Korean Adoptee Resource Hub

All You Can Ever Know
By Nicole Chung
Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, prepackaged myth. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But as Nicole grew up—facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn’t see, finding her identity as an Asian American and as a writer, becoming ever more curious about where she came from—she wondered if the story she’d been told was the whole truth.

With warmth, candor, and startling insight, Nicole Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, which coincided with the birth of her own child. All You Can Ever Know is a profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections and the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets—vital reading for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong.

Becoming Korean: A Memoir
By Amy Gilbert
Becoming Korean is the true story of one woman’s journey, and sometimes struggle, to embrace the nation and the heritage of the country that gave her up for adoption. After being adopted as a child and living in a white American family, she found her Korean family at the age of forty-nine, and developed relationships with them. This book describes how she is re-discovering the culture, language and family that were lost and forgotten. She shares her joys and losses of being adopted, living in America and Becoming Korean.

Come and Join Us!: 18 Holidays Celebrated All Year Long
By Liz Kleinrock
Who says the holidays only happen in the winter? Every day’s a holiday when you live in a world as diverse as ours! From Juneteenth to Vesak, and Yom Kippur to Día de las Muertos, the festivities never end.

Come and join us and learn about eighteen holidays celebrated by a diverse group of children in this inviting and joyful picture book written by renowned antibias and antiracist educator, Liz Kleinrock of Teach and Transform, with vibrant illustrations by Chaaya Prabhat.

This book is useful for discussing holidays in the classroom and can be an enjoyable resource for making sure no one holiday is more valued than the other.

Eyes That Weave the World’s Wonders
By Joanna Ho and Liz Kleinrock
From New York Times bestselling Joanna Ho, of Eyes that Kiss in the Corners, and award-winning educator Liz Kleinrock, comes a powerful companion picture book about adoption and family. A young girl who is a transracial adoptee learns to love her Asian eyes and finds familial connection and meaning through them, even though they look different from her parents’.

Her family bond is deep and their connection is filled with love. She wonders about her birth mom, and comes to appreciate both her birth culture and her adopted family’s culture, for even though they may seem very different, they are both a part of her, and that is what makes her beautiful. She learns to appreciate the differences in her family and celebrate them.

Inconvenient Daughter
By Lauren J. Sharkey
Rowan Kelly knows she’s lucky. After all, if she hadn’t been adopted, she could have spent her days in a rice paddy, or a windowless warehouse assembling iPhones–they make iPhones in Korea, right? Either way, slowly dying of boredom on Long Island is surely better than the alternative. But as she matures, she realizes that she’ll never know if she has her mother’s eyes, or if she’d be in America at all had her adoptive parents been able to conceive.

Rowan sets out to prove that she can be someone’s first choice. After running away from home–and her parents’ rules–and ending up beaten, barefoot, and topless on a Pennsylvania street courtesy of Bad Boy Number One, Rowan attaches herself to Never-Going-to-Commit. When that doesn’t work out, she fully abandons self-respect and begins browsing Craigslist personals. But as Rowan dives deeper into the world of casual encounters with strangers, she discovers what she’s really looking for.

With a fresh voice and a quick wit, Lauren J. Sharkey dispels the myths surrounding transracial adoption, the ties that bind, and what it means to belong.

The Invisible Lines
By Hanna Lee
The Invisible Lines is a little bit horror in the woods and a little bit cliche influencer reality tv. When a guest of one of the wealthiest influential families goes missing on vacation, suspicious things start to happen around the mountain top mansion. Luckily, the family’s staff are a group of young, quick- thinking individuals who risk everything to try and discover the truth. As things slide into chaos with each passing day, the staff find themselves uncovering deeply rooted secrets that have been hidden by the family for generations. What would they do to keep their cynical past buried? What lengths will their truth-seeking staff go to finally reveal who the Arricott’s really are behind their public personas.

A Living Remedy
By Nicole Chung
Nicole Chung couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found community and a path to the life she’d long wanted. But the middle class world she begins to raise a family in – where there are big homes, college funds, nice vacations – looks very different from the middle class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week, health insurance is often lacking, and there are no safety nets.

When her father dies at only sixty-seven, killed by diabetes and kidney disease, Nicole feels deep grief as well as rage, knowing that years of precarity and lack of access to healthcare contributed to his early death. And then the unthinkable happens – less than a year later, her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the physical distance between them becomes insurmountable as COVID-19 descends upon the world.

Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another – and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and grievous inequalities in American society.

The Ones Who Misbehave
By Hanna Lee
Ever felt like you’re about to explode but you don’t know why? Like they say, sometimes we have to lose ourselves to find the true self. Follow this tale through the eyes of a woman of color (Vanessa aka Van) who is brimming with frustration and sent to a wellness center to recover. You’ll find out why certain emotions are brewing from this refreshing perspective told by a minority within the minority experience—void of the traditional stuffy-old stereotypes Asians are often reduced to. As Van listens to the experiences of her newfound friends, something within her is released. On this path, the protagonist gains insight into an unknown community and also herself. If you’re simply human, you will be able to identify with this contemporary true-to-life fiction story. This will be a book you’ll want to gift to friends and fellow human-rights advocates.

Palimpsest: Documents From a Korean Adoption
By Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom
Thousands of South Korean children were adopted around the world in the 1970s and 1980s. More than nine thousand found their new home in Sweden, including the cartoonist Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, who was adopted when she was two years old. Throughout her childhood she struggled to fit into the homogenous Swedish culture and was continually told to suppress the innate desire to know her origins. “Be thankful,” she was told; surely her life in Sweden was better than it would have been in Korea. Like many adoptees, Sjöblom learned to bury the feeling of abandonment.

In Palimpsest, an emotionally charged memoir, Sjöblom’s unaddressed feelings about her adoption come to a head when she is pregnant with her first child. When 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.

As Sjöblom digs deeper into her own backstory, returning to Korea and the orphanage, she finds that the truth is much more complicated than the story she was told and struggled to believe. The sacred image of adoption as a humanitarian act that gives parents to orphans begins to unravel.

Start Here, Start Now
By Liz Kleinrock
Most educators want to cultivate an antibias and antiracist classroom and school community, but they often struggle with where and how to get started. Liz helps us set ourselves up for success and prepare for the mistakes we’ll make along the way.

Each chapter in Start Here, Start Now addresses many of the questions and challenges educators have about getting started, using a framework for tackling perceived barriers from a proactive stance. Liz answers the questions with personal stories, sample lessons, anchor charts, resources, conversation starters, extensive teacher and activist accounts, and more. We can break the habits that are holding us back from this work and be empowered to take the first step towards reimagining the possibilities of how antibias antiracist work can transform schools and the world at large.

We must remind ourselves that what is right is often not what is easy, and we must continue to dream. Amidst the chaos, our path ahead is clear. This is our chance to dream big and build something better.

The Struggle for Soy: And Other Dilemmas of a Korean Adoptee
By Megan Sound
Like many Korean adoptees of the 1980s, Megan Sound was brought up in an era when American parents were led to believe that the best way to raise their babies was to take a color-blind approach. The denial of a child’s ethnicity neglects a significant part of their identity. The Struggle for Soy is a powerfully intimate essay collection that shows how one transracial adoptee navigates from the margins to the middle, from I am not to I am.With wit and whimsy, Sound sheds light on race, gender, and identity. The Struggle for Soy shows how Sound navigates restrictive labels like ‘unexplained infertility’ and stereotypes of Asian women. Her experiences are thought provoking for both those familiar with representation and how misrepresentation in pop-culture feels, and those who haven’t had reason—before now—to imagine what it’s like to be Asian in America.

A Very Asian Guide to Korean Food
By Michelle Li
Explore the delicious world of Korean Food! A Very Asian Guide to Korean Food introduces little readers to classic and modern Korean dishes and provides fun facts about the foods and culture of Korea. Learn how kimchi is made or discover what makes a Korean fried chicken so crispy. Author, Michelle Li, brings pride and energy for her Korean culture in her debut children’s book. Illustrated by Sunnu Rebecca Choi in mixed media, each page is a colorful exploration of a dish that is sure to make every reader hungry.

Ward of the State: A Memoir of Foster Care
By Karlos Dillard
“Ward of the State: A Memoir of Foster Care,” tells what happened to a little black boy from the inner city of Detroit. This is the story of Karlos Dillard, severely neglected by his mother who often left him and his siblings at home alone for weeks to fend for themselves. Enduring severe neglect and abuse, the boy was removed by the State of Michigan and put into foster care. Karlos was removed from his mother’s care just to end up in foster homes that treated him worse. The book is an emotional rollercoaster. Every time Karlos describes the pain he is feeling you will feel the same pain. Whether it be hunger, anger, or being sexually violated. Karlos’ use of words makes sure that you aren’t just reading the book, you are actually engaged. What is most enticing are the small victories experienced in the story because they give you a break from the horrors of some of the foster homes. Karlos was told he was not loved, he was not wanted and he was nothing but a ward of the State. Karlos had nothing left to look forward to and that almost ended his life, but his hope to find a family that loved him kept him alive.

“You Should Be Grateful”: Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption
By Angela Tucker
An adoption expert and transracial adoptee herself examines the unique perspectives and challenges these adoptees have as they navigate multiple cultures.

“Your parents are so amazing for adopting you! You should be grateful that you were adopted.”

Angela Tucker is a Black woman, adopted from foster care by white parents. She has heard this microaggression her entire life, usually from well-intentioned strangers who view her adoptive parents as noble saviors. She is grateful for many aspects of her life, but being transracially adopted involves layers of rejection, loss, and complexity that cannot be summed up so easily.

In “You Should Be Grateful,” Tucker centers the experiences of adoptees to share deeply personal stories, well-researched history, and engrossing anecdotes from mentorship sessions with adopted youth. These perspectives challenge the fairy-tale narrative of adoption, giving way to a fuller story that explores the impacts of racism, classism, family, love, and belonging.