Reflection I’m writing from a beautiful rental home in Washington state with three adoptee friends. We’ve been meeting yearly for a writing retreat. Over past years, books have been written, research studies have been launched, articles have been submitted. The weekend combines two of my passions: being in community with other adoptees and working on adoption-related projects. This year, in addition to writing this Lab Note, I am launching a new project focused on adoptee mentoring at this retreat. I received a Faculty Fellows in Community Engagement award from UW Tacoma’s Office of Community ..read more

Photo by Sindre Fs on Pexels.com It’s been a busy couple of months here at Harlow’s Monkey Central. I took some time off in December to rest and reflect on what I hope to do this next year. As 2024 begins, I’m somewhat shocked this year will mark 20 years since I’ve been blogging, and this spring will be the 18th anniversary of Harlow’s Monkey blog and website. My blog is reaching adulthood! I want to reflect on some of my own growth and lessons I’ve learned since I first became engaged in my identity development and with the broader adoptee community. I started this blog as a way to be in com ..read more

Reflection I chose to skip responding overall to National Adoption Month. November is the month I dislike the most, due to the trifecta of NAM, my assigned birthday, and the Thanksgiving holiday. But I did miss one happy anniversary in November! November 22, 2022, was the launch of the Lab Note series here on this blog. I was inspired to start these reflections because I found blogs by other transracial adoptees such a support for me when I was trying to understand the broader context and implications of adoption. As I’d mentioned in my introduction to the series, I wanted to find a spot betwe ..read more

Reflection So much is happening in the adoptee and child welfare community, especially as November comes and we begin to wade through the swarm of National Adoption Month posts. I had a whole different reflection planned for this Lab Note but given it’s Adoptee Remembrance Day, I decided to go with a different reflection. Thank you, Pamela Karanova, for continuing to shed light on Adoptee Remembrance Day. Over my sabbatical last year, one of my goals was to choose fewer, but more meaningful, projects to work on. I’m choosing to focus even more on projects that really center adoptees, particu ..read more

Reflection I started to draft a reflection on The New York Times article, World’s Largest ‘Baby Exporter’ Confronts Its Painful Past, that was making the rounds in my adoptee communities a few weeks ago but I got behind while transitioning back to work after a sabbatical year and it seems so many adoption-related news and happenings were occurring I almost feel the news cycle has moved on. This article (for which I’ve provided a gift link for those without subscriptions) discusses some of the many concerns many of us have expressed before related to adoption practices – especially transnationa ..read more

Reflection In my world, summers are all about adoption conferences. I missed two adoptee-focused conferences this year – KAAN (Korean Adoptee Adoptive Family Network) held in June and the IKAA (International Korean Adoptee Association) conference in Seoul, South Korea in July. I’ve attended both these conferences several times over the past 20 years. I was able to attend an adoption and foster care conference organized by Families Rising (formerly North American Council on Adoptable Children). As I watched all of the photos on social media of friends and acquaintances attending the adoptee co ..read more

Reflection I recently had to cancel a series of focus groups I planned to conduct as part of my new project, the Transnational/Transcultural Adoption Project. I had to cancel these because so many of the people who signed up turned out to be fake. For some time now, online surveys have had to deal with bots and scammers. This seems to be related to the chance to win a gift card or receive an honorarium for filling out a survey. Responses from fake emails make it appear that the survey is getting a great response rate. Unfortunately many of these fake accounts are randomly filling in responses ..read more

Reflection On May 16th, Korean adoptee Adam Crapser won part of his lawsuit against the adoption agency Holt Korea. This AP article discusses the lawsuit and its findings. Like many other adoptees I have been following Adam’s story for a number of years. When I moved to the Pacific Northwest, I learned that Adam was detained just a few miles from me at the Northwest Detention Center while his deportation case was being processed. South Korean adoptee Adam Crapser speaks during an interview in Seoul, South Korea, Jan. 2, 2019. A court on Tuesday, May 16, 2023 ordered South Korea’s biggest adop ..read more

Slide created by @joonae.hk In my Lab Notes #10 post I mentioned I had written a chapter for an academic anthology,  “The Complexities of Race: Identity, Power, and Justice in an Evolving America.” My chapter is titled “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption” and I first wrote about this chapter in a blog post about anti-blackness in adoption back in 2020. In the book, I present what I term a “transracial adoption justice framework.” My intent in using this framework is to attempt to shift the discourse in transracial adoption parenting away from color-evasive*, drive-by ..read more

Reflection This past week the Janchi Show podcast featured my friend Lauren Rees. Lauren and I met at KAAN in 2021 and bonded over our love of knitting! We had followed each other on knitting Instagram and I was so happy to meet her in person. Lauren shared so much in her interview but a couple of things really stood out to me. In one part of the interview, Lauren says, “supporting racism isn’t love.” I’ve been ruminating on this sentence for days. So often transracial adoptees have adoptive parents, family members, or friends who support racist ideologies, practices, and policies – the very s ..read more