Korean adoptees, long ignored in studies of Korean immigration and community, earn mention in a recent Washington Post article entitled "For Koreans, Changes in Store." 2003 marks the centennial of Korean immigration to the United States, and staff writer David Cho hypes Koreans as a "changing, assimilating community."

The bulk of Cho's article focuses on Church and Store. In a section called "Beyond the Mom-and-Pops," he profiles a large Korean-owned supermarket chain that, in true American spirit, is edging out smaller Korean-owned grocers up and down the East Coast. Following this, the section called "Into the Churches" examines the importance of church communities for many Korean Americans, and for some, the difficult choice between Korean and "American" church.

Cho's mention of adoptees comes in the introductory section of the article when he talks immigration numbers. Tens of thousands of Korean children have immigrated to the U.S. for adoption. Nearly 1,800 in 2002, "the fourth-largest total, behind Russia, China and Guatemala."

Like I said, it's a mention.

All right, so I'm willing to forgive Cho his cheesy title—check out mine—but his irresponsible use of Korean adoptees I cannot overlook. It's not the numbers I question. It's the fact that Cho doesn't actually say anything about Korean adoptees: Why, in a fairly lengthy article, doesn't Cho do more than rattle off numbers?

Maybe because he doesn't really need to. He can depend on what the reader already "knows" about adoptees to fill in the story. Just the fact of us is support for his portrayal of a smoothly assimilating community. Transracial adoptees are once again used as the poster children for assimilation and "acceptance."

I also suspect that Cho really can't say more, at least not comfortably. It's hard to talk about us adoptees without bringing up the one subject Cho so noticeably omits: war. For Korean immigrants, the benefits of developing historical amnesia are clear. Economically and socially, as Cho's article documents, it is more profitable to Americanize. My white abductors strongly discouraged me from thinking about the "unpleasantness" that continued to play out in that distant country I was born in but had never been to. Cho, not uncommonly, portrays "loss of ethnic identity" as something only the older generation worries about (and we all know that an assimilating community must learn to ignore its elders.)

The final section of Cho's article is called "Changes in the Family." His discussion focuses on generational differences and, of course, interracial marriage. Nowhere is there another mention of adoptees, reminding me that we aren't really a part of the big Korean American family, just a convenient footnote in its hundred-year history of assimilation into that bigger, simply "American" family.

(Cho, David. "For Koreans, Changes in Store." Washington Post 13 Jan. 2003: A01. Available online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47604-2003Jan12.html)