Mary Cardaras, editor, Voices of the Lost Children of Greece: Oral Histories of Cold War International Adoption. London and New York: Anthem Press. 2023. Pp. xi + 192. 30 illustrations. Paper $35.00.
It is rarely acknowledged that the practice of transnational adoption of children started as a British practice of outplacement of UK-born children to British commonwealth nations (Selman, 16) beginning as early as 1618 (Hoksbergen, 87). Though adoption may have been socially configured very differently during that time, adopted individuals then and those adopted in the more widely recognized contemporary period of transnational adoption practice beginning at the end of World War II have the common experience of being administratively erased and forgotten in the national annals of history within both sending and receiving countries. Early postwar transnational adoption practice in the United States was marked by the involvement of faith and other charitable organizations attempting to expand their missions while taking advantage of lax or nonexistent international adoption policy (Herman, 217). This mission-led work under the banner of American benevolence began to build an American international adoption industry that focused more on supposed child saving than child welfare, creating systems which prioritized child removal and swift adoptive placement over retention of familial or cultural identity for adoptees. It is into this complicated historical, social and cultural landscape that Voices of the Lost Children of Greece: Oral Histories of Cold War International Adoption enters.
Author, book editor, journalist, Communications professor and Greek American transnational adoptee, Mary Cardaras, addresses the general lack of information about adoption within her adoptee community of over 4,000 Greek American transnational adoptees by turning to Greek adoptees themselves to record this important history. In addition to editing the volume, Cardaras contributes an introduction, a conclusion, and an autobiographical chapter of her own. She also includes an introductory chapter by a non-adoptee, Greek history and adoption scholar Gonda Van Steen.
The fifteen autobiographical accounts in Voices include adoptees born in Greece and adopted to the United States in the 1950s to the early 1960s. Cardaras has organized a group of authors that represent a diversity of Greek adoption experiences: men, women, gay, straight, adopted into ethnically Greek families or not, those with close and estranged relationships to adoptive parents, those who had searched for birth family and not, those who had found birth family and not. The fifteen adoptee authors write with clarity and honesty in telling sometimes very moving stories of their experiences and feelings about their lives as well as their memories of their American and Greek families. Many write about the profound but often unacknowledged loss they experienced, including family, language, culture, and their own identities and memories of pre-adoption. Some recount experiences of abuse within adoptive families, which are especially difficult for adoptees to square with the dominant narrative that adoptees should be grateful for their adoptions.
Most also write about their search and reunion with their Greek birth family. The majority of these adoptees were able to locate members of their biological families, though it is not clear to me if this is typical of the greater Greek American adoptee population, or if this might be one of the key factors that brings these adoptees into adoptee-centered communities, as is the case in the Korean American adoptee community. Though the life experiences in this volume are specific to these individual adoptee authors and to conditions of their adoptions from postwar Greece, thematic similarities between these authors and transnational adoptees adopted from other countries during later periods in history are striking. I immediately recognized these storytellers’ experiences of erasure, loss, invisibility, and secrecy as well as the tools they have used to recover their histories and connections to Greece, including community building with other adoptees, networking on and offline, DNA testing, and self-education, as universal to the transnational adoptee experience.
Van Steen’s chapter provides valuable context around the political climate that shaped Greek transnational adoption practice, or perhaps more accurately, lack of cohesive practice, marked instead by the chaotic and likely corrupt environment present in a politically charged postwar environment. Though Greece and other transnational adoption-sending nations may have been attempting some form of postcrisis child welfare intervention, in practice, Van Steen notes that the birth mothers of Greek adoptees were often some of the most vulnerable members of society who were, therefore, least able to prevent their children from being taken away. Unfortunately, taking advantage of state policies based in misogynistic cultural norms to procure children from disempowered populations of women has remained a consistent characteristic of the international adoption industry ever since. Van Steen dedicates almost half of her chapter to arguing for the importance of adoptee autobiographical storytelling as a way to recover the intentionally lost histories of this population of Greek immigrants. She cites the value of self-determination in any marginalized community and points to the power of autobiography and memoir writing in the much larger Korean American adoptee community, placing the nascent work of Greek adoption studies in conversation with a growing interdisciplinary field of Critical Adoption studies.
As a Korean adoptee and a scholar of the Korean adoption experience within Critical Adoption studies, I am struck by the many commonalties between the stories of Greek and Korean American adoptees as well as the politically and economically dependent relationship between these sending counties (as noted by Van Steen) and the United States upon which the surrender of children seemed to be predicated. This work does not much engage with what these adopted adults meant and mean to Greece or the Greek people (though these important questions are more fully addressed in Van Steen’s own monograph on this topic), and I was left wondering how and where this adoptee population fits in both Greek and Greek American identity and history. This is on my mind as a scholar who has worked, with varying degrees of success, to find a place for Asian adoptees and Asian Adoption studies in Asian America and Asian American studies, respectively. In her conclusion, Cardaras notes a number of adoptee-centered policy changes at the national and international level, which if enacted and followed could certainly benefit the half million transnationally adopted individuals in the United States. However, like me, she seems to acknowledge there is still much work to do to address the unmet needs of adoptees created by our ongoing transnational adoption experiment.
Kim Park Nelson
Winona State University
July 17, 2024
Kim Park Nelson is an Associate Professor of Ethnic studies at Winona State University. She is a Korean American adoptee whose scholarship and advocacy has focused on the experience of American transnational/transracial adoptees and building the field of Critical Adoption Studies. Her 2016 monograph, Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism, is an ethnographic exploration of Korean Adoptee experience.
Works Cited
Herman, Ellen. 2008. Kinship by Design: A History in the Modern United States. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Hoksbergen, Rene. 2000. “Changes In Attitudes in Three Generations of Adoptive Parents: 1950-2000.” In Intercountry Adoption: Developments, Trends and Perspectives, edited by Peter Selman, 86–101. London: British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering.
Selman, Peter. 2000. “The Demographic History of Intercountry Adoption.” In Intercountry Adoption: Developments, Trends and Perspectives, edited by Peter Selman, 15–39. London: British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering.