When my husband Ralf and I adopted our first child, Paul, in 1989, we knew virtually nothing about raising a child from another culture. We knew very little about Paul’s birth country Korea, had no connections with the Korean American community and knew few Korean adoptive families. “Unprepared” doesn’t begin to describe how little we knew about our impending parental experience.

That’s not to say we weren’t eager to learn. But even as recently as 15 years ago, when we began our adoption journey, the focus of transcultural parenting was on the “parenting” more than the “transcultural.” The prevailing attitude at that time seemed to be to let things take their course, and to let our children guide us to the right amount of Korean-ness to weave into our family’s fabric. We were taught not to “force” Korean culture on our children. Discussion of genetic ties was practically nonexistent, and like other adoptive parents, we felt safe adopting from Korea because there was less chance our children’s birth families could attempt to “reclaim” them. We became “tourist parents,” got more familiar with Korean history, geography and food, but didn’t delve much deeper into the Korean American community than that. We were told that “love would conquer all,” and that made us experts.

When Paul arrived in September 1989 and was placed in our arms for the first time, everyone else in the airport literally faded away. The only ones who remained were Paul, my husband, me — and Paul’s birth mother. Looking at our new son, I could picture her with the same eyes, him with the same mouth. Even if we never met, we were bound to one another in a way that no policy, social convention or personal choice could ever change. How strange that this woman I had once feared in the abstract could become so real so quickly. Mara, our second child, came two years later, and because of my experience with Paul, I felt much more connected to where she had come from.

An experience in 1992 really opened my mind. A good friend and I had an opportunity to travel to Korea as escorts for our adoption agency. Our itinerary included visits to my children’s birth towns — Seongnam (where Paul was born), and Jeongson (Mara’s).

It’s hard to explain how wonderfully ordinary Jeongson is. Apart from the gorgeous mountainous countryside that literally rings the town, there’s little else to distinguish it. We passed shops, apartments, a small hotel, the police station, city hall and a market. Laughing children rode by on bikes, couples walked hand in hand and music wafted out of open windows. Any one of them could have been a neighbor or friend of our daughter’s birth family, or even her birth mother herself. Korean people and everyday Korean life could never again be brushed aside as distant concepts.

Ralf and Margie with their children Paul and Mara at Soraksan in Korea in 2001.

I realized suddenly that this place, these people, could have been Mara’s life, had circumstances been different. But they were lost to her forever. Even if she returned one day, or met her birth family, she could never fully regain the life she would have known there. The enormity and gravity of those losses hit hard.