ABSTRACT
This chapter provides new insight into how Korean adoptees understand the concept of “an adoptee” and what it means “to be adopted” in order to critically analyse the process of transnational adoption. Korean adoptees are aware of their adopted status from a young age due to the racial and other physical differences between them and their adoptive parents. However, there is more to this experience of “adopteeness”. Korean adoptees’ identity transformation from Korean child to Korean adoptee is the result of a systematic process controlled by government departments and adoption agencies, and yet from the perspective of the adoptees, this process in which they had no control or input also contributes to a feeling that their lives are arbitrary – that is, they could have been adopted to a different country and a different family with a completely different life and sense of self. This chapter goes beyond a superficial awareness of being an adoptee and asks: how does an awareness of adoption as a broader transnational process, beyond the individual level of themselves and their family, affect Korean adoptees’ sense of self and their understanding of what it means to be and become “an adoptee”?
