The aim of this article is to give a short presentation of a project dealing with the complex relationship between a diasporic community and its homeland, in this case the 150,000 adopted Koreans and the Republic of Korea, henceforth Korea. After some words on different perspectives on international adoption, I will place the matter in a Korean context encompassing the tradition of displacement since the second half of the 19th century and today´s politics of globalization under president Kim Dae Jung to illustrate how overseas adoption became an issue in Korea and speculate on its symbolic meaning for a postcolonial, divided and dispersed nation. The goal is to examine the role of the adoption issue (ibyangmunjê) in creating a new Korean ethnicity in the age of globalization.