reading, The Book of Sarahs by Catherine McKinley Brown, which came out in around the time of Outsiders Within, I think a little bit later.
Shannon Gibney:But she's a black Scottish adoptee. So much of that book, I was like, okay. Yet again, I thought I was this individual freak, but I'm actually this archetype of a, mixed black transracial adoptee. These are the things that happen when you were put in these social situations. This is how your psychology kind of lays out.
Shannon Gibney:So that was another one, that also really opened up things for me. I don't know that I can say that any other part of my identity and it's intersect my identity is super intersectional like all of ours, and most adoptees I know, our identities are very intersectional. But, I mean, I I can't say that there's another part of my identity that is more important to how I move through the world than that of adoptee. Not even mixed black female. And that's just you know, I can talk about why that is, but it's just something that I know in my body.
Shannon Gibney:So that's been very transformative to really kind of, like, embrace that, especially in terms of the issues of shame, right, of, like, I was not responsible for these things that happened to me being taken from my home community and my biological family and put into this other family and you know, which in many ways was good and bad, like everything. You know? But I'm not going to be ashamed of this. This is who I am. You know, like, in the last fifteen years, it's all this stuff around state sanctioned killing of black bodies, right, and then the gun rising gun violence and, you know, the ongoing destruction of genocide of native communities and native cultures such as sort of, like, you know, endemic to The United States.
Shannon Gibney:I just feel like we're definitely in a different place with all of that than we were when outsiders within came out. But at the same time, like, I do feel like my identity as an adoptee allows me to hook into all those pieces in places and see the ways in which they inform my daily life and everybody else, you know, even privileged privileged people, right, who may not have to think about it, you know, all the time if my if I make myself open to that. And so I'm really thankful for that.
Sun Yung Shin:Yeah. I think I mean, because the dominance of of kinship I mean, throughout human history, but, like, everyone either has a family, had a family, has been exiled from a family, is missing a family, has a traumatic family. Like, there is, you know, there is no escape from, yeah, family structures and how our worlds are organized around them and, you know, yeah, name, date of birth, how we're tracked and surveilled and defined. I'm also thinking I know we're not gonna have time to talk about, like, siblings and healing and language. I also I just started reading Rebecca Caroll's book, and there were just a couple moments even in the first couple chapters about language that just like, when her mother, adopted mother says something to her in one moment and then, like, she just it's the way her mother says, like, black ballet teacher.
Sun Yung Shin:Like, she gets Rebecca into this ballet class that this other white her white friend goes to, and she sees the mother's kind of conspiring about it. And then she does but no one says until she gets to the class that the the LA Teacher is black. As a black woman, all the other kids are white, then there's Rebecca Carroll. And then, you know, the way her mom kind of approaches it afterward and the way that our white moms or parents approach racialized words as this as if they're, like, barrels of toxic liquid or something. You know, there's this, like yeah.
Sun Yung Shin:The way and the way she describes kind of her moment of, like you said, like, dissociation or, like, as a child, she realizes she really doesn't like how her mom just said black. You know? Yeah. Anyway,
Shannon Gibney:It's all there. It's it's all in the language. Just talking about that with my editor, you know, because we're we're in past three of of of my novel Botched, which is all about these, you know, narratives and holes and all this stuff. Right? And he's just like you know, he's a straight cisgender white dude, and he's not doesn't have much familiarity with adoption.
Shannon Gibney:So working with me is, you know, sort of. And, of course, for my first book, shout out to Jayram. He had to get, expert testimony on, this issue of dis race, racial identity being disability sort of codified in that way because he didn't believe it. You know? And Jaron was like, Montreuil Monfreuil.
Shannon Gibney:This is this is this is how it is. It's like we were just talking. He in Bosch, there's I I include the non identifying information that I was given just word for word from my file, and it was, you know, never anything that was secret. You know, my I asked for it when I was nine. I got it from my parents.
Shannon Gibney:You know? It's fine. I looked at it, and he was just like, the language, like, it it was just blowing his mind just around, like, identifying and non identifying information. Just that. Just that.
Shannon Gibney:Just tells you so much about the framework and the history of adoption and adopt the identity.
JaeRan Kim:Yeah. One of the things that I have really tried to do is understand the history of adoption practice, specifically from my field, which is social work, because we are kind of credited, so to speak. I mean, there's, you know, culturally, there's always things that are happening simultaneously. So there's the whole legal aspect, but then there's the quote, unquote, practice aspect of it. And social workers who, when the whole kind of field of child welfare, child development happened during, you know, the nineteen hundred nineteen twenties period in The United States, they were really trying to formalize and standardize adoption practice, which up until that point had been kinda like, oh, here's a kid, and parents would go to court, and they would say we'll take on the parental responsibilities.
JaeRan Kim:But no such thing as home studies, no such thing as assessing the fitness of the parents or the child to be placed or all those things. But as you can imagine, and as I look at things from, a disability social model or social justice framework versus, like, the medical model, which really was how we develop, assessment tools, you know, looking for strengths, but also looking for all the deficits and kind of putting them into little charts and stuff. So you look at old files from social workers and the language is so problematic. It's it is, because they are trying to standardize and create a kind of a template that would make it easier to facilitate these adoptions versus what was happening at the time, which is kind of like a free for all. The other thing that talking about language that, hits home is, so I have an article that's that just got accepted in a in a journal, based on my research of adult intercountry adoptees that were displaced from their adoptive families.
JaeRan Kim:So when we think about adoption, as being like, oh, these kids don't have parents, so we're gonna put them in adoptive homes, and that's gonna be their quote, unquote forever families. In the child welfare parlance, we call it permanency. Permanency meaning they're not in foster care. They're, you know, with, permanent legal guardians or adoptive families or, in some cases, even reunified with their first families. But this whole language around permanency and forever families and how strong that's been associated with adoption.
JaeRan Kim:So we see all these children's books, and we see advertisements on adoption agency websites that talk about forever families as if families can be forever. Right? I mean, we all know there
Shannon Gibney:Any family.
JaeRan Kim:Any family. That's my argument. Any family. There's divorce. There's death.
JaeRan Kim:There's estrangement. There's so it's, it's a fantasy. And we'd seem to apply it only in the cases of a foster care and adoption. We'd we we we've we've everybody else knows that families aren't quote unquote forever. And who knows best that than than adoptees.
JaeRan Kim:So one of my participants in my study, said, forever family is a hallmark idea. And so I use that as the title of my paper, and I talk about it, and we kind of critique this idea of adoption practitioners and adoptive parents need to stop using this term because here we're talking about adoptees whose first first families were disrupted then their adoptive families disrupted. So now they're in foster care or treatment or they were kicked out of the house by their adoptive families or or whatever, or they ran away because their adoptive families were abusive. These are all the things we don't wanna talk about when we talk about adoptive families. We just wanna hear the positive stories.
JaeRan Kim:So there's this whole positive adoption language that's developed as a result of that because we don't wanna say kids were abandoned or given up. We wanna say that their, first parents made a plan for relinquishment. You know? But that's not true. That in in many cases, that's actually just not true.
JaeRan Kim:One of the reviewers, during the peer review process for my, article really was like, we don't use the term adoptive, forever families anymore when it comes to adoption. And I was like, yes. We do. And so it became a point of contention over, well, no. You know, social workers are better than that now.
JaeRan Kim:We don't use that.
Shannon Gibney:I'm sorry. That sounds like white enough to parents. Like, oh, we're so much better now. We don't do that. Yes.
Shannon Gibney:You do.
JaeRan Kim:Yeah. They wanted me to change that in my article. So but I was like, no. I'm keeping it as the title. And not only that, like, here are, you know, here are several articles in the past five years that have been published in the in research that show the term forever family.
JaeRan Kim:Here's, children's books that use the title forever family. Here's 10 agency websites. I just did a Google search where forever family is listed on their front page. You know, it's still it's still happening. So when we're talking about language, as you said, I think that it's similar to the languages that we're using around, well, the debate around critical race theory and what kind of language we use and how do we describe terms.
JaeRan Kim:And there's an attempt to erase and minimize, right, instead instead of just telling the truth about things.
Sun Yung Shin:Well, that language, it's not for the adoptee or the foster child because they're not the ones shopping for parents on websites. Right? It is to convince prospective parents that this will this child will be their familial property forever and not go back to their first family, that their birth mother won't come back and claim them, and that the investment, the financial and the time investment and the energy and emotional labor that they plan to provide for this child or really for the bond for the family construction, that they'll get to have a family even once this kid is grown up. It's, you know, a fiction being sold to them, and the only thing that's gonna break through that is adult adoptees speaking out about our conditions as adults and the the statuses and conditions of our family relationships with our adopted families as adults, and into our older years and intergenerationally, like you said, with our children and even their children. And so it's like that that term forever families has tried to do so much work to lock something down.
Sun Yung Shin:So adoptive parents will get to keep their status because being a parent has tremendous status in this culture. And if that is gonna be ephemeral, then why invest in this random child, the stranger's child, this child that doesn't look like me, this child that may have, quote, unquote, special needs? Like, the only way that this is gonna work out for me culturally and and for my cultural capital for my status is if I can be assured my status as a parent is going to, you know, endure. And it's oh, man. It's so intense.
Sun Yung Shin:I'm so glad that you're doing that work.
Shannon Gibney:I mean, I just wanna also say too when we're talking about how we've moved through things since Outsiders Within came out, I mean, I also wanna talk about you both, of course, have made some brilliant points here about the status of parents and parenting. You know, I can talk about things in my, you know, writerly life, my professional life, but in my personal life, I did not have kids. I was not partnered long term or semi long term, right, because I'm not divorced, when outsider's within came out. But this issue, this very issue that you two articulated so powerfully about who has the right to parent. Does everybody have is that everybody's right to parent?
Shannon Gibney:Is it only people who are economically and educationally privileged in the in the global North? How are we gonna say this? Right? And when you talk about things like, let's say, the effective work that children do in mostly white, but not always, middle class families. I mean, it unsettles people, even people who are otherwise on your side.
Shannon Gibney:Get I mean, so I've I've lost friendships, actually, around this kind of thing. Or I have friends who I I'm just not gonna talk about this with them because it's like I know what's gonna happen. And, also, it's really complicated because I am heterosexual, and so I have access to things like sperm that, you know, some of my my queer friends maybe didn't. Right? So they they go the route of, IVF and some other, you know, reproductive technologies to build a family.
Shannon Gibney:And, of course, as an adoptee, my first thought is always with the child. Right? I'm like, okay. But, like, what's gonna happen when that child reaches tween dom or teen dom and then beyond, right, where we really have these, like, identity questions? And they're like, you know, but okay.
Shannon Gibney:What's the deal with my my my father or, like, that side of the family or, you know, my my Filipino side, my black side, or whatever. Like, what are you gonna do as a parent to make that journey with your child? Right? And I don't get the sense that, you know, even my my close friends are thinking about this in a real way. And if I bring it up, people get offended.
Shannon Gibney:So, again and I know Jayram has talked about these sacred cows, right, you know, in our and that that's a huge one. I mean, it is huge beyond you know? I mean and I have a friend who's, you know, this brilliant black woman professor, and she had ideas and and was talking with another friend of mine about, like, oh, it's, you know, it's really a fun process. You get to choose, you know, like, dimples or things. And I was like, you know, just I could not and I was just, like, paralyzed.
Shannon Gibney:You know? And then this is a person who's a feminist. Right? This is a person who understands the the, you know, racial capitalism and all the right? But somehow when it's personal, it's different.
Shannon Gibney:So I just wanna kind of also bring that up as, like, that that's been much more prevalent in my life in the past fifteen years when, you know, everybody is having kids, including myself. I have an 11 year old and a six year old. And and and and building families, you know, all kinds of different ways.
JaeRan Kim:We work really hard as a society to separate that. You know? So the whole idea about family forming families or building families or whatever euphemism you wanna use and the different things that people do to create their families. We're really, really good at creating all these different words or concepts in order to distance ourselves from the very kind of capitalist way that our society has now kind of governed family making. So I consult with the state department office of children's issues on things.
JaeRan Kim:And kind of fairly recently, we were having a conversation around the quote unquote gestational carriers and the fact that people from other countries are coming to The United States because we have fairly unregulated rules around, surrogacy. Couples from other countries will come and hire and pay a surrogate in The United States to carry a child for them or vice versa because in many countries in Europe, it's actually illegal to to use surrogates. But The United States, it's still a free for all, basically. So, the term gestational, carrier. Right?
JaeRan Kim:So celebrities or people now are using these terms gestational carrier as a way to not say, like, this is an actual woman, somebody with a uterus Right. Person with a uterus who is who is carrying a child for nine months and then going through the pain of delivering said child that's going to then end up with another couple. And so or the, the the snowflake adoptions, the embryo adoptions when people, use assistive reproductive technologies and end up with several embryos, but they only are going to carry one themselves and so they store the others. So there's a whole market for embryo adoptions. These are the things though when we're using these euphemisms and these different words and phrases as a way to kind of distance ourselves from kind of the unseenliness of the fact that children are commodities or they or they are commodified in the process of being transferred from one family to another.
JaeRan Kim:And that's something that we just we really need to have more of these conversations. And when we're talking about what does reproductive justice look like, it's not just about the right to end a pregnancy or to prevent a pregnancy. It's also reproductive justice is about the right to parent a child that you've had.
Sun Yung Shin:Right. A child produced by a donor cannot consent to being born into the conditions where they are supposed to perhaps never know their whole ancestry. The bioethics, you know, no one but adoptees and people who've been donor reproduced by these third and fourth party technologies can address really the existential anguish of being produced as a human being this way. And until more people who have been produced this way are continue to speak out, and with the rise of commercial DNA, you know, we are seeing some at least people, you know, doing more. I've seen a few projects, like a few art projects around, you know, oh, I have 50 siblings.
Sun Yung Shin:And then there's also these temporal, you know, time travel where, like, a 50 year old woman has frozen her eggs from twenty years ago and then uses a sperm from an 18 year old. Or then there's also, of course, which is older, the implanting six viable embryos and then selectively aborting four of them because you don't wanna have five kids or you don't wanna have four kids or three kids or two kids, your doctor will abort them. You know? So what's the burden once that child and if that child ever finds out I had all these I was, like, quadruplet. They all died for me to live.
Sun Yung Shin:Like, what is that? And the same thing, Shannon. Like, with my queer friends, I cannot I can't talk about it, but
JaeRan Kim:it's I
Shannon Gibney:mean, it's just it's a mind field. Like, it is an absolute mind field. I mean, I brought it up with one of my friend. Like, are we are we really gonna say that everyone has a right to parent? Every what does that mean?
Shannon Gibney:What does that mean if we say that? It's hard because too much information, you know, but, I mean, I I had kids late. I got pregnant very easily. Of course, you both know the story. You know, I I I lost one of my daughters, but still, you know, I didn't have all this fertility problems, right, that a lot of people who who use these reproductive technologies have.
Shannon Gibney:You know? And so it was a friend that that was her story. Right? And she was really like, I have this right to parent. I have a right to do whatever it takes to, you know, build my family.
Shannon Gibney:And I was just like, I don't agree. You know? Like, I just don't agree. You know?
Sun Yung Shin:I know. No one's no one is asking us for insights.
Shannon Gibney:Yeah. No. No. They don't wanna hear.
Sun Yung Shin:About the consequences for our children. Yep. No one's asking.
Shannon Gibney:Right.
JaeRan Kim:And then the other, I think interesting connection to these transnational surrogacies is that, then you're dealing with a a child that's born that is an immigrant then to the country that their one or some of their parents, you know, if you have a a gay couple, from Norway who's using a surrogate in California using a donor egg and one of their sperm, the child's born in California then. So then what nation does this child belong to and what kind of immigration status does this child have if they go back to Norway with the couple who's adopting them or who is not adopting them because they have they contributed part of the genetic material for the child to be born. Right? So then you start getting into these other questions around citizenship and, country and nationality and all these other things too, which is it there's just it's just that we're not having these conversations on a larger level yet to really start to talk about it, with some depth and and really thinking it through the ethical and moral considerations of it. It's just it's happening, and we're trying to catch up to it
Shannon Gibney:now. So the technology, right, in a in a capitalist system. And even Jiran, like, this whole idea to, you know, Johanna Gutin's research. She does some amazing research. She's a Korean Swedish adoptee, on surrogacy, and and and she's got a team.
Shannon Gibney:She is a humanity scholar. But, of course, there's, I think, two anthropologists and two doctors, and they're doing a large scale study in India, of surrogacy there. And, you know, I was talking with her and, you know, educating myself because she she studies this stuff, and she's just like, you know, this whole argument about, like, sort of the genetic material being kind of like the real material of the baby, of the person, she's like, that's not universally accepted, even close. She's like, there's all kinds of materials and fluids and essential, you know, blood and all kinds of stuff that flows between I hate to put it this way, but, you know, the woman who's carrying the baby and the baby itself. Why would we say that the the the sperm and the egg is actually, you know, the thing that determines, like, whose baby this is?
Shannon Gibney:You know? It it just there's so much to it that you're just like, oh my god. This is happening now, and we haven't even begun to dig into this ethical stuff? Oh my god.
JaeRan Kim:I mean, we're still struggling to do it when we're talking about adoptees, much less that they're talking about kind of this new area, this growing area. But the issues and the concerns are the same.
Shannon Gibney:Right.
Sun Yung Shin:And then if those you know, like, your specialty with disrupted adoptions, then if the if that hypothetical child who has become a Swedish citizen then is disrupted, then are they stateless because their birthright citizenship from The United States has already been terminated. Right?
JaeRan Kim:Right. Yeah. You know, so as we're seeing that's happening with, you know, international adoptees in The United States, you know, because many parents didn't follow through with their naturalization. So so we're seeing, adoptees get deported, because they don't have citizenship. And and so, you know, yeah, these issues really intersect in so many different ways, you know, with the carceral system in The United States too or with, immigration.
JaeRan Kim:Adoptees are being held at detention centers if they commit crimes or if they just don't have their naturalization papers or citizenship. They can be detained.
Shannon Gibney:And, of course, the crisis at the border. Right? We know, you know, the past few years with children being separated from their parents and and then sort of that that being, this way that children get sort of, like, you know, a pipeline into this, adoption, system as well. And, you know, when that when that started happening, adoptees and adoptees scholars and activists were on the front lines of, like, okay. We know what's going on.
Shannon Gibney:We like, this is not this is a pattern. This is this is what this is how this works.
JaeRan Kim:Right. And and the fact that it was adoption agencies, very well known and large with a large national presence, it was adoption agencies that were taking these kids and putting them in their licensed foster homes. I think for myself and for many of my colleagues, that was that was a big concern because, like you said, it just makes it so much easier. Yes. They already had these licensed foster parents kind of at the ready because that's that's the main part of their work.
JaeRan Kim:But then how easy is it to just funnel through? Many agencies use the same home study for both fostering and for adoption so that it's really easy to just flip that switch when you need to. And and then I think the way we don't understand the child welfare system is for parents who are then deported to the their country of origin and the child's now in The US and The US foster care system, the protocol is that you require the parent, the the child's parents to complete a a plan for how they're gonna be reunited and safely provide safety for their child. You can't do that if the parent is you can't find the parent because they've been deported back to their country of origin. And so by de facto, we have laws that say after so many months, of the parent not interacting with the child following their case plan, we can take it to court.
JaeRan Kim:And even in their absence, we can terminate their parental rights. And that's how it's done. So there are all these mechanisms in place just to make it easy to do.
Sun Yung Shin:Oh my gosh. You too.
Shannon Gibney:We could talk forever.
JaeRan Kim:We have. We've had a lifetime of talking about these issues. Right?
Sun Yung Shin:I'm so grateful that you both continue to make this part of your work because it's hard.
Shannon Gibney:Doesn't make you popular.
JaeRan Kim:Yeah. No. It doesn't doesn't make you
Sun Yung Shin:that yeah. That's not making us that popular. But, I just want to say thank you so much for your time and for these fifteen plus years of this political and, you know, personal growth that we've been going through together, it's just it's just made life so worthwhile. So thank you. Thank you to Eric Anderson at the University of Minnesota Press.
Sun Yung Shin:Thank you to Mindy Saddler who's organized this podcast series. Thank you, J. Ron. Thank you, Shannon. Thank you.
Sun Yung Shin:And we'll talk
Shannon Gibney:again soon. Everybody out there listening and reading the book and, doing the work. Yeah. It's all, about community.
Sun Yung Shin:Thank you to the community, all the contributors, all the readers, everyone we've talked to over the years and learned from. So thank you.