In an interview on The Asian American Experience

Book number three.

After the Morning Calm. This is a very interesting book. I actually didn’t know about Korean adoptees until I met two of them on a book tour. One in Lancaster Pennsylvania and one in San Francisco. It turns out that Minnesota has the highest number of Korean adoptees in the country. There are 14,000 of them there. There was this social worker, an older lady from Korea who had lived through the Korean war and seen all these orphaned children at the side of the road and decided to do something about it. So, she emigrated to America and started getting them adopted. She brought 95% of the total into America herself. I didn’t realise any of this, but Korean society places a significant amount of importance on family names and family ties so that if a child is unwanted no Korean will adopt somebody else’s child. I could understand it if this was thirty years ago, but it’s still true now when there is no excuse whatsoever. One in every 250 Korean births is adopted by an American family.

This book has first person accounts of these adoptees and how they all get to the point where they realise; I don’t really look like my parents. I mean, it’s a stark difference since they are adopted by middle American white families and one day they’ll wake up and look at themselves in the mirror and think – who am I?

Do any of them go back and find their birth parents?

There’s one who does but she is different, in fact. She is mixed race and her mother had a relationship with a white soldier. That happened a lot and, you know, I lived in South Korea until I was ten and these people, mixed race people, were really shunned.

Did you shun them yourself?

I was a little young but I’m sure if I’d stayed there I would have done.