At and Between Conferences, KAAN is For You

Written by Katie Bozek, Executive Director

Over the years, we’ve often asked people what KAAN means to them. We’ve heard answers like “KAAN is people,” shared by Mark Hagland in 2023, and “Something you have to experience yourself,” as Kala Sharp once described it.

But what is KAAN, really? KAAN is a place of intentional work. Choosing to attend means choosing to place yourself in a space where difficult truths are acknowledged rather than avoided. It means intentionally engaging with thoughts, feelings, memories, and questions that can so easily be pushed aside during the rest of the year — topics that may feel too heavy, too complicated, or too “irrelevant” to confront in everyday life.

Of course, there is joy at KAAN. There is laughter, connection, celebration, and community. But alongside those moments is something equally important: the work itself.

In 2019, I stood before KAAN attendees for the first time as Executive Director — and as the organization’s first Korean adoptee Executive Director. During that conference, I shared what I call “The Suitcase Analogy.”

In 2014, I returned to Korea for the first time through the Mosaic Tour, back when the program was still in its early stages. Our group spent much of the trip in Seoul, but we also traveled throughout the country, visiting a single mother’s home in the southwest and an elementary school on the east coast.

On our way back to Seoul, people discussed evening plans, but I felt a pull toward solitude. I took my kimbap back to my hotel room instead. Sitting quietly in the stillness after several emotionally heavy days, I began unpacking and reorganizing the small suitcase I had brought for the trip. Its contents had become jumbled during our travels, and as I carefully repacked everything, a realization surfaced:

This is what adoption can feel like.

We spend our lives unpacking and repacking the same experiences, memories, questions, and emotions — just in different ways. Sometimes something takes up less space. Other times it feels larger and heavier than before. The contents themselves may not change, but how we arrange them does. Some moments require only a quick adjustment; others ask us to slow down, examine something more closely, and find a new way to carry it.

That is how I have come to understand adoption. I cannot change what happened. What I can do is continue unpacking and repacking what those experiences mean to me, so I can carry them forward in a way that feels manageable rather than overwhelming. Even when we gain new information, it simply means we must once again reorganize our understanding to make room for it.

And perhaps that is why so many people return to KAAN year after year — even if not consecutively. Different seasons of life call for different kinds of unpacking. Topics that may sound familiar from one conference to the next can land in entirely new ways because we have changed. Our understanding deepens. Our perspectives shift. We grow.

So, if you attended this year, it was wonderful seeing you. And if this was not your year, I hope our paths cross next year, or the year after that — whenever the time feels right to unpack and repack once more.