Kit Myers, 42, is a transracial Hong Kong adoptee and assistant professor in the Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Merced. In this interview, we talk about Myers’ search for his birth mother and feelings he’s had of having a ‘ghostly’ or ambiguous kinship with someone he doesn’t know. We also talk about his upcoming imprint, ” Violence of Love, Race, Adoption and Family in the United States.”
Audio available on May 24, 2024.
Instagram: abolish_and_build
Twitter: @MyersKit
(0:00:00) speaker_0: (instrumental music plays) Welcome to Adapted Podcast, Season 7, Episode 19 starts now.
(0:00:15) speaker_0: This is a podcast that centers the voices of Korean inter-country adoptees. Adopted people are the true experts of the lived experience of adoption.
(0:00:33) speaker_0: I’m Kaomi Lee, and I was also adopted from Korea.
(0:00:37) speaker_0: Our voices have been silenced by adoption agencies, governments, sometimes even our adoptive parents and society that wants only a feelgood story.
(0:00:48) speaker_0: Our lives are more complicated than that.
(0:00:51) speaker_1: Um, there’s this term of ambiguous loss for adoption, and people in foster care too, because there’s different types of ambiguous loss.
(0:00:59) speaker_0: This next episode is about a Hong Kong adoptee. I first met Kit Myers at an adoption symposium at the University of California, Irvine.
(0:01:08) speaker_0: His work in ethnic studies and critical adoption studies is helping to reframe and inform the dialogue about transnational and transracial adoption.
(0:01:19) speaker_0: Before we get to this episode, I just wanted to mention this podcast is free, but if you’re able and have enjoyed listening through the years, I’d like to ask you to consider becoming a Patreon supporter.
(0:01:30) speaker_0: For as little as a few dollars a month, you’ll receive early downloads of each episode.
(0:01:34) speaker_0: We are nearing the end of the podcast, but your support can help us complete episodes as we finish out seven seasons. Please go to patreon.com/adaptedpodcast.
(0:01:46) speaker_0: Thank you. And thanks to our current supporters, you are the best. Now, here’s the episode.
(0:01:57) speaker_1: My name is Kit Myers. My name as given at birth is Chan Wai Kit, and I was born in ’82, so I’m 42 years old, and I live in Merced, California.
(0:02:10) speaker_0: Okay. And, Kit, are you a, a researcher, professor?
(0:02:17) speaker_1: Yeah, both. Um, I’m a researcher and professor, assistant professor at the University of California, Merced.
(0:02:25) speaker_1: I’ve been at Merced since 2016, so this is my… I’m finishing up my eighth year there, and I’ll be going up for tenure.
(0:02:34) speaker_1: My book is coming out, and, um, so that’s, you know, that’s kind of actually what I need to, to get tenure is to publish a book in my field.
(0:02:42) speaker_1: Yeah, so I’m excited about all that stuff that’s happening.
(0:02:46) speaker_0: Okay. And what is your field?
(0:02:48) speaker_1: Uh, my degree is in ethnic studies.
(0:02:51) speaker_1: In undergrad, actually, I went to University of Oregon and I studied journalism and ethnic studies, and then I went to school-
(0:03:00) speaker_0: Oh, interesting.
(0:03:00) speaker_1: … I… Yeah, yeah, I continued with ethnic studies.
(0:03:03) speaker_1: I actually originally wanted to be a PE teacher at a high school because I just wanted, in my mind, like, the easiest, most fun job that there could be.
(0:03:11) speaker_1:
(0:03:11) speaker_0: Yeah.
(0:03:12) speaker_1: And yeah, so I wanted to, like, teach PE and coach sports, you know, soccer and basketball. But I really fell in love with ethnic studies, uh, U of…
(0:03:21) speaker_1: University of Oregon, and sort of kinda continued on that path, in part by luck, because, you know, I got into two grad programs, but my two acceptances were, like, toward the tail end of the (laughs) the letters that I received.
(0:03:33) speaker_1: So for a while, I was, you know, I was unsure of what I would be doing.
(0:03:38) speaker_1: But yeah, I got into grad school and up for ethnic studies at UC San Diego, and was down in San Diego for a while, doing that.
(0:03:44) speaker_0: What did you find most interesting about ethnic studies?
(0:03:48) speaker_1: Yeah, I mean, you know, at University of Oregon, it’s a predominantly white campus. PWI, they call it, or predominately white institution.
(0:03:57) speaker_1: But even then, that was actually a very diverse space for me compared to Canby, Oregon where I grew up, which was less than 15,000 people and probably nearly 90% white with the largest minority population being Latinx folks.
(0:04:13) speaker_1: And so, yeah, when I got to U of O, it felt very diverse even though compared to a lot of other places, it wasn’t.
(0:04:20) speaker_1: And I took ethnic studies, I think, by chance, and I was just really pulled in by the histories that they were teaching, this idea that race was constructed was an incredibly fascinating ideas about racism.
(0:04:35) speaker_1: And eventually, you know, the more classes I took in African American studies and Native American studies, Chicano studies, and Asian American studies, like, they all just in different ways really were very, you know, eye-opening for me at that time.
(0:04:50) speaker_1:
(0:04:50) speaker_0: Yeah, I kinda remember too, like, my own kind of racial awakening I think was when I watched, um…
(0:04:58) speaker_0: I think we saw it in college, my undergrad, but we watched this series Eyes on the Prize.
(0:05:05) speaker_1: Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s a great documentary series. Yes, yeah.
(0:05:08) speaker_0: Yeah, and I just… You know, the civil rights struggle and, um-
(0:05:12) speaker_1: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
(0:05:13) speaker_0: … and I, I think that’s when I really started to think deeply about race in this country, and you know, just social injustice.
(0:05:22) speaker_1: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, for me, it’s been a long process. I mean, I’m just constantly… I’m always learning still to this day.
(0:05:30) speaker_1: But something that looking back I realize that I learned, and, and what I teach in my class is just, like, the amount of intentionality that existed in these sort of things, and the way that society really went out of its way to create inequality and to maintain it.
(0:05:48) speaker_1: And when advances did happen, that most of the people weren’t on board with those advances, you know?
(0:05:55) speaker_1: A lot of people objected to them, and so it’s just always been a struggle, right?
(0:06:00) speaker_1: But what’s been inspiring to learn is the other side of that, is that communities have always been struggling and resisting to-…
(0:06:08) speaker_1: create belonging and to create community and, and those sort of things.
(0:06:12) speaker_2: And, uh, you’re not a Korean adoptee. Ca- can you tell us a little bit of your origin story?
(0:06:17) speaker_1: Yeah. Yeah. It is funny. For a long time, I actually didn’t think to sort of disclose that aspect of my identity.
(0:06:25) speaker_1: Uh, I think people knew I was adopted in terms of being an adoptee researcher, but I just always forgot to explain-
(0:06:34) speaker_2: Mm-hmm.
(0:06:34) speaker_1: …
(0:06:34) speaker_1: where I was born, and so yeah, I was born in Hong Kong, and like I said, I was born in ’82 and then I was adopted in ’86, so I was almost four years old when I was adopted.
(0:06:44) speaker_1: And with Hong Kong, it was under sort of British rule for 100 years, so it kind of has this strong English influence.
(0:06:53) speaker_1: All the documents from the orphanage were in English.
(0:06:57) speaker_1: I have some medical records that are both in Chinese and English, and I, I actually have my birth certificate with a lot of information on it, with my mother’s name, the address that she lived at, and, and all that stuff is both in English and in, in Chinese, um, Cantonese.
(0:07:16) speaker_1: Yeah.
(0:07:17) speaker_2: So you were born in ’82?
(0:07:19) speaker_1: Yeah, mm-hmm.
(0:07:20) speaker_2: Was it… It was no longer a British colony at that point?
(0:07:24) speaker_1: No, it still was. It, it was until ’98, I think. ‘9-, ’98 or ’97. The, the late ’90s, if, if my memory serves right.
(0:07:32) speaker_2: Oh, okay.
(0:07:32) speaker_1: It was, like, a 100-year sort of situation.
(0:07:34) speaker_2: Oh, okay. Yeah.
(0:07:35) speaker_1: Yeah.
(0:07:35) speaker_2: And what were the politics going on at the time that you were relinquished or abandoned or do you… Or stolen?
(0:07:44) speaker_1: Yeah.
(0:07:44) speaker_2: Do you know?
(0:07:45) speaker_1: Right. Yeah, it was from both the paperwork and… Yeah, I have quite a bit of records.
(0:07:51) speaker_1: I think part of that is because I stayed there a long time, but also, again, it was a weird situation where…
(0:07:58) speaker_1: Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s not weird for Hong Kong, but yeah, there’s this birth certificate and there’s a lot of information about my birth mother, and it was apparently that she was married and she had relationships with maybe two other people outside of the marriage, and so th- the…
(0:08:19) speaker_1: My father is not known and, and then the fact of sort of my existence was, um-
(0:08:27) speaker_2: Outside of marriage.
(0:08:28) speaker_1: Yeah, uh, being outside of marriage was… Especially her mom, my birth mother’s mom, was very upset about that and kind of forced the relinquishment.
(0:08:38) speaker_1: Um, yeah, so that’s kind of the main situation, and it seems to have been confirmed in many ways. I actually connected with my first cousins.
(0:08:48) speaker_1: I have four first cousins on my mom’s side, and I’ve met one in person and two over Zoom, and they…
(0:08:57) speaker_1: It’s, it’s all a complicated story, but they didn’t even know my mom existed, so they didn’t know that they had this, uh, this extra aunt until maybe, like, seven years ago, at which point the grandma dies, and at her funeral there’s a picture with the uncles, the two uncles and the aunt, and then also my mom.
(0:09:18) speaker_1: And so another cousin sees this picture and was like, “Who’s this woman who’s taking this family photo with our parents and our grandparents?
(0:09:27) speaker_1: ” And th- that’s when they’re like, “Oh, yeah this is an aunt and we don’t know where she is.
(0:09:31) speaker_1: ” And she seemed to be, um, both a secret, but also kind of truly not knowing w- w- where she was because when I connected with my cousins and two of them mentioned me to their parents and one of my uncles was very, um, not interested in me or his older sister, and so he didn’t want to continue that conversation.
(0:09:56) speaker_1: The, the oldest uncle, he did…
(0:09:58) speaker_1: You know, he was, I guess, quite emotional upon, you know, learning about my existence and, and then regretting that he had lost contact with his sister.
(0:10:08) speaker_1: But he had indeed lost contact with her and it had been a very long time since he had had any contact, so he, he didn’t know where she was or is.
(0:10:17) speaker_2: W- did you get the sense that your mother was a bit of a black sheep, or was she, um…
(0:10:22) speaker_1: Yeah. Uh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s… That’s kind of what the paperwork suggested and, and what the oldest uncle kind of s-…
(0:10:30) speaker_1: And I… He didn’t say that explicitly, but it’s… I mean, if you don’t know where your sibling is, it’s because they…
(0:10:37) speaker_1: You know, she either left or they kicked her out, or both-
(0:10:41) speaker_2: Mm-hmm.
(0:10:42) speaker_1: … is my sense. The other whole aspect of this thing is that, um… And it’s kind of temporally…
(0:10:48) speaker_1: And, and I know this is, like, kind of weird to bring it up at the beginning of the podcast, but essentially I’ve been searching for my mother since 2013 and I have all these clues that so many people don’t.
(0:11:03) speaker_1: And I went to her home address, I found out that that address…
(0:11:07) speaker_1: Like, my grandpa owned that flat or that apartment or, you know, that sort of unit from land records, and then I found out he’d died, and so then I found an uncle’s name through the death record of my uncle and the grandma’s name through the land records and…
(0:11:22) speaker_1: So I found all these different records and sort of identifying people, but I wasn’t able to locate her.
(0:11:29) speaker_1: And then through 23andMe is how I connected with one of my cousins who had taken a 23andMe test as well.
(0:11:36) speaker_2: Are they still in the US?
(0:11:37) speaker_1: Yeah. Yeah, actually he is. He’s been living in Berkeley, two hours away from me-
(0:11:41) speaker_2: Wow, okay.
(0:11:42) speaker_1: … since… Yeah, since 2008.
(0:11:43) speaker_1: So this is all just a very unusual case because we have this situation where he’s been in Berkeley and he speaks fluent English.
(0:11:50) speaker_1: I mean, you wouldn’t know that he was not born here.
(0:11:52) speaker_2: Mm-hmm.
(0:11:52) speaker_1: And same thing with my other two cousins who are up in Vancouver, BC. They speak fluent English.
(0:11:58) speaker_2: Mm-hmm.
(0:11:58) speaker_1: And then there’s a fourth cousin who’s actually older than me and he lives in San Jose. So they’re all in the same time zone as me.
(0:12:04) speaker_2: You know, that brings up… Sometimes when you’re searching via DNA testing and the, the experts tell us, “Don’t reveal you’re an adoptee,” right away.
(0:12:14) speaker_2:
(0:12:14) speaker_1: Mm-hmm.
(0:12:14) speaker_2: How did you approach that?
(0:12:17) speaker_1: Um, well, yeah. I- it- it’s- in the DNA test, it showed first cousin, and I was like, “Wow, okay.” Um, and h- his last name was Chan, so, um-
(0:12:28) speaker_2: You must have been over the moon. That’s…
(0:12:31) speaker_1: Y- yeah. It was really shocking. I was kind of resistant to the idea of taking a DNA test at first because of, you know, the whole privacy thing.
(0:12:38) speaker_1: But my partner got me the test, and so I did it. But it took two years for him to (laughs) to realize that I had messaged him.
(0:12:45) speaker_2: Mm-hmm.
(0:12:45) speaker_1: And so there’s kind of like a two-year waiting period, and then finally one day, he just messaged me and said, “Yeah, all this information that you sent me and this message aligns exactly with my family.
(0:12:57) speaker_1: ” And so, of course, the DNA test said first cousins, and so he’s like, “Yeah, I think for certain, we’re first cousins.
(0:13:03) speaker_1: ” And so then eventually, he shared that picture that I was talking about. He had it-
(0:13:08) speaker_2: Mm-hmm.
(0:13:08) speaker_1: … and he, you know, sent it to me. And so I got to see a picture of my birth mom for the first time, and of course, you know, other family members and…
(0:13:16) speaker_1: Yeah, we- we got to Zoom a few times, and I’ve seen him in person, I think, three times now.
(0:13:22) speaker_2: What did you think when you saw the photo? And I mean, do you, do you see the family resemblance?
(0:13:27) speaker_1: Yeah, I mean, it’s funny because my mom and I, there’s a- a- a little bit of resemblance, but it’s not striking.
(0:13:36) speaker_1: I think the closest resemblance is with my grandfather. Yeah, I mean his… The face that he has is kind of like…
(0:13:44) speaker_1: It’s not the face I have now, but it was a face I had when I was younger.
(0:13:48) speaker_2: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
(0:13:49) speaker_1: So, that was really interesting.
(0:13:50) speaker_2: And so they had a hunch already what branch of the family tree you were from potentially, right? Because you kind of pinpointed (inaudible)
(0:13:59) speaker_1: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And, um, I wasn’t too worried about revealing my adoptee status.
(0:14:06) speaker_1: I think the first time we had a Zoom meeting, um, he was kind of trying to feel me out and just-
(0:14:15) speaker_2: Like what your motivations were?
(0:14:16) speaker_1: Yeah.
(0:14:17) speaker_1: If there’s any particular motivation outside of, you know, what I think most adoptees are trying to do, which is just like to find family and connect with them.
(0:14:24) speaker_1: Yeah, I think once we talked and he realized that I have a job and I have my own family and those sort of things, that he felt maybe more comfortable.
(0:14:32) speaker_1: And, you know, it is a difficult situation because I asked them, you know, different questions and I’ve asked them for assistance and maybe talking to their parents, but I also feel like those requests have to be a little restrained, right?
(0:14:49) speaker_1: Or, or timed in a particular way, just, just so that I don’t create any disruption or…
(0:14:56) speaker_2: What’s the sense that you got from them that they were a little bit hesitant to share?
(0:15:00) speaker_1: Um, I… Well, I mean, two of them have kind of unique circumstances, and, and one, I kind of hinted at it.
(0:15:08) speaker_1: Her dad had a bad relationship with my mom, and so he has very negative feelings about her.
(0:15:14) speaker_2: Mm-hmm.
(0:15:14) speaker_1: And so I don’t feel right sort of asking her to like probe there, and then there’s another, you know, the oldest uncle I still haven’t connected with, and I think he was going through something, so I didn’t want to like push to reach out to him.
(0:15:31) speaker_1: And so I’m just… I’ve been waiting to connect with him.
(0:15:33) speaker_2: And it wasn’t, it wasn’t offered either?
(0:15:36) speaker_1: Yeah. He, he hasn’t-
(0:15:38) speaker_2: Okay.
(0:15:38) speaker_1: … reached out. Uh, he knows about me, and he’s, you know, he hasn’t reached out yet.
(0:15:43) speaker_1: And, you know, the youngest cousin, he, he, um, he has his own sort of situation that he’s dealing with.
(0:15:50) speaker_2: Mm-hmm.
(0:15:50) speaker_1: And so he hasn’t told his mom about me. He’s told his dad about me, I think. Um, and so, you know-
(0:15:58) speaker_2: Mm-hmm.
(0:15:58) speaker_1: … it’s just…
(0:15:59) speaker_1: Everybody has a sort of unique circumstance, and I’m trying to, you know, make sure that I respect people’s situations and their boundaries and those sort of things.
(0:16:09) speaker_1: But at the same time, I do feel like…
(0:16:11) speaker_1: I think a lot of adoptees, uh, you know, you get in a situation where finally you’ve found something and then you, you want to get as much information as you can.
(0:16:20) speaker_1: And so it’s kind of this weird situation where I’ve gotten so much, but there’s still a lot of questions.
(0:16:28) speaker_2: Yeah. Oh, I can really, I can really feel for you because it is. It’s like, oh, the potential to meet living, you know, your mother’s siblings.
(0:16:36) speaker_2: You, you’ve got uncles-
(0:16:38) speaker_1: Mm-hmm.
(0:16:39) speaker_2: …
(0:16:39) speaker_2: alive, and yet it’s not such a straightforward thing where you have to sort of, when the time is right, take into consideration, you know, that DNA connects you with relatives, and you’re sort of relying on their help and assistance when they don’t really know you and the trust isn’t really built up.
(0:17:00) speaker_2: It’s just, it’s always just a, a fraught kind of situation because, you know, this information should be your, your right to know.
(0:17:09) speaker_1: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
(0:17:12) speaker_1: And the part that I was actually getting at that I don’t think I (laughs) that I didn’t get to is that I’m going back to Hong Kong this summer, and, um, I was planning to do more retracing, and so I have two friends there, one who is an artist there and…
(0:17:33) speaker_1: An artist and a teacher, and she’s actually helped many Hong Kong adoptees search for their birth family, and I, I don’t actually know how she started this, but it’s something that she’s been doing for quite some time.
(0:17:45) speaker_1: And then another friend from my grad school days, he was an undergrad at UC San Diego, but he is from Hong Kong, and he’s now back in Hong Kong, and so the two of them have been helping me in the search, and what essentially I found out a little over a month ago is that we’re like almost 100% sure that, that my mom passed away, uh, in 1995.
(0:18:10) speaker_1:
(0:18:10) speaker_2: Oh. How did you find that out?
(0:18:13) speaker_1: Yeah. Well, we, we had sort of decided that we’re gonna do a death record search.
(0:18:20) speaker_2: Okay.
(0:18:21) speaker_1: Because-
(0:18:21) speaker_2: And you, you knew her name?
(0:18:24) speaker_1: Yes, I have her name on the birth certificate. And I had actually done a death record search before.
(0:18:30) speaker_1: Yeah, I’ve been to Hong Kong twice, and my memory is blurry, but I think the second time I went, that was 2015.
(0:18:36) speaker_1: I did a death record search, and I went 20 years back because it costs money for the record search the further back you go.
(0:18:44) speaker_1: Like, every five years you go back it costs more money.
(0:18:47) speaker_2: Oh.
(0:18:48) speaker_1: And so at that point I was just like, “Okay, if I go back, you know, 20 years, that should cover a good amount,” that would…
(0:18:54) speaker_1: I mean, because she would have had to die really young if she died before 20 years, before 2015.
(0:19:00) speaker_1: And so it didn’t produce anything, and so then I felt like, “Okay, maybe, yeah, she’s still alive but she’s just not wanting to be contacted or something.
(0:19:07) speaker_1: ” Because I’ve had… The Red Cross in Hong Kong actually helps with reconnecting family, and adoption is one of the areas that they do that for.
(0:19:18) speaker_1: And so, the- they’ve done some searching, and the immigration office and the adoption agency, they’ve all sort of done different things to try to locate her, uh, to no luck.
(0:19:31) speaker_1: So… We had agreed to do like kind of a full death record search. But for… Interestingly, they like went a different route.
(0:19:39) speaker_1: My artist friend knew this person at a cemetery, and they looked up the cemetery records and found someone with the same name and the same birthday as my, as my mom.
(0:19:50) speaker_1: And my other friend over there, he went to the headstone and took pictures of it, and even though I don’t have a more recent picture of he…
(0:20:03) speaker_1: Like, the picture I have is, is when she was younger. There, there is some… There’s resemblance there.
(0:20:09) speaker_1: So it’s like you have resemblance, you have the name, you have the birth date. That all sort of match up.
(0:20:18) speaker_2: What are the chances, Kit, that someone… It could be someone else with that same name and birth date? I mean…
(0:20:24) speaker_1: Yeah, right, and that’s why it’s like not 100%. It’s almost 100%, I mean…
(0:20:29) speaker_2: Because, is it like in Korea where a lot of people have the same name?
(0:20:34) speaker_1: Well, I mean, it’s like, it’s… Her name is Chan Ching Yee, so there’s three parts of her name. So it’s not-
(0:20:42) speaker_2: Mm-hmm.
(0:20:43) speaker_1: … like there’s just two parts of her name, so there’s that aspect. And…
(0:20:48) speaker_2: Is it a bit, a bit unique name?
(0:20:50) speaker_1: I don’t know like how unique it is. I mean, Chan obviously is not unique. But I’m, I’m not sure about the other part.
(0:20:57) speaker_1: But, you know, with the birthday and with the picture, it, it feels like it’s her.
(0:21:10) speaker_1: (instrumental music plays) And then, at that point, I was just like, um… You know, that’s like on April 1st that I found out, and-
(0:21:26) speaker_2: Oh, just this year?
(0:21:27) speaker_1: Yeah, just this year.
(0:21:28) speaker_2: Wow. Okay.
(0:21:29) speaker_1: And, uh, it… Like, that felt like, immediately like a loss. I mean, in part because my friend was like, “This is your mom.
(0:21:38) speaker_1: ” Like, there was, for him, there was no question.
(0:21:42) speaker_2: Mm-hmm.
(0:21:44) speaker_1: Um, and for the artist friend, it was like, “This is probably your mom. This is most likely your mom.”
(0:21:50) speaker_2: There’s a high probability.
(0:21:51) speaker_1: Yeah. Yeah. And then, so we searched the death record. We, I mean, uh, sort… It’s kind of backwards, like…
(0:21:56) speaker_1: So we then go to the death record, and I thought it would triangulate and confirm some of the information that I had.
(0:22:02) speaker_1: But the death record has very little information on it.
(0:22:06) speaker_1: It has her name, and it has this surviving husband, which means she remarried, because divorced the person she was with when I was born.
(0:22:16) speaker_1: Right after I was born or right before I was born, she divorced that husband, who is not my father, and… But she got remarried.
(0:22:25) speaker_1: And so, on the death record is, you know, his name, the day she died, the cause of death, which said heart attack and cervical cancer, and, and she died at 42 years old.
(0:22:38) speaker_1:
(0:22:39) speaker_2: Oh, so young.
(0:22:40) speaker_1: Yeah. Which was also… You know, as I mentioned, I turned 42 on April 8th, so seven days-
(0:22:47) speaker_2: Right.
(0:22:47) speaker_1: … away, you know, myself from turning 42. And so it was just like this really… I mean, it was, it was sad, but it was like a reserved sort of sadness.
(0:22:59) speaker_1: And still is because I, I don’t know for certain if that’s her. And, and so it’s like this… There’s this ambiguity there.
(0:23:09) speaker_1: Um, and there’s this term of ambiguous loss for adoption, and people in foster care, too, because there’s different types of ambiguous loss, and then people who experience like their parents having Alzheimer’s.
(0:23:22) speaker_1: There’s these different types of ambiguous loss, but this, I, I…
(0:23:27) speaker_1: Is kind of for me in that category of just not knowing for sure if she’s passed, and then just this weird temporality of finding this out, you know, almost 29 years later, which is not typical, right?
(0:23:41) speaker_1: It’s not typical that you find out that the person who gave birth to you died 29 years earlier. So it’s…
(0:23:49) speaker_2: That-
(0:23:49) speaker_1: Yeah.
(0:23:51) speaker_2: So, Kit, I’ll share a little that is similar in my story. Um, I recently found out that…
(0:23:57) speaker_2: Through DNA I found a half-sister, a bio half-sister who is also an adoptee.
(0:24:03) speaker_1: Oh, wow.
(0:24:04) speaker_2: But adopted to Denmark.
(0:24:05) speaker_1: Wow.
(0:24:05) speaker_2: And even though my paperwork has very little, her paperwork had information that her father died in 2013.
(0:24:15) speaker_1: Wow. Wow.
(0:24:15) speaker_2: So a few years ago, I found out. You know, it’s sort of like you.
(0:24:21) speaker_2: It’s, it’s not 100% confirmed, but most likely we share a father, and most likely, if her paperwork is correct, I learned that he died. So-
(0:24:31) speaker_1: Oh, wow. Yeah.
(0:24:33) speaker_2: How, how do you go about grieving? Or what’s been your process so far? I re- I realize it’s really just been, you know, a month or so- (laughs)
(0:24:42) speaker_1: Right.
(0:24:42) speaker_2: … that you’ve been going through this, but I mean, is it…
(0:24:46) speaker_2: It, it sounds like you’ve had a very kind of, um, engaged search for a while, and then to have this sort of be what you find out out of it, you know, it’s like, h- how do you process that?
(0:24:58) speaker_2:
(0:24:59) speaker_1: It is, yeah, it’s hard to process, and I’m sorry about your situation. I mean, yeah-
(0:25:06) speaker_2: Oh.
(0:25:06) speaker_1: … it’s very similar and that’s-
(0:25:08) speaker_2: It is what it is, I guess, right? (laughs)
(0:25:10) speaker_1: I don’t know. Yeah, I mean, it’s just, uh, it was a weird…
(0:25:14) speaker_1: (sighs) It was just a weird moment in, in my life in terms of the, like, the, the time I found out.
(0:25:21) speaker_1: It was, I was, like, finishing my book revisions that day. Like, they were due that day and it was this weird situation-
(0:25:28) speaker_2: Wow.
(0:25:28) speaker_1: … where my friend in Hong Kong from grad school, he messaged me the Friday before April 1st, and he’s like, “Hey, I have some information.
(0:25:38) speaker_1: I think I confirmed something.” And I was like, “Okay, uh, you know, what did you confirm?
(0:25:43) speaker_1: ” And, and he’s like, “Well, I think Winnie, our mutual friend now, um, she should tell you.” And I was like, “Okay. That’s, that’s kinda weird, but okay.
(0:25:53) speaker_1: ” And so I really couldn’t get a read on if this was, like, good news or bad news, and so I just left it at that, and he’s like, “Yeah, she’s gonna contact you soon.
(0:26:04) speaker_1: ” And then my wife was away and then she came back, and on April 1st I was telling her as we were eating lunch, and I was kind of breaking in the middle of the day because I had been working nonstop that previous week.
(0:26:16) speaker_1: ‘Cause April 1st was when all of the citations, and the acknowledgments, and formatting and all of that was due, so that was the next big deadline, and I’d been working, you know, probably 10 or 12 hour days for the last week on, on that.
(0:26:32) speaker_1: So I was taking a break on Monday and Ma, my wife, she, she had thought I was gonna be done on the 1st.
(0:26:40) speaker_1: So I tell her about this conversation through text that I had with my friend and she’s like, “I know what he’s talking about ’cause he actually reached out to me.
(0:26:47) speaker_1: ” And she said, “I told him that maybe you should wait until the 1st to tell him because he’s got this major deadline coming up.
(0:26:58) speaker_1: ” And so then I was just like, “Okay, this is even more weird because, you know, my wife knows this information,” and so then I was like, okay, you know, I trust her, and I had a hunch, and so I just said…
(0:27:12) speaker_1: I- it was kinda weird because I was like, I could ask her and she would tell me or I could just ignore it and just finish this book.
(0:27:20) speaker_1: And this book that I know that I’m gonna have to actually pull an all-nighter for because that’s just how much work I had left to do.
(0:27:28) speaker_1: And, uh, so I said, “Okay, I’m just gonna do one guess, and if I guess right, then just tell me the truth.
(0:27:35) speaker_1: ” And so w- yeah, we’re sitting at the lunch table and, you know, of course I, I guessed correctly that she had passed, and so, again, my wife thought, like, I was gonna be done on the 1st and that that would be the time to tell me, but essentially I learned about her passing at lunch and still had, like, 20 hours of work still to do.
(0:27:59) speaker_1: And so she and I kind of sat together and I, you know, cried for a little bit, and then I collected myself and worked for another 20 hours, and then I actually flew just a day and a half later to Rhode Island.
(0:28:14) speaker_1: There’s a Adoption Studies Conference in Rhode Island. I don’t know if you’ve heard of, about it, it’s the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture.
(0:28:21) speaker_1:
(0:28:22) speaker_2: Yeah. Yeah.
(0:28:22) speaker_1: So yeah, it was like a whirlwind because before I knew it I was on the plane.
(0:28:27) speaker_1: I mean, I canceled class the next day, which felt much needed ’cause it was a weird situation where nobody knows who this person is, nobody’s met this person.
(0:28:36) speaker_1: I have no recollection of this person and I just have a name and some information about her.
(0:28:43) speaker_1: But of course, you know, finding that news out was, you know, devastating and, and so it was just weird, like, what do I do? Am I supposed to keep teaching?
(0:28:53) speaker_1: Am I just supposed to, like, you know, kind of, like, how do you treat this?
(0:28:58) speaker_1: And somebody in my department had just lost her mom and she, you know, she flew out of the country, back to her, her home country, and was doing class remotely and, and having us fill in and everything, and canceled class for the week.
(0:29:14) speaker_1: And so I was just like, “Okay.”
(0:29:18) speaker_2: Oh, right. As an adoptee, you-
(0:29:20) speaker_1: In, in this, in this situation. Yeah.
(0:29:23) speaker_2: Yeah. Do workplaces respect, or can we even ask for time off to grieve a birth family member?
(0:29:31) speaker_1: Yeah, and, and my chair is so supportive.
(0:29:33) speaker_1: He, of course, would’ve said absolutely yes, and I, you know, I actually just recently told him about her passing a few days ago, and he absolutely would’ve…
(0:29:44) speaker_1: But at the same time, it just feels weird and different because of the way that…
(0:29:50) speaker_1: We, we have never met my colleague’s mother, but we’ve heard about her, and we knew that she was sick, and we knew that our colleague had this s- you know, beautiful relationship with h- her mother.
(0:30:03) speaker_1: And so, you know, it’s just a different context.
(0:30:06) speaker_1: And so that was all very confusing, and then the conference was one in which I was co-organizing the conference, and so I was getting very little sleep and I was super busy.
(0:30:17) speaker_1: Um, it, it was-
(0:30:18) speaker_2: So in a sense you could bury your feelings and just, “I gotta-“
(0:30:22) speaker_1: Yeah.
(0:30:23) speaker_2: “…apply to this conference.” I mean, is that what happened?
(0:30:25) speaker_1: It’s kinda what happened. I mean, I presented at the conference, and my presentation was kind of the conclusion of my book.
(0:30:32) speaker_1: And one of the things that’s in it is this concept of ghostly kinship of, you know, having kinship with ghosts.
(0:30:43) speaker_1: And there’s this idea that when we are afraid of ghosts, they are an absent presence.
(0:30:50) speaker_1: Which means they’re present but kind of in the background and, and we kind of make them disappear.
(0:30:57) speaker_1: They’re absent in the immediate sort of sense of things, but they’re always like this sort of seething presence that haunt, that haunt our lives, right?
(0:31:07) speaker_1: But I talk in the conclusion with Ghostly Kinship about what would it mean to, like, sort of invert that and produce a present absence?
(0:31:17) speaker_1: And, and that means to bring what is absent into closer proximity to us in, in whatever way we can.
(0:31:26) speaker_1: And so at the end of my presentation, I showed on, on the last slide, I, I had a picture of my birth mother and, you know, the, the headstone of her.
(0:31:38) speaker_1: Trying to, like, bring her into the room at that moment.
(0:31:46) speaker_1: So that, for me, was super emotional, but it, it, it felt like both part of the mourning and, you know, I don’t wanna say healing, but, uh, somewhat of a, a release I guess.
(0:32:02) speaker_1: I had been holding it in and work had been covering a lot of my emotions, so at that moment, at the end of the presentation, I was probably the most emotional I’d been since April 1st.
(0:32:17) speaker_1:
(0:32:18) speaker_2: You know, it seems to me that in that moment, the slide comes up, a room full of scholars at the edge of their seat, and it seems like in that moment, you did bring your ghost into the present.
(0:32:31) speaker_2:
(0:32:31) speaker_1: Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s what I was trying to do. And I think, you know, a lot of people felt it certainly.
(0:32:37) speaker_1: I mean, I think everybody in the room, not everybody in the room is connected to adoption, but, but most of the people are.
(0:32:45) speaker_1: And so they, I think they felt it too, so. (instrumental music plays)
(0:33:13) speaker_2: Can you talk more about your book?
(0:33:16) speaker_1: Yeah, yeah. I’d love to. Um, the title of the book is called The Violence of Love: Race, Adoption, and Family in the United States. And-
(0:33:27) speaker_2: So provocative.
(0:33:28) speaker_1: Yeah, thank you.
(0:33:30) speaker_1: I mean, essentially what, in my earlier research of course all of us who are kind of have a critical lens on adoption understand kind of the harm that it can do and the trauma that exists-
(0:33:45) speaker_2: Mm-hmm.
(0:33:45) speaker_1: … um, and is attached to it. And how adoption is like this lifelong process and all of these things.
(0:33:53) speaker_1: But in a lot of the literature, it kind of talked about adoption as either being this good thing, like a lot of these outcome studies that-
(0:34:02) speaker_2: Mm. That they, they interview kids about their adjustment? (laughs)
(0:34:05) speaker_1: Yeah. They, they’ll either interview kids, like, in front of their parents or they-
(0:34:09) speaker_2: Right.
(0:34:09) speaker_1: … actually they survey the parents themselves, the adoptive parents-
(0:34:12) speaker_2: Right, about how their kids are doing. Yeah.
(0:34:14) speaker_1: Yeah, yeah.
(0:34:15) speaker_1: And those studies supposedly, you know, categorically or unequivocally proved, you know, quote unquote proved that transracial and transnational adoptions were a good thing, right?
(0:34:26) speaker_1: And that they’re beneficial, they’re good and, and loving and all of these things.
(0:34:30) speaker_1: And, and then of course there’s a lot of adoptees who are really critiquing that, and then there’s some scholars who are also critiquing that as well.
(0:34:37) speaker_1: And of course I lean toward the latter side, but I also wanted to look a little bit more deeply into this idea of love and how, you know, how do we get to where we are?
(0:34:50) speaker_1: Like, how did we get there? And how were adoption agencies, how was the government, how were adoptive parents imagining this thing that we call love?
(0:35:02) speaker_1: How were they practicing this idea of love?
(0:35:05) speaker_1: And then in both the imaginative aspect and the discursive and the sort of the practicing of, again, this thing called love, how was it always attached to violence?
(0:35:17) speaker_1: Whether violence was the condition that produced the need for love or whether violence occurred during the process of adoption or after that sort of official act had finished.
(0:35:32) speaker_1: And when we talk about how adoptive parents make parenting choices or dismiss their child’s feelings and experiences, you know, those sort of things.
(0:35:41) speaker_1: So essentially trying to think of the different levels that violence exists so I, I, I talk about structural violence and symbolic or representational violence and then traumatic violence though, to a lesser extent, because I think most people understand the traumatic part that’s attached to adoption.
(0:35:58) speaker_1: So there’s a number of lines that I look at and one of the threads is a comparative relational thread of looking at the children, uh, Asian, Black and Native American children, um, and those different histories and trajectories….
(0:36:43) speaker_1: so I talk about the sort of, these three different groups of adoptees, or adoptions, and then I’d, I’d look at the different layers of violence that I’d mentioned before.
(0:36:56) speaker_1: And so those are kind of the main themes in the book.
(0:36:59) speaker_2: Um, structural violence, would that be like societal pressures, cultural norms, expectations and reasons why a child would be separated from their family?
(0:37:12) speaker_2:
(0:37:12) speaker_1: Yeah, absolutely.
(0:37:13) speaker_1: I mean in a technical sense, and I kind of talk about this in my introduction, in a technical sense the way that I talk about structural violence in my course is that it’s the combination of ideological and institutional…
(0:37:29) speaker_1: You know, I talk mostly about race but I also talk about gender and sexuality and class, and so it’s the ideological and institutional aspects, right, that are combined over a period of time, and so it’s those things, those two things over a period of time that produce the structural aspect of racism, of patriarchy or hetero-patriarchy, of classism, and all those things.
(0:37:59) speaker_1: And so when I say structural, I mean that sort of in a very specific way. But it covers a lot, right? It covers all those things you said.
(0:38:08) speaker_1: So it covers how families don’t receive social support.
(0:38:12) speaker_1: You know, one of my chapters looks at the 1990s and federal legislation that’s passed in the United States, and even though adoption law is typically state law, because it’s family law, but there are a number of federal legislation that deal with adoption and a lot of them passed in the ’90s.
(0:38:33) speaker_1: So when you think about institutional, institutional aspects of racism, of classism, of sexism, all sort of operating, we think about welfare reform in the ’90s, we think about how there was an adoption tax credit.
(0:38:49) speaker_1: So here you’re giving money to adoptive families to adopt. And at that point, I think it was 6,000, you know, approximately $6,000 to adopt a child.
(0:39:03) speaker_1: So rather than using that money to support or keep a family together, we’re going to pay an adoptive family, right, to adopt.
(0:39:11) speaker_1: And it was supposed to encourage people to adopt from foster care, and it was supposed to encourage people who were maybe lower or middle class families to adopt.
(0:39:21) speaker_1: But ultimately, the tax credit has really just helped upper middle class and wealthier families to adopt, primarily overseas.
(0:39:29) speaker_1: And of course, you know, the number of overseas adoptions or transnational adoptions has declined but when we talk about the adoption tax credit, the people who are, you know, taking advantage of it the most were at the highest end of what was allowable in the tax structure.
(0:39:47) speaker_1: And so yeah, when I talk about structural violence, I’m talking about that, I’m talking about the Supreme Court case for, that challenged ICWA.
(0:39:56) speaker_1: There’s two Supreme Court cases that challenged ICWA, the Indian Child Welfare Act.
(0:40:01) speaker_2: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
(0:40:02) speaker_1: Those type of things, yeah.
(0:40:05) speaker_2: And Kit, are you a transracial adoptee as well?
(0:40:07) speaker_1: Yeah, yeah. My parents are white and, um, I have a brother who is not adopted and, um, but we, you know, I have a good relationship with them.
(0:40:18) speaker_1: I would say that it’s the disclosure about what my research was about, that was much more recent. I had a lot of anxiety about that.
(0:40:27) speaker_1: My relationship with them otherwise was really, you know, pretty good. I guess relative to a lot of families, like we-
(0:40:35) speaker_2: But you were…
(0:40:36) speaker_1: Yeah.
(0:40:36) speaker_2: You were worried about their reaction?
(0:40:38) speaker_1: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we enjoy hanging out with each other and I call my parents almost on a weekly basis, and… But we don’t really talk a ton of politics.
(0:40:48) speaker_1: I mean, my area of research, of course, is controversial.
(0:40:52) speaker_2: Critical adoption
(0:40:54) speaker_3: are.
(0:40:55) speaker_1: Yeah well, and ethnic studies in general.
(0:40:57) speaker_1: You know, I have my, I teach a class on race and law and I, you know, I teach about the construction of race and the history of racism and all of these things.
(0:41:05) speaker_1:
(0:41:05) speaker_2: And like many transracial families, you’ve just learned not to talk about race.
(0:41:09) speaker_1: Yeah, I mean I don’t completely avoid it but…
(0:41:13) speaker_2: At home.
(0:41:13) speaker_1: Yeah, but, um, it doesn’t come up often just because I get such little time with them that I don’t want to spend all my time sort of teaching ethnic studies to my parents.
(0:41:26) speaker_1: But I think they’ve grown a lot, I mean, on their own in some ways, and I finally did disclose to them, like, what my research was about, and again it was very, it was this area of anxiety and I started, like, going to therapy again because of it.
(0:41:44) speaker_1: And so yeah, I finally did it this last winter break and it was a big relief to kind of tell them what the title of my book was and kind of the general ideas of the book, and that what I’m talking about, you know, doesn’t reflect my feelings about our family or this desire that I wish I wasn’t adopted.
(0:42:07) speaker_1: Certainly I think I still have, you know, these questions of, “What would my life have been had I not been adopted?
(0:42:13) speaker_1: ” And I think a lot of adoptees have that, uh, th- those questions.
(0:42:17) speaker_1: Um, and of course some adoptees do wish they hadn’t been adopted and so that’s essentially what my book is trying to capture.
(0:42:24) speaker_1: It’s trying to capture the wide range of experiences that people have and, um, the way that in those wide ranges, like, that violence is always attached to adoption no matter how much love is infused into the idea of it and the practice of it, that…
(0:42:48) speaker_1: You know, there’s just a, a multitude of layers in which violence is causing adoption, is, is sort of producing adoption or, or, or occurring alongside it or coming after it, and, and even happening outside of it.
(0:43:04) speaker_1: And, and when I say, like, the violence that happens outside of adoption is, you know, the example of how adoption is a privileged form of immigration.
(0:43:13) speaker_1: And so, when we talk about adoption as this loving form of family-making, a lot of people, I think, agree with that, but then we look at how other families who are trying to come to the United States and they have a much more difficult time, right?
(0:43:28) speaker_1: And then they’re labeled as illegal and all of these different things that…
(0:43:33) speaker_1: The, the way that we construct adoption and adoptive families produces violence even outside of the realm of adoption.
(0:43:43) speaker_2: Mm. What was their reaction?
(0:43:45) speaker_1: Their…
(0:43:46) speaker_1: Yeah, their reaction was, um, y- you know, I think the ini- the very, very initial reaction, sort of, a- and actually I don’t know this for sure, but kind of reading my mom’s face, it felt like s- sh- you know, she was sort of trying to, she was trying to wrap her head around of, you know, “What does this title mean?
(0:44:06) speaker_1: ” And, and maybe the title kind of being a little stab in the heart maybe? Um, but i- the more I talked about it, it, and it kind of happened in two moments.
(0:44:19) speaker_1: Once kind of in a shorter conversation the first day we’d gotten together for that winter break, and then later at another conversation, uh, when it was actually just the four of us, and when I say the four of us, my parents and my brother, at a lunch, and it had been such a long time since the four of us had been together, just the four of us with, like, no spouses and no children, just the four of us, and I really couldn’t remember the last time that that had happened.
(0:44:47) speaker_1: And so, yeah, my mom just asked me this question of, “I know that you’re both going through a lot this year, and, you know, what can we do to help you in this upcoming year?
(0:44:57) speaker_1: ” And so I took the opportunity just to, to tell her that, “I, I’ve written this book.
(0:45:02) speaker_1: ” A- and again, I’d already told her, but, uh, it was just kind of revisiting it and, and going a bit deeper and just saying, you know, “I’ve written this book and, you know, the best way to support me at this moment would be to, to take the book in the way that I’ve tried to write it, which is to try to be…
(0:45:20) speaker_1: to be loving, ironically, but critical.
(0:45:23) speaker_1: ” And, and, and I think that for, for them, they, you know, they knew that I still love them, and I th- for them, that’s like, you know, that’s kind of the bottom line.
(0:45:35) speaker_1: And so whatever’s in the book, I think they, they, I think are excited to read it.
(0:45:40) speaker_1: And my mom was questioning whether she would even understand anything in the book, and I told her I, I hope she would read it and, you know, would be able to get some stuff out of it.
(0:45:52) speaker_1: And I tried to write it for a broader audience and not just the academic audience because, for me, this is, you know, something that I want social workers to read, of course, adopt- adopt- adoptees and foremost, but, you know, adoptive parents, social workers, psychologists.
(0:46:07) speaker_1: I, I, I would want as many people who are connected to adoption to read it because it tries to sort of, you know, lay out this history that a lot of people have talked about in different ways, but I try to bring in these three histories of the adoption of Asian, Native American, and Black children to, sort of together in conversation with each other, and I talk about positive adoption language, and I talk about these federal laws and, and looking at the congressional hearings and how legislators were talking about adoption and, and the laws themselves.
(0:46:41) speaker_1: And then I talk about international law, the Hague Adoption Convention, and then I talk about the Supreme Court cases, like, like I mentioned.
(0:46:51) speaker_1: So, those are the main sights that I look at.
(0:46:54) speaker_1: I also sort of open and conclude with my time working at a summer camp for adoptees as an example of some of the different ideas that I’m talking about, so there’s a lot of examples in there that I think help illustrate this idea that, this framework that I’m trying to put forth.
(0:47:11) speaker_1:
(0:47:11) speaker_2: Well, it’s, it’s an important book. I can’t wait to read it myself. And it really gets at this… (sighs) There’s the tension in adoption, right?
(0:47:24) speaker_2: So, as adoptees and as, uh, critical adoption scholars and thinkers, you know, you can think of adoption under a critical, intellectual lens, and then on the other side of it, we have our adoptive families, we have our families.
(0:47:39) speaker_2:
(0:47:39) speaker_1: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
(0:47:40) speaker_2: And in a way, it’s sort of like separating ourselves, you know, we’re detaching, for example, our families and then really putting adoption under the necessary critical lens it needs to, because that’s our truth and that should be investigated.
(0:47:58) speaker_2: And at the same time, then we’ve got our families and our family relationships and that sort of acknowledgement that we’re, that we’re all kind of agents or, or parents or agents, but actors, we’re all party to this system and we all have different roles in them, and, and so it, it is difficult to have these conversations, like, on the one hand, you know, I can love my family and at the same time, I can look at adoption and look at it as a system and as a social injustice.
(0:48:37) speaker_2:
(0:48:37) speaker_1: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. H- like, you know, how do we hold those two things-
(0:48:43) speaker_2: Mm-hmm.
(0:48:43) speaker_1: … uh, together and how do we sort of disentangle the……
(0:48:49) speaker_1: story that we sort of know about adoption, and think about the future and what we could do differently in the future.
(0:48:59) speaker_1: And yeah, there’s a lot of aspects that make adoption just a really difficult topic to talk about. And so, yeah, I’m hoping that the book will…
(0:49:09) speaker_1: Could, could be a res- you know, o- one of the many amazing resources.
(0:49:13) speaker_1: You know, there’s just so many in terms of whether it’s poetry or the children’s books and, that are coming out as different forms to look at adoption and to really think about it in a, in these deeper ways.
(0:49:27) speaker_1: And the memoirs that have been coming out as well.
(0:49:30) speaker_1: And now, th- there’s really, with your podcast and I know there’s other folks who are doing podcasts to have avenues to talk about the complicated nature of it.
(0:49:40) speaker_1: Because of course, a- again, you know this, that adoption is reduced and simplified to this very specific idea when it’s much more complicated than that.
(0:49:52) speaker_1:
(0:49:54) speaker_2: What do you…
(0:49:55) speaker_2: Well, for example, there’s so many folks like you who are transracial international adoptees, who are creating leading bodies of work and really bringing forth new ideas or taking ideas and making things clearer, bringing things into the light.
(0:50:16) speaker_2: And are you seeing that maybe the collective way we think about adoption is changing?
(0:50:24) speaker_2: I know that’s a big, you know, (laughs) statement to make, but I’m wondering if the needle is changing in, we call this dominant narrative about adoption, and so much scholarly research and memoirs and also just, um, court cases coming out (laughs) about adoption.
(0:50:46) speaker_2: Just wondering if your sense of it is that the discussions around adoption are changing.
(0:50:53) speaker_1: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great question.
(0:50:55) speaker_1: I mean, I think on a wide scale, that the dominant narrative of adoption still holds, and you see that a lot of times in media still, and the way that people talk about it, or the way that people sort of talk about it on social media when they respond to adoptees who post-
(0:51:13) speaker_2: Mm-hmm.
(0:51:13) speaker_1: … or are, you know, challenging the norm or, uh, as you’ve seen, flipping the script.
(0:51:19) speaker_2: Mm-hmm.
(0:51:20) speaker_1: A- a- and of course, so we see those responses and that there’s a lot of people who are still unexposed to the different realities and truths of adoption.
(0:51:29) speaker_1: But then, of course, there’s like these gigantic…
(0:51:31) speaker_1: And I wouldn’t even call them pockets, ’cause I feel like pockets is too small, but there are these areas and realms where things are starting to change.
(0:51:41) speaker_1: And I mean, I think about the family policing system, and the University of Houston, their social work program has taken an abolitionist mission to its school, and it’s a graduate school for professional social work school.
(0:51:56) speaker_1: And so they are now training social workers to think about abolition and think about the child welfare system or the child protective system as a family policing system.
(0:52:06) speaker_1: And so, the, the fact that you can get an institution of higher learning to take that approach is, that’s a big thing.
(0:52:15) speaker_1: And of course, the dean of that school did get fired, but the mission still exists, and so I think there’s anxiety around that direction.
(0:52:24) speaker_1: They created an academic journal, um, an abolitionist journal.
(0:52:28) speaker_1: And then you look at some of the organizations that are doing work and they are starting to, um, think about new ways of creating permanency and, and relationality and care that don’t always look toward adoption as the best option.
(0:52:49) speaker_1: And so I think that, in those ways, there is quite a bit of movement.
(0:52:53) speaker_1: Not a systemic movement, but there’s certainly a lot of people who recognize that the way that we’ve done things is really harmful to children, most importantly, but also, of course, to families who are separated for different reasons that are typically due to poverty or racism, hetero patriarchy, and all of these things that are in fact structural, right?
(0:53:15) speaker_1: And so I think a lot of people are starting to recognize that and trying to figure out ways to support families as opposed to facilitate the breaking up of families.
(0:53:24) speaker_1:
(0:53:24) speaker_2: Kit, is your book available for pre-order and where can people buy it, and then also how can they contact you if you’re open to being contacted?
(0:53:35) speaker_1: Yeah. The book is supposed to come out like at the end of 2024, early 2025. It’s not up on the website yet.
(0:53:42) speaker_1: It’s through University of California Press, and the reason I went with them is because they have an open access plan that you can do, and so I’ve, I’ve chosen the open access route, so it’ll be available for free online to anybody who wants to-
(0:53:56) speaker_2: Wow.
(0:53:57) speaker_1: … online. And it can als- it, it’ll be available-
(0:53:59) speaker_2: It can be purchased as well.
(0:54:01) speaker_1: Yeah. Yeah.
(0:54:02) speaker_2: Okay.
(0:54:02) speaker_1: In every sort of typical outlet.
(0:54:04) speaker_2: Okay.
(0:54:04) speaker_1: But yeah, it’ll be available online, and I, I’ll certainly be posting about it on my social media outlets, which is really, it’s Instagram and Twitter.
(0:54:12) speaker_1: Instagram is called Abolish_and_build, abolish and build with some underscores in there, and then I think the Twitter is just myerskit, @myerskit.
(0:54:25) speaker_2: Okay. And folks can check our Adapted Podcasts Instagram and website also. I’ll publish the right handles-
(0:54:34) speaker_1: Cool. Perfect.
(0:54:34) speaker_2: … for Kit too. So, okay, well, Kit, it’s been a pleasure.
(0:54:39) speaker_1: Thanks for having me.
(0:54:39) speaker_2: Thank you for taking the time out from your family on this weekend, and I’m really glad I got to meet you at a symposium on adoption at UC Irvine, and you know, all the best.
(0:54:51) speaker_2: I hope I’ll run into you again.
(0:54:54) speaker_1: Yeah. It was so wonderful to meet you there, and thank you for reaching out about this podcast.
(0:54:59) speaker_1: And I’ve been listening to various episodes that you’ve had, and, and you’re just, uh, you’re an amazing interviewer-
(0:55:06) speaker_0: Oh, thank you. (laughs)
(0:55:07) speaker_1: …
(0:55:07) speaker_1: and, uh, just the way that you’re able to, like, kinda capture what people have said and then sort of ask follow-up questions that really sort of help reveal super important connections and all those things.
(0:55:20) speaker_1: So, you’re very skilled at what you do, and, and I really appreciate the work that you’re doing to put this out there for our community.
(0:55:26) speaker_4: (instrumental music)
(0:55:38) speaker_0: Thank you, Kit. We eagerly anticipate your book coming out in early 2025. Thanks also to new patron supporter, Heeji Jacobs.
(0:55:50) speaker_0: I want to also plug an online kimjang, or communal kimchi-making event, coming up on June 1st.
(0:55:56) speaker_0: The six-hour course will allow you to learn how to make kimchi in your own home with your own utensils.
(0:56:02) speaker_0: We will also take several breaks, so you won’t actively be in class the whole time.
(0:56:07) speaker_0: Korean adoptee community leader, Holly McGinnis, will facilitate the kimjang, and help us process our grief and joy of being adopted Koreans who are reconnecting to our heritage.
(0:56:19) speaker_0: It’ll also be special as the group will be very intimate. There will be an added bonus of tea from Jirisan shipped to you.
(0:56:28) speaker_0: But you have to act now while we have time to mail out the tea. Go to our Instagram page to find out more. Until next time, I’m Kaomi Lee.
(0:56:37) speaker_4: (instrumental music)