Transcript below video created by AI.
Those of you who know me know that I am adopted. I was adopted as a baby from South Korea. I was one of hundreds of thousands of Korean children who were put up for adoption.All of the world sent off to various countries. Of course, the United States being the biggest receiver of Korean children. It started, of course, with the Korean War and trying to find homes for those who were orphaned by the war.But we have since discovered that South Korea has, as a country, admitted to the way in which they really sold us. It’s hard to get your brain around it, but the country as a whole participated in trafficking. They have admitted to this. As a country, they were looking for ways to provide for children and to do something to restore the country after the war. They just looked the other way when agencies came in and said, We’re going to take all these kids and give you money for them.
Now, that said, people like me, born in 1973, I am now 51 years old, turning 52 in September. I’ve done a lot of research over the years and I have looked into the history of my people and immigration. Immigration laws at the time, as well as, you know, currently, how adoptees, specifically international adoptees, gain citizenship. Because I was an infant when I was about six months old when I came to this country and was adopted by a middle-class white family in New York.I was then, it wasn’t until I was, I believe, almost four years old that I became a citizen. I became a naturalized citizen. I did not have to take a class or take a test.I didn’t have to fill out forms. My parents did. My father did.To my knowledge, my father didn’t have to take a test for me. It was a matter of, you know, a naturalization process for a child. And I just lived here in the United States for what I believed to be three years.
So by the time I was four years old, I had become a legal, naturalized citizen of the United States. And you better believe that I checked into that to make sure that it had been official, that I have an official document that states that I’m a citizen of the United States. Because, you know, when this comes up, as it has over the past several years, and in 2016, I was given a, it was scary because 2016, of course, was a presidential election cycle where a president was talking about citizenship and revoking said citizenship, or, you know, like scrutinizing more intensely. Even on those of us who have lived here, practically our whole lives. And so the adoption community definitely took note of that. And we all checked and double checked to make sure that every T was crossed, every I was dotted to know beyond the doubt that we were citizens.
And there were many, of course, there was a very public case of an adoptee who has lived here his whole life almost, and never did follow through on citizenship and didn’t really know he had to and ended up getting deported. And it was in Korea. He had been married with children and now the whole family lives in Korea.I have not heard any updates on that from what I understand. That’s just how it happened.
Now, when that was going on, my husband and I had a conversation about that.We definitely had a conversation like, should we look into citizenship? And, you know, he said, my husband, bless his heart, he said, you know, if they come for you, there’s no question, we’re all going. We’re all going with you. There’s no question in my mind, of course, we’re going to come with you and we’ll cross that bridge and come to it. Thankfully, we have not come to that yet. I worry, even in telling the story, I worry the way things are going right now. And I certainly try to carry papers with me wherever I go. I try not to be too anxious about it. I certainly am not looking forward to traveling at all. Certainly not outside of the United States. And probably not even to major cities at this point. I’m just, I’m worried about it. I know that there have been others that I’ve heard of who are, you know, being racially profiled, you know, people being pulled over, traffic stops, all things are happening. All things that we’ve, some of us have been learning about and people kept telling us, “oh, that’ll never happen,” or if you have your paperwork and you don’t have to worry about it, of course they’re going to check and bad’s going to happen to you. You know, all the things that people say, people who tend to be, overall, pretty ignorant about any of this.
Like, they don’t even really understand what makes someone a citizen, how people become citizens, what’s legal, what’s not legal.There’s just this general ignorance about all of it. And I’m not saying I know everything either. I mean, I certainly don’t. I know from, you know, I know what I know by researching, by reading up on it. And if you don’t research or read up on immigration laws, then you don’t know either. I mean, that’s that. But I have learned things over the past several years because of my own situation and just making sure that I had the right papers and all that.
And here’s what I really want to talk about. As someone who has adopted and has been told my whole life that my life is better off for being here.I mean, that is the narrative. You know, people here in America tell us adoptees that, you know, our situation was bleak wherever we were and our white families came and saved us and gave us a better life. Nobody’s arguing with that. Nobody’s arguing with the idea that, you know, we should be grateful. I’m certainly grateful. I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve had, the privilege I’ve had. I know that I’ve been privileged in a lot of ways because I am, you know, adopted into a family that we didn’t really have to worry about a lot of things. I mean, we weren’t rich, but we certainly weren’t poor. You know, my dad had a good job. My mom worked part-time. She, you know, always seemed to get a job doing various things. And it wasn’t like we were destitute by any means. We had a house who lived in the same house their whole lives. My whole life I lived in the same house. That’s a privilege.That’s something that, you know, I didn’t even know until I became an adult just how privileged that was, for example, right? Like, that was just something that I never, I totally took for granted. I didn’t realize that that was not what most people had.
And all that to say, you know, we adoptees have been given this narrative that America is better for us across the board. We have all the benefits and opportunities of this country and how great it is, and that wherever we were was never going to live up to that. So that’s the narrative on the one hand.
But here we are in 2025, and those same people don’t want anyone else to come here. And they say pretty hateful things. I mean, I’ve sat with people who I know and love who say things that break my heart about other countries, about other cultures, about other people. And they don’t, on some level, deserve the same opportunities that I deserve, me.
So I get, you know, I’m not, I’ve seen this, a lot of us, adult, international adoptees, struggle a lot with survivor guilt, right? This idea that I survived, I got out of the mess. What makes me worth that? Like, why am I worth that and not the next person? And it’s taken me a long time to really wrap my brain around it, like in a new way in thinking, hey, maybe the opportunities that I’ve had just goes to prove that life is difficult all around, for one thing. Even though you’re in this country where we’re promised certain things and the things are better here than anywhere else in the world, allegedly.
And I still haven’t always been able to live the American dream in the way that I think I’ve been told I can. I mean, I have. I’ve been told you work hard, you’ll get ahead. You, you know, make the right connections, you’re grateful, you stand on the shoulders of giants and all the things, and you’ll be successful. And some of us have done all of that, and we certainly have met with varying degrees of success. You know, I sit in a house that my husband and I purchased, in part because we had a death in the family, and we’re given, you know, a good-sized inheritance. We are able to pay the bills. We are scraping by. We’re scraping by. But it’s been difficult. And both of us, my husband and I, have two jobs. He has a full-time job and part-time.I have two part-time. We’re trying to make ends meet. We’re trying to stay put until something’s got to give, right? You know, for better or for worse.
All that to say, it’s like the American dream is such that, you know, when you play by the rules, and you know the right people, you keep your head down, you don’t get into trouble, any kind of trouble, bad trouble or good trouble. And you can make it, you can make it big. You can do whatever you want. You can be whoever you want to be. That’s the American dream, right?
For me, there have been times when I’ve been in jobs where if I just kept my mouth shut and looked the other way and did the things, regardless of whether I agreed with them or whether or not I thought they were ethical, if I just did what I had to do and played the system, I would have made good money. So would my husband. My husband’s been in positions where he made decent money. He could play the game, stay under the radar, you know, shake hands, kiss babies. And we could do fine for ourselves.
But it’s not who we are, first of all. We’d have to be different people.
And secondly, it’s not the reality of most people’s lives here. It’s just not.
And we’re seeing that at an alarming rate in this country right now. Because what we’ve seen is so many people who have busted their butts and worked hard and tried to do the right thing. And they get crushed. And the American dream is not, you know, anybody can make it here. It’s not. It’s not just anybody. It’s not. And we keep telling people that. You know, I don’t tell my kids that. I don’t. I don’t give my kids that false hope of you can be anything you want to be and you can be successful as you want to be.That’s not true. It’s just not.
The truth is, the reality is, the American dream is based on very specific rules by very specific people who have for centuries, for 250 years now, built a system where only certain kinds of people are successful.That’s the reality. I think, I think that we’re going to see more of this class war. Because that’s what it is. I mean, it’s certainly racist. It’s certainly misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, ableist. It’s all, it’s all of those things. For, for certain.
But I think all of those things get wrapped up into classes. Because even if, even if you’re wealthy by some standard, but are you any of those things, any of those protected federally, as of right now, federally protected classes, classifications, demographics, even if you’re wealthy, you’re still going to be limited. And that’s the truth. I mean, that’s the truth. It’s the reality of the situation we’re in, in this country.
And until those ceilings, you know, if you will, the glass ceilings, on all of those demographic types are shattered. I mean, how do you shatter them? How do you shatter them? First of all, you have to name them. We have to be specific. We have to look at the cases where it’s actually happening, where people are being discriminated against. And name them for what it is, to be honest about.
We also have to shatter this perception that everyone has an equal shot.That the people who hold the power and the wealth and the status and the opportunities are actually giving everyone an equal shot. Because what we’re seeing now, in this dismantling of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility is the metrics that we’ve finally had to determine whether or not everyone’s getting an equal shot. So if you take those metrics away, and we don’t measure that anymore, no one will know.No one will know if people are getting an equal shot or not. No one will know if there are opportunities for everybody. No one will know if we were all given a path to success. We won’t know anymore because we won’t measure it. And we won’t be able to see how people get to where they are. That’s how they do it. That’s how it’s done. That is the playbook.
So as an adoptee, I cannot stress this enough: I’ve never wanted to be the poster child for adoption and how great it is for multiple reasons. I love my family. I am grateful for the life that I’ve had.There have been many, many issues that have happened over the course of my life that I don’t want to go into right now. But suffice it to say that the idea that I’ve been told my whole life to be grateful for being raised in this country and giving all the opportunities and all of the resources that I’ve been given and then to watch this country vilify and dehumanize people who come to this country for those reasons… it’s astounding to me. It’s disgusting.
And it floors me when it comes to people who claim the name of Jesus. It’s just the cognitive dissonance there and that hypocrisy is evil. It’s just straight up evil. And I cannot let it go. I will not let it go if someone, when someone tries to make that argument, to me or to someone I care about or in front of my face, I’m going there and this is where I’m going. It’s not okay. And I can’t be silent about it. This IS me being grateful for what I have.That’s what this is. It’s me being grateful for the opportunities and resources I’ve been given as an American citizen who came to this country, not of my own choice. I was a baby, but I’ve stayed here and I’ve worked hard and I have labored in this system and I have tried to make a better life for myself and for my family and for my children. I know what it’s like to be an American citizen and to earn that honor.
And I gladly open the doors-wide open- for anyone else who knows that it is better here. It is better here. There’s more opportunity here. There always has been and there always should be the opportunity to be in this great nation and to contribute to our way of life and our freedoms and the blessings of this country and to deny that to people based on fear and racism and discrimination is evil. And we cannot as a church, as people who believe in a God who loves and has created the whole world, we cannot allow that kind of rhetoric to continue. We cannot.
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Asking For Me 
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