Adoptee Voices: Hollee McGinnis

Hollee McGinnis, PhD, MSW, has spent the past 30 years advocating for adoptees through her work as a professor, community organizer, policy expert and researcher. In honor of AANHPI Heritage Month this May, Hollee spoke with Holt recently about her past and current projects, her goals and her dreams for all transracial adoptees.

Hollee McGinnis was born as Lee Hwa Yeong in South Korea in the early 1970s. Her birth parents did not marry, but Hollee was raised for a time by her birth mother and paternal grandparents, who were seaweed fishermen on an island off the coast of Incheon. When Hollee was 2, her birth family could no longer care for her. So they placed her in the care of a warm and loving couple who ran an orphanage on Deokjeok Island, where she lived with 15 other children. As Hollee recalls, the orphanage was more like a foster home. 

In May 1975, at the age of 3 ½, Hollee came to the U.S. to live with her adoptive family — her parents and two older siblings who were biological to her adoptive parents. Growing up in the suburbs of New York City, Hollee had not considered a career related to adoption. But after she established the adult adoptee organization Also-Known-As in 1996, the trajectory of her life’s work began to change. For the past 30 years, Hollee has been a professor, scholar, writer, policy expert, community organizer and researcher whose work has centered on adoptive and racial/ethnic identity, adverse childhood experiences and complex trauma, cultural loss, and the life course of adoption and adoptee-led mutual aid groups.

Earlier this month, in honor of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month, Hollee spoke with Holt about her early days in the U.S., her involvement in establishing Also-Known-As, her return to Korea as a researcher and scholar, her current passions and interests, and the legacy she hopes to leave behind. Here are some excerpts from the interview.

Hollee, thank you so much for speaking with us. We’re so grateful for all the work you’ve done for the adoption community over the years. So let’s start at the beginning of your life in the U.S. You arrived here at 3½ years of age, speaking no English and thrust into a completely new environment. What was that like for you?

Back in the 1970s, it was assumed that children were blank slates, that we were resilient and we would just handle things. There wasn’t an understanding of how traumatizing it was for a child to be separated from familiar people and places, and experience disrupted attachments. 

When I arrived in the U.S., I was deeply attached to the people who cared for me in South Korea. In fact, a few years after I left Korea, the director of my orphanage wrote a letter to my parents, describing the day that he and his wife brought me to the airport. I had been escorted to a point [at the airport] where they could no longer see me, but I broke loose and ran back to them. I grabbed onto the legs of the orphanage director’s wife and cried, “Eomma! Eomma!,” or “Mommy! Mommy!” Basically, I was fighting to not get on the plane.

In the first months of being in my new adoptive home, I often ran to the front door saying something in Korean that my mother didn’t understand. Later, she learned I was saying, “I want to go home.” I also wanted my older sister to sleep in the room with me the summer I arrived, which she did for a time. That’s because in Korea, young children do not sleep by themselves until they are much older.

I arrived in May, and by September, I was speaking English and able to go to nursery school. I was able to adjust, and my parents’ love did settle me down. But something inside me was broken.

So what happened next for you?

Growing up, I had to shut the door on my past as a coping mechanism and just start my new life. I identified as Hollee McGinnis, part of an Irish Catholic family. I knew I was adopted, but it only came up in conversation if someone pointed it out, or if I had to explain how I got into my family. There were always these little nibbles, though, these microaggressions. For example, my parents and two siblings and I would go to a restaurant, and a waiter would ask if we needed a table for four — not five, not realizing I was part of the family. 

In college, I realized people were expecting things of me because of my race that I could not deliver. They would speak to me in Chinese or Japanese, or praise me on my English. I thought I would major in Asian studies so I could learn about all the things people expected me to know because of my appearance. But then I thought, well, that’s just fulfilling a racial stereotype! So I changed my major to American studies, focusing mostly on 20^th century race relations. I hoped to better understand why people were interacting with me based on my race and not my lived experiences.

In college, I realized people were expecting things of me because of my race that I could not deliver. They would speak to me in Chinese or Japanese, or praise me on my English.

After college, I was working in New York City when I learned about a three-month leadership training program. As part of the program, we were asked to design something for our community. Since I had studied international adoption and its history as an undergrad, and since I was hearing news stories about Chinese adoptees coming to live in America, I thought this could be a compelling focus of the project. I thought it would have been helpful for me to have had mentors or seen other families like my own when I was growing up, so that was the impetus for this project — to find adult adoptees to mentor this upcoming generation of international transracial adoptees. And that’s how the organization Also-Known-As got started in 1996.

It’s amazing that Also-Known-As is still around today. How has the organization changed?

Once we got started, our mission grew because we realized we needed more than just a mentorship program. So we focused on three things: empowering adoptees to understand their own lived experiences, building bridges back to our countries of origin and to ourselves as a way of healing, and transforming conversations about race. As I began building a community of adoptees for Also-Known-As, I started to feel that adoption was much more at the forefront instead of just in the background of my life. That’s when my career focus started to shift.

(Editor’s note: To delve deeper into her work in the adoption community, Hollee returned to school to earn a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University, completed a clinical fellowship at the Child Study Center at Yale University and worked as the policy director at the Donaldson Adoption Institute, with an emphasis on program development, public policy and mental health care. Then in 2013, Hollee returned to Korea for 18 months to conduct research on children living in orphanages as part of her doctoral dissertation.)

What prompted you to return to South Korea to study children living in orphanages?

In 2000, Also-Known-As planned a trip to Korea for adopted adults and I went as one of the tour guides and mentors. We visited an orphanage, where all the children were 6 and under. It was the first time I’d been back to an orphanage since I was a baby. When I was getting my PhD, I wanted to research the mental health outcomes of adolescents in orphanages in Korea. One of my core questions was, Do children in orphanages experience birth parent loss in the same way that adopted children do?

David Brodzinsky [professor emeritus of clinical and developmental psychology at Rutgers University] was one of the first people to really study birth parent loss as a core trauma or a core stressor of adoption. He found that it correlated with higher anxiety and depression in adopted children. So I was curious if this would be true for the kids in the orphanage too. They ranged in age from 12 to about 18 or 19, and I was struck by the fact that 80% of the kids in my study had some contact with their birth parents. But regardless of contact, they still experienced birth parent loss, and in my data at least, it was found to correlate to higher trauma symptoms. One of the things that came up was that the children didn’t know why they were in the orphanage, why they had been abandoned. I think this is a core question for adopted people too. (You can read more about Hollee’s research in South Korea here.)

What did living in South Korea mean for you personally?

I always had a dream to go back to South Korea and live there for at least a year. So personally, this was very special because I went with my husband, who is also adopted from South Korea, and my oldest son, who was 6 at the time we arrived. It was a really profound, foundational experience that really solidified the subtleties of being in another culture. After that experience, I felt that I was truly bicultural — that year and a half put that deeply in my bones.

When we came back to the U.S., the experience seeded in me a desire to eat the food I ate in Korea because I really developed a palate for it. So that motivated me to cook more Korean food at home, including kimchi. And now I teach kimchi-making workshops from time to time, both in my home and on retreats!

That sounds so interesting. What do those classes involve?

For many years, I felt like an imposter, someone who was “performing” Korean culture when I tried to do things that were Korean. Inside me, I felt like I’m not a Korean Korean, like people who live in Korea are. When I approached culture only from my mind, I thought… ‘I didn’t grow up in Korea. I didn’t grow up with Korean parents. I didn’t eat Korean food every day.’ But when I realized that if I could let go of those thoughts, I could actually touch this authentic part of myself that says, ‘Of course, you’re Korean. What are you talking about?’

So in my classes, I use the power of making kimchi as a healing process for adoptees. We let go of the imposter syndrome, the thoughts that say, ‘How can I make someone else’s food?’ And we reclaim and re-indigenize ourselves to our ancestral wisdom through our bodies, hearts and souls.

That’s beautiful! What else have you been working on these days?

One of the things I’ve been interested in is how complex trauma and early adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in adoptees can correlate with physical health and mental health challenges and problems as we age. Most of the research on adoptees stops by the time we’re 20 or 30, so we’ve not looked at these long-term health aspects.

Currently, I’m leading a research study called Mapping the Life Course of Adoption Project, which examines the health, wellbeing and importance of adoptee connections in adulthood. In 2023, we surveyed 465 adoptees over the age of 18, who were adopted domestically, internationally or through foster care. The average age of the survey participant was 36, although we did have a few people in their 40s, 50s and even 60s. We’re analyzing the data now and finding that the average number of ACEs is higher in the adoptee survey participants than in the general population — and we’re assessing what impact that might have on our long-term physical and mental health.  

Through the Mapping the Life Course of Adoption Project, we want to leverage the power of research to benefit all adoptees, including those in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s.

Complex trauma can show up in in the body in many ways. For example, I have a group of eight close women friends, all adopted from Korea, who I’ve known since my 20s. Five out of the eight of us developed breast cancer in our 40s. Is this related to the fact that the rate of breast cancer is rising among Asian American women in general and at earlier ages? Or is this also somehow connected to our adverse childhood early experiences? We just don’t know because the research isn’t there. That’s part of what we hope to accomplish with this study and others in the future. We want to leverage the power of research to benefit all adoptees, including those in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s.

Hollee, you’ve done such important work in so many aspects of your life. Is there a particular motto you live by or legacy you’d like to leave behind?

I think for now I’m trying to live by my principles and my ideals, which are to be fully present to my children, my community, the people who matter to me. I think that’s what I would want to most be remembered for — that I lived a life that wasn’t just lip service, right? That I lived a life aligned with my values and wish for all people to believe in their own beauty and worth.

Finally, as we wrap up Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, can you share something about the importance of elevating AANHPI voices — and in particular, AANHPI adoptee voices?

Yes, of course. Adoptees who are of Asian ancestry are a minority within a minority. So it’s very important for us to elevate our experiences. It’s also important for us to connect to how we are immigrants as well, and a part of the Asian American experience. Even though some of our adoptive parents immigrated a long time ago, those legacies of how Asians came into the United States, and our histories as Asian Americans, impact our lived experiences because we walk in Asian bodies. While I also dream that we live in a world where a person is not judged by the color of their skin, the truth is the only way for us to get there is to see how our society has not operated this way. Only when we see how color and race have shaped how we treat each other and ourselves can we move to this dream for all of us.