Amid Global Adoption Reckoning, Adoptees Fight Long-Standing Narrative They Should Be ‘Grateful’

Cosette Eisenhauer-Epp, a Chinese transracial adoptee with white parents, said she remembers a salient moment after the March 2022 Atlanta-area spa shootings.

“The people he shot look like me, but he’s the same ethnicity as my parents, so where do I go from that?” said Eisenhauer-Epp, a 23-year-old master’s student at the University of Texas at Arlington.

For Eisenhauer-Epp, the shootings were just another reminder of how complicated it was navigating her identity as an adoptee.

Many adoptees say they have recently been pushing back against a certain narrative they feel is foisted upon them. Amid recent investigations that exposed systemic adoption fraud by the Chinese and South Korean governments, some adoptees have capitalized on the global reckoning with adoption to combat messages from the media and well-intentioned commentators that they should be “grateful.”

Many adoptees also say that with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and conservative-backed push to present adoption as an alternative to abortion, the idea that adoptees were “rescued” and should be thankful is woven into America’s political fabric.

Eisenhauer-Epp is co-founder of Navigating Adoption, an online platform for adoptees, and also works with Sisters of China, an adoptee-led organization for female-identifying Chinese adoptees affected by China’s one-child policy. She recently created a TikTok for the organization that addressed how harmful it is to ask adoptees if they feel grateful.

The adoptee community responded to her video, commenting “Preach,” “literally” and “so truee” and that they identified with the sentiment.

By sharing their experiences online, adoptees and adoptee advocates have pushed for a new narrative that decenters adoptive parents and amplifies adoptee voices.

“I can’t think of any other groups of trauma survivors who are told to be grateful for that traumatic experience, and especially not with such cultural insistence that adoptees experience,” said Adoptee Mentoring Society program coordinator amanda paul, whose name is not capitalized.

This narrative is part of the adoption industrial complex, paul said, a system that “produces” adoptees to meet the demands of governments and adoption agencies more interested in finding “potential buyers” than caring about children.

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“I know that adoptees have been sharing their own stories and archiving these experiences and processes for a really long time, and in the Korean adoptee communities specifically for generations,” paul said.

Paul, who uses they/them pronouns, was born in Korea in 1990 and raised in Chicago by two white parents. Their parents spent no time with other people of color, and that damaged paul’s ability to form a healthy understanding of their identities, they said.

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