314 Nik Chang Hoon
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/314
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.
You are listening to Adoptees On the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's guest is memoirist and poet Nik Chang Hoon. Nik shares his journey of identity and language reclamation, including returning to Korea and reuniting with his birth mother in secret. We also talk about estrangement, healing and his powerful writing that invites us to look deeper at the pain and resilience of finding one's place between families and cultures.
Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps [00:01:00] support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. And we wrap up with some recommended resources. As always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.
I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Nik Chang Hoon and welcome Nik.
Nik Chang Hoon: Yay. Thank you so much. It's such an honor to be on your show, Haley. Thank you.
Haley Radke: Oh, I'm so glad we finally get to meet, my husband's name is Nick. So we're you already have bonus points.
Nik Chang Hoon: We're on the right path already.
Haley Radke: That's right.
Nik Chang Hoon: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Can you start, would you mind sharing some of your story with us?
Nik Chang Hoon: My name is Nik Chang Hoon. My given adoptive full name would be Nicholas Chang Hoon Nadeau, and like many adoptees from Korea, I grew up in Minnesota. So Minnesota historically is home to the highest concentration of adopted Koreans in the world.
And so I grew up with a plethora of korean [00:02:00] adoptee culture camps. A lot of different, yeah, just avenues for exploring myself as an adoptee, which I find looking back, I'm really fortunate. I think not many of us are able to say that we have a community like that. If you can hear my dog barking, I apologize.
We probably have a delivery. And I also feel like most things related to adoption, I think it's like a contradiction. It's not like I wake up every single morning over my yogurtand blueberries and think, I'm adopted. I wonder what that means for me today. But it also means that adoption still permeates my life in very concrete ways.
I think it permeated, my friendships, my romantic relationships, certainly my career path and the choices I made along the way. And so what I like to say is, adoption is something that doesn't define me, but certainly describes and accounts for quite a bit of my life experience. So I'm happy to chat more about all of those things about living in [00:03:00] Korea, about understanding myself both as an adoptee, and a Korean and now a husband.
Haley Radke: There's so many places we can go, but I wanna press pause.
Nik Chang Hoon: Yeah. I just gave you like a gajillion places to go.
Haley Radke: You did. You did I think Land of Gazillion Adoptees was originally Koreans in Minnesota. Yes.
Nik Chang Hoon: Yes.
Haley Radke: Korean adoptees.
Nik Chang Hoon: Yep. Kevin Vollmers and many others who contributed. Yes, they're amazing.
Haley Radke: Tell me, do you know why. Why were there so many?
Nik Chang Hoon: I happen to have a non-official, a non-academic explanation for that, but I would like to shout out Dr. Kim Park Nelson, who's based here in Minnesota and is one of the pioneers of Korean adoption studies, and actually teaches an entire course on this that we're privileged to be able to register for here in Minnesota.
So I'll give a amateur's version, and I typically say, there are three main factors. One actually is a single person. She colloquially went by the name of Mrs. [00:04:00] Han, and she single-handedly following the Korean War, began to form relationships in Korea. And essentially build from scratch a form early form of Korean adoption.
So obviously the first wave of adoptees out of Korea, like almost anywhere else in the world where adoption occurs is from civil war or some other form of military conflict. And so Mrs. Han played a big role in building out those early years of what we now have as a formal adoption system.
Minnesota also historically, has been a more progressive state with a lot of social welfare systems in place, and also quite, quite a Christian community. I'd say, I myself grew up Catholic. There's, I would say, plenty of Lutherans around as well, and especially in that first and maybe second wave, a kind of a Christian destination. While that didn't describe my experience, was certainly sometimes a stated preference among relinquishing parents. And [00:05:00] also Minnesota has a pretty strong relationship historically following the Korean War with Seoul National University and other institutions that were actively trying to build their own higher education system following the war.
And beyond just social services and social welfare. Minnesota did have a kind of an outsized role in, those early years and decades following the war. And I think the most important part is to understand that, adoption, like any other system that involves transactions is inherently complex.
I happen to be of the perspective that intercountry or international adoption should be abolished. But that's not the position that I started at, and in fact many before me were, I think, instrumental in laying the foundation for those arguments. And so I'm both humbled and embarrassed to say that it took me actually quite a long time to reach that perspective.
And I think, regardless of one's views on adoption itself, I like to [00:06:00] say that it's okay and actually helpful to think about adoption. Like we think about where our steak comes from or how the cotton in our t-shirt, where that came from. These are things that almost journalistically and historically we can trace to very identifiable reasons.
Haley Radke: I think the more we research the behind the scenes of things, the more abolitionist often we become.
Nik Chang Hoon: Almost certainly is the case. At least it was for me and still is.
Haley Radke: Yes. Okay. Thank you for that little interlude of teaching time for us. Can we go back? Did you go to school with any fellow Korean adoptees?
Nik Chang Hoon: Yeah, so I grew up in kind of the outer ring suburbs of St. Paul where my community was almost exclusively white. I like to say that I, a mile north of me were dairy farms and a mile south of me were a strip malls. So that's the outer edge of where I grew up. I went to a school system called [00:07:00] White Bear Lake.
The running joke growing up is that it was nicknamed White Boy Lake 'cause there were so many white boys. And I happened to have a lot of Korean adoptee friends through Camp Choson, which was a, and still is a summer camp for adopted Koreans. But also through school. I, one of my closest friends still, Laura, is a friend I've known for a long time.
The librarian at my high school was an adoptive, is an adoptive parent to someone who essentially single-handedly created and still runs a traditional Korean dance studio here called JangMi. And so there's just so many connections that you make almost accidentally being here in the Twin Cities where it is actually somewhat normal to be surrounded or at least exposed to other adoptees, especially Korean adoptees, not necessarily as much with Latin American or Russian or Chinese adoptees.
So yeah, the short answer is I had some adoptee friends, but [00:08:00] certainly not, the majority, the vast majority were yeah just white friends that I grew up playing hockey with and hanging out with, playing football in the backyard, things like that.
Haley Radke: I guess if someone forced me to say something positive about great numbers of Korean adoptees leaving Korea and to go into your area, you had some peers that you could identify with and build community with.
Nik Chang Hoon: Yes.
Haley Radke: That's great. Okay. When did you first decide you wanted to go back to Korea, was that something that you always wanted to do? Did you think about it as a child? Tell us about that.
Nik Chang Hoon: Growing up my parents were really open about my origins. I also was in possession of certain documents that were, revelatory of just basic facts about my birth family [00:09:00] and the circumstances around my relinquishment.
Haley Radke: Wait what papers did you have? Like, when did you get them?
Nik Chang Hoon: Yeah, so as long as I can remember my parents kept a kinda like a box or I think a file with a few things. So one was basically a series of forms that included testimony from my birth father at the time of my relinquishment around the late spring, early summer of 1988.
And that information actually had my birth mother's name in Korean as well as my birth father's, their ages their locations. It didn't have any contact information, but even just to have, the legitimate legal name of one's, birth parents or relatives from one's first family is definitely a privilege.
It's something that most adoptees do not have. And at the same time, there was certainly a lot left out. I wasn't really able to gather my birth mother's perspective [00:10:00] from those documents, it was only based on testimony from my birth father. Later I found out it was because he was the one to, for lack of a better phrase, hand me over.
My birth mother was actually outside, which she shared with me several years later. I also knew and had some home video. So they're somewhere in our files and boxes still is a VHS tape with some footage of me not surprisingly to those who know me, I was a little crabby, I was a maybe a eight or 10 month old needed to eat perhaps, but I was throwing a temper tantrum right on home video.
This was supposed to be the video that essentially helps adoptive parents see what a wonderful, well-behaved child they will be receiving. And so we had footage like that. What we didn't have was circumstances beyond just my birth father's brief account. I didn't know, certainly didn't have addresses, and I, overall didn't have a whole lot of desire to do a birth family search consciously, at least [00:11:00] growing up, it wasn't something that dominated my thoughts. I think the first moment when at least going to Korea or learning Korean as a language really dawned on me, was when I was home from college really early on. So probably during a holiday break, my first year of college, this would've been 2005, and I recall there was a package of photo paper. At least still back then, we had some technology to print photos at home. It was still quite primitive. But we had a photo printer and it was an HP. Hewlett Packard brand and the paper was blue, or the packaging rather, it was a blue kind of foil bag to seal that photo paper in and on the back of that bag were instructions.
I'm not sure why photo paper requires instructions, but these were instructions in all kinds of different languages. And in the middle of that package, I knew that one of the languages was Korean. It was couched [00:12:00] between two others, perhaps, or maybe it was the one on the top or the bottom. I knew there were three Asian languages.
One was Chinese, one was Korean, one was Japanese. I knew that. I just didn't know which one was Korean. And while I didn't have a name for that feeling at the time, I now know that the name for that feeling is called shame. So I felt a really deep sense of shame and this just to give further context was during a time when I was aspiring to be a Spanish language professor, I was essentially enrolled as an undergraduate in really advanced Spanish grammar.
I literally had a grammar textbook coming home that took you through basically the nuances of all the things that you might want to know to become a teacher of the Spanish language. And I remember thinking to myself, why am I going so far in my study of Spanish when I can't even recognize the alphabet of my own birth country's language, my language of origin, and so that, period of [00:13:00] time going back to college was when I sought out the only other Korean adoptee I knew his name was Brian.
And I specifically remember, we, he was kind enough to invite me into his room, and we had a long conversation where I related a lot of what I just related to you. And at the end of it it felt almost like the matrix, if you've seen the first matrix film when Neo visits the Oracle and the Oracle essentially tells Neo that he's already made a decision and he is just here in this room with the Oracle to understand the decision he's already made. That's the best way I can describe what I felt like in that conversation where I knew what I had to do and what I had to do seemed really dramatic and epic at the time, which was to cancel this trip to Costa Rica that I had planned that summer to immerse myself in Spanish.
And with that money and more that I took out in additional student loans, I enrolled in a 10 week intensive course. Korean language immersion course at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in Minneapolis, which was [00:14:00] by coincidence the first summer that they were offering this kind of summer intensive program.
So for that whole summer, this was July through August, 2006, I learned Korean at the U of M met someone named Martha Vickery and Steve Wunrow who run a Korean American newspaper basically they're white adopted parents themselves, but they've long published an amazing newspaper called Korean Quarterly.
So I interned for them as a staff writer, and they also just so happened to found a Korean traditional percussion group. So in, in that summer, I did those three things and that changed my life, there was no looking back after that.
Haley Radke: The documents that you had as a child, were those all translated into English? Was it a combo like you, could you go back and look at it?
Nik Chang Hoon: Sure, yeah. Most of what I have is transcribed, Romanized for names, and so there certainly were Korean characters so Hangul was appearing, but a lot of that information was transcribed into English. [00:15:00] Later, maybe 2007, I believe I returned to Korea to search for my files at my adoption agency based in Seoul, and I was bracing myself for new or additional information and actually the documents were the exact same in my file. And so I again had quite a privileged experience of, being in possession since early childhood of the exact same documents in the same form that I later found were in my file. Yeah.
Haley Radke: Wow. I had goosebumps while you were talking about this language reclamation. Really. That's amazing. Okay, so you learned Korean, but in Minnesota.
Nik Chang Hoon: Yep.
Haley Radke: And then when did you go back to Korea?
Nik Chang Hoon: My first trip back to Korea was actually through korean Quarterly. Steve and Martha sent me essentially on a journalistic mission to cover what essentially was a global adoption summit [00:16:00] that the Korean government was hosting.
They were doing this mostly for national image reasons, but there was a certain degree of substance to it. There were folks across all kinds of disciplines, social workers, other journalists, other adoptees and scholars who were invited to this kinda week long conference. And I was able to go, essentially as a journalist, but also as a participant, both at once.
It was like not reality. They put us up in the Ritz-Carlton in Kangnam. I distinctly remember the first morning I got there. I landed at four in the morning. Not only had I never been to Korea or Seoul, I had never been to a large city at that point in my life. And so I was trying to get to the Coex Mall. I wanted to see this huge mall that I'd heard about with a huge aquarium. And I walked down the hill from the Ritz Carlton to the intersection where I believe there was a subway station, but I didn't know what a subway station looked like. I assumed I had to go down some stairs, but I spent a good hour [00:17:00] circling that intersection in the heat of summer.
And getting lost. So another feeling of shame. Another episode of shame, part two. I finally pulled aside a Korean, an Ahjussi uncle kind of guy, showed him the business card of the Ritz Carlton, and asked him in really clumsy Korean where he if he knew where it was and he just looked up and lo and behold, if you just thought to look up, you would see a ginormous golden lion perched atop a sparkling white building.
And that was the Ritz-Carlton. So I promptly thanked him, bowed awkwardly, and. And went back. And so that was the start of my week. We did a lot of conversations about adoption. I believe we went jet skiing once. It was the oddest thing. And the president of Korea at the time gave essentially an address by video conference, essentially apologizing for Korea, having let so many adopted infants go. And that's when I was first introduced to the concept of Korea as a [00:18:00] motherland. And I wrote extensively about that as an undergraduate and have thought about that ever since.
Haley Radke: This is slightly related, like we'll go back to your story, but I guess I found a piece from Korean Quarterly at some point you were writing about this, so this seems like a little bit after in 2011, where you write about Korean unwed mothers pushing for a stigma free society.
Nik Chang Hoon: Yes.
Haley Radke: And I'm curious, can, if you can just speak to that and you're talking about your personal feeling of shame and societally, Korean, Korea had that for anyone who had a baby out of wedlock and now can, and then can you speak to, do you know what it's like now all these many years later?
Nik Chang Hoon: So first of all, I would say a couple of things. First and foremost when we think about the adoption triad. So for our listeners, that means adoptees as one corner of the [00:19:00] triangle, our biological parents and relatives as another, and then adoptive family as the third, dominant media narratives around adoption almost exclusively focus on just two of those corners of the triangle.
And if birth parents and especially biological mothers are left out, usually it's because number one, there's not a whole lot of access to, locating them and speaking with them. But number two, just everyone else in the triad, they're often objectified. They're either framed as these salvific figures that did a beautiful thing and otherwise live in destitute poverty, or they're just not really part of the picture.
And so when I lived in Korea from 2009 to 2011. Right after college, I was on a Fulbright grant teaching English my first year, and then working in the Fulbright office My second year I, in my spare time, especially when I was able to live in Seoul, I would volunteer as a reporter, so I, for Korean Quarterly, so I would go to various events that were sponsored [00:20:00] by a nonprofit called KUMFA, the Korean Unwed Mothers and Families Association, I believe is the long form of their name. And Dr. Richard Boas was the founder and someone that I interviewed for a story at that time around just what Korean unwed mothers often go through. And so the Korean term for unwed mother is mihonmo. And mihonmo in Korea undergo still a lot of social stigma.
It is really difficult and often dangerous, extremely risky to reveal that you've once had a child out of wedlock. And even now, 15, 20 years later, it's still something my own birth mother will not share. And so I'm still a secret from my half siblings and much of her immediate family as a result.
There was a New York Times story, I think in 2009 or 2010 that really dove into this issue for the first time in, in detail. And one of the subjects of that piece was almost instantly she was a [00:21:00] hairdresser and she almost instantly overnight lost a large portion of her clients who refused to, get their hair cut from her. And so there are material and familial consequences due to a lot of things. But one of them is just this constant focus on image and continuity of bloodline. I think it's more complicated than just chalking it up to quote unquote neo-Confucianism. But I also think there is, a valid argument to be had that, this kind of thing really happens when you have a post-war country, whether it's Korea or Guatemala or anywhere else, out of which adoption springs, those who stand to lose the most, almost always are the birth families. And I think we, we need to talk about that a lot more than we do.
Haley Radke: I can't believe there's no movement. That is so sad.
Nik Chang Hoon: Yeah. I mean it's, I think it's growing as a conversation and certainly over the last five to 10 years there's been more scholarship around the state of, biological families. But it's certainly still [00:22:00] a burgeoning field and I wish we'd talk about it more.
Haley Radke: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Thank you. Okay. We can't gloss over this. You met your mother. Tell us.
Nik Chang Hoon: Yeah, so in 2009, during my first year in Korea through a Fulbright grant was when I first decided to pursue a search formally, and so I filled out some forms. I think I paid a fee of $200, which I negotiated down 'cause I was a pretty poor college student and like most experiences I've had, again, one of deep privilege.
I located my birth mother in three months. So at the time that I received the email. Sharing news from my adoption agency, which is how I searched that they'd found her. I was at a friend's homestay family's apartment in Seoul watching the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games that February, and I just started searching in November of 2009.
So literally within 90 days I received an [00:23:00] email, and a couple months later that April, I met my mother. And my eldest maternal uncle, at a halfway point between Seoul and where they lived in Daegu. And I write about that experience. I have an essay in the Texas Review from the summer that kind of expands on what that felt like.
But I think there, there are two things I'll say. One is it's a really surreal experience to meet someone who looks like you for the first time. In fact, my mother, when she first saw me, I thought there was gonna be some hugs, some tears, like Good Morning America. What actually happened was she stiff armed me like a NFL running back, and I remember just the impact of her hand on my shoulder. It was like a, it was like, ooh, and she wasn't trying to create distance. She actually wanted more time to look at my face. And the first thing she said, to me and to herself was that I looked a lot like my father was her, was what she said in Korean you look exactly like your father.
And that was [00:24:00] how it started. So we had an interpreter that first day. And for the subsequent months afterward, while I was still living in Korea, we would meet probably once every few months. Each time was incredibly awkward. She'd wanna hold my hand in public. There was a time where we slept in a love motel, which essentially is what it sounds like.
It's a grimy, cheap hotel with Kleenex boxes, with sketchy phone numbers on them. And, that's where we could afford to spend the night sometimes. And so we would and there were just a lot of moments where it felt like. And still to this day sometimes feels like she's a stranger who happens to be my mother.
And then there are some times where we hang out where she feels like she's absolutely my mother. Usually if she's nagging me on needing to go to grad school or find a job or get married. And those things that are more normal to hear from a parent. Those are when it definitely felt like, okay, this is my mom.
Haley Radke: So I heard you describing this. This time of sleeping in the hotel with her?
Nik Chang Hoon: [00:25:00] Yes.
Haley Radke: And just for listeners who aren't familiar it's cultural to sleep with your parents for a long time. Yeah.
Nik Chang Hoon: Yeah. So in Korea, I can't account for how it is these days, but I would say, traditionally it's a lot more common than, for example, in the United States to share a bed with your parents, especially, as a kid.
But even, growing up, as a teen, it's also really common to be in the same household as your parents until you're married. Partially for cultural reasons, but honestly mostly for economic reasons, because housing in Korea is so expensive and there was a time in Daegu where my mom and I made plans essentially to sleep in a motel, and I had prepared for several weeks a monologue in Korean that I had revised and rehearsed that basically said something to the effect of I really appreciate that you want to, sleep in the same bed with me, but in the United States, that's actually a strange thing to do, and I don't really feel [00:26:00] comfortable. And would you be okay if we slept separately? So I had this whole thing planned out. It was like a thirty speech.
I remember we were walking toward the motel and my mother started crying and her, she held my hand really closely and I said, mom, why are you crying? And she goes, I've been waiting more than 20 years for this. And I asked 20, 20 years. For what? And she, she said to sleep in the same bed with my own son.
If you can just imagine me like metaphorically ripping up that monologue, throwing it in the trash, that's what I had to do. And what ended up happening was we were in bed together. She rolled over on top of me and was just sobbing, just completely, just weeping uncontrollably.
And it was really hot in that room and we didn't have the window open. There was no AC unit or at least it wasn't on. And so that was my out, I was like, Hey, it's actually really hot in here. I'm sweaty. Is it okay if we kinda just sleep on this side and you sleep on that side of the bed and she understood.
But that, I think when I think back on that [00:27:00] experience now for that and many other reasons, I think those early years especially I like to say that it almost felt like having an affair with my own mother because whenever we met in secret. We deleted any of the photos that we took together, or at least made sure we had a system in place. So her own two children and her husband, who is not my birth father. Would not find out. And it literally had that feeling, concretely of almost having an affair with my own mom. And I think as normal as that was to me, when I look back on it now, especially, it. It does hit hard when I think about what that meant.
Haley Radke: Yeah. It's Katrina Palmer's book, an Affair with My Mother. Same.
Nik Chang Hoon: Yep. Yeah. It's a very universal feeling, I think for those who've reunited.
Haley Radke: Yeah.
Nik Chang Hoon: In secret.
Haley Radke: Nik. Is it to this day that your other half siblings and her husband, they don't know about you?
Nik Chang Hoon: Yeah, so in 2016 I moved back briefly to Korea that summer and I spent that whole summer on a campaign to try to [00:28:00] persuade my birth mother to allow me to meet my two half siblings. I have a half brother and a half sister, and it was not a successful attempt. I was told at that time. That her idea was to wait until they turned 30, which seemed pretty arbitrary to me. But, what could I do? But also, even, now with her position being the same I don't know if I was given the opportunity that I would go through with it, if only because it would put her in quite a bit of risk within her family and potentially outside of it.
Yeah, we, I still meet her in secret. My wife and I both go to see her, but we, my mom will always have an alibi. She'll always share that she's going out to see friends or that she is meeting her brother, my uncle or something like that. There was a brief time where on KakaoTalk, which is a Korean Messenger app, I did have my birth father's cell phone number and his Kakao profile appeared, and so there, and I assume that might have been a two-way street. And so there are very valid reasons for I think both my birth mother and I to [00:29:00] be cautious. But at the same time I've had my own arc with this. I feel like I deserve the choice and understanding the risks. I still I think would wanna meet them even more than my birth father, at least once. And I've seen pictures of them. I know what my siblings look like. We are similar in appearance. Certainly I would never be able to pretend that I was like an English tutor or something, which is an idea I floated once my mother laughed and just said, that wouldn't work. We, we looked too much alike.
Haley Radke: I'm sorry.
Nik Chang Hoon: Oh, thank you. Thank you.
Haley Radke: I know you're not alone in that. It's just so painful. That's so painful. Yeah,
Nik Chang Hoon: I agree. And I think the, the difficult part, bringing the conversation here to either my own adoptive parents or to adoptive parents in general is, it's really, I think, difficult for many adoptive parents to sit with that discomfort either because that might lead to feelings of guilt or complicity or bewilderment or confusion.
But [00:30:00] also just because, international adoption is this really strange, destructive thing where infants are children are commodified. And in that process, a lot of things happen at once. And one of those things that happens is, we become objectified. We're often the family completion solution, right?
Often many adoptees including myself were adopted due to the infertility of their adoptive parents. So we were a, yeah, a solution for completing one's family and I think it's accurate to say, and I often say that Korean adoption or any kind of any form of adoption, domestic or international, is inherently the splintering of one family in order to complete another.
And I think that second half, that completion side is so often talked about as this joyous event worthy of celebration and, memorializing each year. And I think also it's true that we should think about it and memorialize on a regular basis, [00:31:00] the first part, 'cause you can't have the second without the first.
And for me and my family, my birth mother actually tried to take me back. So she felt almost immediate remorse, saved up as much money as she could over a period of several weeks and return to what I call in my creative writing the giving place. And she was told that she the cash she had brought was not enough to cover the room and board that I had incurred.
She's not the only one to attempt this. One of the biological mothers who's interviewed in that New York Times story I mentioned from I think 2010, she was successful in reclaiming her son and to this day calls that her son's second birthday. And so there are many situations like this that are not cases of bad apples or exceptionally atrocious circumstances. This is just how adoption works, and I think it's both okay and healthy and necessary to talk about that.
Haley Radke: So our first interaction was at [00:32:00] a workshop that you were a part of at the Adoptee Literary Festival in 2025.
Nik Chang Hoon: Yes.
Haley Radke: And it was called Writing Into the Void and the topic was writing about estrangement.
Nik Chang Hoon: Yes.
Haley Radke: Are you comfortable sharing a little bit about that for your
Nik Chang Hoon: Yeah, sure.
Haley Radke: Personal story?
Nik Chang Hoon: Yeah. Thank you for asking. Sure. Yeah, for me, about a couple years ago, a little more, I had reached a point with my parents here in Minnesota that I needed some space both to process how I felt a lot about our family dynamics, but also because I was increasingly feeling this disconnect between the reality of my experience and feelings around my adoption and my own life and theirs.
And I think this is really common when you have adoptees adopted into white families who typically don't have a lot of exposure to the country of origin of their children. My parents, in their case, didn't go to Korea. They wouldn't have been [00:33:00] able to afford to had they been required, but there wasn't this home visit required.
So they didn't, make the trip. But even if they had visited Korea for a week or two before my adoption, it's still felt like to them I just came outta nowhere and this is pre 9/11 when I arrived. So I literally just arrived at the gate at Minneapolis St. Paul Airport. There was a whole party. I have it on home video, and that's how it starts. And I think the part about, this whole other country and having a birth mother who is a real person and still is alive and knows who I am, I just felt there, there wasn't that sense that they understood or perceived that as as a reality. And to some extent I hadn't asked for it. I hadn't communicated that I really wanted that from them, but I also felt like I didn't necessarily I didn't want them to feel guilty. And I also didn't want, like many adoptees, we wrestle with this a lot. I didn't wanna seem ungrateful and so I had to wrestle with my own feelings and what was negotiable and what was not. And so I [00:34:00] took some time off essentially in communicating with them, with a few exceptions in between. And, during that time, which was, I think, the most difficult of my life, I think a couple of things happened. First, it just allowed me the space to, to reflect a bit more.
Certainly many conversations with my therapist whom I've been seeing for many years, an adoptee therapist, someone who really understands firsthand what it's like. And I also felt that I needed to develop my own set of expectations around what I wanted from my parents here, and also maybe what I didn't need from them. And so when we talk about radical acceptance, sometimes that's a phrase that gets floated around a lot. But I think in my case, I really did need to reach a point of acceptance that felt like it's not, at times, maybe unfair at times, maybe not something I wanted to do, but this past spring, I think we organically found a path back into communicating with each other.
We [00:35:00] now are able to just have meals together and talk. And I think what is clear to me now is, sometimes as adoptees it's really hard to untangle what is inherently tangled or to un mesh, what is truly a really enmeshed experience where we're supposed to somehow be of service or of help or of joy to so many people at once. And sometimes you just have to give yourself permission to not need to do that.
Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. Can we go to a happier note?
Nik Chang Hoon: No, sure.
Haley Radke: I wanted to hear about how you met your wife.
Nik Chang Hoon: Oh man. This is such, the best part, I think about the last seven years and some change has been meeting my wife. Her name is Hyein her Korean name is Hyein. She goes by Theresa in English. So I sometimes have to explain, I'm not married to two different people. But her English name is Theresa, Korean name is Hyein. And we met in 2018 and at that [00:36:00] time. We were both temporarily attending this Korean Catholic church here in the Twin Cities.
And I probably sacregligiously joke that we treated church like Tinder and just deleted the app afterward because we met, we really, we took a walk of about, I think we walked like a full 5K around a lake and, I understood that she was someone I probably was never to meet again. I don't think I would be able to find someone who had a heart like hers with values that we shared so closely, and someone who was Korean. I had previously been in a relationship among others where I felt that something was missing, and I think I had to give myself permission over about a decade to understand that. Maybe having a partner who in some way was Korean, but not necessarily an adoptee but not necessarily Korean American. All of those things I was sorting out. And she did check some of those boxes, but she wasn't just a series of check marks, she was a person. And at first I, I think [00:37:00] I idealized, frankly what it would be like to date a Korean, she grew up in Minnesota, but spent most of her life kind of flipping back and forth between suburban Minneapolis and Seoul, outside Seoul. And, first I thought of course we're gonna talk in Korean all the time. And in reality I was super insecure about my Korean and we just spoke better in English. And so there were a lot of things that I learned about myself through her. And also we really, I think, made a cute couple and I enjoyed being with her. The first year was nuts 'cause we made the the decision to spend some vacation time together. So within six months of dating her, I flew to Korea with her, stayed with her grandma and her mom, and met her whole family.
And all my Asian friends back home were just like, Nik, that's like a big deal. And I was like. Nah. And they're like no. That's a huge deal. And then we both got back from that trip and we were like, wow, that was actually a big deal. And we got married in 2021. We had a COVID wedding overlooking a lake here in Minneapolis [00:38:00] about 10 minutes from our house.
And currently we live just outside Minneapolis in a kind of in a first ring suburb with our. Golden Doodle Penny, who may have made an auditory guest appearance once in a while.
Haley Radke: She absolutely made appearance. I love the name Penny. Listen that I, that's what I wanted to name my first dog.
Nik Chang Hoon: We're trying to maybe do a second dog named Nikel or quarter something.
Haley Radke: Aw, that's so cute.
Nik Chang Hoon: One is enough for now.
Haley Radke: Cute. That's so cute. Okay. Congratulations. Can I ask you an intrusive question?
Nik Chang Hoon: Oh, intrusive. Go. As intrusive as it gets.
Haley Radke: I know a lot of adoptees who are people of color adopted into white families.
Nik Chang Hoon: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Often end up with white partners.
Nik Chang Hoon: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Did you feel some kind of way, like you weren't quote unquote, like good enough to be with her? Like you weren't Korean enough, you weren't like, did you have to process through any of that.
Nik Chang Hoon: [00:39:00] I love talking about this. This is not intrusive at all. I think it's.
Haley Radke: I'm sorry. It is intrusive and I, thanks for sharing.
Nik Chang Hoon: I think it's really important to talk about relationships in intersection with adoption and cultural identity. So for me, I had dated across the whole spectrum of culture identity.
I had dated white people. I had been in relationships with other Asians that weren't Korean, but Hmong or Southeast Asian tried immediately before my wife tried dating a Korean adoptee that turned out to be disastrous. And I think the most, I think pivotal decision I made from a dating standpoint was when I realized that dating a Korean and potentially marrying a Korean was important to me and my white friends, many of them did not understand that they thought either that I was being racist or that I was misguided and oversimplifying, you know what, why would that matter? Is the question I would often get. And my Korean adoptee friends were just, they understood immediately. They're like, yep. We've [00:40:00] had so much stolen from us and we're not, I would say I wasn't just someone that stayed around. I did study Korean extensively. I lived in Korea. I thought I was gonna be there forever at one point and so I think it was important to me that I at least try to date a Korean. And so I distinctly remember I was with Hyein in her living room at the time, at her apartment in Minneapolis, and she was watching a Korean variety show and I just got extremely emotional and insecure and I was like, I'm so sorry, but could I actually ask you to turn on the English subtitles? And until that point, I had taken so much pride in not needing them or having Korean subtitles 'cause my Korean is decent enough, but I, she was laughing at things that I wasn't understanding and she was really apologetic and I was like no this isn't about like you doing anything wrong. This is more just about me needing to get over my own pride and insecurity that even after, I took out more than $10,000 in student loans to learn in Korean. I didn't need the [00:41:00] credits. I just wanted to do it. I lived in Korea. I studied, even while living in Korea. I studied so hard and to ask for English subtitles was something that took a lot of humility for me. And I think that was a breakthrough moment where we both realized we could be vulnerable with each other. And where I also realized over time that, look, she lives here too, in, Minnesota. She's not necessarily aware of the exact trend that's going on right now in Korea. If you blink, the trends change in Korea, even if you live there.
So over time, I think it also helped that I understood that we were both in this together, meaning that we both felt estranged from our own country of origin, and sometimes we needed to go back to recharge and fill our cup and our information bank with all the things that are, in vogue at that moment. 'Cause otherwise you're just gonna feel outdated every single time, which is inevitable. But we try.
Haley Radke: And imagine getting to my age, we're only, I think we're only a few years apart. And [00:42:00] when you have if you ever choose to have children, my teenagers remind me that I am. I have, I say teenagers. I have one teenager and they remind me how uncool and how I don't get it.
Nik Chang Hoon: I feel like that's their job. I feel like they're not doing their job, and they, if they don't do that, but they don't make it easy.
Haley Radke: And as someone who's chronically online to keep up.
Nik Chang Hoon: I'm now known for my dad jokes.
Haley Radke: All right.
Nik Chang Hoon: And that's, I've reached radical acceptance about that.
Haley Radke: I love that. Okay, let's pivot. I. Oh my goodness. As transparent as Nik is, has been with us in this interview. Your writing is so much more.
Nik Chang Hoon: Oh, thank you.
Haley Radke: And in particular, I love this piece you have out in the Kenyon Review, Emotionally Self-aware, Adoptive Parents Contract for Services. It's so brilliant. I love it so much.
Nik Chang Hoon: Thank you. Thank you.
Haley Radke: I've read it like 10 times now. It's [00:43:00] so good. I don't know. I know you're, you have poetry, you have essays, you have a bunch of different pieces. But this one in particular I think will really speak to adoptees and we'll link to it in the show notes. But yeah I don't know what's a good part that, do you wanna describe it to us perhaps?
Nik Chang Hoon: Yeah. So this piece is written as a legal contract and the kind of premise is that one party, the adoptee, is basically trying to strike up an agreement with their adoptive parents to do things like engage together in family therapy to understand that discussions around adoption may involve things like privilege, whether it's white privilege, I say Catholic guilt privilege, small town Minnesotan, passive aggressively, self aware of it, like privilege, and there's all kinds of tongue in cheek references, but I think the piece is written as a lyric or a hermit crab [00:44:00] essay, which means it takes on a sort of a non-traditional container and the container would be a legal contract.
And the context of this piece is that two summers ago I was attending my first ever writing conference a writing workshop. So it was the Kenyon Review Adult Residential Writers Workshop that occurs twice a summer in Gambier, Ohio at Kenyon College, and the prompt was write a lyric essay that takes on an unexpected form. And at Kenyon the way it works is you generate writing from a topic that morning and 24 hours later, back in workshop, you're sharing the piece that you wrote over the last day. And so it's really intense. It's generative, intense, lovely, and all those things at once. So I wrote this piece at a moment of deep, I think, grief and frustration within the estrangement that I had initiated with my adoptive parents. And this was essentially what spilled out, and so the piece is satirical. It is meant to be humorous, [00:45:00] but when I, anytime I read it, whether it's to myself or out loud, I mostly what I feel is sadness. And so I wrote that piece as part of that workshop. I read it out loud a couple nights later with the help of a lot of folks cheering me on, and I did not know it at the time, but the editor of the Kenyon Review, Nicole Terez Dutton, was in the audience and after my delivery approached my writing instructor Rajiv Mohabir, and asked him to ask me to submit it, which was itself just a ridiculous thing to happen, like I would never have expected that. And so I submitted it that September, and just as I touched down in Los Angeles this past March to attend AWP, which is a writer's conference that occurs every year, I received an email that said it had been accepted and it just came out in the mail a few weeks ago. So it's this surreal thing now, where to see something you wrote, on your laptop in this polished dorm room at Kenyon College is now. In the Kenyon Review, and I have no idea what that means. I still [00:46:00] am in disbelief anytime I think about it.
Haley Radke: It's a real thing in the world. I love it. The other thing that.
Nik Chang Hoon: It's a real thing.
Haley Radke: The other thing I'll link to the piece that won the Annie Dillard Prize in 2024 is Abandoned Supposings A Letter to My Non Father's Silence. So for folks who are sad that we didn't talk too much about your father today, they can read that in Nik, what did you wanna recommend to us?
Nik Chang Hoon: Oh there's so much that I could recommend, but I think more than anything else I've been thinking about as someone who writes memoir, what it is about the genre of memoir or just that container of memoir that can best reflect the adoption experience and so as someone who's painstakingly trying to write a memoir. I have the fortune and privilege of learning from the pros, and one of those pros is Shannon Gibney who lives right here in Minneapolis who wrote a speculative memoir that won the Michael L. Printz Award and has been out for almost two years now.
It will be two [00:47:00] years this coming January three, actually this coming January, 2026. So it's called The Girl I Am Was I Never Will Be A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption. And what I think is really helpful and instructive about the way Shannon writes, both in general and specifically in this memoir is that as adoptees we, our lives are inherently speculative. Actually, Alice Stephens, another adoptee writer, just spoke at AWP in a, in an adoptee panel in March, and she said something just earth shattering to me, which is that adoption itself is a fiction. And I think what Shannon's memoir teaches is how speculation sometimes is the only option adoptees have.
Whether we're transracial adoptees born in Korea, like me or someone who was adopted domestically and is able to speak to that experience like Shannon, in both cases or in all cases, all adoptees I think by [00:48:00] definition, wonder, speculate, and imagine. Sometimes it's because that's what we're asked to do, but often it's because we have no other choice.
And so I think the most real non-fiction approach is to writing about one's adoption experience often involve the imagination. And so what I think is fun artistically about writing into the adoption experience, even though it does involve a lot of hardship and tears, is that you can play around a lot with form. You can play around with the meaning of reality and what reality is and I think most, if not all adoptees would agree that adoption is inherently an exercise in entertaining the multiverse. It's entertaining the multiple ways that we might have ended up the multiple selves we might or could have been and that I think is what Shannon does so well and so that is my recommendation. The Girl I Am Was and Never Will Be.
Haley Radke: Love it. [00:49:00] We did a book club with Shannon in deep dive. Yes. So good. Love. That's a great one. Thanks for bringing it back up to us. I can't wait for your memoir to be out in the world. Nik, where can we follow along with you online to be informed of all your upcoming writerly projects?
Nik Chang Hoon: Thank you for asking. You can follow me on Instagram @nikchanghoon. That's N-I-K-C-H-A-N-G-H-O-O-N or my website nikchanghoon.com. And I think, more than anything else, I'm just grateful and just so fortunate to be in conversation with you and so many other adoptees who are I think, doing the thing that we all need to do, which is speak to our experiences and center our voices. So thank you for producing this amazing podcast. I think it's one of the most essential things we can do as adoptees is to have conversations like this.
Haley Radke: Thank you. I agree. What a delight to get to talk to you today. Thank you, Nik.
Nik Chang Hoon: Thank you, [00:50:00] Haley.
Haley Radke: I love hearing about the projects people are working on, and I'm so looking forward to getting to read Nik's memoir when it is out in the world. I'm also working on a project you may have heard about it. I am working on is working title's called On Adoption, and it's going to be a brand new investigative podcast where I have been interviewing multiple mothers who have relinquished their children for adoption, and we are talking about the impact it's had on them. We are talking about the impact adoption has had on adult adoptees, and we are really going to tell the full story of adoption. If this sounds interesting to you, if you would like to support it, you can go to onadoption.net [00:51:00] for more information and we'll also have links in the show notes for how you can be a part of this project.
Thank you so much for listening. We are going to be back in January with brand new episodes. I hope you have a lovely winter break and we will talk to you very soon.
