Dozens of South Korean adoptees, many in tears, have responded to an investigation led by The Associated Press and documented by Frontline (PBS) last week on adoptions from South Korea.
Yooree Kim, who was sent to a couple in France by the Holt adoption agency when she was 11, displays some old photos of her and her brother in her apartment in Seoul, May 18, 2024. In this photo provided by Kyla Postrel, she stands with her half-brother, Robert Milburn, at his wedding in Norfolk, Va., in April 2024. She found him through a DNA test and their first in-person meeting was one day before his wedding.
I’m one of the adopted children with falsified records. My adoptive parents were as shocked as I was when I learned my Korean and American papers differed.”She has been flooded with messages from other adoptees looking for help, and tells them not to be disappointed if they can’t track down their stories.
“It was probably one of the most angry moments in my life,” Duet says. “Who are you to tell me that I don’t get to know who I am?” A city worker posts a flier on the crowded bulletin board of a government office in Bucheon, South Korea, May 30, 2024. The flier, featuring two photos of Nicole Motta, an adoptee now residing in Los Angeles, taken as a toddler and an adult, was provided by the Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link as part of Motta’s search for her birth family. Amy McFadden always believed what the adoption agency told her parents — that she was abandoned on a staircase at 5 weeks old.
Her original documents said her mother was young, unmarried and uneducated, she says. Her full files from the South Korean agency contained a different story: Her mother was married and she was born of an affair. DNA testing showed both stories were untrue, and identified her mother and father as married both back then and now.
She has learned of a Korean cultural concept called “han,” an existential and endless grief, born from colonization, war, poverty and the line that cleaves Korea into North and South, splitting families for generations. “That’s something we experience too,” she said. “We are Koreans.”Adoptees can request information from their adoption agencies or the South Korean government’s National Center for the Rights of the Child.
Nicole Motta, whose Korean name is Jang Hyeon-jung, fills out paperwork for a DNA test at the Eastern Social Welfare Society in Seoul, May 31, 2024, as she and her birth father are reunited for the first time since she was adopted by a family in Alabama, United States, in 1985. Frustrated with search failures and unreliable records, many Korean adoptees in recent years have attempted to reconnect with their birth families through DNA.
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