Transcript
Mark Raffield – Korean Adoptee
Interview by Miae Kim
Date: 7/25/04
1 Disc, 19:31, 2 Tracks
TRACK 1 – 13:55
M: Hello, my name is Mark Raffield.
K: Introduce yourself.
M: Yes. My name is Mark Raffield. I am a Korean adoptee. I was adopted when I was 13 years old and have lived on the east coast and currently live in San Francisco.
I was adopted in 1980 when I was 13 years old.
I am 37 years old.
I was adopted because my father had passed away at a young age and my mother could not support us financially due to her illness.
I was adopted into a professional family. Both of my parents are professors. They don’t have kids of their own. At the time, they were looking to adopt a young girl and while they were applying they discovered the young girl had an older brother. And once they learned the older brother was interested in joining his sister they decided to adopt both. So we came together. At the time they were living in Pennsylvania. We lived there for the iniail there years and then moved around quite a bit and moved ot Tennessee and then moved again to rhode island. After spending ga year there I moved to California to go to college.
In some sense, yes. Being 13 obviously you have the lanaguge and cultural barriers but in some sense it was an easier transition for me because at 13 you already have a sense of self an dalready undersand there are obstacles to overcome. You have more tools within yourself to deal with obstacles. The obstacle was the cultural barrier in America, the language barrier. But ultimately the positives outway the negatives. I was able to assimilate rather uickly.