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| Photo Credit: AP. |
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — For 40 years, Louise Kwang thought she was an orphan baby found on the streets of the South Korean port city of Busan before her adoption by Danish parents in 1976.
She felt her
entire sense of identity collapse in 2016 when her South Korean agency
matter-of-factly acknowledged that her origin story was fiction aimed at
ensuring her adoptability.
“(The
English file) says you were transferred from Namkwang Children’s Home in Pusan
(Busan) to KSS for international adoption. In fact, it was just made up for
adoption procedure,” Kyeong Suk Lee, a social worker at the Korea Social
Service, wrote in a letter to Kwang after she requested her original
Korean-language file.
The agency
turned out to know about Kwang’s biological parents, including her father whom
she later met. There’s no indication Kwang was ever in Busan, which is several
hours’ drive from the country’s capital, Seoul, where her father had been
living in 1976.
“I was not
an orphan. I have never been to Busan nor at the orphanage in Busan,” Kwang
said at a news conference in Seoul on Tuesday. “This was all a lie. A lie made
up for adoption procedure. I have been made non-existent in Korea, to get me
out of Korea as fast as possible.”
Kwang is
among nearly 300 South Korean adoptees in Europe and the United States who so
far have filed applications calling for South Korea’s government to investigate
the circumstances surrounding their adoptions, which they suspect were based on
falsified documents that laundered their real status or identities.
Their effort
underscores a deepening rift between the world’s largest diaspora of adoptees
and their birth nation decades after scores of Korean children were carelessly
removed from their families during a foreign adoption boom that peaked in the
1980s.
The
Denmark-based group representing the adoptees also on Tuesday delivered a
letter to the office of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol urging him to
prevent agencies from destroying records or retaliating against adoptees
seeking their roots as the agencies face increasing scrutiny about their past
practices.
The 283
applications submitted so far to Seoul’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission
describe numerous complaints about lost or distorted biological origins.
Some
adoptees say they discovered the agencies switched their identities to replace
other children who died, were too sick to travel, or were retaken by their
Korean families before they could be sent to Western adopters. They say such
findings worsen their sense of loss and sometimes lead to false reunions with
relatives who turn out to be strangers.
Peter
Møller, attorney and co-founder of the Danish Korean Rights Group, said he also
plans to sue two Seoul-based agencies -– Holt Children’s Services and KSS -–
over their unwillingness to fully open their records to adoptees.
While
agencies often cite privacy issues related to birth parents to justify the
restricted access, Møller accuses them of inventing excuses to sidestep
questions about their practices as adoptees increasingly express frustration
about the limited details in their adoption papers that often turn out to be
inaccurate or falsified.
Møller’s
group last month initially filed applications from 51 Danish adoptees calling
for the commission to investigate their adoptions, which were handled by Holt
and KSS.
The move
attracted intense attention from Korean adoptees from around the world,
prompting the group to expand its campaign to Holt and KSS adoptees outside of
Denmark. The 232 additional applications submitted Tuesday included 165 cases
from Denmark, 36 cases from the United States and 31 cases combined from
Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Germany.
The
commission, which was set up in December 2020 to investigate human rights
atrocities under military governments that ruled South Korea from the 1960s to
1980s, must decide in three or four months whether to open an investigation
into the applications filed by the adoptees. If it does, that could trigger the
most far-reaching inquiry into foreign adoptions in the country, which has
never fully reconciled with the child export frenzy engineered by its past
military leaders.
While the
commission’s deadline for applications comes in December, Møller said his group
will try to persuade the commission to keep the door open for more applications
from adoptees if it decides to investigate the cases.
“There are
many more adoptees that have written us, called us, been in contact with us.
They are afraid to submit to this case because they fear that the adoption
agencies will ... burn the original documents and retaliate,” said Møller. He
said such concerns are greater among adoptees who discovered that the agencies
had switched their identities.
Holt didn’t
respond to calls for comment. Choon Hee Kim, an adoption worker who has been
with KSS since the 1970s, said the agency is willing to discuss issues
surrounding its adoptions with adoptees individually but not with the media.
When asked
about KSS letters admitting to the falsifying of biological origins, Kim said,
“The adoptees are saying they received such letters because they did, and it’s
not like they are making things up.”
About
200,000 South Koreans were adopted overseas during the past six decades, mainly
to white parents in the United States and Europe and mostly during the 1970s
and 1980s.
Military
leaders saw adoptions as a way to reduce the number of mouths to feed, solve
the “problem” of unwed mothers and deepen ties with the democratic West.
Special laws
aimed at promoting foreign adoptions effectively allowed licensed private
agencies to bypass proper child relinquishment practices as they exported huge
numbers of children to the West year after year.
Most of the
South Korean adoptees sent abroad were registered by agencies as legal orphans
found abandoned on the streets, although they frequently had relatives who
could be easily identified or found. That practice often make their roots difficult
or impossible to trace.
It wasn’t
until 2013 that South Korea’s government required foreign adoptions to go
through family courts, ending the policy that allowed agencies to dictate child
relinquishments, transfer of custodies and emigration for decades.