Loss and reclaimed lives: Cultural identity and place in Korean-American intercountry adoptees

This dissertation is an exploration of the interrelationship between cultural identity and place in the lives of adult Korean adoptees living primarily in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. Using life histories derived through multiple semi-structured interviews, a web of related themes emerged which reveal the interplay between ethnicity, identity, gender, and place. From childhood to adulthood, most Korean adoptees followed a similar developmental trajectory of denial, self-awareness, and emerging cultural consciousness about their Korean heritage. These journeys were mediated and nuanced by individual adoptees' particular configurations of internal strengths and environmental factors such as their pre-adoption and adoptive family experiences, cultural norms, and places adoptees lived or visited in Korea, the U.S. or elsewhere abroad. Dominant American ideologies and stereotypes about Asians were imposed on and challenged by Korean adoptees in varied ways at different stages of their evolving cultural identities. Given the relative dearth of geographic literature on intercountry adoption, this work applies a geographic lens while drawing on insights from the literatures of social work and developmental psychology. This study highlights, moreover, the limitations of previous studies that focused only on adoptive parents or adoptees as children, an approach which loses the life course perspective of intercountry adoptees' search for identity, belonging, and a sense of home.