Cultural Displacement: Growing Up Between Worlds
As a South Korean adoptee, I grew up in a white household with German and Polish roots. I had friends. I could move between different groups and get along with almost anyone. But beneath those friendships, I always felt a barrier.
I felt close enough to be included, but never fully accepted. There was a distance I could feel but could not explain.
For much of my life, I thought that distance said something about me. Later, I found words that helped me understand it: cultural displacement. For an international adoptee, cultural displacement can mean growing up separated from the people, language, customs, and community connected to your beginnings. Research with Korean adoptees has documented the complicated experience of belonging to, and feeling excluded from, their families and both white American and Korean American groups.
To me, we are transplants. We grow where we are placed, but we still have questions about the soil we came from.
Feeling Like You Have to Earn Your Place
Later in life, I began to recognize how deeply feelings of abandonment had shaped the way I interacted with the world.
Adoption stories differ. Some involve circumstances and decisions we may never fully understand. Separation does not always mean a birth parent willingly chose to leave. But the feeling of being left can still be real. An adoption can provide a loving home while leaving an adoptee with grief and unanswered questions. Even people adopted as infants may later experience feelings of loss connected to their adoption, as explained in the “Separation and Loss” section of Child Welfare Information Gateway’s adoption support bulletin.
For me, that showed up in trying to prove my worth. Be helpful. Be agreeable. Go above and beyond. Give people enough reasons to want me around. Other adoptees I have spoken with describe similar patterns. We learned to make ourselves valuable, sometimes at the expense of understanding our own needs.
I cannot speak for every adoptee. But I know what it feels like to approach relationships as though you have to earn your place in them.
When Your Birth Country Also Feels Unfamiliar
Some adoptees return to Korea hoping to find the belonging they have been missing. For some, that connection is meaningful. For others, it brings another painful discovery: looking like the people around you does not automatically mean feeling at home. Without the language or an understanding of everyday customs, you can find yourself feeling like an outsider again.
That is the part I wish more people understood. You can spend your life feeling different where you were raised, then feel different in the place you came from. Our separation from Korean culture can begin before we have memories we can describe. We may grow up without seeing our features reflected in our parents, hearing Korean spoken at home, or participating in traditions that connect us to our origins. Separation from family and community can disrupt those cultural connections and contribute to feelings of disconnection, as described in “Loss of Culture Within the Child Welfare System”.
How do you find what feels familiar when you never had the chance to know it?
Finding Words, Finding Each Other
In conversations with other adoptees, I have heard about restlessness, changing jobs, substance use, and destructive habits. Those experiences have many possible causes. I do not assume adoption explains them all. What stays with me is how many people describe searching for something without knowing what is missing.
Joining Korean adoptee groups helped me recognize how much confusion and pain others were carrying. It also gave me a sense of belonging. People were putting words to feelings I had struggled to explain.
If you recognize yourself here, feeling out of place is understandable. It does not make you ungrateful, and it does not mean you have failed.
This is why I believe in The Becoming. I want us to make room for honest conversations, difficult questions, and experiences that are too often left unspoken. To me, that is what makes The Becoming so beautiful. It is about discovering an identity you can step into as your own, beyond who you have been or what society has labeled you. It is your journey of becoming you.
Each week, I will explore a little more, sharing my experience alongside factual information and clearly distinguishing the two. We do not have to unpack everything at once.
We deserve answers about our own lives. We deserve the chance to feel whole. And we deserve a place where belonging does not depend on proving our worth.
Sources & Citations
Kim, Suyemoto, and Turner (2010). Sense of belonging, sense of exclusion, and racial and ethnic identities in Korean transracial adoptees. The link opens the study’s abstract, which describes interviews with 14 adult Korean adoptees. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
Child Welfare Information Gateway (2018). Providing Adoption Support and Preservation Services. A full PDF hosted by the University of Connecticut. See “Needs That Services Address,” then “Separation and Loss.” (health.uconn.edu)
Child Welfare Information Gateway (2024). Loss of Culture Within the Child Welfare System. Explains how separation from family and community can disrupt cultural connections. (content.govdelivery.com)
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