As the U.S. public reels from Trump’s illegal military strikes in Iran, communities across the globe are feeling heightened fear, insecurity, and destabilization. This war has already proven particularly devastating for women and girls. In the first wave of joint U.S.-Israeli strikes, one missile struck a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran, killing at least 175 people including children. An estimated 170 children were in class at the time.

This devastating news was yet another reminder that in wars and conflicts, women and girls suffer disproportionately. In honor of International Women’s Day, we must amplify the call to challenge wars and militarism.

Even before Trump’s strikes on Iran, women and girls were experiencing historic levels of insecurity due to wars and militarism. The United Nations has warned that women are living at the highest risk, based on proximity to deadly conflict since the 1990s. In the past two years, civilian casualties among women and children have quadrupled, and conflict-related sexual violence increased by 87 percent.

In the coming weeks, if the U.S. shows no sign of deescalating in Iran, the impact on women in Iran will be ever more disastrous. Meanwhile, women in Gaza continue to suffer from mass starvation, violence, and abuse, women in Sudan suffer from ongoing sexual violence, displacement, and starvation, and women in Cuba struggle to procure resources for pre-natal health due to escalating U.S. blockades.

As a Korea peace activist, I have seen how the history of the U.S. forever war in Korea has laid the blueprint for wars waged globally and how women’s resistance to war has shaped the International Women’s Day we celebrate today.

In 1950, President Truman bypassed Congress to begin what he then called a “police action” in Korea, marking the first time a U.S. president authorized large-scale overseas combat without congressional approval and setting a precedent. The State Department also published what would become a foundational document, NSC-68, justifying massive military buildup for aggressive containment of communism and Soviet influence.

All subsequent U.S. presidents inherited this legacy: Lyndon B. Johnson in Vietnam, Richard Nixon in Cambodia, Ronald Reagan in Libya, Bill Clinton in Yugoslavia, Barack Obama in Libya, and the list goes on. Trump’s actions in Venezuela and Iran — while an escalation — are enabled by this long legacy of overseas U.S. interventions without congressional oversight or approval.

The costs of these decisions are catastrophic and have made all women across the world less secure. In the case of Korea, women are still bearing the immense costs of war. Landmines and unexploded ordnance remnants in the Demilitarized Zone continue to harm women in particular, who are often responsible for agricultural labor in the affected areas. An estimated million Korean women have also suffered harm from decades of militarized sex trade orchestrated by the U.S. military and the South Korean government. And finally, women in North Korea face the  impacts of ongoing sanctions that exacerbate women’s economic vulnerabilities and deny women access to critical supplies for maternal health.

These histories feature many atrocities, but they also showcase important examples of resistance. In the 1950s, global women peace leaders proved instrumental in exposing the horrific experiences of Korean women due to the ongoing war. Due to their reporting, international awareness of the atrocities in Korea rose.

These women leaders went on to spearhead the UN Initiative to mark International Women’s Day and to designate 1975 as International Women’s Year. Inspired by this activism, women can and must continue to take stands against wars. For this year’s International Women’s Day, over 100 global women leaders and organizations demanded that the United States take accountability for the decades of the U.S. military’s harm and abuse of women and girls in Korea. In drawing attention to this legacy, these activists show that no wars — even those deemed successful by U.S. policymakers — make women or girls safer or more secure.

Women are facing an increasingly dire future. The U.S. has systematically divested from aid and social services as well as diplomacy efforts globally. As social services are cut in the U.S., military spending is skyrocketing. The U.S. military budget has reach $1 trillion, with likely increases for continued strikes on Iran.

This madness must end. Trump’s latest actions in Iran should be a wake-up call for the public about the larger issues that have long plagued U.S. democracy at the expense of women and girls both at home and abroad. On International Women’s Day, let’s follow the example of the generations of women past who have boldly and courageously called for an end to wars, and fight for a better world for ourselves and future generations.

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Every year on January 13, the U.S. observes Korean American Day, a day that celebrates those from the Korean American community “who have made immeasurable contributions as small business owners, military service members, faith leaders, doctors, artists, and elected officials,” according to one webpage describing national holidays.

Officially established in 2005, Korean American Day commemorates the first arrival of Joseon citizens to the U.S. in 1903. Back then, there was one Korea; North and South Korea did not exist. Joseon was already weakened after Queen Min was assassinated. King Gojong attempted to maneuver between Russia and Japan, and an imperial dispute over the peninsula was underway. Japan’s victory over Russia soon sealed Korea’s fate. Joseon people survived by being flexible.

Like poor European migrants seeking the American Dream, Joseon immigrants were not diplomats or elites but peasants entering a racialized labor regime. Many sought better livelihoods through American missionary networks that operated within the broader framework of Japanese imperial expansion. The diplomatic alignment between the U.S. and Japan at the turn of the century remains a source of grievance in Korea, particularly President Theodore Roosevelt’s endorsement of Japanese control over the peninsula, negotiated alongside U.S. interests in the Philippines.  Roosevelt would later receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

As I write about the migration history of my ancestors, I sit here in Germany as an immigrant whose existence is no longer defined by a single crossing. I write from Berlin, a city shaped by its own reckoning with state violence and ideological extremism, and I am aware of the privileged distance I enjoy.

The images of ICE targeting the immigrant communities in Minneapolis feels both surreal and unbearably familiar to me in a city that has memorialized the dead who were brutally persecuted and murdered for being different.

Across the U.S., communities are organizing volunteer patrols, food distribution networks, and mutual aid systems in response to heightened immigration enforcement. The fear is real. In Minneapolis and other cities like Chicago, Denver, Seattle, volunteers stand outside schools and courthouses, whistles in hand, watching for ICE officers and vehicles. Compassionate folks are delivering food to vulnerable families who must remain indoors, afraid to be seen. But it is not new. And it is not unique.

Conditional citizens

For some, this moment feels unprecedented. For others, including many Korean adoptees, the conditionality of belonging has always been a reality. Political theorist Claire Jean Kim has described Asian Americans as “conditional citizens,” people who may hold legal status yet remain symbolically outside the state because of narratives that cast them as perpetual foreigners.  Many BIPoC adoptees experience this layered conditionality, accepted in some circles and questioned in others, because belonging in America or within an ethnic enclave diaspora is constantly interpreted rather than assumed.

With that in mind, what does it mean that the first large-scale Korean migration to the U.S. began under imperial pressure, facilitated by U.S. missionaries, and involved vulnerable rural laborers seeking survival? And what does it mean that decades later, another mass movement of Koreans across the Pacific was also organized through the same missionary networks and geopolitical alignment?

For over 70 years, 200,000 Korean “orphans” crossed borders with South Korean state encouragement, through foreign religious and humanitarian frameworks, that ultimately spoke for us and our families. Those of us who were forcibly relocated to the U.S. make up 10 percent of the Korean diaspora.  In Korea historian/author Bruce Cumings’s glowing chapter America’s Koreans (in his historical account Korea’s Place in the Sun, the 2005 reprint) which frames the achievements of Korean Americans, adopted Korean Americans do not appear even as a footnote.

“We saved you. You are so lucky to be adopted to America!” That is the shortcut narrative Korean adoptees often hear.

If rescue becomes a moral and political necessity, it also becomes intimate. This is what sentimental kinship sounds like.

An uneasy alliance and the rescue narrative

Nigerian American writer, Teju Cole, once described a “White Savior Industrial Complex,” a system that “supports brutal projects in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.” He goes on to argue that certain rescue narratives offer emotional satisfaction without dismantling the structures that produce the suffering.

Transnational adoption operates within that terrain, where vulnerability and altruism are emotionally linked and hard to untangle. South Korean overseas adoption practices, often described as an “adoption industrial complex,” emerged from that same historical constellation, shaped by Cold War alliances, missionary networks, and a shared investment in rescue as moral narrative.

Korea became a central site through which the U.S. could consolidate its postwar identity as both military power and humanitarian guardian, with the cooperation of successive South Korean regimes.

The modern transnational adoption system was constructed in South Korea with the support of Americans, but was not about love or rescue. It relied on the unpaid labor and sacrifice of countless Korean mothers for political and moral optics. It was about transforming two nations at once, economically, morally, and symbolically. Our mothers, many of whom were separated from us under conditions that undermine the meaning of consent, were placed on a state-funded assembly line they never agreed to, producing what I have elsewhere described as “K-Orphans” that made the story work.

For decades, our bodies were quietly conscripted into a national project. We were framed as humanitarian success stories, exported to help rebuild postwar South Korea and to “complete” American families into something called multicultural. We were welcomed into a narrative that secured the U.S.’s moral high ground, even as we were deployed as instruments in the fight against communism.

Remembering adoptees in Korean American history

Korean American belonging is forged not only through labor or migration, but also through what I describe as sentimental kinships: Bonds that transformed geopolitical entanglement into intimate narratives of rescue and the idea that “every child deserves a loving (American) home.” These kinships complicate how adoptees are seen within Korean American history. While many immigrants crossed the Pacific in search of work, education, or mobility, we arrived through a different apparatus. It cast us as dependents rather than migrants, not as children of immigrants raised within ethnic enclaves.

We arrived as symbols of alliance, of rescue, of Cold War benevolence. That difference in origin continues to structure our (mis)recognition, rendering it ambiguous and shadowed by shame.

For some first-, 1.5-, and second-generation Korean Americans, the founding narrative centers migration, sacrifice, and community-building under prejudice. The presence of adoptees introduces an uncomfortable truth: That U.S. imperialism and South Korea’s complicity are also embedded in Korean American formation.

However, Korean adoptees belong in this history too. But not as footnotes. Not as grateful orphans. Over the past 70 years, we have become generations of Korean Americans shaped by forced family separation, systemic silence, and extraordinary resilience. We are the forgotten 0.5 generation, who migrated without our Korean families to be given to strangers in a foreign land.

When adoptees began warning that immigration enforcement could affect those of us without secure citizenship status, the response was often disbelief. Adoption, it was assumed, had erased vulnerability. For many raised in white families, proximity to whiteness has long been equated with protection and belonging. But that proximity has always been conditional. Legal status can be questioned. Citizenship can be scrutinized.

Opacity and the Politics of Recognition

And other international adoptees have found themselves subject to the authority of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), even when presenting documentation of legal status and citizenship.  Korean American adoptees are still waiting to be fully acknowledged as belonging somewhere. We arrived in the U.S. classified as war refugees and later as “orphans.”

Recent findings by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission have documented systemic irregularities in overseas adoption practices, including falsified records and cases in which parental consent was misrepresented or absent.  For many of us, the paperwork that defined our identities was not merely incomplete, but structurally compromised.

In 2010, under the Obama administration, I was detained for hours in a DHS office inside U.S. Customs and Border Protection at JFK Airport in New York. Officials did not believe the passport belonged to me: An East Asian face paired with a Western name. I had gained some weight, and my face was rounder than in the photograph taken a decade earlier.

When they insisted on calling my adoptive parents to confirm my story, I felt reduced, as though my citizenship were provisional. I was no longer an independent adult voicing my own story but a humanitarian gesture expected to perform gratitude, subjected to insistent questions about my identity and entitled demands for transparency.

Political philosopher Édouard Glissant described the “right to opacity” as the refusal of such demands. In colonial systems of power, people are required to make themselves fully legible, to explain and categorize themselves in order to be accepted as legitimate. Opacity asserts a different principle: individuals and cultures do not owe complete transparency in order to exist and be recognized.

But in America, recognition often depends on whether our bodies tell a story that comforts those in power.

Editor’s note: A version of this essay with full citations and references is available at the following Substack link.

The post Sentimental Kinships appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

The eerie opening scene of the Guthrie Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth sets the tone for the rest of the play: The three witches, or Weird Sisters, enter with smoke rising around the edges of the Guthrie’s thrust stage. Their movements are slow and deliberate, like a carefully-coordinated modern dance piece, as they utter the famous lines, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair; hover through the fog and filthy air.”

Even if your knowledge and understanding of Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy is not college-level, this production does an excellent job of highlighting the central themes at the heart of the story; ambition, manipulation, and moral unraveling. Former Guthrie Artistic Director Joe Dowling returned to direct this powerful staging of this iconic play, which premiered January 31 and runs until March 22. It’s clear that this is not his first rodeo.  Dowling approaches the material with a confident hand, making bold artistic choices in how scenes are staged and selected.

After a victorious battle, Macbeth is praised as a war hero and rewarded with a new title. He is already contemplating the Weird Sisters’ prophecy that he will become king when Lady Macbeth makes her entrance and begins her sly scheming.

As Lady Macbeth, actor Meghan Kreidler is a commanding physical and emotional presence, and she effectively conveys the hold she has over her husband. Her wide, expressive eyes show her initial excitement at the prospect of becoming queen, and her later unraveling into madness.

Macbeth (Daniel José Molina) seems a bit young in this production compared to other iterations of his character depicted on stage and screen. But Molina’s fresh face underscores his character’s initial sincerity and genuine desire to please, and makes his later descent into tyranny feel like a sharper, more startling transformation.

Dowling (and Shakespeare) also inject humor into several tense scenes. In his Guthrie debut as the Sergeant/Seyton, newcomer David Michaeli is a master of physical comedy, wobbling drunkenly in celebration in one scene, and in another, his knees literally knock in fear of Macbeths’ violent temper. In contrast, Guthrie veterans Sun Mee Chomet and Regina Marie Williams add gravitas as the iconic Weird Sisters and other supporting roles, grounding the production with their assured demeanors and voices.

As the premier theater in the Twin Cities, the Guthrie has considerable resources to devote to lighting, set design, and staging, and they are put to excellent use here. Macbeth may be a small man in terms of his moral character, but his presence looms larger than life in shadow, projected on a huge banner behind him. At one point, a beautifully set dinner table rises gracefully on a hidden stage lift, and in another scene, large menacing trees ominously drop from the ceiling. Costume designer Judith Dolan dresses her characters in stunning costumes – from the Weird Sisters’ tattered, flowing garments to Banquo’s ghostly appearance at the formal dinner and Lady Macbeth’s dramatic transformation from plain nightclothes to regal, gorgeous gowns.

All of these elements come together to create a production that is visually striking and emotionally grounded, even for viewers who come in without a deep familiarity of the play. This Macbeth makes Shakespeare feel accessible, urgent, and worth seeing twice.

Macbeth runs at the Guthrie through March 22, 2026.

The post Embrace the foreboding appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

South Korean documentary filmmaker Seyoung Jo told a packed room at the University of Minnesota, after a recent showing of her new film K-Number, that when planning for screenings of her film in the U.S., she specifically asked to show her film in Minnesota.

The reason?  She had met a lot of Minnesotan Korean adoptees in researching and filming two films about transnational adoption in South Korea, and knew there were a high concentration of Korean adoptees here, many of whom have lived and worked in South Korea, and have belonged to or led adoptee organizations there.

K-Number digs deep into a timely topic – how the recent revelation about fraud and mismanagement of adoption has its roots in South Korean history, and how that history reverberates into the lives of adult Korean adoptees today.

The title, K-Number, comes from a numbering system that ostensibly kept track of a majority (but not all) Korean children adopted internationally. The film describes the numbering of human beings for export, which is one piece of the narrative; it refers to the administrative structures, policies, and official records that the film attempts to explain.  

The term also represents the individuality of hundreds of thousands, scattered to many places, who built lives elsewhere, and have regrouped as a social force in recent years, in a campaign to reclaim their human dignity on a world stage. While the term “K-Number” refers to a dehumanizing system, it also symbolizes the unity and resilience of a group of people.  

Mioka Kim Miller, in a scene from K-Number, views photos she has collected of herself as a child at various ages.

South Korean international adoption in the headlines

A recent admission by the South Korean government concerning international adoption history made headlines globally – that the degree of fraud found in the adoption records of transnational adoptees constitutes a human rights crime under South Korean law.  The new president of South Korea, Jae Myung Lee, formalized this revelation in an official apology to Korean adoptees, delivered in a speech on October 2025. The emerging revelations about the adoption system in South Korea have made Jo’s research and her recent documentary film a hot topic in both South Korea and the U.S.

Jo did an interview on February 10, the day of her film event in Minneapolis, halfway through a month-long U.S. tour with her film.  She was assisted by translator Deborah Yoon, a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Psychology.

During the recent tour in the U.S., K-Number was screened in Boston and at a venue near Washington, D.C., prior to the Minneapolis showing. The filmmaker traveled with her film to do interviews and audience Q and As after each showing.  After the Minneapolis event, she showed the film at Northwestern University (in partnership with Korean Adoptees of Chicago) and then to California for a screening for the Association of Korean Adoptees of San Francisco (AKASF).

A career of human rights filmmaking

Jo had an intense interest in film starting around 2001 while in college. She calls herself a “bad student” for her disinterest in anything beyond making films with her fellow film club members. The first film she partticipated in making was Words Kept in a Stone. It looked at the faulty 1987 presidential election, when military dictator Do-Hwan Chun lost to Tae-woo Noh in 1987, just before South Korea hosted the Olympics in 1988.  

After college, in 2024, Jo directed her first film about Korean adoptees who were returning to Korea at that time to live and work. It was the beginning of an interest in Korean adoptees and international adoption that now spans 20 years. Her film Made in Korean (now listed in English as Made in Korea (no “n”)) in most filmographies) also delves into the suspicion of corruption in the process. No one was aware of widespread records fraud at that time, she said, however, the film does document examples of how adoptees searching for birth family were denied access to their own records by their adoption agencies.

She also directed Variety Survival Talk Show (2009), on the stories of sexual assault survivors. Her second feature-length documentary, Let’s Dance (2013), focuses on abortion in South Korea.  

Decades of frustration

There is an oblique reference to Made in Korean in the beginning scene of K-Number, during which the viewer hears a conversation, which becomes more heated, between a Korean adoptee man and a woman who is an adoption agency staff member. During the conversation, the woman is apparently paging through the man’s file, and refusing to show it to him or let him have copies of certain pages he asks about. 

Jo explained that the (audio only) conversation was from the 2004 Made in Korean. Its inclusion hints at the frustration of adoptees who have pled for records access for decades. That kind of scenario, with agencies holding onto records and citing confidentiality, and adoptees pleading for access to their own information, happened in 2004 and was still happening in 2022 when Jo was filming for K-Number.

One adoptee’s story, and a dose of history

At the beginning of K-Number, the viewer has an up-close introduction to Mioka Kim Miller, a U.S. Korean adoptee who is doing a birth search in Seoul. The viewer soon learns that this is only the most recent of several trips Miller has taken to South Korea for the same purpose – the first one was in 2009.

Mioka recounts her memory of leaving her home to search for her mother. She has only a hazy recollection of her mother leaving their home, and does not remember the reason she left.  She can vaguely remember a few details of her home – a place with a courtyard and a closed entrance with a security guard.   At one point in visiting neighborhoods she thinks she may have lived, she takes a photo of a place like that.  She does not remember the city she lived in. She relates that she blames herself for getting lost, even though she was so young she can barely remember what she was doing, or why.

Her search for birth family has been impeded many times by authorities denying her access to her files. She tracks down a children’s home where she was first placed, and visits it, obtaining a redacted record, but the record does not reveal the city where she was found, only a neighborhood name. She believes the record could be missing key information, due to the many redactions.  She is assisted in her search by a Korean women’s group, Banet, whose director is interviewed on her knowledge of the search process.

She eventually obtains the same record, unredacted, toward the end of the story, with no explanation for the prior redactions. She gets the record apparently only because of her persistence and the intervention of the experts helping her.  

Mioka also describes leaving her adoptive parents’ home as a teenager for good after being “kicked out” by adoptive parents who never loved her. She also describes how, in her papers and mementos of her adoption, she found a filled-out application form for U.S. citizenship, apparently completed by her adoptive parents but never sent.  On her own as an older teen, she finished high school, worked and attended beauty college part time, and eventually established her own business. As an adult, she hired an immigration attorney to assist her in obtaining her U.S. citizenship.

Mioka’s story was helpful for the film narrative in many ways, Jo explained.  Her repeat visits to Korea showed how missing and inaccurate records can make a birth search tedious and nearly impossible, even with the expert help from the Banet organization.  That she discovered as an adult that she was never made a citizen brings the U.S. bureaucratic failures into focus.  Mioka’s demeanor was also a factor in advancing the story, Jo said. Diplomatic and polite at all times, her friendliness, persistence and focus on her search highlights the illogic of the system she is trying to work with.

A continuum of life experiences

Jo said that meeting many adoptees has taught her that “everyone’s experience is so different.” She shows that in the stories of other Korean adoptees she follows in K-Number, including Dana and Mary Schlafman, a married American couple, both Korean adoptees. They both come up empty in their search for birth parents.

The Schlafmans’ musing on a way of reclaiming and honoring their fellow Korean adoptees was the inspiration for the film title.  Mary explains that earlier adoptees were numbered differently, and that there are an unknown number of people who were adopted informally in the early days of international adoption. However, she believes the K-numbers, used to number most Korean adoptees, could still be a key.  Dana shows a photo of the 9/11 memorial, and explains that nearly 3,000 people’s names depicted around the huge steel and granite pools at its base are findable by a digital numbering system linked to a grid. He imagines a similar memorial that would honor all Korean adoptees with their K-numbers.

A reunion and a second abandonment

The story of Kaylin Bower describes another kind of birth parent reunion. Kaylin successfully locates her birth mother (with the help of the Banet group) and meets her a few times with a translator. However, Kaylin’s birth mother, whose face is never shown, tells Kaylin to go back to her adoptive family, and to not visit her again. During the uncomfortable meetings, the viewer hears what the translator is telling Kaylin, — a softer version of the translation seen on the screen in subtitles.

In the end, Kaylin agrees not to pursue the relationship, telling her birth mother “I understand,” but the subtext is more like “I don’t understand.”  Back at her hotel, Kaylin talks to her little son on a video call – he is in a silly mood. His bright voice comes through on the speaker, and Kaylin tries to match his enthusiasm. “Maybe you can come with me next time,” she tells him.

Linking past and present

K-Number is more comprehensive than the adoptees’ stories. It takes on a wide spectrum or legal, governmental, moral and emotional issues wrapped into South Korea’s international adoption system.  It reports in some depth on the adoption bureaucracy, which necessitates explanations of some key points in Korean history, with contemporaneous documents, photos and film footage.  

One of the film’s strengths is in the linking of events in South Korean modern history to the present predicament of adoptees.  In telling the stories of Mioka and several other adoptees, it digs into how records access problems and the puzzling bureaucracy of international adoption affect adoptees today – in money, time and much misery.

An unlikely champion for adoptee human rights

Despite some enthusiastic advocacy in South Korea between 2004 and 2017 for greater records access for Korean adoptees, Jo said, there was very little movement on the issue.  What changed in 2017 was U.S. adoptee Adam Crapser’s human rights lawsuit against the Holt Agency and the South Korean government for his deportation from the U.S. to South Korea. (see 2016 feature story in the KQ archive section)

During the era of the late ‘90s to early 2000s, deported adoptees were in the news in South Korea because many were in crisis there, experiencing poverty along with cultural and social isolation.  In that era, Jo said “there was reporting of deported adoptees dying on the streets.”  One adoptee, Phillip Clay, died by suicide in South Korea in 2017.  In Korea, it brought the plight of deportees into sharp relief.  In the U.S., Clay’s death prompted some nationwide pro-citizenship advocacy, including a bill (which still has not been voted into law) to ensure automatic citizenship for adoptees.

Jo said she was initially interested in the question of U.S. Korean adoptees and their citizenship issues, but that question prompted the research that eventually became the K-Number film. The film briefly describes Crapser’s lawsuit, which he initially partially won.  In an interview, Crapser plainly expresses his disgust for both the U.S. and South Korean governments.  After the initial court case, the Holt agency was ordered to pay him 100 million won (around $75,000) for damages.  However, Holt  never paid.  Instead, it appealed;  the Associated Press reported in January (2026) that Holt and the South Korean government won the appeal.

The appeals court ruled that neither Holt nor the government were responsible for Crapser’s lack of citizenship. On appeal, Holt cited a 1970s law, passed during military dictatorship and intended to speed up international adoptions, which declared that the government was not responsible for ensuring adoptees were made citizens of their new country.  

While Crapser lost his case, that he was able to bring the case at all was significant, Jo explained. It highlighted the injustice, and paved the way for further action by adoptees, which the  K-Number film links together.

Significantly, a group of Danish adoptees, the Danish Korean Rights Group (DKRG) filed a suit in 2022, claiming that the government abused overseas adoptees’ human rights in the way it mishandled their adoptions.  The South Korean government turned it over to its own human rights investigatory body, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a kind of national grand jury tasked with determining if a case against the government rises to the level of a human rights abuse. K-Number includes some footage of TRC hearings.

However, the film was completed long before the TRC published bombshell findings in March 2025 that the historic treatment of Korean adoptees constitutes a human rights abuse under South Korean law.  The South Korean government in 2025 charged the TRC with administering a third round of investigation. That investigation formally began on February 26.

The seven-year project

At the beginning of her work, Jo dug deep into the history, financing, and politics of Korean international adoption, and met many experts. Wading through the facts and history for nearly four years, she could include only a small percent of what she learned in the film.  “The information was scattered,” she said, “and it took a long time to put the pieces together.” Finding funding for her independent production was also challenging, and stretched out the timeline.

Jo started filming in 2019. She followed and filmed adoptees doing birth searches in Korea for about two years. The editing process took about 10 months, but the film was ready in time for the Busan Film Festival in 2024, where it won an audience popularity award.  In 2025, the film was distributed to about 150 movie theaters nationwide. “The whole process was about seven years of work,” she said.

Targeting her work, busting some assumptions

The target viewership “is Korean people who are not really familiar with Korean adoption and do not see it in their everyday lives,” Jo explained, “it was important to figure out how to remove the most complex stories, but give enough information so that they can understand.”

Jo showed the final cut of the film to six different levels of focus groups, she said – from the most informed experts on Korean adoption to groups of ordinary Koreans who knew next to nothing about the topic.  Then she edited again, with the goal of making the film understandable to all the groups, and believes it was worth the time.

Jo also wanted the film to offer facts to counter the stereotypical view of international adoption. “The shortcut narrative among Koreans is that ‘the mother threw away the child, so the child got adopted,’’” she said.  That story is told commonly about Korean single moms in the 1980s and ‘90s, she added. In understanding overseas adoptions prior to the ‘80s, she added, people believe the motivation for adoption to be post-war poverty.

Jo believes that the common point of view was dished out to the general public by “the government, the adoption agencies and at that time, the churches that were involved.”  People from other countries think similarly about international adoption also, she believes.  

Additionally, while a majority of South Koreans believe international adoption happened mainly in the ‘60s, when poverty was widespread, in reality “much of the adoption was happening in the ‘80s up to the time of the [1988] Olympics, when economy was strong,” Jo pointed out.

According to statistics she has read, Jo said, among Korean adoptees who begin a birth search, less than one percent find a birth parent. “But because what they show on TV is successful reunions, people believe many searches are successful – that the rates [of success] are much higher,” she added.  Most successful reunions are accomplished through a DNA match, or because adoptees use the media, she said, while few are accomplished by relyiing on adoption records.

In the standard film or TV depiction of an adoptee and birth parent meeting, a reunion is a beautiful thing, Jo said, “with lots of hugging and crying and happiness that we are all together.” The viewer rarely sees the negatives of the process; the searches that turn up nothing, or the search followed by a reunion with a negative outcome of some kind, like Kaylin’s experience.  There are many successful reunions after which a family relationship fails to develop.  “Time separates them, and trying to build relationship results in conflict,” she observed.

Korean adoptees also go to Korea for many reasons other than birth searches, which many Korean nationals do not understand, she commented.  “In most cases, it is not about just finding their mom. It’s about learning the language, the culture, things they don’t know or can’t remember, learning what it’s like to live in Korea, how people live and express themselves, and so many multiple factors,” she said.

A couple hundred children in Korea are still placed for international adoption annually, Jo added.  “In the present day, although the economy will certainly support a couple hundred kids per year, they are still adopted internationally. Like, because they created the system, they are stuck,” she said. “They do say lately that they will stop international adoption in 2029, but others ask ‘why are we waiting?’”

Reconciliation on a global scale

After many years of puzzling out its intricacies, Jo has learned that Korea’s huge system of international adoption, which operated for many decades, went largely unchallenged. Receiving nations failed to scrutinize the system, even looking the other way.  The results affected hundreds of thousands of people globally.  As a matter of restoring justice, it will not be resolved quickly.  

Among the societies involved in international adoption, Jo suggested, it will take time to work together on a path toward reconciliation. The human rights harms affected many who were unaware – not only adoptees, but birth parents, adoptive parents, and the partners, children and other loved ones of Korean adoptees. “People need to think this through, and not continue to make the assumption that these were certain individual cases,” she said. “We have to look at this as a bigger picture.”

Editor’s note: Filmmaker Seyoung Jo told the audience during the Q and A after the screening that she hopes her month-long February trip will be an impetus for the film to be screened elsewhere in the U.S.  The distribution company Sunbo Film reported that the film is available for community screenings (contact sunbofilm2022@gmail.com for further information). Any additional U.S. screening dates will be announced through the official K-Number Instagram account.

The post Unpacking international adoption appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

Spectrum Planet is a comic from the Philly based Korean Adoptee cartoonist and animator Meaghan Dunn. Dunn has been publishing in Korean Quarterly since the very first issue with her comic Kimchi Girl. Meaghan is a multimedia developer, creating instructional design & VR training for international brands, and teaches animation at various Philadelphia universities. She runs a student focused animation incubator in Philadelphia with former TV executive producer from Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, Linda Simensky, known for Rugrats, Ren & Stimpy, Powerpuff Girls, and many other shows. The studio is currently developing an original new series pilot that is very much focused on a Korean adoptee and her daughter. Dunn says the animated series is about the spectrum of experiences among Korean adoptees and various artists she knows and has interviewed.

Dunn is a doctoral student with one daughter in college.

The post Spectrum Planet appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

Two Fridays ago, my wife and I made a decision we never imagined making in America: Wherever we go, we would carry our U.S. passports.

Not because it’s normal.

Not because it’s required.

But because it feels safer.

Around the same time, many lawyers began offering unsettling advice to U.S. citizens, such as “Say less,” “Follow instructions,” “Don’t argue”.  Not because the law demands it, but because a new reality does.

That was the moment it became clear to me: Something fundamental is shifting.

Why Minnesota?

People across the state are asking the same question. Why Minnesota? Why such a heavy presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal immigration enforcement here? Are we afraid of undocumented immigrants crossing from Canada?

The answer does not lie in the immigration numbers. Minnesota does not have the highest number of undocumented immigrants. There are lots of estimates on percentages of immigrant population per state. The top five are usually named as California, followed by New Jersey, New York, Florida and Nevada. California is at about 27 percent immigrant population; Nevada at about 20 percent. Minnesota is way down the list, at about eight percent.

But it does have one of the highest per-capita concentrations of ICE agents in the nation right now, and the Twin Cities is the main target. No wonder the key question in all our minds is “So why us?”

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Minnesota was perhaps thought to be a “soft target” — geographically isolated, culturally polite, with enough first-generation immigrants who tend to keep their heads down. Big cities hold assets. Red states have loyal bases. Places like ours are easier for the federal government to target its military power.

Or so they thought. During January 2026, however, Minnesotans showed how this theory was wrong. Instead of caving under the onslaught of armed thugs, they have put up a  persistent and resilient target, repelling ICE troops with righteous anger, unity, self-control and even humor, despite unlawful and often brutal ICE behavior.

Fear in immigrant communities

In my community, many people are first-generation immigrants. Their English is accented or limited. They are unfamiliar with American legal culture. They hesitate. They respond slowly. They are not confident, and that makes them vulnerable.

Many are U.S. citizens or legal residents, yet, like people in all non-white immigrant groups, they fear being mistaken for undocumented immigrants. They are not afraid because they have broken the law — but because they believe enforcement will act illegally.

This fear is not abstract. It is real.  The proof is on the ground, and it shapes how people speak, move and live.

The cost of standing up

I’ll be honest, I’m not brave. I’m not like Alex Pretti.

Knowing the risks, he still stood up when he believed the government was acting unjustly. We soon learned that dedication to the public good, and his belief in the ideals of this country played out in his life. He was a U.S. veteran, and became a registered nurse in order to work on behalf of other veterans at the Veterans’ Administration hospital.  

In his final moments, he wasn’t thinking about himself — he was trying to protect others. His last words were to ask the woman he was trying to shield from ICE attack “Are you OK?”

“Give me liberty, or give me death” is an American ideal attributed to founding father Patrick Henry in exhorting Virginians to rise up against British rule in 1775. Although all of us, even Alex Pretti, would prefer to show our support for our democracy without being shot dead for it, we can all agree with Patrick Henry that a life spent hiding out of fear of an oppressive and reckless military force is no way to live.

Alex Pretti didn’t get up that morning thinking “Give me liberty or give me death,” but because he was out there, standing up for liberty and helping his neighbors, he was forced to carry it to its brutal conclusion.

He was exercising the most basic constitutional rights: freedom of speech, assembly, petition, and the right to observe authority. For that, he was shot

The American system on trial

On January 7, Minnesota lost Renee Good. The Bad and the Ugly then showed up.
Then on January 24, Minnesota lost Alex Pretti. This time, more Minnesotans stood up. Vast marching crowds, videoed by drones, appeared on social media immediately.  The images encouraged Minnesotans and all Americans that we stand together in defiance, resilience, courage, and most of all, unity. These images were proof that there would be no backing down in the face of tyranny.  

The U.S. was first called the “Great Experiment” by George Washington. At the time of its founding, the U.S. governance structure was unique.  Its original genius was not to confer power only to perfect leaders, but to allow a system designed to restrain power. The three branches of government are designed as co-equal so they can tug one another toward a dynamic middle. Separation of powers, due process, and public accountability were meant to prevent exactly the kind of abuse we are all witnessing in this moment.

America’s strength is not that it never errs. It is that it can correct itself. Recently, that self-correction design has been corrupted and skewed. It is a time where the experiment is being tested. Will it hit a breaking point?

What patriotism really means

Recent events have caused me to reflect about what American patriotism is. For me, it is an act: Patriotism means upholding the democratic ideals the country was built upon.  It is also a feeling of loyalty to democratic principles and norms: Liberty, justice, and the rule of law. 

Citizens in a democracy are not subject of a greater power; they are overseers of a system derived from their own power. 

Conflict is not a failure of democracy — it is evidence that democracy still functions. There are accepted principles around government-sanctioned conflict. The media can question the government. Citizens can question law enforcement, including ICE.

I am stating these principles advisedly, since many citizens have been violently dragged from their cars and detained for taking photos or filming on their cell phones. Recently, two Black journalists were arrested (then released) for reporting on a protest held at a St. Paul church.

And, of course, Alex Pretti and Renee Good were killed by federal immigration authorities for showing up and questioning ICE. As history reflects on this moment, I believe they will be remembered for speaking up,  protecting others, and in holding power accountable. To many, those actions reflect the very spirit of patriotism — ordinary citizens standing for what they believe is right.

Now, across the country, Americans of many political views are asking the same question: Are we abandoning the Constitution itself?

A brief reminder on the Bill of Rights

The Bill of Rights is a set of 10 amendments to the Constitution. They were intended to guarantee the rights of individuals, check and restrain the power of the government. A few of these amendments are particularly important in this moment:

• First Amendment: The right to speak, freedom of the press, the right of assembly, and petition the government for grievances against it without fear of death.

• Second Amendment: The right to keep and bear arms (as a safeguard against tyranny, not a pastime).

• Fourth Amendment: No searches or seizures of a person’s home or private property without probable cause and a warrant.

• Fifth Amendment: Every person accused of a crime has the right to due process, that is, there is no imprisonment without fair procedures and trials.

• Sixth Amendment: The right to a speedy and public trial by jury in criminal cases, for specific criminal charges.  The accused must be able to formally face the accuser, present their own witnesses, and be represented by a lawyer.

How many of these rights are now being violated by ICE?  ICE’s oppressions are challenging our First Amendment rights to speak and assemble, and the recent arrests of journalists (for showing up and doing their jobs) are obvious attempts to chill the freedom of the press.

Alex Pretti’s Second Amendment right to bear arms was certainly questioned in the aftermath of his death by the federal authorities.

ICE is also battering down the doors of private homes to arrest and take away the occupants, and dragging people out of their cars, violating their Fourth Amendment rights to unreasonable search and seizure of one’s home and personal property.

Detainees are being flown to holding facilities out of state and often denied representation either because their attorney is denied access or because the attorney cannot even find out where they are, thus violating their Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights.

Demonstrators have also been arrested and taken away under no particular charge, for being too annoying or challenging to ICE authorities, for refusing to follow ICE orders they consider illegal, and/or for looking like an immigrant (i.e., a person of color).

Immigrant detainees and arrested demonstrators are both being denied their Sixth Amendment right, when arrested, to have specific charges against them, with the opportunity to refute the charges in court. This puts them in the untenable position of not knowing how to defend themselves because they don’t know what they are accused of.

How many of our individual rights have to be taken away before we say ”No more”?

A question of decency

Most Americans are decent people. Which makes an old question echo loudly again: “Have you no sense decency, sir?” This was asked of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954 during proceedings of his House Un-American Activities Committee to upon McCarthy’s harsh accusations that one of attorney Joseph Welch’s staff had ties to a communist organization.

McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign was a personal vendetta to root out suspected “communists” in the U.S. government, along with any LGBTQ-plus government workers or officials, who were labeled as security threats. Its few Democratic members resigned in disgust early on, but hearings rambled on, televised, for months in 1954. 

The question about decency reverberated with viewers, ordinary Americans were tired and revolted by his campaign. After that pointed question, McCarthy’s power disintegrated almost overnight. There are many current parallels to this moment of history today.

It was a watershed moment. Have we also just experienced another such reverberating moment?

Blaming the victim

Upon hearing of Pretti’s death, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was quick to describe his actions as “domestic terrorism,” saying Pretti was “attacking” officers and “brandishing” a weapon before he was killed. Other loyal Trump administration staff joined in on the blame. 

Right after that announcement, of course, they were walking those comments back, because the video recording, taken by a brave (and law-abiding) bystander, clearly showed what happened. We all saw the video, we know the facts, and we will NOT agree to conclusion that the murders’ higher-ups decided to force-feed to the public. ( “Have you no sense of decency?”) The eyewitness testimony and many videos especially contradict Noem’s accusation about the legally-carried gun, which he never drew.   

What we can do

In the Chinese American community, many are choosing caution. Safety comes first — protecting family, avoiding unnecessary risk. As immigrants, many of us try to avoid trouble. We focus our energy on protecting and providing for our families — staying safe, staying quiet, and keeping away from conflict.

But there is more we can do even if we cannot or should not be marching in the streets right now. Personally, I have decided to:

• Thank neighbors who protest when others are afraid.
• Record events peacefully and lawfully — documentation matters.
• Support community business, particularly minority-owned and immigrant businesses, some of which have to close intermittently for fear of ICE raids.
• Participate in community event such as a Lunar New Year celebration or any other event where the space is safe. 

Most importantly, Asian Americans must not live in fear. This is a time to believe in the ongoing experiment of America, and remind ourselves that patriotism is an ongoing act. Our great experiment needs our support to succeed.

In the words of Alex Pretti, at a remembrance of a patient who had just died at the Veterans’ Administration Hospital,  “Today, we remember that freedom is not free. We have to work at it, nurture it, protect it, and even sacrifice for it.” 

And for my fellow Minnesotans coping with a disrupted life in their home cities, we need to persevere. Our community needs its liberty back, and we can all help achieve it.

The post When fear replaces freedom in Minnesota appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

The renewal of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for a third mandate, approved on January 29 offers a new opportunity for South Korea, through its official human rights investigatory body, to address many unresolved issues of international adoption that have shaped so many lives.

The TRC’s investigations are assigned to the committee in two- or three-year periods of time, during which the committee has to perform its assigned investigation, hold hearings and publish results. It’s purpose is to investigate various human rights violations by government from 1910 (the Japanese occupation) through 1993 (the end of authoritarian rule in South Korea). So far, there have been two separate TRC investigation periods focusing on fraud and mismanagement of Korea’s international adoption system. 

This year will mark the third assignment to the TRC (nicknamed TRC3) to do research into international adoption. TRC2’s findings were published (in English and Korean) in March 2025.

While I welcome TRC3, my experience with TRC2 has taught me to approach this moment with caution. We must acknowledge the limitations of past TRC investigations — both in uncovering historical truth and in delivering paths toward reconciliation and justice.

I am one of the 56 overseas adoptees whose cases the TRC2 confirmed as a human rights violation last May in Korea. For decades, I lived with the knowledge that my separation from my family and country was not just tragic; it was unlawful and morally wrong. The TRC’s recognition of my case was validating, but also deeply unfulfilling.

The commission’s findings are a long-overdue acknowledgment of the injustices embedded in Korea’s overseas adoption system. However, they represent only the tip of the iceberg. Over 300 cases submitted to the TRC remain unresolved, and tens of thousands of adoptees — many of whom lack documentation — are excluded from this reckoning. Its recommendations, while symbolically important, fall short of delivering meaningful justice. As we anticipate another round of TRC investigations, it is important to address some of the shortcomings of the first investigation.

Insufficient scope of TRC investigations

The TRC’s reliance on documentation to verify harm presents a cruel irony. The very system under investigation was built on falsifying, fabricating and destroying those documents. Many adoptees were assigned fictitious family origins like “Hanyang” to classify them as orphans — even when they had living parents. Records were altered or even destroyed to obscure family relations to facilitate the export of children on a speedy schedule. To require documentation as proof of injustice is to demand evidence from victims within a system designed to eliminate it.

This approach excludes the majority of adoptees from recognition and redress, not because the injustices committed against them are less valid, but because the state ensured those injustices would be undocumented. Justice must not be contingent on paperwork. It must be grounded in oral testimony, systemic patterns and historical context. Otherwise, the TRC risks reinforcing the very violence it was meant to expose.

Another weakness of the TRC’s decision concerning the first 56 cases has become cruelly clear to us: They do not address the structural violence that rendered us socially illegible, nor do they offer pathways for restoration.

Some of us have tried to file lawsuits against the Korean government, but the lawyers are unsure how to pursue them. Some have instead tried to file financial compensation claims against the government. We are still waiting for the decisions on these claims. This uncertainty around the consequences of the TRC decision shows the limitations of its recommendations.

At the same time, legal action or financial compensation do not equal justice. They are tools to bring adoption into the spotlight and a pressure point for working on politicians. They cannot repair the rupture of being severed from one’s family, culture and identity. Lawsuits and financial compensation cannot restore the years lost to disorientation, cultural isolation and the expenditure of labor spent on reconstructing a history that the state itself worked to erase. They are tiny bandages on thousands of gaping wounds. What we need is political and legislative action that addresses the injustices of the overseas adoption system.

Reframing overseas adoption as banishment

To understand the depth of the harm done, we must reframe overseas adoption not as a humanitarian gesture or necessity, but as a form of banishment. Under the 1392-1910 Joseon Dynasty’s penal code, banishment was considered one of the harshest punishments. It meant being stripped of one’s place in society, severed from family, community and identity and sent to end one’s life in a distant territory. It was a form of social death.

Overseas adoption mirrors this punishment, yet in many ways is even more severe. Those banished under Joseon law may have lost their title, status and home, but they retained their names, histories and origins. We adoptees, by contrast, were not only removed from our families and homeland — we had our names changed, our identities falsified, our histories erased and our citizenship revoked. The system didn’t just sever us from our roots; it actively worked to make those roots irrecoverable.

We were reclassified as orphans, scattered across the globe and expected to assimilate into new identities while being denied access to our original ones. The violence was not just in the separation, but in the bureaucratic machinery designed to make rejoining nearly impossible. This is not benevolence — it is punishment for people who committed no crime. It demands accountability, not pity. I am unsure whether another round of TRC investigations will bring about justice unless accompanied by political action.

Restorative justice as a possible way forward

Restorative justice must be proportional to the harm done. It must be reconstructive, not only financial or symbolic. Instituting restorative justice for adoptees means, for example, being willing to restore South Korean citizenship to all overseas adoptees at the expense of the government, regardless of documentation status. It means opening all adoption records, removing barriers to access and supporting efforts to trace families. It means financial support for returnees in housing, language education and employment assistance, along with compensation for families who were coerced or misled.

The South Korean government must also provide archival justice and take responsibility for the records it manipulated and concealed. Mechanisms for verification must not rely solely on documentation. Oral histories, community corroboration and adoptee-led investigations must be recognized as valid pathways to truth. Public education campaigns, national memorials and adoptee and family-led forums should be part of reparations.

Most importantly, adoptees and their families must be included in shaping future redress policy. We are not voiceless — we are evidence. Our insight is essential to crafting policies that are ethical, effective and reparative.

In Korean folklore, gwisin are spirits who linger because of unfinished business. Overseas adoptees are much like gwisin. We were severed from our families, stripped of our names and histories and rendered socially dead. Yet we persist in returning to Korea, not out of vengeance, but out of necessity. We are the reminders of a system that commodified children and exported citizens for profit under the guise of humanitarianism. Our presence unsettles the national conscience because it forces Korea to confront what it tried to conceal.

Unlike the gwisin of folklore, we do not seek rituals to send us away. We seek recognition, accountability and repair. Our unfinished business is not spiritual — it is historical, legal and moral. Korea cannot move forward until it reckons with the lives it displaced, the families it fractured and the truths it buried. We are not ghosts, but until our rights are restored and our histories reclaimed, we will remain in the margins, haunting Korea’s consciousness not out of malice, but because we are driven to seek justice.

Editor’s note: It was recently announced that the third round of investigation by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC3) will begin February 26.

The post Adoption as banishment appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

So far this year, in Minneapolis, there have been three homicides, two of them by ICE.

Eat Street in the Whittier neighborhood, where Alex Pretti was gunned down Saturday morning, is historically the closest thing to a “Chinatown” in the city, though really, it’s much more diverse. Mexican, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Jamaican, Greek, German, Irish, East African, Mediterranean, Malaysian, Tibetan, etc. restaurants, grocers, and other businesses reflect some of the best aspects of Minneapolis, on many levels of community — the rawness of its arts, music, and culture; the diversity and hungry American bustle; the high number of transitional housing units, shelters, churches, non-profit agencies.

As one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Minneapolis, Whittier is home to some 25 languages from 30 countries. For a good decade, I lived, worked, and had a writing office right on Eat Street (Nicollet Avenue).

You could say the future lives in Whittier. Literally, aside from being one of the most racially and economically diverse communities, it’s a Midwestern neighborhood with one of the highest populations of folks 18 to 34 in the city. On the night after Alex Pretti’s brutal and brutalizing killing, long into night, amid minus-9 F cold (with a minus-20 F windchill), many hundreds of folks (coming and going), mostly zillennials, kept vigil late into the night, setting up tables for hot soup and coffee, chanting, holding space for Mr. Pretti’s and one another’s spirits, and keeping shops open.

Memorial site, the night after

One women-owned, LGBTQ-friendly curated secondhand clothing boutique, b. Resale, stayed open so the vigil keepers could sit and thaw, or get a free, extra pair of tube socks or hand warmers, or bottles of water. Meanwhile, next door at Glam Doll Donuts, right across the street from the scene of the killing, mourners warmed up with free coffee and hot chocolate.

For the hour that I was there, I laid a flower down and paid my respects at the memorial site on the sidewalk in front of New American Development Center, before my toes in my heavy boots went numb. Our call and response never ceased: “Say his name!”/“Alex Pretti!”/“Say his name!”/“Alex Pretti!”

Near the memorial site, with its hundreds of flower bouquets and candles, a few controlled fires raged, warming fingers, noses, and lips. The mood was somber, glowing, and peaceful. But if one word had to describe the feeling on this first night of the new year’s second killing by ICE in South Minneapolis, it would be this: Reverence. Reverence for Mr. Pretti’s intentions and actions. Reverence for all the others in recent — and distant — memory gunned down by the law, or, in one recent murder of Melissa Hortman, Minnesota’s DFL Speaker of the House of Representatives, and her husband, gunned down in their pajamas this past summer by someone impersonating the law.

Amid the call and response on Eat Street last night, many names began to mix in my head.

“Say his name!”/“Alex Pretti!”
“Say her name!”/“Renee Good!”
“Say her name!”/“Melissa Hortman!”
“Say his name!”/“George Floyd!”
“Say his name!”/“Amir Locke!”
“Say his name!”/“Daunte Wright!”
“Say his name!”/“Philando Castile!”
“Say his name!”/“Jamar Clark!”
“Say his name!”/“Fong Lee”

Trauma comes in layers

Yes, it’s true. Minnesota, and especially Minneapolis — in recent years, the nation’s epicenter of violence — is deeply traumatized. There are layers and layers of trauma here. From the very beginning with the government’s brutal policies toward Indigenous peoples, to Dred Scott, to a bloody history of labor crackdowns, to vigorous redlining, to uncommonly high Korean adoptee and Southeast Asian, Somali, and other refugee populations leading to anti-Asian and anti-African sentiments, to being a sanctuary city, to some of the highest levels of racial, economic, and educational segregation in the U.S. to this day, there is no shortage of collective traumas to reckon with.

Since COVID, the traumas have outpaced many of our personal capacities to productively process this history and our present society. To this day, you see and feel it in the still-shuttered storefronts in the once lively Uptown area, and well beyond; the still-closed, burnt-down Third Precinct Police Station; the ongoing, ever-shifting human encampments; the many struggling restaurants; the long car lines outside the food shelves; the curtains drawn in conspicuously ICE-monitored neighborhoods; and, yes, the shuttered daycares and other services, some of which are, or were, as is repeated over and over by the right, run by immigrant and refugee businesspeople currently under investigation by the government for wide-scale fraud.

Still and nevertheless, as with George Floyd’s murder and the many Minnesotans who showed up in 2020 to make sure justice was served, last Friday’s massively unprecedented and peaceful ICE Out march through downtown seems to mark, among other things, yet another evolution in Minnesota’s attempts to reckon with American history.

Maybe, as a curious conservative, in reading this you think we’re all crazy. Or why be so sanctimonious? Or, on the other hand, maybe, on the far left, you know the depths of this nation’s bloody history and think it’s not enough.

A movement emerges

But for the tens of thousands, by some accounts 50,000-plus people, who marched in ICE Out just one day before Mr. Pretti was killed, it was something. Whistle-blowing the state-sanctioned brutality collectively is something.  And whatever the influence on federal policy all this does or does not have long-term, this anti-ICE resolve has already influenced similar movements in New York, Boston, Portland, Seattle, Austin, El Paso, Philadelphia, and Washington DC, among other cities, who are all attempting to reckon with their own city’s past for the sake of their people’s future.

Daily, I witness folks compelled to do something when they see that so many people, including many women and children, are frightened, trapped, and suffering. Mr. Pretti exemplified this. Despite mutterings to the contrary, it is inaccurate to characterize ICE Out as being about “wacko liberal sheep” drunk on blue Kool-Aid, as many on the right would have America believe. An ICU nurse with a permit-to-carry does not fit that lazy characterization. The tens of thousands of people who marched on Friday in sub-zero temperatures — some raising Release All the Epstein Files signs, or Dads Against Dictators signs, or God Sees All signs, or Corruption Kills signs, or Not Like This signs, amid all the Fuck ICE signs — do not fit that lazy characterization.

ICE v. people of conscience

The government, along with much of purple and red America, pound the message that ICE in Minnesota is all about state corruption and criminality. What they and their supporters do not seem to understand is that ICE Out has little to do with whatever level of corruption there may or may not be in the government, state and/or federal. In fact, to give perhaps the most compelling example in the aftermath of Ms. Good’s equally brutal killing, I would argue that anyone with the depth of Mr. Pretti’s conscience, and, by the accounts of those he worked with, moral rectitude, is well aware of the corruption of many politicians; and is certainly aware that our two-party system is not just broken, but is on fire, due to corruption.

What much of America doesn’t understand is that with trauma, layers and layers of trauma, can also eventually emerge self-awareness, insight, a free and open reliance on community, and, finally, perhaps a new, however strange-seeming, kind of reverence.

Maybe Minnesota, at the end of the day, will prove to be thick with corruption.

Maybe Minnesota will prove to be the state where our politicians worked the hardest, lost the most face, while trying to hold the now ubiquitous ideology of violent American capitalism at bay.

Maybe, in the end, Minnesota will have been the canary in the coal mine of a much worse future curse to one day visit all Americans at authorized gun point.

Or, maybe, our first night of vigil for Alex Jeffery Pretti will be a kind of wavering candlelight in the deep, dark moral and ethical power outage that is America, for so many near and far.

No one is okay

“Are you okay?” Mr. Pretti reportedly uttered — his final words to a fellow citizen, as he himself was being pepper sprayed.

The resounding answer is, “No. No one is okay.”

On both sides in America, whether silently stewing, shouting, obsessively checking the market, fighting, blowing whistles, making art, or just sleeping more than usual, no one is okay.

Reverence, however, is still out here in sub-zero temperatures, day in and day out.

Reverence. I know it’s a funny word.

The other week, on our drive home from my fourth-grade daughter’s school in Whittier, two blocks away from what would later become the memorial site of Alex Jeffery Pretti’s death, I mentioned, in passing, that the Minneapolis police we’d just passed on the street, in contrast to the ICE agents, were standing around, assisting people, and behaving with an odd kind of reverence that I hadn’t personally ever seen in their behavior. From the back seat, she asked me what the word reverence even means.

In the moments to follow, I struggled with how to define for a child the word without any reference to any formal religion or church, which we do not attend. But I tried my best, all the while recalling, silently, Plato’s words, or warning:

“Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.”

After turning off Eat Street, she finally said from the back seat, “Is it kind of like. . . dignity?”

“Kind of,” I said, switching lanes. “But maybe for others. Like when you do something so that not just you, but so that others can be sure to have it too.”

This essay was reprinted with permission from Literary Hub (website: www.lithub.com)

The post Call and response appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

Sara Ryung Clement has designed costumes and props, and built scenes for all sorts of characters on stages across the country. She has set Elizabethan characters at the iconic Folger stage in Washington, DC, created costumes for Noises Off  at the Guthrie, and crafted both costumes and scenes for a production of Annie in California.

This month in Minneapolis, she is designing the set for six cartoonish dogs to display their hijinks for the delight of preschoolers. “We’re creating space for six actors who are incredible clowns,” Clement said, summing up the job during an interview in mid-January.

Based on the 1961 picture book Go Dog. Go! by P.D. Eastman, the new production at Children’s Theatre Company (CTC) features six people in a variety of costumes (designed by Danielle Nieves) performing scenes from the book – more or less. Asked how she reproduced the minimal backgrounds from the book for the stage, Clement said, “I think there are a lot of iconic images in the book that you would see in different ways.” She took period design into account, especially the Pop Art movement from that era, she added. And the production team sneaked in a few obscure theatrical references just in case the “theater geeks” show up, she said.

Clement was adopted from South Korea as an infant and grew up in Minnesota. She went to college and graduate school “out east,” she said, then settled in the Los Angeles area and built a career designing stage sets and costumes. She said she likes moving back and forth between those two types of design, sometimes doing both at once, because “you get to live in that world a little more extensively,” she said.

Her career branched out nationally as her connections grew. “You find a cohort of people that you enjoy working with,” and they call when they need someone, she said. The career isn’t known for its high pay, but the reward, she said, is that “most often we’re working with people we really enjoy.”

Two years ago, her career took a new turn when she was hired by the University of Minnesota’s theater department as an instructor in scene design. While working at the University, she has been fitting in some work on local stages, sometimes bringing students along to observe a design meeting or other aspect of the professional work.

She said children’s plays typically have short runs and employ designers who are still early in their careers, but “it’s been really fun” to do a major production for children now that she’s more established. She also enjoys access to the extensive collection of props and the well-appointed prop shop at CTC.

She said children’s shows are fun because they’re “so theatrical.” She chuckled at the memory of a show that involved considerations such as, “I think the squirrel’s pantyhose should be wider.”

At the same time, she said, the stagecraft has to measure up for its audience – the storytelling, the pace, all the aspects of successful theater – or the kids will let them know. “Young audiences are very honest,” Clement said.

For information and tickets for Go Dog, Go (Ve Perro! Ve!) at the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis (January 20 through February 22) see this link.

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After a week in Minnesota that included the unlawful detention (and later release) of three citizen Korean adoptees on no grounds except for looking Asian, the adoptee service organization Adoptee Hub began a series of Zoom meetings for adoptees to address Korean adoptees’ concerns and inform them of their civil rights in this moment.

Adoptee Hub president Ami Nafzger said she opened up these sessions because she knew fellow adoptees had questions in light of the recent aggressive raids by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) targeting people of color.  She wanted to give them opportunities to express fears and feelings. Three sessions have been held so far, and Korean adoptees have had a lot to say.

The next session in this free virtual series for international adoptees will be Ways to Stay Safe and Reduce the Risk of Detainment by ICE, to be held Sunday, February 8, noon to 2 p.m.

There are two additional sessions planned: On Sunday, February 15, 6 to 7:30 p.m., a session on Navigating Life in Korea: F-4 Visa will be held; and on Sunday, February 22, noon to 2 p.m. there will be a session with speakers from the Hana Center of Chicago, on Resources for U.S. Citizens and Legal Immigrants.

Two recent emotional blows to adopted Koreans (Minnesotan adoptees in particular), have been a lot, Nafzger said.  In mid-2025, there was a report from the Korean government about the high incidence of fraudulent adoption records, particularly among adoptees who are now older adults. This conveys to them that the nations that placed them did not care enough to keep accurate records on their adoption. Immediately after having to absorb that blow, the ICE onslaught in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and other Minnesota cities began. 

It was a double-whammy, sending the message that their new country, which ostensibly promised to adopt them and give them families and homes, is also rejecting them by questioning their right to be here, sometimes with illegal abductions and detentions. “Adoptees are super-frustrated about the whole situation,” she said of the recent traumatizing developments. 

The first session of the series, entitled Acts of Strength: Adoptees Stand United took place Sunday, January 18, was for adoptees only. It provided a safe space for participants to talk about the effect of the recent ICE raids in Minnesota, and its effects on Korean adoptees and their families. The session covered self-care and protecting one’s mental health, personal safety, online safety, and issues around forms of identification adoptees may need to carry with them. 

In a practical sense, she said, adoptees are asking about what to do if they get stopped, arrested or detained.  Nafzger remarked that many Korean adoptees are also seeking answers to more complex long-term questions, like what to do if the situation in the U.S. becomes untenable, and whether relocating to Korea is an option.

The most recent session, held Monday, January 26 was Asian Adoptees’ Experiences with ICE and How We Can Support Each Other. The session included personal sharing and discussion about adoptees’ rights in Korea as people who are Korean-born, to leave the U.S. and relocate in Korea, either temporarily or permanently. The F4 (working) visa is available to Korean nationals who have changed their citizenship to the U.S. The session also included a briefing by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on rights of citizens and non-citizens under the Constitution.

The third session, on Sunday, February 1, included a presentation by immigration attorney Gregory Luce, of the Adoptee Rights Law Center, on the topic of “know your rights” for anyone who is stopped, searched or detained by immigration authorities, Nafzger said.  

One of the sessions will be for friends and loved ones of Korean adoptees, to discuss how best to support Korean adoptee family members, according to Nafzger. 

More information will be available on the Adoptee Hub website, and social media (Facebook and Instagram). Adoptee Hub’s website page for events is: https://www.adopteehub.org/events

The training portion of the January 26 Adoptee Hub session, presented by the ACLU can be found here.

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