Torn Between Two Cultures

For Katie Putes, the first egg she ever ate was a symbolic one. She refused them until she was 2 or 3 until one was brought to her table, sunny-side up atop a bowl of bi bim bap at a local Kim Chee Restaurant.

“I actually remember this,” says Putes. “I remember thinking I should eat the egg because I’m Korean and this is what Korean people must eat.”

Born in South Korea and adopted by a loving Kaneohe family at 3 months old, Putes grew up knowing other Korean adoptees in school and around the neighborhood, but she wrestled with questions of self-identity.

“When I was in high school and going through a bunch of identity struggles, I really wished there were other Korean adoptees I could reach out to that would understand where I’m coming from,” says Putes, who’s now a 23-year-old University of Hawaii senior. “I had one person like that but it would have been nice ... to be able to have support in that type of aspect.”

Today Putes and Ji In Lugtu, a Korean adoptee from Iowa, have helped organize a group of adult Korean adoptees that aims to do just that.

“We’re all Korean adoptees, we all have different experiences, we’re all looking for different things,” Putes says of the group, Korean Adoptees of Hawaii, or KAHI. “Some of us are here just to socialize, some of us are here to do in-depth things like birth search, discuss adoption issues. We just want to provide resources and networking in whatever way we can and provide that community support.”

Still in its first year, the group’s 25 members range in age from 18 to 46 and meet for yakiniku dinners, pau hana socials and Korean cooking lessons, to name a few.

“Right now as we’re getting started we’re doing more social activities just to get people interested and coming back and to build friendships within the group,” says Lugtu, a 30-year-old freelance writer and editor of educational books. “That’s not to say we’re not going to branch out in the future if we have enough people and we have enough resources.”

Plans for branching out include community service, possibly mentoring young Korean adoptees and offering funds for travel or study abroad to Korea, and seeking sponsorship to carry out those programs.

Next August, about eight members plan to attend an international gathering of Korean adoptees in Seoul, where 700 people are expected to gather for presentations and workshops by adoptees; a research conference; art exhibitions, talks and performances; a football Adoptee World Cup; fashion shows; PC gaming; social and cultural activities; sightseeing tours; concerts and parties.

Korean adoptees were raised in all corners of the globe. In the 1950s Sweden was the first country to adopt Korean infants and children as a result of the Korean War. An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Koreans have been adopted worldwide.

Although KAHI doesn’t focus on birth searches, it’s something that both Putes and Lugtu have successfully done.

Putes reunited with her Korean family last year while studying abroad in South Korea. She visited her family in the port city of Ulsan, a five-hour train ride southeast from Seoul, and learned she’s the youngest of seven children.

“When I found out I had two brothers, four sisters and 11 nieces and nephews ... that was kind of crazy,” says Putes, whose Korean name, Mee Joo, was given to her by her adoption agency.

While there, her family gathered for a studio portrait and placed Putes center stage, behind her seated parents and surrounded by all six of her siblings, two in-laws and 10 nieces and nephews. Her adoptive parents and birth parents have since met.

Lugtu, meanwhile, learned she has three older Korean sisters. Her first meeting with her birth parents was an emotional one. Her mother cried the whole time “asking me for my forgiveness and saying how sorry she was,” Lugtu recalls. “My birth father was more traditional. ... He wasn’t very emotional. He kept telling my mother to stop crying and he didn’t look me in the eye. He was just looking down at the table and reciting that we were poor, we didn’t know what to do, we were very poor.”

While not every birth search is successful, Putes and Lugtu both say meeting their birth families was a positive experience that brings with it its own challenges in which some questions are answered and new ones arise.

“It’s kind of like a grieving process where you have to realize that even though you’ve found them, you’ve also lost something like a history with them,” Lugtu says. “My (Korean)

sisters, grew up as sisters and they’re best friends. I’m like the new kid and I don’t know anything about them ...

“You might look the same and you might have similar mannerisms, but you don’t know anything about them. Overall I’m really happy about a lot of things that I found out, but also it’s really difficult and there’s a lot of sadness that goes along with it,” says Lugtu, who was raised in a small town in Iowa by adoptive parents who had two children of their own. She also has an older sister, no blood relation, who was also adopted from Korea.

But it wasn’t until work took Lugtu to Minnesota, home to an estimated 12,000 Korean adoptees, that she began making connections with other adoptees.

“Suddenly it was like a light turned on,” she says. “I was like ‘Oh, these are my people,’like my own little family tree before I had met my birth family.”

That’s where groups like KAHI come in. “What we’re trying to do, and what other Mainland groups have, is fill a gap for people who don’t have that connection elsewhere,” Lugtu says. “When you have a group, then you have so many people who just instantly know what you’ve gone through. You don’t have to explain (yourself), you don’t have to try to bring people up to speed. Everybody just knows where you’re coming from.”
Events are planned for Jan. 15 and 20. For more information, e-mail KAHI at ; a web-site will be coming soon at kahawaii.org

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