While those children are learning to walk and talk and tie their shoes, their older Korean-born counterparts are reaching adulthood, the first generation of international adoptees to do so. Enrico and other adult adoptees and advocates say the prevailing wisdom among adoptive parents was to Americanize their new children as quickly as possible and play down any differences with their classmates and siblings. That process was reinforced by the fact that nearly all parents of Korean-born adoptees are white and, especially until the 1970s, most lived in towns that had few, if any, other Asian faces. That approach fell short, largely because no matter how adoptees thought of themselves, people beyond their families often regarded them as foreign. The scrutiny continued when the family moved to a small town in Indiana, and people walked up to her parents on the street to express their regrets that the couple hadn't been able to adopt white children.
Similar experiences continue today for young adoptees and their families.
Sue Sytsma says that when her family moved to Oak Ridge and away from familiar surroundings in Saddle Brook, some people didn't know what to make of her daughter, then 8. People would pair her up with other Asian kids, even if she didn't like them, things like that. Some adult adoptees say that even when their adoptive parents acknowledged their Korean roots and tried to instill ethnic pride, the adoptees sometimes rejected it in an effort to be more American. But Nelson-Wang, who was not adopted until she was 10 and thus understood Korean, refused to acknowledge him. And when I was growing up, I really didn't want to know anything about Korea.