Mo, our Korean Adoption blogger, posted a very thought-provoking item on whether white adoptive parents can/should wear han-bok, Korean traditional dress or dress up their Korean children in it.
Let me start by immediately veering off this subject. My husband is a professor and teaches (among other things) Native American history. The Native student group here honored all his work and advocacy by presenting him with a special gift (a Pendleton blanket) at their annual pow-wow. They had a beautiful ceremony, which was capped off by a traditional dance.
Now, during parts of the pow-wow, there were some white people who joined in the dances. It was quite apparent they weren’t Indian, and some of them did these really weird dancing movements that looked like a Grateful Dead concert on speed or something. I, personally, found it a disrespectful parody of what Native culture and dance represents. Some people even seemed to get close to the woo-woo-woo! (clap hands over mouth) stereotype that is so offensive.
So anyway, back to the ceremony–before we knew what was happening, they were calling my husband out to the Sacred Circle, drums are going, singing has started, and the students are all dancing. I held my breath, wondering what my husband would do…I had no idea what, in my mind, he possibly should do, either. I think I would have run screaming out of the Sacred Circle and avoided the whole thing 
.
Bless his heart, my husband just walked in a slooooooooow circle on the periphery as the students danced around him. He did make a small white-guy attempt to sort of walk to the drum beat and not just stroll around like it’s his Saturday constitutional.
The point? There is a fine line between advocating and being open to a culture and appropriating it and being disrespectful.
Back to the han-bok issue, I have a writing colleague who is Japanese American, and during a lecture with a famous non-Japanese writer/illustrator who did a children’s book about Japan, my friend publicly objected to the fact that the illustrator drew all the contemporary Japanese people in kimonos, because people basically don’t wear kimonos in Japan except for certain occasions. You go, girl! Was all I could think.
It’s the same thing in Korea. We are the “people of the Han” and thus han-bok are our clothes. Han-bok is more of a state of mind, it’s not one particular piece of clothing. There are wedding han-bok, formal han-bok, paek-il han-bok (100 days), dol han-bok (one-year), etc. etc. If you wore a wedding han-bok out on the street, people would think you’re insane, for instance. So sometimes when I see non-Koreans wearing han-bok and it’s the wrong “kind” or they tie the bow wrong, it feels disrespectful–sort of like one is going on cultural safari, or something.
On the other hand, I have seen non-Koreans, in particular, some adoptive parents who have exquisite sensitivity, wear han-bok in a way that is respectful, graceful, and totally appropriate to the situation. My husband wore han-bok for the traditional pae-baek part of our wedding mostly because he was a good sport and my relatives bludgeoned him into it.
It’s hard to make a rule of thumb for an issue that’s so completely complex, but I can say, if you think merely donning han-bok/cheongsam/ao dai etc. is going to make you Korean/Chinese/Vietnamese, it ain’t! We’re only considering adopting from Korea, but if theoretically we did adopt, say, from China, I personally couldn’t see wearing Chinese dress (also, China is quite a large country with many sub-groups–what exactly is Chinese dress?). Even though Korea shares many cultural roots with China, when I hang out with my Chinese American friends, their culture seems as different to me as I suppose Korean culture seems to a white person (and, again, in the case of China, my friends are Shanghaiese, Toishanese, Malay-Singaporean, from Hong Kong…and speak and eat all sorts of different things).
Respect and awareness, those are the operative words, I think.
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