170 Alice Stephens
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/170
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This show is listener supported. You can join us and help our show grow to support more adoptees by going to adopteeson.com/partner.
You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Episode 170, Alice. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Alice Stephens, author of Famous Adopted People, joins us today. I was honored to hear her describe her childhood, which included years in Botswana.
Of course, we talk about writing in her book reviews. If you ever need a book recommendation for an adoptee-focused look at adoption, Alice is an expert. She even shares a piece of her story I didn't know about her search in Korea for biological family. We wrap up with some recommended resources, and, as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website adopteeson.com. Let's listen in. [00:01:00]
I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Alice Stephens. Welcome, Alice.
Alice Stephens: Thank you, Haley. I'm so pleased to be here.
Haley Radke:* I can't wait. Would you mind sharing a bit of your story with us?
Alice Stephens: Sure. So I was born in 1967 in South Korea. My mother was Korean and my father was an American soldier in Korea. I feel like I was adopted at a very crucial point in adoption history because it was the sixties, late sixties, and it was in the era where adoption was coming out of the closet, so to speak. People were becoming more and more aware that adoption is not something that happens in every family. And in the sixties, the Korean adoption movement that began in the fifties, right after the Korean War, was growing. And we were the first big group of transnational adoptees into the United States. [00:02:00] And when you have a transracial adoptee–somebody who does not look like her family–then everybody in the world knows you're adopted. And again, it cannot be hidden. So a lot of people were becoming more aware of adoption. They were seeing these Korean adoptees or other transracial adoptees and gears were going off in their heads. And so the narrative of adoption was slowly changing. I actually had a newspaper article written about me, and I know I'm not the only one, the only Korean adoptee, who had newspaper articles written about them. The whole emphasis is on how do-gooder it is to adopt these children. How it is a benevolent thing, a self-sacrificing thing even, that they say about my parents. They were [00:03:00] healthy, young, and successful. They had their own children but they selflessly decided to adopt another child. And if you just look at the language in this article that was written in 1969, it is just a fascinating document about the language that surrounded adoption at that time and the way that they were changing the whole concept of adoption. Okay, so I'm getting off track here.
So I was adopted into my family in 1968. I arrived at nine months old. My adoptive family is white. I have three siblings who are the biological children of my parents. I am the youngest. We were this family of three blonde-headed children and me, and we attracted interest pretty much everywhere we went. We lived in Philadelphia for four years. And then after that we moved to Gaborone, Botswana, which is in Southern Africa. And that was a [00:04:00] wonderful experience for me because childhood: it was a land without any TV, without any stoplights. We lived in one of the only two-storey houses in the city. It was a city, it's the capital of Botswana, but at the time it was actually 15,000 people. So it was a small town. I had a really golden childhood just running free. But, in Botswana there were probably about five East Asians, five people who looked like me in the whole town. And so I never saw people who looked like me. And the natives, the people who lived in Botswana, they hadn't seen people who looked like me either. So there would be people who pointed at me and talked about me, pulled their eyes, all that sort of thing. So even though I belonged, I always also knew that I didn't belong and that there was something about me that was really different.
Then we moved back to America when I was in fifth grade. [00:05:00] We moved to the suburbs of Washington, DC, which is actually where I live now. I went to public school, fifth grade. Again, I was the only Asian kid in my class. Another thing about the time that I was adopted was in 1965 immigration laws had changed. Before that basically black and brown people were kept out of America, and it was only the “desirable” European immigrants that were allowed in. They changed that in 1965 and so up until then there were Asians in America but most of them had come before the laws, which for the Chinese were established in, like, 1880 and for the rest of the Asians it was, like, 1925. So for that long period of time, there were no Asian immigrants into America. So when I came to the suburb, [00:06:00] there was hardly any sign of Asian cultural life even though I lived in the nation's capital, which has all sorts of cultures that come there as part of the seat of government. So I grew up really divorced from my genetic cultural background.
My parents are very progressive, very liberal. Of course, they always told me that I was adopted. I always knew my story. I always had access to my adoption file. They had some books about Asian people for young children. One was called The Chinese Next Door, written by Pearl S. Buck. And the way that they depicted Asian people was really as a very different other. And so that kind of affected me, too, as I was growing up, but, like many adoptees, I just didn't realize it. That conflict in my mind was something that I [00:07:00] ignored, but it also affected me terribly. I hated to be singled out as an Asian. I hated the prejudice that I got. It made me really angry. The older I got, the less self-confidence I would have because people would pull their eyes at me, make fun of me. And I grew up in a white world and I thought I was white. And when you get this sort of pushback, “No, you're not white,” it's called cognitive dissonance. And it is a pretty big problem for a lot of transracial adoptees, and it manifests itself, I think, most in adolescence when you're exploring your place in the world, other people are exploring their places in the world, and people like to tell you don't belong in your place. So my teenage years were pretty rough. I had very low self-confidence and I just [00:08:00] basically became a juvenile delinquent and defied everything. Defied the stereotypes about Asian people, defied the stereotypes about adopted people. I was just a bad kid, but I had a very strong family structure around me and I had all that love and I had a lot of information about the world, education, reading, all those things. They gave me all those tools to build my own identity. The only thing they didn't give me was the understanding that it was okay to feel different things about being adopted.
We never talked about adoption as like, how do you feel about it? What do you know? How does it affect you? What's it like for you to be the only Asian person ever in a room? We never talked about it, and even my mother says today, “I don't think of you as Asian.” [00:09:00] And this is very common for transracial adoptees. Your parents tell you, “We don't see your race.” Which is a beautiful sentiment, but it doesn't work in the real world because everybody else does see a race and everybody else tells you about it. And in America, in the Western world, race is one of the biggest defining characteristics, right or wrong. And the more tools that you have to deal with that, the better. And as an adoptee, I didn't have any of those tools.
I did have tools from my parents about getting in touch with my Asian side. My mother majored in Chinese in college. She had a big interest in China. And so in high school I started to study Chinese and I started to get more interested in Asian culture. At the time, there was really [00:10:00] no evidence of Korean culture, and I'm talking about the late eighties now. So the dominant cultures were Chinese and Japanese, and those are the ones that I started to explore. I went to study in China when I was in college. I lived in Japan. But I didn't really think very much about how I was Korean. I thought about how I was Asian because that's what Americans told me: I was Asian or Chinese or Japanese. But I didn't really think about the Korean part. I got married, had kids, still thinking about adoption, but really more like thinking about it in order to ignore it than thinking about it in order to think about it.
And my mom said, “Why don't you look for your Korean mother?”, when I was in my mid-twenties. And I said, “Oh, okay.” And more for her, I wrote a letter off to the agency and they said, “Oh, we can maybe help you for $500.” [00:11:00] And I said, “No. I'm not gonna do that.” And then I moved on. Also, in those years, I really had to find out who I was and I had to be comfortable with the person that I was. I had to break the bad habit of the person that I was when I was younger and become a better person. I had to look at myself and ask why was I not kind of a good person when I was younger, and I just had to figure my shit out, and so I did. It took me a long time. I think a lot of adoptees are slow bloomers. I think a lot of us come to things late. So it took me a long time. I had my own kids, first time I ever saw my flesh and blood was with my son, and that was like wow. And so I was just concentrating on my kids, myself, my family, my career, just life. And then [00:12:00] when my kids were in high school, I had a lovely job and then the 2008 recession came and I was fired. I picked up some other work around that, but I thought to myself, what I really want to do is be a writer and now is the time to start doing it. And so I started to get serious about writing. I'd always been serious about writing, but serious about being a published writer and growing that persona of a writer, being a writer, living as a writer, which means writing. A lot of people don't realize that writing is you actually have to sit down eight hours a day, or whatever, and write.
Haley Radke: Yes. I'm sorry, I'm laughing because there's so many of us that are like, “Oh my gosh, wouldn't it be great to have a book? But we don't really wanna sit down and write.”
Alice Stephens: Yeah, it's like any, anything. You have to practice, practice, practice. You can't just [00:13:00] sit down and write this magnum opus. It takes a lot of time. So I was really fortunate and I had that time, I had that support, and so I started writing. I started with book reviews and I got a column about writing.
Actually, I have to go back. I did start a novel when I was living in Japan, and I wrote this novel. It's a really good novel. When I got fired, I was like halfway through it, so I finished it. After that, I got an agent. I got another agent. It never got picked up. And then I said, “Why don't you write what you know?” That's what they tell you to do. Write what you know. And I said, “Okay. I know adoption.” There are no adoption books–fiction books–out there that I could find. There were very, very few authentic adoption fiction books. There are a lot of novels written about adoption that are not written by adoptees and that mishandled the whole subject of adoption. [00:14:00] So I said, “This is what I'm gonna do.” I wrote the book very quickly. Like nine months, which is very quick for a book. And then I tried to sell it and nobody would pick it up. So it took five years to sell the book. Five years. And I got more than 60 rejections
Haley Radke: For Famous Adopted People?
Alice Stephens: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Wow.
Alice Stephens: Yeah, so it was a really big wake-up call and a really big eye-opener about how the publishing business works.
Haley Radke: Can I ask you a personal question about that?
Alice Stephens: Yes.
Haley Radke: When you said 60 rejections, my stomach flipped. For me, and I know lots of adoptees, rejection–our beginnings start with a rejection. So how was it getting those? Were you taking it very personally because this is the thing you know, you're writing about adoption. What was that like? [00:15:00]
Alice Stephens: Yeah, well, rejection is a huge part of writing, which yes, as adoptees, we hate rejection. And the biggest irony is that I'm in one of those businesses where you have got to have a really tough, thick skin because rejection is the norm. Acceptance is not the norm. Rejection, rejection, rejection. How did I deal with the rejection from the publishers? Actually, they made it easy because the things that they said were so ridiculous. They'd say, “Oh, this is a good story.” Or, it was, “Yeah, I read it. I read it in one night.” But then they'd say things like, “Americans don't like to read about foreign countries.” “Americans don't like characters with foreign names.” “Americans don't like dialogue.” It was all about the foreign and all about how people [00:16:00] couldn't connect and, to me, it spoke of them being afraid, like of them. Nobody said, “This is a pile of crap. You can't write. Give it up. Go home.” They were–not all–but most of them were what we call “good” rejections. There was encouragement in there. There was “This is a good book, but it's not for me.”
The thing about being an editor is you have to totally fall in love with a book. You have to know it. You have to understand it in order to champion it. Who are the people who work in publishing? They're not generally people who are going to look at adoption from a critical point of view. My idea is that the people in adoption are the type of people who adopt children, or the type of people who know people who have adopted children or have adopted transracial children. And that makes them like, “Well, she's trying to tell a different kind of a story. And we can't tell a different kind of story. [00:17:00] America knows one story and why are we gonna try and change the subject? People aren't gonna buy it. There's no market.” So that's what they told me. So I didn't take the rejection personally, and I kept on going. My agent left. My agent, she actually did a great job. She has an adopted, Chinese-born child. She actually did a really good job in representing me. She went over and above, but eventually she said, “Nobody's touching it. I've done everything I can.” So then I went out on my own, and I was sending out cold, and a miracle happened. It's really a miracle that I sent my cold slush file without an agent to The Unnamed Press, which is this amazing indie press in LA, and they picked it up and it was just like, wow.
So anyway, while writing the book [00:18:00] and then in preparing to publish it, I began to get more aware of the adoption community out there. Up until then, I had no idea that there were all these people like you who have been going on for years and years making this community, these communities, and actually organizing on the ground and getting adoptees together. And it's really been so wonderful for me to find out that there are all of these adoptee organizations out there.
Haley Radke: I'm curious because you were saying that you had written part of your novel and then after you got laid off you finished the rest of it and you had this thread of “Oh, maybe I'll look for my mother because my mother said I should.” Where's coming out of the fog in that process for you? Because there's lots of things in the book. When the Adoptees On Patreon group read it as a Book Club book [00:19:00], we found so many themes in it. We were like, “Oh, this is like that.” We were picking all these things out that I would identify as being metaphors for being out of the fog, understanding the adoptee experience at a deeper level. So how about that? Can you talk a little bit about that, like your mindset and things about adoption, while writing?
Alice Stephens: As I said before, I wanted to write a book that refuted the other books that had come out about adoption that were written by non-adoptees, and there are a lot of them out there. I've reviewed some of them. So I wanted to turn those tropes upside down. And I think when I was writing Famous Adopted People, I was writing out all the things that I'd been thinking about for all these years but that I just didn't have an opportunity to articulate because I wasn't sitting down to write a formal book or essay or anything about adoption. [00:20:00] Previous to that, the book that I wrote when I was fired was actually a historical fiction novel. So it didn't really occur to me to write an adoption novel until it did, and then I just sat down and everything that came out of me was things that had been churning around in my mind. And by getting it down on paper, I was able to figure out all those different threads. Writing is about revision, revision, revision. So it wasn't like I just put it all down there and then it all made sense. I put it down there, it was a big ugly mess, and then slowly started unbraiding it and then re-braiding it and making it into a coherent hole. I was also very lucky with my editor, Chris Heiser, at Unnamed Press. The manuscript that I submitted to him was different. He gave me a lot of good pointers about how to make the story more exciting. Like [00:21:00] he said, “You have to have Lisa, the protagonist, at least try to get out.” In my first manuscript, she didn't try to get out of her imprisonment. So anyway, he just helped me make a better manuscript. And then while I was revising and revising, ideas are congealing in my mind. Like I'm being able to see things more clearly.
I think that a lot of adoptees are creative and that by using their creative whatever, whatever that impulse is inside them, they are working out all those emotional and mental things that are within them. By using that creative expression, they're able to articulate their feelings in a way that they might not be able to just sitting down with their friends, or whatever. And by doing it through their art form, that then helps them to be able to articulate with their friends and their family those more basic expressions. [00:22:00]
Haley Radke: There's so much processing that we do throughout our lifetimes. So I love how you're talking about getting this all out and, really, you're probably discovering some more things about yourself and your true opinions by writing. I love that. That's so fascinating.
So you do book reviews for the Washington Independent. I was reading through multiple of your reviews in preparation for our conversation today, and this line stuck out to me and I would love for you to talk about this in your work–you've already addressed it–but now talking about it from a reviewer point of view. You say, “As an adoptee and book reviewer, I greet each new book about adoption with trepidation and hope.” That is gold. What a good line, Alice.
Alice Stephens: Thank you. Well, if [00:23:00] it's an adoptee-written book, then I'm all open. All for it. But if it's a book that is not written by an adoptee, chances are good that they are taking this subject in a predatory manner because it's a subject that can be milked for lots of human drama and it goes down to the very basics of our civilization: the family union and genetic tribes and that sort of thing. I think for maybe, I don't know, the last 30 years, the adoption narrative has been dominated by non-adopted people. You see that in a lot of the books that are offered. And so, as a book reviewer, I started to review whatever books that I found that were about adoption. One of them is The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See, or [00:24:00] Good People by J.D.? I don't remember her last name. But they were both using adoption as a vehicle instead of as the theme. They were riding the vehicle rather than trying to be the vehicle. I don't know if that makes sense. They were just not invested in adoption as a real story. They were using it for their own purposes and making a narrative that, for one, follows a pattern that is the same in many of the same books which is the adoptee gets rescued, and does not rescue herself, and the adoptee is just lost and waiting for somebody to come. Whether it's the adoptive parent to come and take them to their forever home, or whether it's their birth mother or father coming to show them who they really are. [00:25:00] The adoptee, I say, is the object of the story rather than the subject. And what the adoption story should be about is the adoptee and her journey and not about somebody else, the savior who comes to save the adoptee. So many books are the adoptee is the object and not the subject of the story. And whenever I see a book by a non-adopted person, I say it is most likely that person is using the adoptee as the object and not the subject. The object to be acted upon, not the subject who saves herself.
Haley Radke: Thank you. I think it's really only in the last few years I've been hearing that term “own voices” and to apply it to adoptee authors as an own voice, I think is important. And you're sharing mostly with adoptee listeners right now. [00:26:00] What would you say to us about our reading habits or the ways we consume or give reviews or any of those kinds of things? How can we influence publishing to hear more from adoptee authors like yourself and read the kind of stories that we do want told to be mainstream?
Alice Stephens: Yeah, I think it's just by raising your voices and being heard. I mean, by writing book reviews yourself. It is so important that adoptees write book reviews about adoption books. But again, it's like there's this big sort of barrier to it. I've tried to get into the New York Times or the Washington Post to review books about adoption, but it's hard. They don't answer my call and they don't seem to feel like there's a need to have [00:27:00] adoptees review books about adoption. Whereas there is now a movement to have people who write black books be reviewed by black writers and that sort of thing. But the adoptee thing, and I think it's because maybe, I don't know. My mission is to have more adoptees write. I try to encourage adoptees to become writers because I think that's really the way. Adoptees are writing; adoptees are speaking up. And it's got to grow. The movement has to coalesce and grow and become a little more unified maybe. But definitely, adoption is becoming a lot more of a topic of concern, a lot more of a fashionable topic, and not just from the adoptive parents’ (view), but they're starting to listen to adoptees more. [00:28:00] It is slow. But anyway, what can you do? I think that adoptees can write reviews like on Good Reads, Amazon and that sort of thing. Saying: I'm an adoptee and this is adoptee-approved and articulating why this is a good book or this is a bad book. Especially, bad reviews, I think, are pretty important too: I'm an adoptee. This book is harmful to adoptees. This book is [censored] and don't read it. So I think that just being more vocal and letting people know what we think.
Haley Radke: [00:29:00] Okay. I have always encouraged people to make sure they're doing the reviews for adoptee authors, but I love that idea, too, of making sure we're giving critical feedback to the books that are making us into tropes. And I wanted to just circle back just to talk about your reviews and how you've pitched to some bigger publications and they don't want to hear from adoptee voices. I was just talking with one of my friends and comparing and contrasting your review of American Baby by Gabriel Glaser from an adoptee perspective versus the New York Times review. And we were like, “We need to hear Alice's. That's what people need to hear.” And so I'm cheering you on. We are going to hear more from you. More from you about adoption-related books in future, I'm sure.
Alice Stephens: Thank you.
Haley Radke: Another thing I wanted to ask you about is from another one of your articles. You were writing about the original cancel culture. I've heard you express before that publishing is so white and it's very hard for people of color to really break in. And one of the lines where you were talking about this [00:30:00] is “White gatekeepers favoring white voices that cater to a white audience.” Can you speak to that, please? I think it's very important for us to understand that.
Alice Stephens: So, as we said before, most of the people who are in high places in publishing are white, and there's been a lot written about it. Just recently, some changes have been made, I'm talking about just the last few months, and some people of color have been put in charge of a few publishing houses or have been made into editors with power. But it's a very slow process and there is incredible resistance to it in the publishing industry because culture has always been white in America. That's always been the way that culture has been defined, and the people who tell you what culture is have always been white. [00:31:00] That's the way it's always been and it's very resistant to change. I work at a bookstore and I work in outside events where we do events that are outside the bookstore. And I am one of maybe 18 people who work on that staff. We all work there because we love books. I'm the only one who's a person of color and there are only two men. So they're basically older, white women. And I see the way that they read, what they read, what they're told to read. They read what the book reviews tell them to read. “Oh, did you see that Ron Charles loved this book? I'm gonna read it.” And they put it on their list. “Oh, the New York Times said this book's lovely.” And so they're going to read it. All those people, they read what the publishing industry tells them is the biggest, latest book. And while there are a lot of writers of color out there who are making it onto those lists, they're basically, I think, still [00:32:00] dominated by what I would call a lot of mediocre white writing. And it's just a group-think of what you're going to read next, which is dictated to you by the book reviewer who gets it dictated to them by the publishing company.
So I think we've heard about American Dirt, which was a novel that was published, I think, by Grand Central. It was given like a million-dollar publicity budget and the cultural purveyor said, this book is a great immigration novel. And it turned out to be written by a white woman who has a grandmother who's Puerto Rican. But there was a lot of controversy about it because she totally wrote it from a white person's point of view even though it was supposed to be about a Mexican woman and her son. In [00:33:00] reaction to the pushback that people of color gave to this author, you see white cultural critics come out and defend, they get very defensive about it. And people literally said, “I'm just gonna go out and buy this book because people tell me not to.” And I see that as tribalism. I see that as people getting very scared that the white viewpoint is no longer the dominant viewpoint. When they're told that maybe a book that they loved as a child, like Little House on the Prairie, has lots of racist things in it, they get defensive. They don't want to hear that. It just seems to me like there's such a white mindset that, even when it is liberal and open, is actually very closed and very defensive and very self-centered, very privileged. I don't know how to break that. But I [00:34:00] think the best way, really, is to stop having people who write reviews be white people talking to white people, and just be people talking to readers.
Haley Radke: Thank you. I keep bringing out some of my old childhood books to read to my kids at bedtime, and I'm really shocked by some of the things. I've had to skip entire chapters because I don't reread it before I start reading to them. And I think, “Oh my gosh, this is what was filling my head as a child.” And I'm in my late thirties so it wasn't all that long ago. And so yeah, we haven't come very far. But I appreciate that the challenges for us is we need to be reading with our eyes open, as well, and choosing and not just having the [00:35:00] so-called gatekeepers being the ones to tell us what to read. And I think you very much challenged us as well, not necessarily just in this interview, but with your work as a book reviewer. Reading so many great reviews you've done, I'm like, “Oh, I think that book would really stretch me.” So I really appreciate that. I think it's really important.
Alice Stephens: Oh, thank you. If I could just add one thing about book reviews. I make it my mission to review the lesser-known books. When I first started out, I wanted to review all the big books, but now I don't have much interest. There are many people who are going to review those books. Those books are going to get all the publicity they want. I want to bring attention to the smaller books, maybe the more challenging books, or the off-kilter books, to let people know that they're out there too.
Haley Radke: That's perfect. I think some people have [00:36:00] looked at who I interview on the podcast and been like, “Oh, we really wanna hear from this famous person or this famous person.” And I'm like, “Well, they're already famous, I wanna highlight adoptees with all different stories. We wanna hear all the real stories.” And I don't know about you, but sometimes I think, what if I did land a big interview, Alice with some big name, who knows? Are they really going to come on and tell us their real feelings about adoption? I don't know. Probably not. Anyway, that's just my aside if you're ever wondering why I haven't tried to get some super famous person on–just because the name of your book keeps staring at me, Famous Adopted People.
Before we recommend resources, is there anything else you want to share with us about your story or about your work? I just really want adoptees to hear from your heart so is there anything I missed asking you about that you want to get to? [00:37:00]
Alice Stephens: You didn't miss asking about it. I just didn't get to it. I just want to say that I am looking for my Korean mother. I went back to Korea with a group called Me & Korea and I went back on the Hapa tour. So we were all mixed-race Korean adoptees. And the woman who runs it, a lovely woman–Minyoung Kim– has nothing to do with adoption, but she's made it her life mission to get Korean adoptees reacquainted with Korea and she runs these tours. She took me and my husband one day just to search the neighborhood where I was born. We had a picture of my birth mother, my birth father, and we went to this neighborhood where older Korean women who used to live around the army camps lived. We knocked on their doors. We showed them the photo. None of them knew, but pretty soon we were like a [00:38:00] little parade of people going door to door, and all of them hoping for me. That just really, really touched me. We did find where I was born, which, for me, that's like my only connection to that time in my life. So it was very, very moving.
Also, I have found my half-brother through DNA. I found my birth father’s family through Ancestry. I got the results back that said: this person's your first cousin. It took me about six months to decide to contact her because I was very nervous about it, and once you open that box, you can't close it back up. But I did, and she right away knew who my birth father was. He is now deceased. But I have a half-brother. I have two half-siblings, and the half-brother and I are in close contact. He's a nice guy and we text a lot. And so that's been [00:39:00] great. And someday I hope to go to California where his family is from. And, it turns out that I'm a total mutt besides my half-Korean part. My birth father was Mexican-American. So I am like 15% Native American, 25% Spanish, Portuguese. I have some Northern European, I have 2% Ashkenazi Jew, 2% Congolese African blood. Oh, and I have 2% Neanderthal genes! So I'm just like all over the place.
Haley Radke: Who are they matching up with the Neanderthal genes? Sorry. We just did an episode about DNA testing a couple months ago. It's all very fascinating. Thank you for sharing that. I wish I could ask you more about it, but we have to do our resources now. Maybe next time. [00:40:00]
No one will be surprised that I will recommend your novel, Famous Adopted People. What a page-turner. It was a wild ride. There are some very uncomfortable things that happen. And when we, as a book club, dug in and were looking at all the symbolism and things, it was just very mind-opening. And I have this note to myself to remind me to mention this: There are some really stirring passages about adoptee rights and advocacy topics. I just felt it very comforting when I came across those because I'm always like, “Okay, if a normal (I don't know why I call 'em that) someone who's not connected to adoption, so not an adoptee, reads some of those things, I'm like, “Okay, hopefully they'll get it.” [00:41:00] So anyway, I really appreciated that and it is, like I said, a wild ride. I really enjoyed it. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it because, as you said, there's not too much adoptee fiction and so I literally had no idea going in what it was going to be like. And it was really great. I loved it. There was one part–I don't want to spoil anything. I'm not going to spoil it, but we did do a Book Club on it and if you're on the Adoptees On Patreon, you can go and hear that. It's so good. Loved it. And, I said I spent all this time reading your book reviews on the Washington Independent. I think people should go check those out too, because their reading list is just going to get filled right up. So thanks for that.
Alice Stephens: Thank you.
Haley Radke: Is there anything you want to tell us about your book? Or you can just go ahead and recommend your resource?
Alice Stephens: Okay, I thank you very much for that lovely talk-up of my book. I think you said everything that I'd want to say. I'm so glad that you liked it and I was so glad to be part of that Book Club. I've done a lot of book clubs before but I've never done an Adoptee Book Club, and it was just amazing to be able to [00:42:00] talk to people and not have to explain everything and not have to be the spokesperson for adoption. And I think one problem with my book is that people, adoptees and non-adoptees, approach it like this is going to be The fiction book about adoption. It's just one book. There's so much more to be said and it's such a huge topic, so complex. I just hope that a lot more adoptee writers can get published. I know there are a lot of them out there. One thing I want to quickly mention: this is very preliminary, but I'm hoping to start an adoption literary festival with Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello. We are in the preliminary stages of trying to organize an adoption literary festival for adoptee authors only. So hopefully we're going to do that and you'll be the first to know if we do.
Haley Radke: You let us know because we'll tell [00:43:00] everyone all about it. Alright, watch for that. Okay, what did you want to share with us today?
Alice Stephens: My resource is called Side by Side. You can find it at sidebysideproject (dot) com. And it is the project of Glenn and Julie Morey. Glenn Morey is a Korean adoptee and a filmmaker. He has this project where he interviewed a hundred Korean adoptees. It just so perfectly showcases how we are all so different and all the same. It's just a subsection of adoptees, Korean adoptees. Even within that subsection there is this huge array of stories. He interviews Korean orphans who never got adopted, and so everybody from Korean orphans to [00:44:00] people who got adopted, and just the stories are amazing. It's just the interview and the person speaking; it goes from maybe 10 minutes to an hour. And I am fascinated by every single minute. I'm going through it slowly because I can't just sit down and watch a hundred at a time. And I also like to have time in between to think about the stories and to also differentiate the people. But there is every adoption story there from the most horrific to the most fairytale. And there's every emotion, but every single person has that pain, that adoption knot that they had to either work through or that's still sitting there really tight in their chest. And so it's just amazing to see. And the validation that it's okay to [00:45:00] feel that way. It's okay that I felt this way my whole life. They did too. It is really great.
Haley Radke: That power of not feeling alone. Holy-moly, that's huge. It's so huge for us. The other thing I just wanted to mention, because most of us love listening to podcasts, Side by Side is also available on Audible, if you want to hear the stories. I think they announced that towards the end of last year. And it's now an Audible Original.
Alice Stephens: Oh, that's great.
Haley Radke: Yes. Very cool.
Alice Stephens: One thing about watching it, though, is that a lot of the adoptees are from other countries so another great thing is that you don't just get the American adoption story. The adoptees are from Denmark and France and so you get all of these adoption stories and different cultural approaches to the adoption. Though, they're all pretty much the same [00:46:00]. All the approaches to adoption are pretty much like: “You're adopted into this family, and that's it.” But yeah, it's just a fascinating document and I'm so glad that they did it.
Haley Radke: Awesome. I'm sure lots of people will be heading over there to check that out, and we will link it in the show notes. Speaking of, where can we connect with you online, Alice?
Alice Stephens: I have a website which is very convenient and easy to remember. It's famousadoptedpeople (dot) com.
Haley Radke: Perfect. And all of Alice's links will be in our show notes so you can follow her and all the places and the links to that are on her website as well. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us. I so enjoyed our conversation.
Alice Stephens: Thank you, Haley. Thank you so much for everything that you do for the adoptee community. I'm just so impressed by people like you who've been out there, and you getting your voice out there and gathering up all the other adoptees and giving us a place to come and feel like [00:47:00] a part of a community and feel like we're not weird and strange and unlovable and all those things. I really appreciate it and really admire you guys for doing this.
Haley Radke: My honor. Thanks so much.
Alice sent me one more link she wants you to know about. It's her piece recommending four novels that get adoption right. I've got it linked in the show notes for you. It'll help you find your next read after you finish Famous Adopted People.
As I mentioned briefly in my chat with Alice, she joined me and some of my Patreon supporters for a Book Club conversation about Famous Adopted People, which was stunningly insightful. I enjoyed it so much. If you'd like to access that or any of the other bonuses, I have for Patreon supporters, head to adopteeson.com/partner for more details. Without supporters like you, I can't sustainably make the show. I'm so grateful for those of you that are able to help keep it going. [00:48:00] One free way to help the show is to share this episode with just one person. Perhaps you have a friend that's a voracious reader and they may like to get a few suggestions from Alice.
Thanks for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.
