Raised by Caucasian adoptive parents in a white, Midwestern community, Thomas Manvydas tried for years to ignore the unmistakably Korean facial features he saw every day in a mirror.
"I thought I was white," said Manvydas, a 29-year-old financial analyst now living in Glendale. During his teenage years, he said, his identity crisis grew so severe that he routinely used racial epithets when referring to people of Asian heritage.
About 350 adoptees, parents, researchers and community leaders from throughout the United States and South Korea shared and listened to such stories in Koreatown on Saturday during the first national conference on the phenomenon and consequences of the adoptions of Korean children.
In a practice driven by war, poverty and culture, more than 200,000 Koreans have been given up for adoption over the past 50 years, mostly to the United States.
Nearly all were raised in non-Korean families because of a deeply rooted Korean aversion to adoption.
In recent years, many of the grown-up children and their adoptive families in the United States have begun fighting the stigma attached to adopted children, their birth mothers and their adoptive parents by Koreans and Korean Americans.
Sprinkled throughout the nation, many Korean American adoptees grew up feeling isolated from one another and alienated from their ethnic heritage, participants said.
"One of the main goals of the conference is to form a community and foster a sense of belonging," said Manvydas, co-chairman of the conference sponsored by the Korean American, Adoptee, Adoptive Family Network.
South Korea until the late 1980s exported more orphans than any other country. Those adoptees have come of age, constituting more than 10% of all Korean Americans in the United States.
"If you consider their extended families and friends, this is a resource of 3 million people who share the interest of the Korean American community," said Christy Winston, adoptive mother of two Korean children and co-chairwoman of the conference. "These people need to have Korean connections so that their children can be raised with a strong ethnic identity and positive self-esteem."
Discrimination against racially mixed children and those born out of wedlock in the conformist, Confucianism-steeped South Korean society has kept adoptees largely ignored.
