Where Y'all Really From

Sarah Trainor Graves | 'Four Typed Lines'


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After the Korean War, there was a sudden increase in Korean-born babies being adopted by families in Europe, Canada and the United States. By the late 1990s, that number had reached over 200,000. Now, those babies are adults, grappling with big questions about identity and belonging.


Sarah Trainor Graves was born in South Korea, adopted by an American family, and raised in Louisville. In this episode, she talks with Charlene Buckles about how having kids can change the way transracial adoptees think about their own roots.


In 2018, Sarah's oldest child, Miles, was born. "I remember someone telling me, Miles is the first person that you share DNA with that you're going to meet," Sarah says. "There was a sense of pride there, something that I had never felt before," she says. "He looks like me. I look this way."


But she knew he would eventually start asking the kinds of questions she wasn't sure how to answer, yet.


"Why don't Grammy and Poppy, my parents, why don't they look like you? Or why why do we look this way? I was totally ill prepared to answer those questions," she says.


Sarah dove into learning more about her own history and getting more in touch with her cultural identity -- a journey she says she's still on. "Because if I don't know who I am, and if I don't know where I come from, I can't raise a child that's half Korean."

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Where Y'all Really FromBy Louisville Public Media

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