PODCAST · society
Adapted Podcast
by Kaomi Goetz
This is one of the pioneering podcasts on intercountry adoptees. Started in 2016, Adapted Podcast has interviewed more than 130 Korean intercountry adoptees on their lived experiences. The podcast started as a Fulbright research project in Korea and has been now downloaded more than 100,000 times around the world.
Episodes
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Season 7, Episode 26: Alicia Soon Hershey - I am Not My Trauma
I sit down with Alicia Soon Hershey, 41, a Korean transnational adoptee now living in Barcelona. Soon Hershey was the very first adoptee interviewed on the podcast back in 2016 and our conversation book-ends the podcast in the 165th episode (!). We get a chance to hear how she has evolved in the...
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Season 7 Episode 25: Eleana Kim and the Politics of Belonging for Korean Adoptees
Korean-American cultural anthropologist Eleana Kim talks about her research that went into the seminal imprint "Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging," Duke University Press, 2010.
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Season 7, Episode 24: Geoffrey Winder - Fluidity in Identity
Geoffrey Winder (born Jong Ke-Bin) (he/him), 42, of Oakland, CA, shares some of his story as a queer Black Korean transnational and transracial adopted man and about his activism in queer advocacy, adoptee community, and leadership spaces.
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Season 7, Episode 23: Mirae KH Rhee - A Running Dragon
Mirae Kate-hers Rhee, 48, is a transnational, transcultural artist and adopted Korean who uses her socio-political artwork and performance to investigate concepts like identity and belonging.
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Season 7, Episode 22: Sarah Harris - Camptowns and Belonging
Korean mixed-race adoptee Sarah Harris, 54, of Los Angeles, shares her story of visiting Korea and finding the place where she felt truly rooted.
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Season 7, Episode 21: Delight Roberts - Marrying into a Korean-American Family
Korean adoptee Delight Roberts, 52, talks about marrying into a Korean-American family and the challenges and benefits that provided her. Some were surprising – like table eating etiquette – but all of Roberts' experiences from childhood bullying to having future in-laws who didn't approve of her...
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Season 7, Episode 20: Wyatt Tuell - An Unconventional Family
Wyatt Tuell, 45, is a Korean-American adoptee who was raised outside Omaha, Nebraska with a Korean immigrant adoptive mother and a white American adoptive father who was much older than his mother. Growing up in the 80s, Wyatt often felt different from his white school peers around him and was...
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Season 7, Episode 19: Kit Myers - Ghostly Kinship
Kit Myers, 42, is a transracial Hong Kong adoptee and assistant professor in the Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Merced. In this interview, we talk about Myers' search for his birth mother and feelings he's had of having a 'ghostly' or ambiguous kinship with someone...
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Season 7, Episode 18: Nik Nadeau - Meeting My Birth Mother 2
I continue the conversation with Nik Nadeau, 36, a Korean adoptee who is in reunion with his Korean birth mother. He is a secret, unable to meet his half-siblings who are also in their 30s, or be acknowledged by his mother, publicly. His relationship with his mother is qualified by language...
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Season 7, Episode 17: Nik Nadeau - Meeting My Birth Mother
Nik Nadeau, 36, met his Korean birth mother 14 years ago. In this episode, he talks about his creative writing process and about how he's unlocked feelings about the reunion and his own identity as a transnational adopted person.
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Season 7, Episode 16: Yukyeong Kim and Banet
Leader Yukyeong Kim and her group of neighbors and friends in Korea have been quietly and determinedly helping adoptees search for their biological family since 2018. I sit down with Kim to find out more about how the group got started and how their willingness to make a simple phone call has…
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Season 7, Episode 15: JaeHee Chung-Sherman - You Don't Have to Be Resilient
Dr. JaeHee Chung-Sherman, DSW, LCSW, has centered her practice and research on decolonizing adoption and mental health for transracial and international adoptees. A transracial, transnational adoptee herself, Chung-Sherman, 47, has been among the first co-hort of TRIA therapists to do this work....
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Season 7, Episode 14: Leading an Adoptee Organization
Mia Quade Kristensen, 46, and Jannie Jung Westermann, 45, are on the board of the 34-year old Danish Korean adoptee organization, Korea Klubben. They will share about their own search and reunion stories, including one of them being in reunion with her Korean family for more than two decades. The...
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Season 7, Episode 13: Adoptee Consciousness Model
I talk with Dr. JaeRan Kim and PhD student Grace Newton about the Adoptee Consciousness Model - a framework for understanding adoptee awareness of the impact of adoption. Together with Dr. Susan Branco (not featured), the model is now being discussed and critiqued in academic and adoptee...
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Season 7 Episode 12: Thomas Haessly and the Imposter Within
Thomas Haessly, 40, has felt like an outsider ever since he can remember. Adopted from Korea by a Danish mother and American father to Racine, Wisconsin, Haessly recalls feeling like an imposter within his family, of not quite fitting in, and again as an adult at Korean grocery stores and…
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Rachel Forbes and the 4Fs (of Survival and Trauma Responses)
Rachel Forbes, LCSW, is a Korean-American adoptee with a psychotherapy practice in Connecticut where she specializes in transracial adoption and trauma-informed care. She is also an educator who speaks about trauma, attachment and healing within the adoption constellation. Forbes, 34, talks about...
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Season 7, Episode 10: Marissa Lichwick and Her Ghosts
Marissa Lichwick, 46, is a Korean adoptee and filmmaker, playwright and actor. She is using her past pain and trauma surrounding her family separation, abuse in the orphanage and in her father and stepmother's home and the haunting loss of a half-sister she's never met in her art, to process the...
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Season 7, Episode 9: Sara Docan-Morgan and Being In-Reunion
Sara Docan-Morgan, PhD, 44, is a Korean adoptee and communications professor in Wisconsin. She's also the youngest child in her Korean biological family, with whom she reunited with many years ago. Her research has focussed on experiences of Korean adoptees and their families, and this month she…
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Season 7, Episode 8: Mia Haessly is Coexisting with Biological and Adoptive Family
Mia Haessly, 44, is a working mother and adopted Korean-American who has reunited with her Korean biological father. And while introducing her family to him and seeing her children connect with Korea in a way she never had has been meaningful, the reunion has presented new challenges. Besides the...
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Season 7, Episode 7: Helen Noh, From Adoption Worker to Critic in South Korea
Helen Noh, PhD., is retiring next year after four decades working in child welfare in Korea, first as an adoption social worker to now a professor of social work, training generations of students to make an imprint on improving the lives of children and families. Noh, 64, has become a leading...
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Season 7, Episode 5: Robert Holloway and Menzeba Hasati Are Children of an Adoptee
Robert Holloway, 34, and Menzeba Hasati, 40, are siblings who are adult children of a Black Korean adoptee. Their mother is a first-wave adoptee, whose mother was Korean and father an American G.I. She was adopted to Alaska in the 1960s by a Black couple. Her children forged their own identities;...
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Season 7, Episode 5: Matthew Rodriguez and Fact Versus Fiction
Korean adoptee Matthew Rodriguez, 43, is trying to make sense of his adoption story. For years, it's been clouded by stories told to him and those he told himself, even if they weren't accurate. It was a means to survive. But Rodriguez, whose adoptive parents are white and Mexican American, has…
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Season 7, Episode 4: Jenna Antoniewicz is Ready
Korean adoptee Jenna Antoniewicz, 40, has been on a whirlwind over the past 24 months since beginning to reckon her adoption history and adoptee identity. While a mayor of a town in Pennsylvania, she found herself speaking for Asian America during the coronavirus pandemic about anti-Asian hate.…
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Season 7, Episode 3: Hollee McGinnis and Her Soul Work
Hollee McGinnis, 51, is a Korean adoptee and founder of Also Known As, one of the longest continuously running international adoptee community organization and based in the New York Tri-State area. In this episode, she discusses her new project, Mapping the Life Course of Adoption, and provides...
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Season 7, Episode 2: Scar and Flower
Lee Herrick, 52, is a poet, author, educator and adoptee. He was adopted from South Korea to the San Francisco Bay area in 1971. Herrick discusses how he uses his lens as an adoptee to observe and write verse about life. He also reads from his 2019 acclaimed collection of poems, "Scar and Flower."
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Season 7, Episode 1: Kimberly McKee and Asian Adoptee Festishization
Dr. Kimberly McKee, 39, currently a visiting Fulbright scholar at Sogang University in Seoul, Korea, is a critical adoption studies researcher. This November, her latest book, "Adoption Fantasies: Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood" (The Ohio State University Press) will...
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Season 6, Episode 21: Randy Walker and Finding Self-Worth
Imagine a story told to you from childhood, that your biological mother died and your biological father decided to relinquish you? And the people who adopted you rehomed you to another couple, where you found abuse and neglect? Randy Walker, 48, has lived such a life and re-examines his trauma…
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Season 6, Episode 20: Sara Jones Was Marked By Love
Sara Jones isn't sure whether she's 48 or 49. That's because the circumstances surrounding her relinquishment are still a bit unclear. What she does know for certain, is that her father never wanted her to be separated from her family or be adopted overseas. But his worst fears happened anyway…
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Season 6, Episode 19: Eric Poole and His New Hope
Eric Poole, 55, continues his conversation in this second-part of a two-part interview. In this episode, we follow his adoption to the U.S. and adjustment in New Hope, Minnesota, where as a Black Korean boy, he felt like he traded one outsider life for another. CW: N word
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Season 6, Episode 18: Eric Poole is the Boy from Uijeongbu
Eric Poole, 55, is a transracially adopted Black Korean who has come a long way from his early days as a mixed-race Korean child in a US military camptown in Korea. He's now a father to three kids, husband, and one of the few Black pilots in the commercial flight industry. But his success story…
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Season 6, Episode 17: Karen Lechelt and Shapeshifting
Karen Lechelt, 50, is a mother, wife and a returned East coaster after two decades in the San Francisco Bay area and a few years in Amsterdam in between. Their childhood in New Jersey was marked with feeling not quite fitting wherever she was, and having to always adapt themself. Because of the...
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Season 6, Episode 16: Megan Nyberg - Superheroes Have Feelings Too
Megan Nyberg, 37, was adopted as an infant from South Korea to parents in Minnesota. But ever since her premature birth, she has struggled with medical conditions that have been constant reminders of the mystery surrounding her origins. Now a licensed therapist, Nyberg gives other grace and more...
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Season 6, Episode 15: After Midnite - Santa Claus, Birth Parents and Other Myths
Queer Korean adoptee Midnite Townsend, 38, is many things. A large part of her/their past has been as a performer; first training to enter the world of musical theater to realizing her/their real desires were better applied to the art of burlesque and drag king performance. Midnite's throughline...
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Season 6, Episode 14: Laure Badufle (Rebroadcast) Returns to Seoul
Korean-born French adoptee Laure Badufle's story and search for idenity is now the subject of a new Sony Pictures film, "Return to Seoul." In December of 2021, Badufle, then 37, shared some of that story, including meeting her birth parents in her 20s. The film is now opening to more…
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Season 6, Episode 13: Michael Jessup and His Inner Game
Michael Jessup of Mountain View, California is a father, coach and adopted Korean. But it's only been in the last six years that the 46-year old has explored his feelings about his adoption and faced his pain about being abandoned and given up by presumably his first family at 13 months of age.…
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Season 6, Episode 12: Aneyah Elmore Has a Story
Reunion with biological parents can be complicated for adoptees. Relinquishment or losing a child or parent, language, and culture can be traumatic and represent lifelong grief. But whose story is it? Aneyah Elmore, 56, is a Black and Korean adoptee who is balancing the need to tell her own story...
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Season 6, Episode 11: Lisa Woolrim Sjöblom - Our Bodies Have Been in Survival Mode
Lisa Woolrim Sjöblom, 45, is a Swedish Korean who was adopted at a young age from Korea and grew up in Sweden. The illustrator, comic book artist and adoptee and first families activist shares some deep personal insights about motherhood, attachment and the trauma and grief that is brought up…
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Season 6, Episode 10: Samantha Lyons and Exploring Adoptee Identity Later in Life
Samantha Kim Lyons, 41, grew up with racial mirrors unlike many other transrcial adoptees. Her late father was white; her mom is a third-generation Japanese-American. Her childhood was spent in Hawai'i and later southern California. But like other Korean adoptees, Lyons finds herself searching…
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Season 6, Episode 9: Ed Pokropski is Case 84-1410
Edward Pokropski, 39, of New York, NY is an adopted Korean-American who has a new one-man show out unpacking that experience. He talks about why not all audiences are comfortable laughing at jokes about adoption and how he approaches the topic while staying true to himself.
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Season 6, Episode 8: An Investigation Starts (Part 2 of 2)
This is the second-half of a recent conversation with Peter Møller of the Danish Korean Rights Group. The discussion takes place on Dec. 11, 2022 (KST), just days after the Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission decided to start an investigation on Korean adoption by examining an initial 34...
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Season 6, Episode 7: An Investigation Starts
I sit down and talk again to Peter Møller, one of the co-founders of Danish Korean Rights Group, which has succeeded in convincing a truth commission in Korea to open an investigation into Korean adoption. The group has submitted more than 300 cases representing adopted Koreans in a number of...
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Season 6, Episode 6: Zhen E Rammelsberg and Her Puzzle Piece
Zhen E Rammelsberg, 50, was adopted from Korea by a white couple in Iowa in the US. She grew up without mirrors or anyone that looked like her. It would be more than four decades later that she would finally return to her native country. But instead of being able to neatly complete her puzzle she...
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Season 6, Episode 5: Allen Majors on Retiring in Korea and of Not Driving Lamborghinis
Allen Majors, 63, is a Korean-American adoptee who has decided to retire in Korea -- more than 60 years after being sent away for adoption to the US. One could think of it as a kind of reclamation of identity but Majors chooses to not place too much emphasis and burdens on the past. Instead, he...
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Season 6, Episode 4: Christy Zaragoza and Why She Spreads Joy
Christy Zaragoza, 30, regularly spreads joy in the adoptee community as a board member of the Association of Korean Adoptees in San Francisco. She reveals that the reason she is so interested in making others happy around her comes from a dark place. This is the first time Christy has shared her...
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Season 6, Episode 3: Peter Møller and the Truth and Reconciliation Commisison
Danish attorney and Korean adoptee Peter Møller is the next guest in the podcast. He and his group, Danish Korean Rights Group, are submitting cases to Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The aim is to encourage the body to investigate Korean intercountry adoption practices during the...
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Season 6, Episode 2: Share Your Story
At last month's AKASF's Bay to LA annual event in Koreatown, there was a booth dedicated to letting adoptees share part of their story on their own. We didn't know what to expect or whether anyone would share. This next episode is a compilation of all the submissions. It's a different way of...
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Season 6 // Nick Greene and His Three Phoenixes
Season Six kicks off with a live audience interview with Nick Greene of Association of Korean Adoptees – San Francisco. The Bay-area Korean adoptee group held its annual "Bay To LA" event September 16-17, 2022. More than 70 adoptees from CA, OR, TX, AZ, MN, IL, WA and MI attended. Greene, 40, is...
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Season 5, Episode 20: A Love Letter To Tigers -- Sun Yung Shin
American writer, poet and educator Sun Yung Shin, 48, of Minneapolis, MN closes out Season 5 by talking about her latest imprint, "The Wet Hex," and its themes of abandonment, survival, evolution and ecosystems.
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Season 5, Episode 19: Jenny Town - Pear Blossom
Jenny Town, 46, is a Korean adoptee who was one of the first waves to go back to Korea after their adoptions. Now, a foreign policy expert specializing in North Korea, Town recalls her time in Korea as an university student, dating, and what she learned about herself while she was there.
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Season 5, Episode 18: Post-Post-Korea Musings -- Kim Stoker and kim thompson
Korean adoptees Kim Stoker and kim thompson left Korea about five years ago. This time it was their decision. Stoker spent most of her adult life there, and thompson, nearly a decade. They talk with podcast host Kaomi Lee, who also moved back to the States from Korea five years ago, about the...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
This is one of the pioneering podcasts on intercountry adoptees. Started in 2016, Adapted Podcast has interviewed more than 130 Korean intercountry adoptees on their lived experiences. The podcast started as a Fulbright research project in Korea and has been now downloaded more than 100,000 times around the world.
HOSTED BY
Kaomi Goetz
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Adapted Podcast have?
Adapted Podcast currently has 100 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Adapted Podcast about?
This is one of the pioneering podcasts on intercountry adoptees. Started in 2016, Adapted Podcast has interviewed more than 130 Korean intercountry adoptees on their lived experiences. The podcast started as a Fulbright research project in Korea and has been now downloaded more than 100,000 times...
How often does Adapted Podcast release new episodes?
Adapted Podcast has 100 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Adapted Podcast?
You can listen to Adapted Podcast on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Adapted Podcast?
Adapted Podcast is created and hosted by Kaomi Goetz.
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