* * *

Kristin Rutherford was born in 1976 in Inchon, South Korea, just 30 miles north of Seoul. Shortly after birth, she was abandoned at an orphanage in Seoul, where she lived until she was 9 months old and came to the United States.

Her adopted parents lived in Waterbury, Conn., an old New England mill town with a population of just over 100,000. Though the city had a significant black and Hispanic population, there were few Asians, a fact that Rutherford noticed as early as the first grade when drawing a self-portrait.

"Our teacher told us to use an orange crayon if we were white and a brown crayon if we were black," she said. "I mixed the two trying to get the right color and she was like 'What did you do?' It looked like a mess."

As a young child, Rutherford would ask her parents about Korea. If she saw a map of the world, she would ask to be shown where Korea was. At the grocery store, she would ask what people ate in Korea. Her parents' answers, she said, were vague at best, inaccurate at worst.
"They would show me, but they would also kind of make up things because they didn't know," she said. "My mother said, 'They eat a lot of fish.' That's it. End of story. No mention of kimchi (a popular Korean delicacy) or anything like that."

Until middle school, Rutherford attended St. Francis Xavier, a small Catholic private school. She had one other adopted Korean in her kindergarten class. When that student moved away, Rutherford found herself the only Korean, and one of only four Asians at the school.

Her ethnicity seldom arose as an issue in school until the sixth grade, when she transferred to John F. Kennedy, a more urban public school in Waterbury with a large black and Hispanic population.

"We were on the bus with kids from the projects and they would harass me and my friends, calling us ethnic slurs even though they weren't white either," she said. "They would call me 'chink' or whatever. I don't think they even knew the right slur."

Even when she was upset, Rutherford said, she didn't share her feelings with her parents because she didn't think they would understand.

Often, they actually made the remarks that upset her. Sometimes her father made derogatory remarks about blacks, Hispanics and Asians. Other times, she felt her mother was the problem. During high school, she worked with her mother at K-mart. When a co-worker was surprised to find out that they were related, she said, her mother pulled the sides of her eyes back with her fingertips and said "Doesn't she look like her mother?"

"I don't think she recognized how incredibly rude that is," Rutherford said. "She just didn't think about it enough."

However, she is often inclined to give her parents the benefit of the doubt, saying "they might just have seen me as being white." Other adoptees she knows say their families treated them as though they were white, often giving them a chance to see how minorities were perceived within the household.

"We are able to be like a fly on the wall," Rutherford said. "A lot of adoptees go through childhood saying they felt they were white. They had to look in a mirror to remember that wasn't the case."

* * *

In December of 1954, an Oregon lumber businessman named Harry Holt watched a documentary on the plight of orphans after the Korean War. He and his wife Bertha, both devout Christians, felt that simply donating money would not be enough. They decided to adopt eight Korean children.

At the time, adopting children from another country was virtually unheard of. Adoptees were routinely placed with families from their same ethnic background to conceal the adoption. Intercountry adoptions were so rare that it took an act of Congress — the quickly-passed "Holt bill"— to allow them.

The publicity about the couple from Creswell, Ore., generated interest across the United States in adopting Korean orphans. After their adoption went through, the Holts began a non-profit organization to help other couples. Today, Holt International Children's Services is the largest intercountry adoption agency in the world.

Race wasn't a consideration during the early years of Korean adoption. Parents were counseled to "Americanize" their children, especially those who were older and had already spent part of their childhood in orphanages or living on the streets. Because intercountry adoption was so new, there was little research on the psychological effects of raising foreign-born children in white households.

And there were few resources for parents to draw upon anyway. The number of Korean immigrants in the United States had not changed much since 1940, when there were fewer than 2,000, mainly in Western states, Alaska and Hawaii. Korean adoptees, meantime, were scattered across the continent, often in rural areas with little or no Asian presence.

In the early 1970s, the new president of Holt International decided to take a group of adult adoptees back to Korea. A survey of the participants revealed a startling number wished they had known more about their birth culture growing up. According to Todd Kwapisz, administrators at Holt International hit on the idea of a Korean heritage camp for adoptees as these responses became more common. In 1982, Holt started the Holt Heritage Camp in Oregon.

The growing Korean-American community also played a role. The Sae Jong Camp started in 1975 in Detroit, Mich., as a day camp for second-generation Korean-American children. By the early 1990s, it had become a seven-day summer camp located upstate. But interest began to drop off among the Korean immigrant community. At the same time, counselors noticed that more of the children — nearly 30 percent — were adopted. In 1996, the camp added an extra session aimed only at adoptees.

"When we started out, we had 19 campers," said former camp director Jason Rhee. "Last year, we had 97."

Along with canoeing, hiking and other traditional camp activities, Sae Jong Camp offers classes on Korean language, culture and history. During the adoptees' session, counselors talk about issues of identity as well.

"There a lot of talk about their experiences at school," said Rhee, a second-generation Korean-American. "Often, many of them are one of a very few Asians in their community. For a lot of them, this is the first time they're meeting other kids who share their circumstances. For a week, they feel perhaps not so different."

* * *

Kristin Rutherford learned about a Korean culture camp from a mass-mailer from her adoption agency when she was in middle school. She didn't share the mailer with her parents because she wasn't really interested in leaving home during the summer.

"At that time, I was old enough that I just wanted to hang out on the streets rather than go to Minnesota and hang out on some godforsaken farm," she said. "Who wants to do that when they're 15?"

If she'd had the chance as a teen-ager, Rutherford said she would have considered visiting Korea, but she thinks it is simply too inaccessible to an American who doesn't speak the language. Instead, she went to Germany during the summer between her freshman and sophomore years of high school. Two years later, she went on a similar trip to Russia and Ukraine.

"I have kind of a pop psychology theory that I was looking for some kind of ethnic identity," she said. "It was something. Maybe it was the foreignness, something that's not American like my parents were American. ...They grew up in a TV-dinner generic nondescript household. My grandmother is British, and even if you consider that ethnic, it's only British."

Because of her two trips, Rutherford decided to major in Central and Eastern European Studies at American University in Washington, D.C. Although the school touts its diversity, Rutherford said she found it "very white," with most of the foreign students coming from European and South American countries.

Though she lived in an international dorm, Rutherford said she still didn't learn much about Korea in college. She once went to a meeting of the Korean Student Association at American University, but most of the members were older, male Korean nationals. The meeting was held in Korean, and she didn't understand anything that went on.

In 1997, she left college for financial reasons and went to work at a museum and then as a nanny. One day, while checking out an Internet site for Korean-Americans, she saw a posting from Seoyung-Ho Park, a Korean middle-school teacher who was in Virginia on an exchange program. He said he was homesick and looking for Korean friends.

Rutherford replied to his e-mail. She didn't know much about Korea, she said, but she was curious. Would he teach her some Korean? The two decided to meet in a shopping mall and quickly became friends. Park taught her the alphabet and took her to a Korean restaurant in northern Virginia. He talked to her about Korean culture.

When he returned to Korea a few months later, he introduced her to a Korean graduate student to continue her language studies. Eventually, the two began to date, although he didn't speak English very well. Although the relationship ended, it broadened her exposure to Korea. Almost 21, Rutherford said she was finally beginning to feel like she had an ethnic identity.

Rutherford said she never set out consciously to find her identity as a Korean-American, but she feels better about it now that she has. She doesn't blame her parents, but she wishes it could have been different when she was a child.

"My parents didn't encourage learning about Korea," she said. "They didn't discourage it, but in no way did they facilitate it. I never brought up the issue with them, but I just didn't feel that they would be very receptive to it."

* * *

Some skeptics question whether adopting across racial lines can ever work.

Elizabeth KimJin Traver, a professor of social work at the University of South Maine who focuses on the identity issues of Korean adoptees, says that even well-meaning white parents will simply not be aware of the racism that their non-white children will face.

"They won't have to live the lifelong journey of wondering 'How do I fit in?'" she said. "They live in a society where their identity as white middle-class Americans is reflected back to them as what is normal and dominant and valued."

Traver, who was adopted from Korea at the age of 3, said children have a fundamental right to be brought up in the culture of their ethnic origin — whether that is China, Russia or South Korea, the top three countries of origin for foreign adoptees in the United States. Summer camps and language courses, she says, are just not enough.

"I think it's a step forward," she said. "I'm appreciative and grateful of those families who struggle to include it ... but I don't know if it's enough."

Traver is outside the mainstream of political opinion on adoption. However, her views echo those of some Native American activists, who successfully lobbied for the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, which required that Native American children be placed in adoptive homes within their tribe first. Some African-American social workers have advocated unsuccessfully for a similar law for black adoptees.

Still, intercountry adoption continues to grow. In the last 11 years, it has more than doubled, and U.S. citizens now adopt children from 106 different countries. Since 1958, more than 100,000 children have been adopted from South Korea.

In 2000, the first international gathering of Korean adoptees met in Washington, D.C. Among the items on its agenda was promoting the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, an international agreement designed to promote adoption across country lines around the world. There were also group discussions for young adoptees on dating and for older adoptees on dealing with grandchildren, as well as exhibits on the history of Korean adoption in the United States.

Kristin Rutherford attended the conference, which was partly sponsored by Also-Known-As.

"I thought it was really interesting," she said. "I didn't know there were adopted Koreans in Europe. I didn't know this had started back in the 1950s because of the Korean War. I always thought that most adoptees were like me and didn't have any brothers and sisters. ... That turned out not to be the case."

Afterward, Rutherford became involved in Also-Known-As, taking Korean language classes through them and volunteering for administrative duties. As a result, she's met many Korean adoptees and has found that they have a lot in common.

"It's definitely a very unique relationship I have with other adoptees," she said. "There's just some things that don't need to be explained."