Danish Article About the Danish Korean Rights Group (DKRG) Effort in 2022:
Hundreds want adoption cases from South Korea scrutinized: - I have lived a lie.
Hundreds want adoption cases from South Korea scrutinized: - I have lived a lie
Louise Kwang has been in Seoul together with the Danish Korean Rights Group to hand over documents to the Truth Commission on behalf of several hundred adoptees from South Korea.
by Camilla Rytz & Kristina Hohlmann
A group of Danish adoptees from South Korea has submitted documents on behalf of several hundred adoptees who want their cases investigated.
Louise Kwang was on stage at a press conference in Seoul on Tuesday morning.
Here she told those present why she believes that the Truth Commission in South Korea must review the circumstances surrounding her adoption.
- For 40 years I have lived on a lie. I was not an orphan. I have never been to Busan. It was all a lie. I have been made non-existent on paper so that they could get me out of Korea as soon as possible, she told the press present.
Louise Kwang lives in Frederiksberg on a daily basis, but has traveled to South Korea because she believes it is important that potentially fabricated information that has been used in connection with adoptions from South Korea comes to light.
- For so many years, I have built my life around a story that has turned out to be completely different. It may be difficult for others to understand, but for me it has been a huge upheaval, says Louise Kwang to TV 2.
Need to know one's own history.
She was adopted to Denmark from South Korea in 1976. In the adoption papers her Danish adoptive parents were given in connection with the adoption, it was stated that Louise Kwang was an orphan and that she was found on the street in the country's second largest city, Busan.
Throughout her upbringing in Denmark, Louise Kwang has not given much thought to the fact that she comes from South Korea. Only when she became a mother and entered her 40s did a need arise to examine her own history more closely.
She had heard from other adoptees that the orphanages in South Korea might have more information than what they gave to the adoptive parents.
Wasn't an orphan after all
When she approached the Korean Social Services (KSS) Adoption Agency in South Korea in 2016 for a copy of her original adoption papers, she got a surprising answer back.
The KSS Adoption Agency wrote, among other things, that they had more information about her biological parents, including that the parents separated shortly after Louise Kwang was born, and that the father then gave her up for adoption.
The agency also wrote that they had tried to get in touch with her biological parents without success.
Parents that Louise Kwang – until 2016 – had no idea existed, because the adoption papers she had had stated that she was an orphan and found on the street.
Found her biological father on her own
In the letter, which TV 2 has seen, it was also stated that the agency, which is today an agency for post-adoption, would like to apologize for the erroneous information that was in the adoption papers she had so far.
The document also states that the information she previously received was only written for the sake of the adoption procedure.
- They have made up information about me to make the adoption go through faster. I think it is reprehensible that you just get such a false story. And I think we have the right to get the truth about who we are and where we come from, says Louise Kwang.
On her own, she managed to get in touch with her biological father in 2017. She managed to visit him five times in South Korea before he died in 2020, but she has yet to find her biological mother.
Adoptees from around the world seek answers
Louise Kwang was there when the organization Danish Korean Rights Group, led by Danish Peter Møller, handed over documents on behalf of a total of 283 adoptees from South Korea to the Truth Commission on Tuesday.
The vast majority of cases are from Denmark, but there are also Americans, Germans, Dutch and Norwegians among them.
Several of the applicants, like Louise Kwang, have discovered that the adoption agencies have written imprecise information about them in the papers. This can be birth name, dates or details of the child's biological parents.
What they all have in common is that they now want the South Korean Truth Commission to investigate the circumstances surrounding the adoptions that took place from the 1960s to the end of the 1980s from South Korea to Europe and the United States.
During those years, South Korea was under military rule, and since the Truth Commission is a government agency responsible for investigating incidents in Korea that took place under military rule, the group of adoptees hopes that they will shed light on their cases.
Worldwide, 200,000 children have been adopted from South Korea, including 9,000 to Denmark.
Expect reply within three months
Peter Møller, who is a lawyer and one of the leading figures in the Danish Korean Rights Group, expects that in three months they will have a final clarification on whether the commission will take up the case.
He tells the news agency AP that he hopes that during that period the commission will allow even more people to apply to have their cases included in the now submitted case complex, so that everyone who wants to have their adoptions investigated will have the opportunity.
- There are many more adoptees who have written to us, called us and been in contact with us. They are afraid to enter into this case, and they fear that the adoption agencies will get rid of their original documents, says Peter Møller.
If the Truth Commission takes up the case, according to the AP news agency, it could be the largest South Korean investigation into adoptions abroad ever.
DIA, which mediates foreign adoptions here at home, will now engage in dialogue with various stakeholders in the matter, including the organization Danish Korean Rights Group, with whom they will meet this week.
- We of course support that the data on the adoptions must be correct. Adoptees have the right to know the data on their case, both in Denmark and in the country from which they were adopted. At the moment, we receive several inquiries from adoptees from South Korea who want additional information about their adoption data, says Robert Jonasen, day-to-day manager at DIA.
He also emphasizes that they would like to be helpful in obtaining additional information, if it is available in the country of origin.
The Toronto Star has spoken to an adoption worker at KSS, the orphanage where, among others, Louise Kwang was adopted from. They have said that they are willing to discuss issues related to the adoptions, but only on an individual level, and not in the media.
Korea Times Articles About Korean Adoption.
See the entire series of articles edited by Dr. Kyungeun Lee (with many Adoptee contributors) here.
Articles About Korea Social Service (KSS) Adoptees.
Famous story about the Allen Thomas twins reunion (the twins were adopted through KSS in Korea and Welcome House in the US)
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KSS Adoptee Scott Mundy Reunites With His Birth Family And Twin Brother
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A Korean Adoptee Does Her Own Detective Work in a Gamble to Find Her Family
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A KSS Adoptee’s Successful Birth Family Search
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'Doe mij maar zo'n Koreaantje!' ('Give me one of those Koreans!')
A Dutch article containing a video about Dutch Korean Adoption
See the English translation of the Dutch article (via Google Translate) on the Wereldkinderen page here.
In the only known video we have of him, KSS Founder Kun Chil Paik (mistakenly called Mr. Park) appears at the 18:04 mark in this Dutch video about Korean Adoption in the late 1960s and 1970s
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30 years later, this Korean adoptee finds ‘home’ again:
I was born on January 14, 1978, in Seoul, South Korea. Two days later I ended up at Korea Social Service, an orphanage in Seoul. On July 6, 1978, I arrived at Minneapolis International Airport into the loving arms of my adoptive parents, facilitated by Lutheran Social Service in Minnesota. My adoption was finalized on April 23, 1979, and I became a citizen of the United States on April 26, 1980. For more than 30 years I never gave any of this much thought.
Then, in 2010, I was invited to speak in Seoul — in a country I hadn't seen for decades. This is the story of when I first touched the land in South Korea.
Related: For many, international adoption isn't just a new family. It's the loss of another life.
It’s late morning on an overcast, steamy August day in Chicago in 2010. I have been up since 4 a.m. Buckled firmly into my seat on the largest airplane I have ever been on, I am anxiously awaiting our departure from the gate. The stale airplane air makes my stomach a little queasy, and occasionally my seat lurches forward, victim to the little feet kicking it from behind.
The scenery outside begins to move as we push away from the gate. Slowly the plane turns toward the runway. We sit for a few minutes. I watch the cars speed past on the highway just beyond the airport. The world outside is full of commotion. In some ways, time seems like it has sped up this morning. But inside the plane, it feels like time has stopped.
We rumble down the runway, gaining speed for takeoff. I feel every bump in the pavement. I hold on to this feeling — it is comforting and familiar because I am still on the ground, I am still home. Then, I feel my body pushed back into the seat and my stomach drops as we lift off the ground. Skyward bound, and eventually westward, I am moving forward in time in one sense, yet back through time in another. A country I know nothing about is calling my body to it. I am going home.
Trying to make my way through a home my body remembers, but one in which I have no conscious memory of, is hard enough as an adoptee — ibiyang. But I also have to contend with being queer in a country where the LGBTQ community is still very much underground.
My body knows it is home when it touches the land in South Korea, but other than the physical connection to place, everything else — including my mother tongue — is missing. I left my country when I was an infant, and like an infant, all I can do to communicate with my people is point and try to utter the few words I know in broken Korean. The disconnect between what my body remembers and my inability to fully be Korean in my home country is sad and confusing.
Read Shawyn’s piece on the darker history of international adoption to America
Every three years, the International Korean Adoptee Association hosts an international conference by and for Korean adoptees from all over the world. This is my first time attending. I am presenting on my experiences of being a Korean adoptee and being queer. Trying to make my way through a home my body remembers, but one in which I have no conscious memory of, is hard enough as an adoptee — ibiyang. But I also have to contend with being queer in a country where the LGBTQ community is still very much underground. It’s odd and unsettling to feel so out of place for so many reasons in my motherland.
Left: Lee's sister (right), Lee (left), their adoptive parents (top right), their attorney (top left) and the judge (seated) at Lee's sister’s adoption on Dec. 22, 1980. Lee was adopted nearly two years earlier on April 23, 1979, with the same attorney and judge present. Right: Shawyn Lee and sister stand in front of a giant American flag at Lee's sister's naturalization ceremony, which took place at the Festival of Nations at the St. Paul Civic Center, in St. Paul, Minnesota, May 1, 1982.
Credit:
Courtesy Shawyn Lee
I visit the orphanage where I stayed for the first six and a half months of my life. With a crude map in hand, I try my best to communicate with the cab driver in broken Korean, English and some pointing. I arrive at Korea Social Service on a hot August morning. The building towers over me as I stand at the base of the stairs leading up to the main entrance. Its brick facade is stark against a dull sky.
It isn’t curiosity or even nervousness that washes over me, it’s an overwhelming feeling of sadness. Why? What is my body remembering?
At this moment it isn’t curiosity or even nervousness that washes over me, it’s an overwhelming feeling of sadness. Why? What is my body remembering? Why can’t the words be in my brain? I walk up the stairs and enter the building. Immediately I am ushered into a small meeting room. I sit alone. No lights are on. The noise of the air conditioner drowns out any conscious thoughts in my head. The room feels heavy and lonely as it wears a dreary grayish blue hue from the ambient light. I shiver under the icy breath of the air conditioner.
The director of KSS enters the room after a little while. She is a short, petite, middle-aged Korean woman. Her black hair hangs casually just above her shoulders. Her eyes look tired but kind. She is clutching two file folders to her chest. One is my sister’s, and the other, mine. I stand to meet her. She is a bit taken aback by my appearance. I tower over her. My androgynous appearance doesn’t look like a grown-up version of the little girl who is in that folder. I assure her I am that same little girl, now grown. We sit down opposite each other at the small table in the meeting room. She gently lays the folders down on the table. I read the label: LSS 2530 LEE Cho Hee. There I am, laying on the table, closed up for 32 years. That was me. My history. My answers. My life.
Lee's file folder filled with faded brown papers documenting her first days.
Credit:
Courtesy of Shawyn Lee
Inside the folder are faded brown papers all written in Korean. I want so badly to touch these pages, leaf through my story. I wish I could gather up the contents, clutch it to my chest and absorb the residual energy. But I am instructed that I am not allowed to touch anything. My interactions with the KSS director are stoic and businesslike. I want to make sure I ask all my questions and understand everything that she is telling me.
I was born Lee, Cho Hee on Jan. 14, 1978, at 9 a.m. in a clinic in Seoul. My mother, Lee, Eun Joo was a single, unwed mother. She was 24 when she had me. According to my file, she did not want to share much about her story with the social worker from KSS. There is no information about my birth father.
I had always been told that I was abandoned at a police station with a note pinned to my clothes listing my name and birthdate. My file told a different story. On January 16, 1978, two days after I was born at the clinic, I was brought to KSS. There is no information about where I was for those two days. The story of being abandoned at a police station is common among Korean adoptees around my age — it helped expedite the international adoption process by leaving fewer questions to answer.
Lee looks at the babies in cribs that may have been like her own as an infant at KSS.
Credit:
Courtesy of Shawyn Lee
After reviewing my file, we go up to the second floor of KSS where the nurseries are. There are four infants and a 1-year-old boy with developmental disabilities in the room. I walk past the director into the room. She whispers gently to me, “One of these cribs was probably yours.” I make my way over to the row of cribs. Fighting back some tears, I run my hand along the rails. I feel the cool metal bars and breathe in the stale nursery air, filling my lungs and my body with memories of yesterday. One of the babies looks like me in the pictures I have from the orphanage. I feel as if I am looking at myself. My heart fills with a heavy sadness as I think about these children and their missing stories.
We tour the rest of the grounds. The other buildings on the premises are abandoned. When I was here in the late 1970s, KSS was home to around 200 children. There were only 50 employees who worked at the orphanage and no volunteers. During my visit, only five children are there, and two volunteers. Today, foster homes have replaced the need for orphanages. This place feels empty and desolate. The abandoned buildings are in various states of dilapidation and the grounds are patchy and unkempt.
In the late 1970s, KSS was home to around 200 children and 50 employees. During Lee's visit, only five children were there, and the abandoned buildings were in various states of dilapidation. Now, foster homes have largely replaced the need for orphanages.
Credit:
Courtesy of Shawyn Lee
We walk to the building I lived in while here. My eyes are seeing the same things now that my tiny infant eyes saw for the first six months of my life. I peer inside the windows. It’s dark and hollow — gutted. I try to listen for the sounds of children playing, workers scurrying around, babies crying. Nothing. The energy has seeped away.
More than three decades ago, I left this place on a plane bound for the United States, my home. More than three decades later I come back home to discover the story of my beginnings. As my trip comes to an end, I find myself desperately clinging to this place. But no matter how much I change up my grip, I feel it slipping away. I never want to forget this place. I need to feel and experience South Korea just as I do now even when I am back in Minnesota.
I was at home in Minnesota before I came to Korea, and a stranger in my homeland. Now I feel like I am home in South Korea and will be a stranger back home in Minnesota.
I started this journey holding on to every bump on the runway before we left the United States for Korea. Now, the jolt as the wheels touch down back in Minnesota marks a jarring end to an unforgettable journey and one that I will continue to process for the rest of my life. My eyes fill with tears and the lump in my throat lingers as we taxi to our gate. I feel more whole and complete now knowing that I left a good chunk of me in South Korea. Someday, I’ll be back again.
Editor's note: Shawyn Lee is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Work at the University of Minnesota - Duluth. As a critical adoption scholar, Shawyn’s work incorporates archival research, critical pedagogy and intersectional identity politics based on Shawyn’s personal experiences as a queer Korean adoptee. Read Shawyn’s piece on the difficult history of international adoption to America.
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Johns Creek woman discovers sister:
JOHNS CREEK, Ga. — This summer Janine Dzyubanny, a resident of Johns Creek for 11 years, took a DNA test to learn about her medical history. She never expected she would find a sister.
Dzyubanny was born in Seoul, South Korea, and was abandoned on a street corner as an infant. She was adopted by a loving family in New Jersey and never felt a need to search for her birth family, but now that she has children of her own she wanted to be aware of any genetic health conditions.
Jennifer Frantz was born two years before Dzyubanny. She was adopted by a family in New York and now lives in Canton, Ga.
“To know that we were both born in Seoul and that we’re 20 minutes away from each other here in Georgia is pretty amazing,” Dzyubanny said. “We could have been anywhere in the whole wide world.”
Frantz received her results from the 23andMe DNA test in January. Like Dzyubanny, she was mostly interested in the health information. Although the test identified some potential third cousins, she didn’t put much stock in the family section of her results until June.
“All of a sudden I received an email. ‘We predict Janine Dzyubanny is your sister. You share 47.9 percent of your DNA,’” Frantz said.
The sisters connected over email and social media, and a few days later met in person. Initial nerves and awkwardness quickly faded away, and the pair hit it off like lifelong friends.
“We had so many weird coincidences and similarities,” Dzyubanny said. “It’s almost like it was meant to be.”
The geographic proximity was the beginning of remarkable coincidences in the sisters’ stories. As they compared their lives, the sisters realized they had several mutual acquaintances. Both were raised with older brothers, both are preschool teachers and both have pet Labradors. They moved to the Atlanta region around the same time, gave birth to daughters five months apart and were on vacation out of the country when they received their results.
“They’re so insignificant, but you add them up together and it makes this just big wow,” Dzyubanny said.
The two women said they were met with disbelief when they told their friends and family about their newfound sister. Frantz said everybody was excited and supportive.
“I think everyone knew it was possible, but it’s been 42 years,” Dzyubanny said. “It’s been about half of our life, and we’d never had a sister. We had a world full of older brothers.”
Dzyubanny and Frantz were born in the 1970s, the peak of international adoption from South Korea. That decade 48,247 South Koreans were adopted, and more than a third, or 17,260 children, had been abandoned by their birth families.
Single motherhood and adoption are culturally frowned upon in South Korea leading to the high numbers of international adoption. In the second half of the 20th century, more than 100,000 children were adopted from South Korea to the United States.
Both said that growing up they felt fully integrated with their adopted family and never tried to connect their Korean relatives. They were curious, but never expected to find anything.
Now that they’ve discovered each other, they’re making up for lost time. They are integrating their two families and starting an event planning business together, Lucky Penny Party Planners.
“It’s been like ‘let’s put on our seatbelts and just go,” Frantz said. “Even though it’s been so quick and such a short period of time, it honestly feels like I’ve known her forever. There was never [awkwardness] except for the very first time we met.”
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Adopted Koreans, Stymied in Search of Birth Parents, Find Hope in a Cotton Swab:
Sun Mi Stapel in Seoul, South Korea, where she traveled from the Netherlands to take a DNA test this month in hopes of learning about her birth parents.Credit...Jean Chung for The New York Times
By Marie Tae McDermott
Aug. 27, 2016
SEOUL, South Korea — Five years ago, Sun Mi Stapel, a claims handler at a Dutch insurance company, began searching for her South Korean birth family.
Ms. Stapel first turned to the Dutch adoption agency that had placed her with her adoptive parents in Krommenie, the Netherlands, where she grew up. Then she tried Korea Social Service, which had handled the Korean side of her adoption. Last year, she finally obtained her adoption files, but they were missing vital information.
She traveled to Seoul, appearing on a morning television show with her baby photos and asking viewers to call a hotline with any information. She registered for a national database for missing people. She distributed fliers in the neighborhood around her orphanage in Incheon, where she was born, and visited nursing homes and community centers there in hopes of finding someone who knew her parents.
No one did.
So on a recent Tuesday afternoon, Ms. Stapel, 46, went to a guesthouse for adoptees in Seoul, where a volunteer rubbed the inside of her cheek with a cotton swab, dropped the swab in a tube and shipped it to a lab in Texas, where her DNA will be analyzed and uploaded to a website that scans submitted samples for genetic matches.
The result could link her to her birth family and fill in some of the blanks of her personal history.
“I want to know the simple things,” she said. “When is my real date of birth? Who is my father? Who is my mother? Do I have siblings? Do I look like somebody?”
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Many South Korean adoptees who have the same questions are turning to DNA testing to circumvent what has long been a tortuous and often fruitless process.
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Ms. Stapel, 46, whose Korean name is Nam Sun-mi, with photographs of herself at her former orphanage in Incheon. “I want to know the simple things,” she said.Credit...Jean Chung for The New York Times
For years, South Korea was the world’s leading baby exporter. Since the 1950s, it has sent about 200,000 children abroad for adoption, including about 150,000 to the United States.
Every year adoptees return, looking for information about their past. But South Korean laws block them from obtaining their full birth records without their birth parents’ consent. And government adoption files are often falsified, incomplete or missing, making birth parents impossible to track down.
From 2012 to 2015, fewer than 15 percent of adoptees who asked to reunite with their birth parents were able to do so, according to Korean government figures.
For many, DNA testing offers a way around the bureaucratic hurdles and flawed records.
Ms. Stapel was one of a few dozen adoptees who took free DNA tests made available in Seoul this month during the International Korean Adoptee Associations Gathering, which meets every three years.
Monica Toudahl Knudsen, 33, who grew up in the Jutland peninsula, in Denmark, also took the test. She has been searching for her birth family since 2012.
According to her adoption file, her parents were teenage sweethearts who could not afford to raise her. On a previous trip to Seoul, she had visited the site of the midwife clinic where she was born. It now houses a cafe and fried chicken restaurant.
She feels grateful for her life in Denmark, where she is a chef. If she is ever able to meet her birth parents, she said, “I just want to thank them for letting me go.”
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Monica Toudahl Knudsen, 33, whose Korean name is Lee Soon-sook, has been searching for her birth family since 2012. If she is ever able to meet her birth parents, she said, “I just want to thank them for letting me go.”Credit...Jean Chung for The New York Times
The DNA testing movement has been largely financed by Thomas Park Clement, a Korean adoptee who now lives in Manhattan and in Bloomington, Ind. A scientist who founded Mectra Labs, a medical manufacturing company, he has pledged to spend $1 million on DNA kits to give away.
“I have throughout the years experienced so many of my fellow Korean adoptees’ frustrations with birth relative searches,” he said in a recent interview. “DNA is shortcutting the search process and bringing all parties in direct communication with each other.”
He has donated 2,550 kits to Korean adoptees and Korean War veterans in the United States. Some of the veterans are the fathers of the first wave of South Korea’s international adoptees. He has also given 450 to 325Kamra, a volunteer organization started last year, to distribute in South Korea.
When testing works, it is remarkably efficient.
This month, 325Kamra announced its first match between a Korean birth mother and an American adoptee. Within 48 hours, the adoptee, Kyung Eun Davidson, 33, of Everett, Wash., was speaking to her mother for the first time in 30 years.
“It’s been an amazing, crazy and wonderful experience,” Ms. Davidson told The Korea Herald.
The biggest obstacles to finding more matches are the databases themselves: There is no single consolidated database widely available both to Korean birth parents and to overseas Korean adoptees. Databases used by Americans and Koreans are incompatible and cannot share information.
The South Korean police collect DNA samples for their national database of missing people. Adoptees and birth parents are eligible to submit DNA for this database, and many do, but not nearly enough.
The testing done by 325Kamra goes into the databases of Family Tree DNA, a Houston-based DNA testing company, and GEDMatch, a service that scans for genetic matches from three popular testing companies: Family Tree, 23andMe and AncestryDNA. Ms. Davidson used 23andMe, her birth mother took the test with 325Kamra in South Korea, and they were connected by GEDMatch.
Another limitation is the parents. While an estimated 1,000 adoptees have submitted their DNA for matching on GEDMatch, only 100 birth parents have taken tests with 325Kamra. Many are afraid to come forward because of the shame associated with adoption in South Korea, where they risk being shunned by their families and communities.
Stigma has always been a factor in South Korea’s international adoptions, which began in the mid-1950s, when the children of Korean women and American servicemen were ostracized for their mixed racial heritage. Later, the shame of single parenthood fueled abandonments, and the poor local economy favored international adoption.
But by 1988, the country’s reputation as the leading baby exporter had become a national embarrassment, and the government introduced a quota system for international adoptions and began promoting domestic ones.
Adoptees are not the only ones placing their hopes in DNA tests.
Last month, Song Chang-sook, 89, traveled 200 miles from Pusan with his caregiver to take a DNA test in Seoul. Having heard about the testing on a morning television program, he was searching for the three sons he relinquished for adoption more than 40 years ago.
When his wife died of typhoid fever in 1970, his mother-in-law decided that the children should be given up for adoption rather than raised by a single father. He gave up his three sons: Won Ho, born in 1965; Won Young, born in 1967; and Won Hee, born in 1968.
Five years later, he returned to the adoption agency, Holt International, asking for their whereabouts. He inquired many more times after that. At one point, someone told him that his sons were living together in France. But Holt was prohibited from disclosing personal information about the three boys. The 2012 adoption law that gives adoptees the right to petition for their birth records offers no such benefit to the parents.
Mr. Song thinks about the last time he saw his children, on Nov. 3, 1971. The year before, his oldest son, Won Ho, had been hospitalized for a month with a broken shoulder from a car accident.
He wants to tell his children: “I love you. You have no idea how much I struggle to find you.”
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Ailing adoptee from Demark hoping long wish to find blood relatives comes true
Ailing adoptee from Demark hoping long wish to find blood relatives comes true
Posted on : May.10,2016 16:02 KST Modified on : May.10,2016 16:02 KST
Hankyoreh readers reach out as part of a growing movement of Korean adoptees trying to find birth parents
Adoptee Kim Yoo-ree
Last month, a reader sent an email with a heartfelt, urgent plea: to help realize Choi Ho-young’s final wish to find her blood relatives. Choi, 40, is a Korean-born adoptee in Denmark who is currently battling cancer. Despite six operations since it was first discovered in 2013, the cancer has spread throughout her body. Choi is currently undergoing radiation treatment in London.
The email said, “My friend Ho-young doesn’t have much time left. She’s tried asking around through South Korean police, but hasn’t been able to find anything. She was told the details about her birth parents (father Choi Deok-man and mother Kim Hak-myeong) on her Korea Social Service adoption papers from 1980 appear to be inaccurate. Our only hope was to go to the media and ask for help.”
The reader, 44-year-old Kim Yoo-ree, subsequently paid a visit to the Hankyoreh on May 5. Explaining that she too is a Korean adoptee raised in France, she brought an armload of documents from other Danish friends besides Choi who were looking for family in South Korea.
“There was a lot of adoption of Korean children to Denmark and Scandinavia between the early 1970s and early 1990s. They now make up the single largest Asian community there,” Kim explained.
“As many of them have gotten married and had children, there has been a big trend of ‘finding your roots.’ The children keep asking about their family. Everyone has talked about how May is ‘Family Month’ and May 11 is ‘Adoptee Day,’ but I have a lot of friends who have never used the words for ”mom“ and ”dad“. Many of them would like to come to South Korea at least once, but can‘t because of their financial situation.”
Kim admitted to feeling overwhelmed by the requests for help, given her own lack of experience working for an adoptee group or organization.
“Frankly, I was terrified,” she said.
On the left is Choi Ho-young, a Korean adoptee now undergoing treatment for cancer in London
“In Ho-young’s case, she‘s someone I’ve known for ten years, yet neither of us knew the other was adopted. Then one day in February, I was stunned to see her story posted on a site for Korean adoptees in Denmark. I‘d thought she was doing well - marrying her Swedish husband, having kids and a successful business in Malta. But I found out she was sick and desperately wanted to find her family.”
Seeing Kim’s post on the site, other adoptees began sending her their own adoption files.
“I’ve actually been pretty lucky,” she said. “I went back to Korea in 1993 at the age of 21, and within two weeks I found my family. I’d been adopted when I was seven, so I had clear memories of my biological parents, my siblings, even the house in Jeongneung.”
At 17, Kim left her French adoptive parents to study on her own, majoring in Korean language and literature at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris. It was with the help of Korean friends she met at the time that she was able to find her family easily, and it was through connections formed at a part-time job assisting South Korean news outlets with local coverage that she was able to settle in South Korea in 2002, she said.
“I ended up doing part-time work with [journalist] Hong Se-hwa‘s daughter in Paris,” she recalled. “Because of that, I’ve had a lot of good teachers working with me and helping me escape my identity confusion and scars relatively well.”
Kim, who said she has written and published short stories in English, currently works a freelance film producer and interpreter. She also discussed the happiness she felt as a Korean serving as interpreter for a recent good-will match between the South Korean and Algerian Olympic soccer teams.
“In the ‘80s, I would cut out the tiniest references to South Korea from the newspaper and treasure them as a way of soothing my loneliness and longing for my mother tongue,” she said.
But beyond her own story, Kim has asked others to spread awareness about the stories of other Korean friends in Denmark. She also discussed problems with the leading role of U.S. and Christian adoptee groups in South Korea, which she said limits the ability of less proactive European adoptees to participate. While some groups and organizations do receive South Korean government support, the practical benefits to adoptees have been few - possibly because of lax management and oversight.
“I’ve looked through the adoption files my friends have sent me and found myself crying alone over the seeming hopelessness of it,” Kim said. “Even if the chances of finding the biological parents are realistically very low, I still wanted to cry with them and hold their hand and help them release some of the sorrow.”
“Ra Jong-il once said that Koreans have a peculiar sensibility that transforms sorrow into joy, and that‘s something I’ve shared in my own experience,” she said, adding that she now wants the same opportunities to happen for other friends. She also shared an email address (kimyooree@gmail.com) where readers can provide potential leads for adoptees.
By Kim Kyung-ae, staff reporter
Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]
Articles About Korean Adoption Generally.
Here is a great in-depth article about proxy adoptions and its inherent issues by Harvard scholar / US Korean Adoptee Kelly M. Rich:
Sight Unseen: Proxy War, Proxy AdoptionThis is one of the articles critical of S. Korea’s adoption industry which resulted in the Korean government drastically reducing the number of available exit visas for orphans in 1988, thus significantly curtailing the export of S. Korean children for international adoption.
South Korea Slows Export of Babies for Adoption
About the significant reduction of international adoptions from Korea in the wake of the negative press coverage of S. Korea as a “baby exporter” during the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul. The Korean government significantly reduced the number of available exit visas from Korea, which dropped the number of children being sent overseas for adoption drastically following the negative press coverage. The 1970s and 1980s were the absolute peak of international adoption from S. Korea, with 1976 being the peak year in the decade of the 1970s, and with the 1980s eclipsing the 1970s in terms of overall numbers of children being sent abroad for adoption. We do not know what happened to all of the children who were in social welfare institutions in 1988 after Korea drastically reduced its international adoption program.
Source: KSS Adoptees / Paperslip
Wikipedia article: International adoption of South Korean children
See the chart: Intercountry Adoptions Out of South Korea From 1953 to 2008