While celebrities such as Angelina Jolie and Madonna have brought recent media attention to the issue of international adoption, the practice of adopting from other countries has been occurring regularly since the post-WWII era.
According to adoptioninstitute.org, between 1971 and 2001, United States citizens adopted 265,677 children from foreign countries including China, Russia, South Korea and Guatemala.
Though internationally adopted students on Ohio University’s campus come from different countries, they share a common struggle of coming to terms with their identities.
A ‘rainbow’ family
Junior Laney Preston, a family studies major, knows a lot about living within a “rainbow” family. Born in Guatemala, she was adopted as an infant by a single mother in the United States. As a child, Preston shared a home with 13 other children — all adopted from various countries around the world, including Haiti, Chile, Colombia and India.
Preston has been interested in Guatemala and her heritage since childhood. From an early age, she and her siblings knew about their birth countries. Preston’s dream is to someday locate her birth family.
“It’s been my goal to find my family ever since I was little,” she said. “If it takes me forever, I don’t care — just as long as I find them.”
Preston wants to find her birth family to know that they are alive, she said. She also has questions about herself that she hopes her biological parents can answer.
Describing herself as “very musical,” Preston sings and is a clarinet player in OU’s Marching 110. Through her research into her birth family, Preston suspects that her musical talents were inherited from her birth parents.
Preston also wants to take lessons in Spanish so that when she travels to Guatemala to find her birth family she will be able to communicate with them.
Mistaken identity
Bethan Eynon’s parents, Susan and Bill Eynon, had difficulty conceiving their biological son, B.J. Unable to have any more children after his birth, the couple decided to look into international adoption.
The couple adopted Eynon, a senior journalism major at OU, from South Korea as a 10-month-old infant.
Eynon said her family made early attempts to teach her about her heritage. Her parents stocked her shelves with books about South Korea and encouraged her to learn the language from their pastor’s wife, though she has no desire to visit South Korea or find her birth family.
In a 2006 contest-winning essay titled “Blending” featured on oftwominds.com, Eynon wrote about her struggle to identify herself as Korean or American. Eynon also described her frustrations with being seen as an outsider because she is different from her parents and her brother.
She recalls people asking her parents if she was an exchange student. In another instance, strangers assumed that she and her brother were dating. On one occasion, a waitress thought Eynon and her mother would be on separate checks.
Since coming to OU, Eynon no longer has to endure the embarrassment that accompanied strangers’ mistakes about her and her family, but she has faced new challenges.
At OU, students often ask where she is from. When she replies, “Youngstown, Ohio,” they do not accept her answer. Confused, they often repeat the question: “No, where are you really from?”
Eynon said it is frustrating when people assign her an identity based exclusively on her race.
“I’m concerned with how people see me,” she said. “I want them to see me as automatically American.”
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