Season 7, Episode 5: Matthew Rodriguez and Fact Versus Fiction
Release Date: 11/10/2023
Season 7, Episode 26: Alicia Soon Hershey - I am Not My Trauma
Adapted™ Podcast
I sit down with Alicia Soon Hershey, 41, a Korean transnational adoptee now living in Barcelona. Soon Hershey was the very first adoptee interviewed on the podcast back in 2016 and our conversation book-ends the podcast in the 165th episode (!). We get a chance to hear how she has evolved in the past eight years and her outlook for life now that she is a mother herself.
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Season 7 Episode 25: Eleana Kim and the Politics of Belonging for Korean Adoptees
Adapted™ Podcast
Korean-American cultural anthropologist Eleana Kim talks about her research that went into the seminal imprint "Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging," Duke University Press, 2010.
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Season 7, Episode 24: Geoffrey Winder - Fluidity in Identity
Adapted™ Podcast
Geoffrey Winder (born Jong Ke-Bin) (he/him), 42, of Oakland, CA, shares some of his story as a queer Black Korean transnational and transracial adopted man and about his activism in queer advocacy, adoptee community, and leadership spaces.
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Season 7, Episode 23: Mirae KH Rhee - A Running Dragon
Adapted™ Podcast
Mirae Kate-hers Rhee, 48, is a transnational, transcultural artist and adopted Korean who uses her socio-political artwork and performance to investigate concepts like identity and belonging.
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Season 7, Episode 22: Sarah Harris - Camptowns and Belonging
Adapted™ Podcast
Korean mixed-race adoptee Sarah Harris, 54, of Los Angeles, shares her story of visiting Korea and finding the place where she felt truly rooted.
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Season 7, Episode 21: Delight Roberts - Marrying into a Korean-American Family
Adapted™ Podcast
Korean adoptee Delight Roberts, 52, talks about marrying into a Korean-American family and the challenges and benefits that provided her. Some were surprising – like table eating etiquette – but all of Roberts’ experiences from childhood bullying to having future in-laws who didn’t approve of her because she is adopted, have strengthened Roberts’ resolve to live the life of her choice.
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Season 7, Episode 20: Wyatt Tuell - An Unconventional Family
Adapted™ Podcast
Wyatt Tuell, 45, is a Korean-American adoptee who was raised outside Omaha, Nebraska with a Korean immigrant adoptive mother and a white American adoptive father who was much older than his mother. Growing up in the 80s, Wyatt often felt different from his white school peers around him and was sometimes teased for being Korean. At home, his family was very close and loving, which he credits today for the choices he's made in life.
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Season 7, Episode 19: Kit Myers - Ghostly Kinship
Adapted™ Podcast
Kit Myers, 42, is a transracial Hong Kong adoptee and assistant professor in the Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Merced. In this interview, we talk about Myers' search for his birth mother and feelings he's had of having a 'ghostly' or ambiguous kinship with someone he doesn't know. We also talk about his upcoming imprint, " Violence of Love, Race, Adoption and Family in the United States."
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Season 7, Episode 18: Nik Nadeau - Meeting My Birth Mother 2
Adapted™ Podcast
I continue the conversation with Nik Nadeau, 36, a Korean adoptee who is in reunion with his Korean birth mother. He is a secret, unable to meet his half-siblings who are also in their 30s, or be acknowledged by his mother, publicly. His relationship with his mother is qualified by language barriers, time and mutual grief, and love. We start off this episode with Nadeau recalling the experience of when he first introduced his then-girlfriend, a bilingual Korean-American, to his Korean mother.
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Season 7, Episode 17: Nik Nadeau - Meeting My Birth Mother
Adapted™ Podcast
Nik Nadeau, 36, met his Korean birth mother 14 years ago. In this episode, he talks about his creative writing process and about how he's unlocked feelings about the reunion and his own identity as a transnational adopted person.
info_outlineKorean adoptee Matthew Rodriguez, 43, is trying to make sense of his adoption story. For years, it's been clouded by stories told to him and those he told himself, even if they weren't accurate. It was a means to survive. But Rodriguez, whose adoptive parents are white and Mexican American, has his own memories. And now in his 40s, he's learning how to feel comfortable being himself and with the truth.