Going Home, Leaving Home

Ansley at Noble Seoul has a new post up about adoptive parents traveling to Korea to pick up their newly adopted children, vs. having them escorted and meeting them at the airport. I don’t know much about adoption agencies’ rules/guidance regarding escort vs. travel, but it seems to be up to the adoptive parents to make that decision [Edited to add: depending on the agency]. Ansley presents some very compelling reasons to travel, and so I encourage folks to click on over and read what they are.

Her post made me think of the journeys that I have taken from Korea to the U.S., or rather, the two that I can remember.

********************************************

On the flight back from our first trip to Korea a few years ago, we had the unfortunate luck to be seated immediately in front of two young Korean brothers traveling alone. I think they were about 6 and 8 years old, and they were presumably traveling to the U.S. to visit relatives. I wasn’t bothered as much by them as by the little toy trucks and robots that they played with on their tray tables, which of course shook the seats in front of them (ours) every time a robot or truck dove into a crash landing. As you can imagine, these crash landings (along with noisy races along the backs of our headrests) happened rather frequently, or so it seemed.

I hadn’t realized that kids so young could travel alone, but apparently they can and in airline parlance are called “unaccompanied minors”. They receive special assistance from the airline staff throughout the flight, but unfortunately for us, this assistance did not include instructions or reprimands not to disturb the passengers around them. I tried to give them my best disapproving stare, but they only stared back at me and giggled. There was a clear language barrier between us, and alas, absolutely no sound barrier.

Right before departing from Seoul we had been on Cheju Island, where we purchased some of the little oranges for which Cheju is known. I passed two oranges back to the boys behind us, half hoping that they would know better than to accept food from complete strangers. For better or for worse they did indeed take the fruit, and a blissful silence ensued for about three minutes as they peeled and ate.

There were other children on the flight, but they all seemed to be traveling with adults. I wondered why it was just my luck to be stuck in front of two unaccompanied minors that I couldn’t communicate with, and counted down the hours until they fell asleep. It took them a long, l-o-n-g time, but they eventually did succumb to slumber.

And eventually, so did we.

********************************************

The flight back home on this more recent trip to Korea was very different. This time I didn’t see any “unaccompanied minors,” but there were plenty of “accompanied” ones. We were on a different airline, one that is apparently used by a certain agency to escort newly adopted children to their new homes.

At first I didn’t realize that these babies and children were adoptees who were being escorted — I just assumed that they were non-adopted kids traveling with their biological families. After an emotional last few days in Korea, I was exhausted and cranky and incredibly sleep-deprived. I cursed my luck to be on a flight with so many screaming children, and tried to hold out hope that they wouldn’t be seated too close to us. We hadn’t gone to Cheju this time, and I didn’t have any oranges.

After I realized who these kids — mostly babies — were, I had oceans more patience for the choruses of crying that handily drowned out the engine noise. I tried to imagine what they had just been through in the last 24 hours, how many times they had been handed off from person to person, and what they thought of the parade of strange faces that must have flashed before them. I imagined the real message behind the cries that I was hearing on that plane was an age-appropriate expression of “WTF happened to me?”, and knew I had probably “asked” that same question as I was escorted to my new home. I thought about how on top of the new people, smells, and noises, they lacked the capacity to understand what was going on or why they had just been ripped from everything that they knew. Because even though adoptive parents talk about their children “coming” home, what it feels like to the adoptees is that they are “leaving” home. Sure, the homes they are going to may be their “forever” homes (at least let’s hope), but what it will feel like to the child is legalized kidnapping. (Hat tip to Ansley for the link.) Who wouldn’t be exhausted and cranky after enduring all that?

I watched the little picture of our plane traverse the map on my seatback monitor, and starting thinking less about what these brand-new adoptees had experienced in the last 24 hours, and more about what they will face in the next 24 years. Will they ever find themselves on another flight back from Korea, this time as adults after a visit to their “motherland”? Will they be exhausted and cranky once again, this time after an incredibly tumultuous and unsuccessful search for their Korean families? Will they pace the cabin of the plane — this time not in a plain brown baby sling strapped to a kind-faced haraboji, but instead on their own two feet — looking for a place where they can finally feel at home?

I got up from my seat, and wondered if this was actually my home. Not the floor of the Boeing 777 that I was physically standing on, but the vast expanse between Korea and America, this third space that is both and neither and in the middle all at once. Twenty-four years from now, will the young adoptees on my flight be joining this metaphorical space over the ocean that adult Korean adoptees are claiming for ourselves?

Twenty-four years from now, will they be asking that same question of “WTF happened to me?” as they turn to us for answers and accountability? What will we answer, when they ask us what we did to minimize the impact of international adoption, and at the same time to reduce the conditions that lead to it?

Twenty-four years from now, will they look around their plane and see yet another generation of adoptees being escorted away from the only homes they have ever known?