Adopted Feels

Check out Eli's Instagram account Attachment Nerd, and her new book Securely Attached: Transform Your Attachment Patterns into Loving, Lasting Romantic Relationships (A Guided Journal).And connect with us on Instagram, Facebook, or via our website!

For more information about the Korean adoptee 2024 gathering in Sydney hosted by the Korean Adoptees in Australia Network, visit kaian.org.au

Friendship might seem like a random topic for an adoptee podcast, and this series - of which the current episode is the first - is an experiment, tbh, like a lot of things we do here. But lately we’ve been thinking about it a lot. Maybe it’s because of the pandemic and the isolation that many of us felt, maybe it’s because Hana moved to Korea and had to make new friends - multiple times, or maybe it’s because of a larger cultural conversation around the role of friendship in our lives, alongside and in addition to fulfilling romantic and familial relationships. Friendship is also at the heart of our podcast - for 3 years now, we have been interviewing people, writing and recording stuff as a way of continuing our own conversations about adoption (and other random shit) over thousands of miles. In this conversation, the three of us talk about how we define a friend, what friendship means to us, what it takes to maintain friendships, whether it’s harder to make new friends as you get older, and more. Korean adoptee Leah 양진 Nichols is an award-winning filmmaker and designer currently based in Seoul. She works to expand models of kinship, increase access to collective histories, and champion the compatibility of trauma and joy. She is best known for her short film 73 Questions (2017) which won the 2018 Social Impact Media Awards (SIMA) Creative Activism Award.

What are you afraid to feel? Fear? Sadness? Anger? Whatever it is, adoptee coach Susan Stam (강선영) wants you to stay with it. And then stay with it a little longer. Adopted from Korea at the age of 4 years and 7 months to the Netherlands, Susan works as a coach specialising in relinquishment and adoption-related issues with AFC (Adoptee and Foster Care) Netherlands, founded by Hilbrand Westra (our Episode 17 guest!). But the path to becoming a coach wasn’t easy; Susan struggled with her own issues, including a hypersensitivity to rejection so strong that she could "smell it", relationship addiction, and insomnia - issues that only started to heal after she became conscious of her relinquishment and adoption trauma. In this conversation, Susan talks about her own journey and then shares some strategies for when we feel triggered, for getting out of our heads and into our bodies, for learning to connect to our feelings rather than numbing or pushing them away, and for setting boundaries when you’re a self-confessed people pleaser. And then, Susan catches us off guard by turning the questions back on us, and we both get real about some shit! Get ready for vulnerability, feels, and some super practical tips that we hope you will find useful! To learn more or to get in touch with Susan, visit www.afcnederland.nl Bonus gifts from Susan!   Susan’s personal k-pop playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3fdlzhOhucBpEgyGPWE4xG?si=73a55990c17e4c9d   Susan’s go-to kimchi jjigae recipe: Susan uses Maangchi’s recipe (http://www.maangchi.com/recipe/kimchi-jjigae) with a few tweaks: • Always make your own stock! • Substitute red radish if you don’t have Korean radish or daikon radish • Use preserved anchovies in oil instead of salt (to taste) • Omit sugar

We had SO MUCH FUN with this guest and we think you will too. Korean-Australian adoptee Ra Chapman is a writer, actor and dramaturg. She has strong ties with the adoption community and works closely with Asian-Australian and diverse artists. Ra is one of those people who has been on our list of guests to invite for a long time, but we were just waiting for the right moment—and here it is! Ra’s debut play, K-BOX, which won the 2021 Patrick White Playwright Award, will premiere at the Malthouse Theatre next month (and we are so freakin’ proud of her!). K-BOX is a surreal comedy with an Australian Korean adoptee main character named Lucy. Lucy has just quit her job, dumped her boyfriend, and turned up on her adoptive parents' doorstep needing somewhere to crash. She's depressed, she's a mess, and she's stumbled across an old cardboard box that was once full of childhood memories but is now completely empty. Lucy and her parents haven’t always seen eye to eye on everything, but when a K-Pop star mysteriously wanders into their lives and starts asking destabilising questions about her Korean roots, new fault lines are exposed in the family unit that become impossible to hide. In this episode Ra talks about the inspiration for K-BOX, as well as her transition from acting to writing. Then Ra shares her experience as an Asian Australian actor and writer, and her thoughts on diversity and representation in the Australian arts scene. Plus, we make our acting debut reading a short excerpt from K-BOX, we learn some industry lingo, such as “meat puppet”, and much more. K-BOX opens at the Malthouse Theatre, in Melbourne, Australia on 2nd September 2022. Book tickets here! https://www.malthousetheatre.com.au/tickets/malthouse-theatre/k-box/

Today we're in for a treat! An outcome of some gentle encouragement from me (Ryan), in this episode Hana shares a beautifully written account of her Korean language learning journey thus far. In the loose form of a listicle - because we can't resist a good list on this podcast - here's 10 'lessons' Hana has learned about, well, learning one's original language as an adoptee, how it differs from learning a foreign language as a hobby, the frustrations and joys, the pressures and the rewards. And of course, on brand, this episode gets deep into some feels.

In this episode we have the pleasure of speaking to Korean adoptee and award-winning writer James Han Mattson. We start with James' path to becoming a writer and the moment when his Iowa acceptance letter arrived in the mail. He treats us to two readings of his work: an extended excerpt from his recent novel Reprieve, and his essay “Letter to a Stranger” published in the literary magazine Off Assignment, which is about a pivotal moment during his time living in Korea. We discuss some of the themes explored in Reprieve - including the complex intersections between love, desire, and racial preferences - as well as the challenges of learning one birth language in one’s birth country, while you’re also so deeply engaged in your craft as a writer who publishes in English. Finally, James tells us about how his time in Korea changed his writing and gives us the scoop on his new novel in progress, which features a Korean adoptee protagonist. James Han Mattson was born in Seoul and raised in North Dakota. He reunited with his birth family in 2009. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is the award-winning author of two novels: The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves and Reprieve, which was a Fall 2021 Book Pick by The New York Times, The L.A. Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, and the TODAY show, among others. He is currently the fiction editor of Hyphen Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter: @jhmattson or check out his website at www.jameshanmattson.com

In this episode we talk to the inimitable Jenny Heijun Wills and touch on some of the themes that - we feel - go to the very core of our stories and our storytellings as adoptees. Consent and access. Fact and fantasy. The challenges of charting our way through the stories people expect - often even demand of us since we were children - to aim for something that serves us: the nuanced narratives we deserve to have, and which we are allowed to create and invent. Jenny Heijun Wills is a multi-award winning creative writer and scholar, whose most notable contribution is the Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize-winning book titled Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related, published by Penguin Random House Canada in 2019. She is Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg and is currently writing two novels. ​For more on Jenny, head to: ​https://www.jennyheijunwills.com/ Twitter: @JennyHeijun IG: @jennyheijunwills

Born in Daejeon, Korea, and adopted to the United States at the age of ten months, Lee Herrick is the author of three books of poems: Scar and Flower, a finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award, Gardening Secrets of the Dead and This Many Miles from Desire. He is also the co-editor of the anthology The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit. As well as being a celebrated poet, Lee is among one of the kindest, most generous, and sincere guests we have ever had the pleasure of talking to on the podcast. In this broad-ranging conversation, Lee treats us to a reading of two poems from Scar and Flower, including “How Music Stays in the Body.” We then speak to Lee about his journey to poetry, about the fundamental fire that drives his art, and his process of coming to peace and forgiveness following his second trip to Korea and an unsuccessful birth family search. Most of all, Lee wants all of us to be ok, and after talking to him we feel that - just maybe - we will be. CW: This episode mentions suicide. Read "How Music Stays in the Body" here: https://poets.org/poem/how-music-stays-body For more about Lee, head to: https://www.leeherrick.com/ Adoptee Literary Festival, 9 April 2022: https://www.adopteelitfest.com/

This is a special compilation episode featuring six powerful short pieces about first encounters with food from our birth cultures, read by their transracial adoptee authors, from our recent autobiographical writing workshop led by Korean adoptee Mee Joo Kim. Hana also has a little chat with Mee Joo about the value of adoptee-only spaces. We hope you love the short pieces as much as we did! We’d also like to thank the Overseas Koreans Foundation for making our writing workshops possible. If you would like to contact Mee Joo about future writing workshops or life coaching services, you can email her at kim.meejoo@gmail.com Stay tuned for more interviews with our writing workshop facilitators!

In this episode, we chat with Jeremy Holt, a non-binary author whose most recent works include Made in Korea, Virtually Yours, Before Houdini, and Skip to the End. Their latest comic series, Made in Korea, is about a Korean nine-year-old named Jesse, who is adopted and sent to live with a lovely couple in America. Equipped with an encyclopedic brain but socially awkward, Jesse’s journey through the complexities of race, gender, and identity hits a fork in the road when she discovers she’s not entirely human—yet. The story is so cleverly crafted and completely gripping - we couldn’t put it down. We thought we were gonna talk to Jeremy about Made in Korea, and maybe about being an identical triplet, and we did, but the conversation kept unfolding in unexpected ways. We start with how Jeremy found their creative calling as a comic writer while working a day job at Apple, and how they eventually got picked up by their dream publisher years after almost quitting writing altogether. We think this episode is really about following your dreams and realising your destiny. Yes - big, epic, stuff. Jeremy absolutely blew us away and this is one of our favourite interviews to date. *Spoiler Alert: We discuss Made in Korea's plot in this episode!*

Happy 50th Episode + Listener Q&A! “How did you two meet? What is going on in your logo image? If Adopted Feels was a food, what would it be?” In this special 50th episode, we answer these very important questions and more, and reflect on the pod journey thus far. Warning: Hana gets bossy/rant-y, and Ryan is predictably sentimental. Plus, we share some highly personal new year’s resolutions for 2022. Thank you for staying with us for these past two and a half years, and thank you to everyone who submitted questions! And for the questions we didn’t get to, we’ll try to address them in a future episode! p.s. Please excuse a couple lags in Hana's audio, and head to our Instagram (@adoptedfeelspodcast) to see screenshots of us watching the trailer for 'Singles Inferno,' a Korean reality TV show on Netflix. A listener asked us to rate the show (a fun question!) but neither of us have seen it - yet.

This episode is all about leaving Korea and transitioning back to one’s adoptive country, and we found the perfect guests to talk about it. Kim Stoker first returned to live in Korea in 1995. She spent almost 20 years of her adult life there and has been based in the US since 2017. She was a leading activist in ASK (Adoptee Solidarity Korea) and continues to be an advocate for adoptee rights in South Korea. Eunha Lovell returned to Korea in 2007 after meeting birth family. While living in Korea, she has spent time learning Korean, working with single mothers and adoptees through GOA'L and Koroot, and attended Hongik University for graduate school. She has a YouTube channel called "The Returnees" that focuses on video portraits of Korean adoptees living in their motherland and she also practices Korean Traditional Painting. To learn more about Eunha, visit: www.eunhalovell.com We threw all kinds of big, unruly questions at Stoker and Eunha, and they were both so candid and generous in their replies. This is a free-flowing, meandering, deeply reflective conversation that touches on reverse culture shock, missing Korea during the pandemic, maintaining connections with Korean family, shifting identities, micro-aggressions experienced by adoptees within the Asian American community, and advice for adoptees planning to leave Korea. So many pearls of wisdom here! We also end with a random question segment in which we guess Stoker’s astrological sign.

We’ve had the privilege of speaking to so many people on the podcast and today’s guests are two of the warmest and most generous yet. Angela Gee and Robyn Joy Park are both Asian adoptees and licensed therapists based in the LA area, who serve the adoption community. Hana first crossed paths with Robyn almost 10 years ago in Seoul, when she co-facilitated a post-birth family reunion discussion group, and more recently, we saw Angela and Robyn speak at this year’s KAAN conference. When we approached them via email to talk on the podcast, their enthusiastic replies were like beams of sunshine radiating through our screens. Don’t you just love emails, and people, like that? In this conversation, Angela and Robyn talk about how they became therapists who specialise in adoption, the challenges and rewards of this work, how their mentorship relationship turned into a professional partnership and deep friendship, the online community they have built for adoptees of colour, some practical advice for adoptees looking for a new therapist or seeking therapy for the first time, and more—all with wisdom, candour, and humour. This conversation reminded us that although the pandemic continues to test and isolate us in various ways, we’re not alone. There are always new resources to be found and new connections to be made. Keep looking and keep reaching out. We are both cheering you on. Speaking of new resources, check out Robyn’s new podcast, “Labor of Love,” a podcast that centers and amplifies the voices of BIPOC adoptees navigating parenthood. You can find it on iTunes and Spotify, and follow on instagram at @laboroflovepodcast Finally, you too can get sorted into a Hogwarts house! Just visit wizardingworld.com and follow the prompts. (https://www.wizardingworld.com/news/discover-your-hogwarts-house-on-wizarding-world)

For transracial adoptees and people of colour, the past 18 months have felt like an emotional gauntlet. At least, they have for us. From the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, which saw a surge of the Black Lives Matter movement, to rising anti-Asian racism and the Atlanta shootings, to the disparate impacts of COVID-19 due to systemic racism and chronic underfunding in public health, there's been a lot to reckon with. To keep educating ourselves, and in the hopes of continuing and deepening some of our earlier conversations on race and the fight for racial justice, we reached out to our friend, Korean American adoptee Rebecca Kinney. Rebecca is an Associate Professor in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies and American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. She is the author of numerous articles and the book Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). She is a Fulbright Scholar Korea (2021-2022) and currently lives in Seoul. This is a thought-provoking, in-depth conversation that traverses the historical, personal, and political. First, she starts with a 20-minute primer on Asian American racial formation and settler colonialism - kind of like an audio lecture. Then Rebecca talks about finding her own ethnic identity as a Korean adoptee from the white working class suburbs of Detroit, before we discuss the barriers to solidarity amongst Asian Americans and POCs, and how we might confront anti-black racism as Asian adoptees. Finally, Rebecca talks about living in Korea and her current Fulbright research, before we end with an extended random question segment. We learned a lot from Rebecca and we hope you do too. To learn more about Rebecca’s work, visit https://bgsu.academia.edu/RebeccaJKinney or get in touch at rkinney@bgsu.edu Donate to the Black Lives Matter Movement here: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019

What do birth family reunion, drag, and skating have in common? For Australian Korean adoptee Ellie Kim, all of these things have helped her get to where she is today. In this casual, wide ranging convo, Ellie tells us about how meeting her birth family was a turning point in her life, and how she learned to embrace her numerous identities with the help of community, writing, and good mental health support. We also discuss self-care during lockdown, social media boundaries (or lack thereof), and therapy via Zoom. For anyone who’s unaware, Ellie and Ryan’s current city of Melbourne is - as of this episode's release - in its 241st day of lockdown: the longest, strictest lockdown in the world. There’s not much we can say or do, but we like to think of this as an audio condolence message to all our listeners undergoing lockdown in Melbourne and elsewhere - and invite you to imagine that we’re in your living room sharing a nice cup of tea, some chocolate (preferably Cadbury Marble), and perhaps donning an Oodie. More about Ellie: Ellie is a 30 something year old digital communications professional, sometime writer and okay roller skater living in Melbourne. She met her birth family in 2013 as part of G.O.A.L's First Trip Home and is very slowly writing a book about it. Feel free to follow her on the 'Gram at @irrellievancy for dodgy skate videos, dogs and food. Plus, check out Ellie’s piece in Archer magazine here: https://archermagazine.com.au/2021/07/celebrating-korean-australian-identity/

[CW: suicide] Pastor Do-Hyun Kim (김도현) talks about his early work in Switzerland and how he first became aware of Korean adoption, the activities he has run at KoRoot over the years to support adoptees, and his tireless commitment to raising awareness of adoption in Korea - including the separation and loss felt by adoptees and original mothers - what he has learned, and the company he has kept. He talks using anger as a powerful force for good, the importance of spotlighting authentic voices, and how he loves to party - for round 1, at least. This is a very special conversation with an incredibly passionate and compassionate man who has devoted so much of his life to supporting Korean adoptee communities and fighting for family preservation.

WE’RE BAAAAAACK! Ryan’s in Melbourne lockdown 5.0, or what feels like 50.0, and Hana can only meet up with one other person after 6pm in Seoul. Plus, she can’t listen to music faster than 120BPM at the gym (but songs like Robyn’s Dancing On My Own at 117BPM are A-OK.) Covid restrictions, eh. In this convo, Ryan shares some exciting life news and Hana talks about pandemic hypochondria and her visit to a one-stop-shop health check centre (kind of like a medical jjimjilbang). We also discuss both the weird and wonderful messages we’ve received after the release of Aaron Choe’s short doco for Vice Asia, dealing with haters, and remembering your audience. (Just in case it’s not clear, this episode falls into our casual, random, frivo category!)

On Adopted Feels, we’ve mainly interviewed friends and friends of friends (sliding into Joel Kim Booster’s DMs didn’t work, unfortunately - if anyone out there can hook us up, please do!). Until now. Korean adoptee Ben Kaplan contacted us out-of-the-blue to offer his story, becoming the first “completely random person” guest on the pod. It would be his first interview, so he apologized in advance in case he was a “noob” (which, for those of you like Ryan who are uninitiated to gamer culture, means 'newbie'). He wasn’t. Ben is incredibly warm, reflective, and generous. This is an in-depth and far-reaching convo about identity and self-exploration: we start with Ben’s time in Seoul, immersed in the underground art scene and doing it rough in a converted machine shop in Mullae, before reaching “rock bottom.” Ben then returned to the US, just as the global financial crisis hit, where he shelved a lot of the questions that Korea had raised, until recent Anti-Asian racism in the US reawakened feelings that had laid dormant for years. We talk about the 3 phases of Ben’s ongoing identity search, how he has come to see being adopted as a superpower rather than as a disadvantage, why he has recently started to think about changing his name, becoming the mentor he never had, and much more! Benjamin Kaplan is a Korean American adoptee currently living in Portland, Oregon. He lived in Korea for 3 years back in the late 2000s and during that time created a website focusing on the underground art scene in Seoul called, The Native Gaze. He now works as a Design Director of Brand Experience at Nike. His wife Erin is also adopted (domestically within the US) and after adopting their dog Pancho last year, they now have a true “family of adoptees.” Check out Ben’s work at www.bvkaplan.com and lots of cute dog content at www.instagram.com/bvkaplan

In this episode we chatted with Edward Yoo Pokropski, the Executive Producer of the upcoming Asian Comedy Fest! Ed is also Writer/Producer for the Brand Creative Team at USA Network and Universal Kids for NBCUniversal. He has been nominated for a daytime Emmy twice and won zero times. He also performs stand-up and hosts events, sometimes for money, sometimes for a drink ticket and a story. He is originally from Philly and proud to be a Korean American adoptee. Ed tells us about moving to New York six years ago, which was the catalyst for developing confidence in his own voice, in both comedy and as an Asian American. This journey from community to activism ultimately led to the creation of the Asian Comedy Fest. Buy tickets now for the digital premiere of the Asian Comedy Fest on May 27th from asiancomedyfest.com (you’ll receive a private link that will stay active for 48 hours) Proceeds benefit Apex for Youth (apexforyouth.org) Follow @asiancomedyfest on Instagram, Twitter and FB Watch Ed’s talk on his Korean adoptee experience for Crushing The Myth here: https://youtu.be/Nn7KNLU2k58 *note: “수박 겉 핥기” (su-bak geot halk-ki) Meaning: doing something superficially, scratching the surface Literal meaning: Licking the skin of a watermelon