Transracial adoptees say their parents need to talk to them about race

"Kim Long lives in Shoreline, but she grew up in Solon, Iowa, a town of about 1,100 people.

"I was the first person of color most people in my town had ever seen," said Long. "And I grew up on a 200-acre hog farm. Like, my culture is literally apple pie, weenie roasts and fish fries."

Apple pie and fish fries in Iowa are cultural points that have nothing to do with where Long was born, in Busan, South Korea. She was relinquished as a toddler with little identifying information and sent to a white family in the early 1980s. She came to the Midwest speaking the Korean language, eating staples like kimchi, a Korean staple made from fermented cabbage, and she likely slept on the floor as many children did at that time."

"Because of the Korean War, there are more Korean adoptees like Long in the U.S. than any other group – an effort started right here in the Pacific Northwest by a man named Harry Holt.

The adoption agency Holt International is still in operation today. Yet, even after five decades, adoptees like Long still face discrimination – experiences her family in Iowa didn’t share or prepare her for as she became an all-American girl.

Long says she felt out of place all the time, and it's still happening. Long just had her first baby, Juniper, and at the very first visit to the pediatrician, she was smacked in the face with a microaggression, a subtle discriminatory act. The Seattle office staff assumed her name wasn’t Kim Long, and instead, someone changed it to Kim Wong."