The Korean Culture Heritage Camp in Colorado offers a distinctive perspective on Korean culture, sharing it in untraditional ways- through a camp for adopted children.
The Korean Culture Heritage Camp at YMCA of the Rockies’ Snow Mountain Ranch near Granby brings together adopted South Korean children and their (mostly non-Korean) families for a four-day immersion in Korean food, language, arts, and history. Started over 30 years ago by a group of adoptive parents, it has grown into an annual retreat that attracts hundreds of families from across the U.S. each summer, offering activities like kimchi-making and Korean drumming.
Rocky Mountain PBS and PBS national platforms frame the camp through kids’ and parents’ voices, emphasizing the emotional profundity of identity the camp works hard to bring. Displaying adopted Korean children posing for photos with a declaration of “kimchi”, the “eye” sound at the end of the work provoking a wide smile, raising flags printed with both their Korean and American names, and sharing a sense of ethnic and social identity amongst other adopted Korean children living in America.
Adults, including former campers who return as staff, describe it as the first encounter of seeing a majority of Asian faces and as a critical site for processing what it means to be a Korean and an adopted child in predominately white communities.
Heritage Camps for Adoptive Families, the nonprofit behind the branch of the Korean Heritage Camp and seven other cultural camps, including but not limited to: African/Carribean, Latin American, Russian/Eastern European/Central Asian, markets these gatherings as spaces where adoptees ages 3 through adulthood and their families “explore heritage and celebrate adoption” together. Parents are required to attend and volunteer, reinforcing the duty of an adoptive family of a different ethnicity/culture to be familiar with and learning the culture of the child’s own heritage. This practice is crucial to strengthening the ethnic and racial identity of their child who may feel like an outsider in a community, neighborhood, and even a home where everyone around them doesn’t look like them, practice the same traditions, or speak their native language.
Back home in Colorado, many of these campers describe a sharp drop in visibility. They go from cabins full of Korean adoptees to classrooms where they might be the only Asian kid, facing questions about “where they’re really from” or why their parents are white. What stands out in interviews is how ordinary racism and isolation feel during the school year, compared with the camp’s brief but overwhelming atmosphere of recognition. At the camp, they trade stories, compare microaggressions like bad Korean jokes, and find the words for feelings they usually push down. The importance of these camps is more than just their parents connecting with their adoptee’s heretic culture– it is the inherent sense of belonging, community, and group identity these children feel, an experience they don’t get often back home.
This singular program alone encapsulated multiple demographic appeals at once: Korean adoptees, largely white adoptive parents, Asian American volunteers from Denver’s K-pop and arts scenes, and public media audiences statewide. This camp of display of Korean culture in Colorado is an intimate and intergenerational project that has fostered sentiments of belonging and connection, reinforced the values of diversity and understanding, and most importantly– brought Korean culture back to those who may have felt that it was taken away from them.
-By Bahnya Kim
