VOICES OF KCCNYC ADOPTEES
By Jon Oaks, Marci DeFrancesco, and Rylee Kennedy
For National Adoption Awareness Month, KCCNYC asked members of our community to share their personal essays about their experience as Korean American Adoptees. We hope you will spend time with each story, helping us to more deeply understand the experiences of adoptees. We are profoundly honored to share these with our readers.
Click on the links below to read their full essays:
Every November, when National Adoptee Awareness Month (NAAM) comes around, I feel a mix of gratitude and restlessness. I am grateful for how far the adoptee community has come, for the adoptee-led projects, gatherings, and conversations that did not exist when I was growing up. But I also feel restless, because this month always brings me back to unfinished questions: what belonging really means, what it means to carry two histories, and how to honor both without losing either.
I was adopted from Seoul, South Korea, in May 1984, when I was just four and a half months old. My new family was from a city in upstate NY, Troy. That’s where my life as Marci DeFranceso begins. A Korean girl with an Italian name. My story has always been a blend of cultures: the mystery of where I came from and the love and craziness of where I grew up.
Like many adoptees, I knew I was adopted from a very young age. When the infamous “where do babies come from?” came out my mouth, my parents were quick to inform me that my story had a few extra chapters tacked onto the end. In addition to coming out of my mother’s “stomach”, I also got to take a long plane ride across the whole world, after my birth mother (who loved me very much, of course) decided I needed to live with other parents who wanted a child. My brother, as well as two of my cousins, are also adopted, so understanding this was easy….
