The Missing Stories of South Asian Adoption
For decades, thousands from the subcontinent were adopted abroad, mostly by white families. Why have they been forgotten?
When Charly B* was in kindergarten, her classmates often teased her about her darker skin and told her that her biological parents had thrown her away. It didn’t stop there. “My adoptive mother would often say things like, ‘You’d be a prostitute on the street if we hadn’t adopted you,’” Charly B*, who is ethnically Sri Lankan, told The Juggernaut. (We’ve anonymized her name because she believes her adoptive parents would be hurt if she shared her story publicly.) “It took me years to unlearn the belief that I owed them something just for being adopted.”
When many think of international adoption, they usually think of South Korea. Since the 1950s, about 200,000 Korean children have been adopted overseas, with the vast majority ending up in the U.S. People rarely speak of Indian, Bangladeshi, or Sri Lankan adoptees — even though India today is the second-largest source of international adoption in the U.S. For many South Asians, that’s made their stories even harder to piece together.