Birth Family Search

Nikwi Hoogland

In an Instagram page in blog-like format, this source offers a personal look at an adoptee’s thoughts and experiences surrounding her identity and reunion experience. This source can apply to and most benefit adoptees who are wondering about an experience like this.

Birth Family Search

A Family in China

An archive of a podcast that discusses the searching journey in multiple perspectives (adoptees, birth parents, & searchers). This source can apply to and most benefit those who are invested in learning more about this topic.

Birth Family Search

ReunionEyes

In blog format, an adoptee writes about her adoption experience and the experience of reuniting with her birth mother. This source has a lot of insight into how the experience has impacted the adoptee and how some people integrate their lives with both their adoptive and birth families.

Birth Family Search

NPR: “I Found My Birth Mother. It Didn’t Rock My Life — And That’s OK”

This is a short narrative story about an adoptee’s experience of meeting her birth mother and her feelings about it. This story can apply to and most benefit adoptees who are wondering about an experience like this. It is important to remember that this short story is not meant to be discouraging but comes from a rather realistic point of view.

Literature

A Mother for Choco

Choco wishes he had a mother, but who could she be? He sets off to find her, asking all kinds of animals, but he doesn’t meet anyone who looks just like him. He doesn’t even think of asking Mrs. Bear if she’s his mother. Then Mrs. Bear starts to do just the things a mommy might do. And when she brings him home, he meets her other children, a piglet; a hippo; and an alligator, and learns that families can come in all shapes and sizes and still fit together.

Literature

Stellaluna

This is a “tender story of a lost young bat who finally finds her way safely home to her mother and friends”.

Literature

A Single Square Picture: A Korean Adoptee’s Search for Her Roots

Kim Ji-yun, who grew up in Seoul, Korea soon became Catherine Jeanne Robinson, who had an American family and lived in Salt Lake City, Utah. Twenty years later, she returned to Seoul in search of her birth mother and found herself “an American outsider in her native land”. Katy was left “conflicted, shattered, exhilarated, and moved in ways she never imagined”. This book is “a personal odyssey that ascends to the universal”, and is “a story that will resonate with anyone who has ever questioned their place in the world — and had the courage to find the answers”.

Literature

Lucky Girl: A Memoir

In this true story, journalist Mei-Ling Hopgood, one of the first wave of Asian adoptees to arrive in America, “comes face to face with her past when her Chinese birth family suddenly requests a reunion after more than two decades. | In 1974, a baby girl from Taiwan arrived in America, the newly adopted child of a loving couple in Michigan”. Hopgood had an “all-American upbringing, never really identifying with her Asian roots or harboring a desire to uncover her ancestry”. | When Hopgood was in her twenties, her birth family showed up. They end up being “a boisterous, loving, bossy, complicated middle-class family who hound her daily life by phone, fax, and letter, in a language she doesn’t understand until she returns to Taiwan to meet them. As her sisters and parents pull her into their lives, claiming her as one of their own, the devastating secrets that still haunt this family begin to emerge. Spanning cultures and continents, Lucky Girl brings home a tale of joy and regret, hilarity, deep sadness, and great discovery as the author untangles the unlikely strands that formed her destiny”.

Literature

Adoption Literature for Children and Young Adults: An Annotated Bibliography (Bibliographies and Indexes in Sociology)

This is an annotated bibliography that covers literature published from 1990 to 1991 suitable for children and young adults “dealing in some fashion with adoption”. There are 503 titles in this volume and are divided into fiction and nonfiction by reading level. “Most of the books included feature adoption as a main theme, others use adoption as a secondary theme, while others have characters who just happen to be adopted”. The bibliography encompasses topics such as “the age of arrival, sibling adoption, single-parent adoption, foster parent adoption, step-parent and relative adoption, transracial and intercountry adoption, Amerasian children, racial identity, minority families, special needs, large families, birthparents, search and reunion, surrogacy and open adoption, and some of the less pleasant aspects of adoption”. It is compiled by a reference librarian who is also an adoptive parent. There is also a featured selective resource list and directory of adoption-related organizations.

Literature

Palimpsest: Documents From a Korean Adoption

Sjöblom was adopted from Korea at two years old into a Swedish home. Throughout her childhood, she struggled to fit in and was constantly told to suppress her feelings of wanting to know more about her origins. Thus, she learned to bury the feelings of abandonment, like many other adoptees. In this illustrated memoir, “Sjöblom’s unaddressed feelings about her adoption come to a head when she is pregnant with her first child [and] she discovers a document containing the names of her biological parents”. She realizes “her own history may not match up with the story she’s been told her whole life: that she was an orphan without a background”. She ends up digging more into her background by traveling to Korea and the orphanage and finds out that the truth is “more complicated than the story she was told and struggled to believe”.

Resources