Hollee McGinnis
Hollee McGinnis is a professor, community organizer, and the founder of Also-Known-As, a non-profit adult intercountry adoptee organization based in New York City.
Born in Incheon, South Korea, she was raised by her birth mother and paternal grandparents before being placed into an orphanage on Deokjeok Island, from which she was adopted at the age of 3½ by an Irish Catholic family from Westchester County. She returned to Korea when she as 24, reconnecting with “pieces” from her early life which lingered, in varying degrees of clarity, within her memory: the half-staircase of the split-level orphanage, the enduring love and affection of her foster parents who cared for her as a toddler. She also met with her biological family, from whom she learned of the socioeconomic pressures her birth mother, a factory worker, faced as a single parent, as well the efforts of her grandfather to keep her anchored to the family tree by giving her the family’s generational name.
These revelations influenced her understanding of kinship; recognizing both the profound comfort of discovering biological mirrors (i.e. her high cheekbones) and the realization that while "blood is thicker than water, love is thicker than blood," Hollee dedicated her life to researching and building critical support structures for intercountry adoptees. But stepping into motherhood brought a new emotional dimension to questions of identity she thought she had settled, questions surrounding the inheritance and legacy of “not knowing” that were compounded by recent health crises with breast cancer. She notes that even though international adoptions from Korea are ending, “the legacy of international adoption will stretch far into the future,” explaining how “everything I don’t know, my children won’t know and their children won’t know.”
Today, much of her work and research is in understanding the life course and intergenerational impact of adoption, retaining what she can for those future generations.
Special thanks to the Thomas and Wonsook Foundation for their generous support in making this project possible.
