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HOMELAND TOURS: THE ISSUES AND THE CHALLENGES
(Originally published in The FACE Adoption
Quarterly, Summer 1997, and updated January 2007)
Marilyn C. Regier, Ph.D., LCSW-C
“I remember landing in Korea. As I came off the plane, the host-greeter
said softly, `Welcome home!’ I looked out at the sea of faces, and they
were all my face . . . everywhere I beheld my face . . . and they were
beautiful faces!”
With these words, a Korean-American adoptee recalls the Homeland Tour
experience of having her breath taken away by first impressions and that
initial sense of belonging. Indeed, a trip to one’s “homeland” is
enormously evocative, especially for an adoptee, and such tours are
increasingly becoming part of the international adoptive family’s
repertoire. Such families are usually inculcated early on with the belief
that showing respect for the child’s culture of origin is of utmost
importance. Popular ways to do so include special holiday celebrations,
ethnic cuisine, language study, and culture camps. Each family develops
its own style, and adoptive parents are often remarkably creative in
finding ways to weave the child’s cultural heritage into family life.
During the last several decades, the “Homeland Tour” (also variously known
as “Birth Land Tour,” “Motherland Tour,” and “Native Land Tour”) has
become the sine qua non of understanding one’s roots; indeed, many
consider it a rite of passage that will allow an individual to claim with
genuine pride his or her dual heritage. Most often associated with Korean
adoption, these tours annually attract hundreds of parents and children.
Trips to China, Colombia, India, Thailand, and other countries have also
been organized and will, no doubt, continue to reflect international
adoption trends. Such trips are generally undertaken with careful
planning, with many hopes and dreams, and often with some trepidation, as
well. Among the questions frequently asked by adoptive parents are: What
is the best age for a young person to go on the tour? Should parents
accompany their child? Is a group tour preferable to a family tour? Can
birth children come along? What kind of preparation do we need for the
tour? As adoption agencies acquire experience with Homeland Tours, a body
of knowledge is gradually emerging from which some modest lessons may be
learned. This article explores in a beginning way some of the special
issues and challenges presented by the Homeland Tour experience.
The tours with which I have been associated reflect the current trend
toward having children travel at a younger age, while also including
parents on the trip. On one trip to Korea, the youngest participant was
8-1/2 years old, while on Barker’s 2005 trip to Colombia, the youngest
person was 11 years old. On some tours, the oldest adopted person has been
only 16-1/2, while on others it is commonplace to see young people ages
20-25 signing up. Some observers have suggested that adoptees who are at
least in their early 20’s when they travel back will have more
appreciation for the country and more pride in their heritage. It is true
that when participants are pre-teens or young adolescents, most parents do
not expect their children to experience the trip as an epiphany or at some
profound level; rather, most parents view the trip as foundational, laying
the groundwork for the future. Less emphasis is placed on “search,” and
the themes and preparation are much different than if an adoptee were
anticipating meeting birth parents. To go straight to the birth parent
experience without a foundational trip places extraordinary psychological
pressure on the average young person. During Homeland Tours, young people
have had meaningful experiences, such as visiting the international
adoption agency or orphanage; reuniting with foster families; visiting
cities of birth; meeting physicians and midwives who delivered them;
receiving additional information from their files; participating in
“presentation ceremonies” in Colombia as new parents received their child;
or personally helping escort Korean-born babies to the United States and
into the waiting arms of adoptive parents. These experiences help the
young people understand more fully the adoption process through which they
themselves once became part of a permanent, loving family.
Is there a bottom-line age for participation? Allowing for developmental
and gender differences, most parents with whom I worked felt that children
under the age of ten missed quite a lot of the trip’s intent, though still
experiencing the trip as positive. As Brodzinski and others have noted,
children at the end of the “middle childhood” stage are less concrete and
more reflective than those in the earlier years of this stage. Yet parents
liked the idea of traveling earlier rather than later. One father
commented: “The sooner you go on the trip, the sooner you can incorporate
more of the culture into family life. Now if something is on the news
about Korea, my daughter and I can really relate to it.” Furthermore, by
having the experience at an earlier age, the adoptees are able to feel
more “normal” by having what everyone else seems to have, namely, as much
information as possible, as early as possible.
Traveling earlier rather than later obviously dictates that in most cases
at least one parent will also go on the tour. Some have argued that
parents must not be so overly involved that they interfere with the
adoptee’s finding his/her own destiny. Yet parental accompaniment also has
many salutary effects – sometimes even for older participants -- not the
least of which is offering the safety net of the family during a
challenging time. A 20-year-old girl traveling back to Colombia in the
mid-1990’s found that her initial dismay at sharing the trip with her
mother changed to relief: “I wanted to feel like this was my own personal
journey, and yet I wanted to know she was there. I needed her there to
support me, especially during the first week.” Furthermore, children often
harbor the notion that any curiosity about their roots means they are
somehow ungrateful or disloyal to their adoptive family. This fear is
diminished when parent and child are fellow travelers, for the child sees
the parent valuing the culture and affirming the search. This shared
experience has the potential to draw the adoptive parent and the child
closer. Finally, when parents travel with their children, they tend to
send a message not only to their children but also to the country; this
message has been articulated in another context by Lindy Gelber, founder
of Camp Sejong, who suggests that “Korea has not lost these children, it
has gained their families.”
Traveling in a group has strong appeal for most pre-teens and young adults
(regardless of adoptive/non-adoptive status). They value the group support
and the feeling of shared, normative experiences. Peer relationships loom
large at this age, and being with others who share the international
adoption experience protects from self-consciousness and, therefore, frees
them to be more fully engaged. While the tours have an American presence
about them that is readable, young people still report feeling less
conspicuous with a tour group than they might with only their family unit.
Thus, many Homeland Tour participants feel that they perhaps enjoyed the
best of both worlds: having a group or clique of peers, but also having
the “protection” of parents, albeit “walking half a block behind us.”
Since adoption issues are inevitably part of the trip, traveling with
other adoptees may also be helpful in de-personalizing the fact of
relinquishment and seeing that their experience is not unique. While the
group experience is usually helpful, nonetheless, some older and/or more
introspective adoptees may prefer more privacy. As one young person
commented: “I had too much to deal with to worry about interacting with
people all the time. This was a very emotional time for me. I wanted more
solitude and more down-time than offered by the typical tour.” Thus,
individual preferences can never be overlooked.
The size of tour groups varies widely. The Homeland Tour groups with which
I have been associated started small in size, with 20-25 participants,
counting adoptees, parents, and grandparents. In recent years, the number
of tour participants has grown to 35-40. As further growth is experienced,
it is often necessary to add additional staff support, and to divide
participants into multiple groups to keep size manageable and the service
personalized. Some of the oldest adoption agencies in the U.S. now sponsor
several Homeland Tours each summer, in order to be responsive to the
increasing requests for such services.
Parents often wonder whether to take siblings along. If two children were
adopted from the same country, or if the family composition includes a
birth child, parents may deliberate about how many children to take. For
birth children, such tours may enlarge their sensibilities about what it
means to be a global family, though unquestionably they will experience
the trip on a much different level than those who joined the family by
adoption. Furthermore, common sense dictates that if there are much
younger siblings in a family, it may be unwise to bring them, for the
average tour is fairly rigorous, and a young child’s needs might also
interfere with parent availability to the child who is the presumed focus
of the trip. In all cases, parents need to be good listeners, for the
adoptee often has strong feelings one way or the other about the inclusion
of siblings, while birth children may also weigh in with strong emotions.
Budgetary constraints, individual family dynamics, and agency/tour
philosophy will all impact the decision.
The agenda for homeland trips almost always includes as least two foci,
one cultural and the other adoption-related. Adequate preparation is
needed for each of these agendas if the trip is to be a truly positive
experience. Preparation for the cultural piece is similar to that
undertaken by any thoughtful family when they are about to experience
immersion in another culture. Such planning generally includes advance
study of maps, guide books, historical and political articles, and a
familiarizing of oneself with the currency and monetary system. Also
crucial is a careful understanding of rules of etiquette governing a
particular country, so as to conduct oneself in ways appropriate to the
cultural setting. In Korea, for example, it is important to realize that
gifts are not opened by the recipient in front of the giver, or to know
that it would be considered rude to turn one’s back on someone while
saying goodbye. Although younger participants do not generally undertake
intensive language study, most desire to master rudimentary conversational
phrases. Participants on tours to Latin American countries find that
computer home language programs enable them fairly quickly to acquire a
repertoire of basic Spanish phrases. Some families extend themselves a bit
further; for example, one father and daughter preparing for a tour found
that several summer months of studying Hangul at the Korean Embassy gave
them a certain comfort level in the country, while also demonstrating
respect for the culture. Experience would seem to point to the wisdom of
more rather than less language study, since participants consistently
observe that language can separate much more than they expected,
especially when the agenda is not just sight-seeing but trying to
reconnect with one’s past.
If the cultural issues require thoughtful advance planning, preparation
for the adoption focus requires even more careful preparation. One
exercise which can serve as a bridge between the tourist planning concerns
(where am I going?) and the adoption issues (who am I?) is to post a large
map of the country and help each young person locate with a pin or
name-tag the city in which he or she was born. In a transitional way, this
activity moves the group consciously but non-threateningly toward
distinguishing this trip as different from any other journey. Yes, I will
be a tourist, but the theme of this trip goes well beyond the family
cross-country trip we took last year in the old station wagon or SUV. Yes,
I am locating a city on a map, but this city is not where some monument is
located or where the finest souvenirs are to be found; this “place” is not
mere geography, but the place of my birth. Indeed, this is a trip that
will reconnect young persons with a past they often cannot remember except
in sensory impressions or screen memories, but about which they generally
have had a rich fantasy life.
In working with Homeland Tour participants, I have found the medium of
small groups most helpful (separate groups for parents and children).
Typically, two orientation groups were held prior to the summer departure;
we met again in September to de-brief and synthesize. Supplemental
one-on-one counseling was available through the agency both before and
after the trip. The children were afforded the opportunity to examine the
themes and issues important to them. Most stated that their parents had
initiated the idea of the journey, and many of them were at first
reluctant travelers. Within the group context, many fears were shared.
Some were experiencing recurrent dreams that the plane would crash; one
girl feared she would slide off the plane’s emergency exit ramp only to
find herself engulfed in an ocean of sharks. Another young woman dreamed
that she was bitten by an exotic fly and lacked the proper inoculation.
Still another girl worried that although it wasn’t “cool” to walk too
close to one’s parents, what if she became separated from her parents
while there? Several participants on tours to Colombia and Korea expressed
fear of being kidnapped by strangers; one expressed the fear that her
birth parent might see her on the street and kidnap her, while yet
acknowledging that this was an irrational fear. Without question, the most
commonly shared fear on several tours to Korea was that a full-scale war
would break out between North and South Korea during the Homeland Tour,
and that the children would be “unable to get back to our home” (emphasis
mine). Within the safety of our small groups, all these fears could be
expressed, acknowledged, and worked through, so that the trip might
ultimately be viewed as less frightening.
We role-played our way through many of the cultural situations and
adoption-related issues the children would encounter. Nowhere was this
exercise more important than in reference to the visit to a maternity
home, where an interpreter was to facilitate the exchange. The adoptees
dress-rehearsed the dialogue they anticipated with birth mothers who were
considering adoption. As they alternated the roles of birth parent and
adoptee, many were beginning to put themselves in the birth parents’
position and show appropriate empathy. They also anticipated being asked
if they were happily adopted and well-adjusted in America. After
returning, the families frequently wanted to reflect more on this
experience than on any other. The older teens and their parents found the
visits with birth mothers at maternity homes (at Esther’s Home in Korea,
and at the Hogar, the Marguerite D’Youville Home in Colombia) to be
extremely poignant. The visit helped them gain new insights into why a
birth parent might choose adoption for her child. One boy later suggested
to his mother that he wanted to send the maternity home residents some
postcards. His mother thought he meant souvenir postcards, but he
corrected her, explaining that he wanted to send them blank postcards so
that they could write to their birth children after placement. From group
discussions with the adoptees, it was clear that they had gained fresh
insights regarding the birth parent perspective.
Parents or tour organizers are sometimes tempted to prescribe uniform
activities for participants. Yet, because children have different
temperaments and varying talents, it is probably unwise to regiment
unduly. For example, journaling is often recommended, and some parents
have even successfully done side-by-side journaling with their children.
For some children, however, journaling is tedious or painful, and they may
prefer photography, artwork, dictation into a tape recorder, souvenir
collection, ticket stubs, postcards, and the like. In the same manner,
tours should offer some optional activities, rather than having everyone
in lock step.
Parent orientation and support are equally as important as that provided
for the adoptees. Parents, too, experience a mixture of anticipation and
angst. Will this trip bring their family comfort or pain? For various
reasons, friends and relatives may caution them against such trips, and
parents wonder how to deal with this. The pain of infertility may also be
revisited. Some may worry that the tour is “the beginning of the end,”
that is, that their children will feel the pull of country, culture, and
birth parent, and leave the nest forever. Moreover, for many adoptive
parents, the international option once perhaps offered the possibility of
distancing oneself from birth parents. Over the years, birth parents may
have been replaced with safer discussions of “the mother country,” foster
mothers, or orphanage surrogate parents. A Homeland Tour, however, reminds
them of the reality that they – like their domestic-adoptive-parent
counterparts -- are truly members of a special kinship network known as
the “adoption triad” or the “adoption circle.” Finally, within the context
of the orientation groups, parents also wanted to talk about the
possibility that previously undisclosed or new history might be available
in their children’s overseas file. Through additional consultation with
social workers, parents could explore whether the children – most of whom
were minors – were developmentally ready to absorb new information, as
well as address confidentiality issues and birth parents’ rights.
The imagery of “life as a journey” is a favorite one. If we all perceive
ourselves as being “on the way,” this feeling is in fact often more
profound for the adopted person. Homeland Tours capture the
life-as-a-journey metaphor in a compelling way. Whether as adoption
professionals or as adoptive parents, we need to make certain that these
journeys are age-appropriate, foster self-esteem, and above all, equip
young people to deal with the issues themselves in the future. Adoptive
parents need to examine carefully the tour’s auspices, experience,
staffing, cost, itinerary, philosophy, goals, and follow-up supports. For
the trip to have maximum benefits, the agency needs to provide ongoing
supports for parents and adoptees after they return. Agency-sponsored
tours have the additional benefit of providing children with ongoing
opportunities to socialize at agency-sponsored events.
Homeland Tours are not magic nor are they an “instant fix” for every
identity crisis. Many adoptees will want to return a second or third time
to continue “connecting the dots.” But with careful planning, the Homeland
Tour can be a pivotal experience, with the potential rewards no less than
reclaiming the past, celebrating the present, and looking with hope toward
the future.
©2007 Marilyn C. Regier, Ph.D., LCSW-C. All rights reserved worldwide. May
not be reproduced in print or electronically, in its entirety or any part
thereof, without the expressed permission of the author. Originally
published in The FACE Adoption Quarterly, Summer 1997, and updated
January 2007. Dr. Regier is Executive Director of The Barker Foundation, a
private, non-profit adoption agency licensed in Washington, DC, Maryland,
and Virginia. For permission guidelines, please contact the author at
mregier@barkerfoundation.org.
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