Unequal Motherhoods and the Adoption of Asian Children by Gill Jungyun;

Author:Gill, Jungyun;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

As described earlier, foster mothers tended to experience enormous emotional difficulty when and after their foster children were sent to adoptive parents. Some of them felt like they gave away to strangers children they loved and had worked so hard to raise. Not knowing what happened to their foster children enhanced the pain of separation. Meeting the grown-up children who they had foster-cared, especially those with health issues or disabilities, provided foster mothers with comfort and assurance. Like Jum-Sun Noh, foster mothers felt pride in their mothering work when they visited adoptees and their families abroad and had a chance to actually witness the living environment of their adopted children.

In conclusion, as in the case of birth mothers, how foster mothers are documented varies by countries. The absence of information about foster care from documentation can make foster mothers’ care and motherhood almost totally invisible to U.S. adoptive mothers. In most of the Korea adoption cases, adoption documents provided to adoptive parents usually included some basic information about the foster care such as foster parents’ names, ages, and education. But this limited information does not reveal the multiple layers of foster mothers’ motherhood and mothering. My field research revealed that despite foster mothers’ crucial role during the adoption process, that is, caring for mostly newborns right after the agency took them in for adoption and until they were sent to adoptive parents, foster mothers in Korea were not their agency’s employees but were instead classified as “volunteers” for the agency. This status contributed to their poor payment levels, far lower than the minimum wage in Korea, and lack of work benefits. Since older women with little education have extremely limited opportunities for paid work in Korea, some of them become foster mothers. It’s these women’s mothering labor that is exploited in the process of international adoption. Foster mothers’ stories indicate that caring for infants is very exhausting and involves sacrifice of personal lives. But their foster children also give them and their family happiness. The hardest part of their foster care work is the emotional difficulty and stress involved in sending their foster children to strangers, the adopting parents, after raising the children as their own. Although foster mothers are not legally or biologically related to the children in their care, doing maternal work for foster children entails maternal identity and bonding to the children. Being often encouraged by adoption social workers, some adoptive mothers and foster mothers went beyond the adoption document-mediated relationship by exchanging letters, photos, and other gifts. Photo albums from foster families are the visual presentations of foster mothers’ care for the children. While many adoptive mothers of Korean adoptees express affection and admiration for foster mothers, they generally do not realize that foster mothers who sent Han-Bok, photo albums, or toys to adoptive parents might have spent their earnings for a couple of days’ foster care labor to buy these gifts. Since adoption documents do not include any information about how little foster mothers were

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