ABSTRACT
Over the past fifty years, approximately 200,000 Korean children have been placed into foreign adoption; 150,000 of them were sent to the United States (G. Kim, 2005). Until adult adoptees began visiting Korea and demanding recognition for themselves and their birth mothers, no one there discussed this history of intercountry adoption, or spoke of their birth mothers. Both figures were erased from Korean history and pushed into the shadows, eclipsed by the nationalistic prerogative of the country’s quest for economic development.
