When a queer Korean adoptee visits her original mother in Seoul, long-held regrets and cultural misunderstandings come to the surface alongside tenderness, humor, and tenacity.

Reunions remain extremely rare

In 2005, the United Nations estimated that over 260,000 adoptions take place globally each year (†). As of 2013, around 7 million Americans are Adoptees (‡). Which means nearly 100 million Americans have an adopted person in their immediate family (‡). Adoption is far from being a niche issue. Despite the ever increasing number of families affected, reunions remain extremely rare.

Original families have no legal right to search for their children. While adoptees have very limited rights to request a search through their agency, they still do not have legal rights to see their complete file which often means reunification is blocked by agencies withholding identifying information.

From the small percent of adoptees who initiate searches only about 2.7% of adoptees were successful in finding an original family member. Most of these reunions end up leading to estrangement, largely due to a lack of support,

Between Goodbyes focuses on the long term struggles of family reunion.

Adoptee documentaries often center around the initial reunion with a redemption lens. It’s a time when emotions run high but it’s often not the most representative of the family’s relationship. This project began by asking, what happens a decade or two into a family reunion? What resources do families have or lack while attempting to stay in touch?

Original family voices have been missing from the conversation for far too long. Their voices deserve to be heard as well.

“No one supported our wanting to keep our children.” §

- Anonymous Korean Birth parent

Stranger Adoption vs. Kinship Adoption

Stranger adoption is very different from kinship adoption. Kinship means the new parental figures already knew the child as well as their original parents. The adoptee retains their identity and family history. Stranger adoption involves an exchange of money and the option to legally rewrite a child's name and family history (Further Reading: Strangers and Kin, Barbara Melosh).

“Why did she give up her child?”

“How could a mother do that?”

These are the most common questions we hear. Far fewer people ask, “Was this choice even made by her? What other choices did she have access to? Why did over 200,000 families relinquish their children, knowing they may never see them again?” This film was conceived out of our frustration with narratives of adoption that exclude Birth Family or Original Family voices and frame adoption as beginning with their guilty choice. We grew up being told that our Original Families relinquished their parental rights out of “love”, but we never heard about their desperation.

Traditionally, parental rights in South Korea only go to the father. If he died or filed for divorce, his children would remain under the control of his family members. Mothers would have no legal claim to their own children. Therefore child relinquishment was usually decided as a family and in many cases without the mothers consent. It wasn’t until 2005 that mothers were granted rights on equal footing with fathers. 

During the boom of international adoptions in the 1980s, South Korea was still under the rule of a military dictatorship. Draconian population control policies handed down from the United Nations were aimed at married women. Their goal was to drastically reduce birth rates from an average of six children to two and later, to one. Sending children overseas en masse coincided with a nationwide strategy of economic growth above all else. By avoiding the cost of caring for these children and turning them in revenue, the government made billions of dollars. The United States and western Europe created this industry and benefited the most from this arrangement.

We hope to be another voice in the critical discourse started by generations of Adoptees before us. In making this film we aim to re-educate the public and remove the stigma associated with being an original mother or parent.