• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.65 no.1
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• pp.83-107
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to understand the life experiences of an adult adoptee. For this purpose, the data were collected through in-depth interviews with an adult adoptee, observation, and documents and analyzed using life history approach. Results of analysis were composed of summarized life history, thick description of life history, theme analysis, and issues for intervention. The themes generated from analysis are 'a slub', 'a larva that want to be a butterfly', 'I am okay. No, I am not okay', 'because it is not my fault', 'love, the critical determinant leading my life'. Researchers, also, examined intervention issues of adoption, post-adoption service, closed adoption or open adoption, searching root, intervention for adult adoptee. Based on the results of this study, the policies and practical guidelines for adult adoptees were suggested.

• American Studies
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.25-56
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• 2020

The essay examines two contemporary American plays that portray adult Korean American adoptees' return to South Korea: How to Be a Korean Woman (2012) by Sunmee Chomet and Middle Brother (2014) by Eric Sharp. While the existing scholarship on transnational adoption has discussed homecoming as a predominantly female experience of birth mothers and daughters, Chomet and Sharp suggest the differing ways in which the adoptee subjectivity is re-imagined in particularly gendered ways after homecoming. In these plays, adult adoptees' repeated, mundane bodily performances of Korean cultural norms illustrate how notions of femininity and masculinity are inscribed onto the body of adoptee individuals under the patriarchal system. Such performative construction of Korean-ness departs from the earlier theatrical representations of young, adolescent adoptees' homecoming that served as a symbolic rite of passage, a necessary process through which they would gain cultural hybridity and mature into cosmopolitan American-ness.