At 3:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, Court Street Coffee is buzzing with business. Espresso machines hiss, baristas call out orders and casual conversations linger throughout the small café. Amid the commotion, an even busier woman walks through the door.
Anna Jinja Mather is the writer, producer and host of The Anna Jinja Show through WOUB Public Media. This is her pre-recording ritual.
The Anna Jinja Show is a podcast that highlights stories about adoption and foster care. In each episode, Anna welcomes a new guest to share their experiences, then connects their story to a song or poem by local artists in Athens, OH. The podcast uses art to inspire storytelling, connection and healing, which Anna calls “creative interchanges.”
Every week, Anna meets her guests at Court Street Coffee, where she treats them to a beverage of their choice, discusses what to expect and walks them over to the WOUB podcast studio.
But first, Anna needs her own drink. She orders a decaf frozen s’mores mocha with soy milk and settles down at the biggest table in the back of the café.
Anna is an adoptee from Seoul, South Korea. She was born in 1972 and was adopted through an international adoption agency just three months later. The agency connected U.S. adoptive parents to children in foster care in South Korea like her. Anna knows very little about her adoption story and where she came from.
“What I’ve been told is that I was left in a box with a note that said, ‘take care of my little girl as I cannot.’ That is what I was told,” she said.
Anna pulls up an image on her phone; it’s a dark, black and white photo of a baby with a small string of numbers printed along the bottom. It looks like a mugshot. The photo was taken of Anna as she went through the international adoption process.
“I look like a little criminal baby. It looks like they said, ‘get this baby out of here, she’s going to cause trouble.’”
After the Korean War ended in 1953, the adoption industry uplifted South Korea’s post-war economy, according to The Associated Press. The government endorsed proxy adoptions like Anna’s, where international families could adopt children quickly without even visiting South Korea, AP reports. As a result, generations of Korean adoptees are left with unknowns about their identities, origins and adoption stories.
International adoptions like Anna’s were not typical in Iowa where she was raised by her adoptive parents. Her adoption story gained attention from local media, and several articles were written about her and her family. Only three years ago, she read one of the reports for the first time.
“I really did not want to deal with it or look at it,” she said. For most of her life, Anna shut out anything to do with her adoption story. Her adoptive mother kept a scrapbook of her story that she refused to look at for most of her life. She avoided saying her middle name, Jinja, which is part of her Korean name assigned by the adoption agency.
“There’s some of it you can’t avoid. I look like I’m adopted, I look different from my family, but anything I could avoid, I would just avoid,” she said.
Anna started The Anna Jinja Show in 2023 but had several years of prior podcasting experience. As an adult, she worked for a nonprofit in Iowa that supported people with disabilities. Her agency partnered with a local news station to launch a podcast highlighting stories about disability; Anna engineered and eventually began hosting each episode. As she spoke with guests, she started thinking about her own life journey.
“Around the twentieth episode or so, the questions I was asking the guests I was starting to ask myself,” she said. In her late 40s, Anna grew curious about the cracks in her own life story that she spent years ignoring. She started to connect with other women her age who were adopted through the same international agency.
“Their stories were eerily familiar: ‘I was left in a box in the path of a social worker,’” she recounted. “That got me thinking: How many boxes are there in Seoul, Korea? My goodness, you know. Is my story really true? Even if your parents needed to give you up in an act of love, it is still abandonment. When you add then lies on top of it, where is your footing when it comes to who you are in this world?”
While storytelling for her job, Anna started exploring her own story as an adoptee. Post COVID-19 pandemic, she left her radio station and moved to Athens, OH, where she started the search for identity and healing that inspired The Anna Jinja Show. She now works for Ohio University and pursues the passion project on the side.
The podcast’s name honors the middle name given to her by the adoption agency and kept by her adoptive parents, Jinja, which she spent years of her life concealing. Thus, when introducing each podcast episode, she meaningfully must say her full name aloud.
The Anna Jinja Show is a small operation entirely produced and promoted by a team of volunteers. “They get paid in chocolate chip cookies,” Anna said. She smiles as she reaches for a brown paper bag filled with goodies. She will give them to her Chief Production & Audio Officer later at their recording session.
“This team that we have believes in the project and connecting adoption and foster care stories with art to create an impact,” Anna said.
Anna prioritizes emotional comfort and safety for her guests. During interviews, she searches for common ground and ways to relate to a guest’s story. “There are times where I have absolutely opposing beliefs about the person’s thoughts,” she said. “My goal always is that I don’t have to be right, I want to transform hearts.”
Anna interjects as little as possible and ensures guests know what conversations to expect before recording begins. “I’m not trying to get some Jerry Springer-gotcha moment,” she said. “My job is to help honor and care for that person in the best way that I can.”
After recording sessions, Anna goes home and reflects on her conversations. She considers what she can learn from her guests and how she can become a better person. Anna believes the stories her guests share are valuable to wider audiences beyond adoptees; conversations about foster care and adoption provide general insights about identity and belonging.
“People feel lonely or pissed off about the world. My story is through the adoption lens, but all of us feel, at one point, lonely or rejected or abandoned. So how do we heal from that?” she said. The show is about helping anyone uncover their own ‘adoption story.’
Looking ahead, Anna is excited to see the show grow but is already happy with what it has achieved. The next season will feature stories from caseworkers and staff at Athens County Children Services.
What motivates Anna to continue this project is knowing she has touched just one life. “I am totally good with it just reaching that one person who needs to hear that interview. But I believe that there are so many others that can benefit from being told to be brave, you’re enough,” she said.
“Be brave, you’re enough.” To a young international adoptee growing up in Iowa, those words could mean everything.
Anna will always have unanswered questions about her life, but her identity is no longer defined by what is missing. Through The Anna Jinja Show and its creative interchanges, she and her guests find connection, self-acceptance and healing. By sharing adoption stories, Anna continues to embrace her own.