SEOUL, South Korea — Rebecca Kimmel sat in a small room, shocked and speechless, staring on the child picture she had simply unearthed from her adoption file.
It was a black-and-white shot of an toddler, presumably taken at an orphanage in Gwangju, the South Korean metropolis the place Kimmel had heard all her life that she’d been deserted. However one thing in regards to the picture — the eyes, the ears, an uneasy feeling deep in her intestine — confirmed what she’d lengthy suspected: This child was not her.
Overcome, she began howling like a wierd, wounded animal. This picture meant that the tales she had been advised about herself have been a lie. So who was she? Who IS she?
Hundreds of South Korean adoptees want to fulfill a uncooked, compelling urge that a lot of the world takes without any consideration: the seek for identification. Like lots of them, Kimmel has stumbled into an internet of switched photographs, made-up tales and false paperwork, all designed to erase the very identification she desperately desires to seek out.
These adoptees stay with the implications of a tacit partnership by the South Korean authorities, Western nations and adoption companies that has provided some 200,000 kids to folks abroad, regardless of warnings of widespread fraud.
For many years, South Korea tried to eliminate kids from biracial mother and father, poor households, orphanages and unwed moms, ignoring illicit practices. Western households in flip have been wanting to undertake from overseas, after entry to contraception and abortion crushed the availability of home infants. Whereas many adoptions ended fortunately, the needs of each side additionally resulted within the pointless elimination of generations of kids from their households based mostly on faux paperwork.
As Kimmel sat weeping in that room within the Seoul adoption company, she knew little of this background. All she knew was that she wanted solutions.
She would discover them — simply not those she wished.
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Kimmel, an artist, thinks she is about 49; her actual age is among the many issues about herself she doesn’t know. She throws herself with depth into nearly all the things she does, significantly her all-consuming quest for her roots.
It wasn’t at all times that means. Kimmel spent a lot of her childhood in what many adoptees name “the fog” — a time of joyful ignorance when they’re oblivious to questions on their adoption.
Her mother and father advised her the origin story they’d gotten from the adoption company: She had been deserted as an toddler on a road in Gwangju and despatched to an orphanage by police. A slip of paper on her clothes listed her beginning date because the day earlier than: Aug. 4, 1975.
There was no details about her organic mom or father. Her beginning identify was both Chung Jo Hee or Chung So Hee — the writing on the unique paperwork was unclear.
She was adopted six months later by a household on the U.S. East Coast. Every Jan. 21, her mother and father would rejoice “Arrival Day,” a kind of second birthday that she noticed as barely embarrassing however candy. They’d show her paperwork and child footage.
However a small element nagged at her: One picture that her mother and father confirmed from South Korea didn’t look very like these of her in the US. When she requested why, her mother and father simply advised her that infants change. They knew nothing of the deeper issues surrounding adoptions from South Korea both.
“I believe my mother and father have been simply joyful to have gotten a toddler,” she says.
In 1986, the household traveled to South Korea, the place adoption employees advised them to go to a unique orphanage than the one they’d thought Kimmel was from. It was referred to as Namkwang, in Busan. They discovered no document of Kimmel.
Kimmel didn’t suppose a lot of it. Again in Maryland, she was residing a suburban American childhood of Michael Jackson and Madonna and malls. She went to varsity, moved to Los Angeles, taught and ran an artwork college.
However a way of loneliness crept in and have become more and more more durable to disregard. From time to time, the thought occurred to her: Was she only a lady from Maryland? Was that every one?
“It didn’t appear very thrilling,” she says. “It simply appeared sort of like a clean slate.”
Kimmel marks 2017 because the yr when the fog started to clear. At some point, whereas looking the net for Korean make-up tutorials, she Googled “Korean adoptions,” and fell into an entire new world.
In 2017, she went to a three-day occasion in San Francisco with lots of of Korean adoptees. The brand new concepts and friendships prompted a deep sense of urgency.
She realized she was working out of time. If she was 42, how outdated would a beginning guardian be?
How late was too late to seek out your roots?
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The Korean adoptee diaspora is regarded as the most important on the planet, with hundreds returning to South Korea in recent times to search for their beginning households. Fewer than a fifth of those that requested the South Korean authorities for assist with their search have been profitable, data present. An enormous drawback is that paperwork have been typically left obscure or outright falsified to make kids look “deserted” even once they had recognized mother and father.
In 2018, Kimmel shut down her artwork lessons and made a visit to South Korea that so many had accomplished earlier than her. She was brimming with pleasure.
The clinic the place Kimmel was supposedly dropped off was closed, however a former physician who had labored there recalled an orphan who had been present in entrance of it.
“Oh God, that is me,” Kimmel thought, tears welling in her eyes.
However it was the primary of many false begins. In contrast to Kimmel, that orphan had been taken care of by a grandmother for some time.
Kimmel subsequent visited Korea Social Service in Seoul, her adoption company. There, she argued heatedly with a social employee who had began working at KSS in 1976, the yr of her adoption.
May she get a duplicate of her file? No.
May she {photograph} her file? No.
May the social employee {photograph} or photocopy her file for Kimmel? No.
Kimmel realized the company didn’t see her identification as hers.
“By no means in my life have I been extra indignant,” she says. “There’s at all times this typical argument between adoptee and a social employee in Korea the place the adoptee says, ‘That’s my data.’ And the social employee says, ‘That’s our data. It doesn’t belong to you.’”
Kimmel fought till she was allowed to see her file. Within the very again, she found a small sq. paper envelope with {a photograph}.
It was just like the one she had questioned together with her mother and father, however shot from a unique angle. And this picture made it clear: The lady was not her.
“I’d opened this Pandora’s field,” she says. “And I didn’t really feel like I might shut it.”
She joined a number of on-line boards the place adoptees shared tales about their lives, their beginning searches, their grievances. She posted photographs of the lady in her adoption file and of herself when she first arrived in the US, asking in the event that they regarded like the identical particular person.
Some mentioned no. Others, together with mother and father of adoptees, reacted as Kimmel’s mother and father had, saying “infants change.” A brand new hunch started to emerge: Had KSS switched her identification with one other lady?
It had occurred earlier than. Throughout a keep in Europe, Kimmel had been startled to satisfy a number of adoptees in Denmark who on the final minute got the paperwork of different kids.
Kimmel had her adoption photographs cross-checked by a dysmorphologist, a medical skilled educated to determine beginning defects in kids, primarily from facial options. He noticed distinctive variations within the ears and the world between the nostril and higher lip. His conclusion: These have been probably completely different women.
“At that time I noticed, oh my God, I went by all of this trial and trepidation to {photograph} a file that’s probably not mine,” Kimmel says. “It has my adoptive mother and father’ names; it’s a file that’s associated to me. However the precise bodily little one just isn’t me; the identification just isn’t mine.”
So who was Kimmel? And who was the opposite lady?
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In 2019, she returned to KSS in South Korea. This time, the identical social employee allowed Kimmel to look the company’s file room herself.
Within the paperwork for 1976, Kimmel discovered what she believed was her “actual file,” with 5 an identical black-and-white photographs of a lady and a slide unfavorable. She was struck by the similarities to early photographs of herself in the US.
“I felt like I used to be trying into my very own soul,” she says.
Finally, a breakthrough. But the small print have been perplexing.
The paperwork mentioned the lady had severe leg deformities that made her unable to sit down. However the medical notes written simply days earlier described a wholesome lady with nothing greater than a cough and diarrhea. Had the company in some way blended data from two completely different women?
She once more consulted the dysmorphologist, this time to match the photographs she had simply discovered to these of herself in the US. She anticipated a match. However as soon as once more, he concluded that they have been completely different women.
Kimmel was shaken.
She felt such a reference to this lady. May she be a sibling? Perhaps even a twin?
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Kimmel threw herself into inspecting the advanced numerical system KSS used to log adoption instances, based mostly on lots of of case numbers she collected from different KSS adoptees. In 2021, she revisited the company with an extended want listing of recordsdata.
The assembly, which the AP attended, resulted in a tense back-and-forth for hours with the identical long-time social employee. Kimmel struggled to include her fury, waving her fingers in disgust.
“You lied,” she fumed.
Visibly irritated, the social employee shuttled forwards and backwards from the room to a doc storage space. However every of the recordsdata she introduced out had no data on Kimmel.
The social employee regarded drained. She denied that the company was withholding data. However she had no rationalization for why it couldn’t current a single doc with Kimmel’s data. Or why the picture in her file was of a unique lady. Or why KSS had advised her adoptive mother and father she was from the Namkwang orphanage in Busan.
The stress grew till the social employee acknowledged a startling observe: Switching kids’s identities was widespread amongst South Korean companies through the adoption rush of the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties.
When kids died, grew to become too sick or have been retaken by beginning households, the companies merely swapped in different kids. Western companies or adopters have been prepared to take any little one of the identical intercourse or related age, as a result of “it will take an excessive amount of time to begin over once more,” the KSS social employee mentioned.
May Kimmel have been a kind of kids?
“I can’t say with confidence that there’s completely no risk {that a} completely different little one was despatched from right here,” the employee confessed.
The employee has retired, and AP has been unable to achieve her since. KSS didn’t reply to requests for remark.
Switched paperwork could also be one motive companies are so reluctant to completely open their recordsdata to adoptees, says Lee Kyung-eun, a former director of childcare coverage at South Korea’s Well being and Welfare Ministry. Even the companies can’t inform which data are actual. Some adoptees the AP talked with spent years attending to know individuals they have been advised have been organic mother and father, solely to have DNA assessments present they weren’t associated.
“It could possibly be much less about hiding data,” Lee says, “and extra about not having a lot to offer.”
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Kimmel was exhausted. However she refused to just accept that this was all she was going to get.
Nonetheless pondering she was a twin, she had been scouring message boards for twin sisters on the lookout for their beginning mother and father, or beginning mother and father on the lookout for twin women. Now she had one clue left: A message written by an outdated man named Park Jong-kyun, on the lookout for twin women relinquished for adoption someday between 1973 and 1976.
Park had left detailed details about his full identify, his spouse’s names, their sons’ names, their beginning dates. He described a small village, which Kimmel tracked down on the southern South Korean resort island of Jeju.
Kimmel went. Inside hours, with the assistance of native police, she met Park.
Park is a slight man with type eyes, who lives in a small, weathered home surrounded by tangerine bushes and flowers that remind him of his daughters. His twins have been born at a time when he and his late spouse have been struggling financially to boost three sons. His spouse wanted an emergency C-section, which the couple couldn’t afford.
The hospital persuaded them to offer away the dual women to alleviate the monetary burden and toll on his spouse’s well being, Park says. He named his women after the Korean phrases for rose and chrysanthemum.
He wrote the twins’ birthdate – Could 11, 1973 – on two items of paper and put them of their clothes, hoping to seek out them sometime.
Park looked for the women for many years, placing in requests with the federal government and Holt Kids’s Companies, South Korea’s greatest adoption company. Authorities officers advised him his twins have been probably adopted to the US by Holt, based mostly on their birthdate and hospital.
In 2018, he visited Holt and the federal government company that helped with adoption searches. He despatched them bins of Jeju tangerines, hoping they’d bear in mind him and search for his daughters.
When Kimmel got here to Jeju in 2021, Park was excited and really stunned. They spent days collectively, consuming in eating places, speaking and laughing as they communicated with translation apps. Park taped Kimmel’s U.S. child photographs on a wall of his small house.
But he felt instinctively that she was not his daughter. His doubts have been confirmed when a DNA check confirmed no relation.
Kimmel was devastated. However within the wake of her grief, she realized that his twins might nonetheless be someplace out on the planet.
Kimmel organized to have kits from an American DNA testing agency despatched to South Korea. She traveled again to Jeju to check Park and a close-by island to check his son.
It took simply three weeks for the corporate to find Park’s daughters — Becca Webster and Dee Iraca.
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The twins are very completely different.
Webster, a nanny with a son in faculty, is whimsical, chatty and easygoing. Iraca, who works as a chef and dietitian, is meticulous, severe and at all times on the go. Her nickname is Speedy Dee-Dee.
These variations are what prompted them to take a DNA check within the first place; they wished to verify for themselves that they’re organic sisters.
Adopted by the identical American household, their recordsdata described them as deserted in entrance of a hospital. Anytime they thought of trying to find their beginning mother and father, they felt overwhelmed.
“Deserted is such a tough phrase….It feels so hole,” Webster says. “Once you’re advised a story that you simply’ve been deserted, left as a child, the place are you going to go together with that?”
They traveled to South Korea for the 2018 Winter Olympics and visited Holt’s workplace in Seoul, simply months after Park went there. A social employee for Holt advised the twins that the company had no additional paperwork for them.
Which led them to marvel: In the event that they’d simply been left on a doorstep, how might anybody have actually recognized they have been twins?
The outcomes have been reassuring; they have been certainly sisters. However the check led to a baffling flip: A stranger despatched them a notice declaring that the DNA website additionally registered a person referred to as “Mr. P” as their father.
They have been shocked. They requested the DNA firm if this was a rip-off. It wasn’t.
The stranger turned out to be Kimmel. She advised them that their father had been on the lookout for them for many years.
“Even now typically, it appears like a dream,” Iraca says.
They felt responsible that so many adoptees, together with Kimmel, had been desperately trying to find their households, and their father had been trying to find them. However they hadn’t been looking.
“It wasn’t about not desirous to know,” Webster says. “It was about chopping that emotion off as a result of we didn’t suppose we had a alternative.”
In October 2022, the twins went to South Korea. Park waited for them anxiously on the airport, holding up a handwritten English signal that learn “Dee, Becca, welcome to Korea.”
He introduced two bouquets of flowers: one roses and the opposite chrysanthemums. He made positive to offer the suitable bouquet to the suitable daughter.
He hugged them. “Thanks for ready for me,” he mentioned.
He spoke solely Korean. They spoke solely English and got here throughout as unmistakably American. At one level, as they tried to stroll inside his house, he mentioned, “No, no, no, no”; they hadn’t adopted the Korean observe of taking off their sneakers.
However for all of the variations, the twins felt an on the spot connection. Park confirmed them photographs on his wall of his personal father and mom. They met their Korean brother and their uncles and aunts, who hosted a welcome celebration. These strangers who have been in some way nonetheless household touched the sisters’ faces and speculated on who regarded like whom.
Park gave every of them a hanbok, a standard Korean garment. They wore them to a Buddhist temple the place there’s a memorial picture of their mom.
Again in North Carolina, the sisters are actually taking good care of their adoptive mom, who has well being challenges, and it’s troublesome to seek out the money and time to go to South Korea. However they need to take the time to get to know their father..
They name him Ok-Dad, to distinguish from their adoptive father, who died greater than a decade in the past. He sends them packages of seaweed and inexperienced tea.
They’re left with blended emotions. In spite of everything, they ended up joyful in America. But their happiness was constructed on an injustice that harm hundreds, together with their beginning father. They resent that they discovered of their identification from a stranger, and that they have been too late to satisfy their mom.
“We now have each constructed such unbelievable lives that it’s exhausting to have a look at that and something unfavorable about it,” Webster says. “(But) there’s part of it that we really feel unhappy.”
Park, too, has blended emotions. He wears an enormous smile when he talks about assembly his daughters once more. Their footage cowl his partitions, together with taped memos of English phrases and expressions. Keen to speak with them, he has purchased a number of English books, however says he isn’t getting wherever.
It was painful for him to see his daughters go away. He’s annoyed that Holt, which didn’t reply to AP’s request for remark, missed a possibility to reunite them as early as 2018. In his mid-80s and nonetheless struggling financially, Park can’t afford an extended and costly journey to America.
“It’s unhappy,” Park says. “There’s so little time left for me.”
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That also leaves Kimmel.
She feels a bittersweet thrill that she managed to reunite the twins with their father. They joke that they’re triplets — two Beccas and a Dee.
Kimmel additionally spends hours serving to and advising different adoptees. She is a key contributor to an adoption-focused web site referred to as Paperslip, named after the phrase that continuously — and typically falsely — seems within the recordsdata of KSS adoptees described as deserted.
Her adoptive mother and father have struggled with their unintended position in a deeply flawed system. Her mom is afraid that Kimmel’s obsession together with her previous has taken a toll on her well-being. Her father says he wouldn’t have thought-about worldwide adoption “had I recognized of the deception and what it has accomplished to so many adoptees of their seek for their identification.”
Kimmel nonetheless doesn’t know — and should by no means know — who she is. All she is aware of is who she’s not. And that leaves her in limbo, torn between a thoughts that sees no level in looking additional and a coronary heart that may’t appear to surrender.
“I’m nearly 50 years outdated, and I nonetheless don’t know after I was born, or what metropolis I used to be born in,” she says. “I don’t know my beginning mother and father. There’s nothing that I find out about myself as actual.”
She typically seems on the picture of the lady she nonetheless believes is her twin.
Like Kimmel herself — like hundreds of others — she stays a thriller.
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PBS Frontline’s Lora Moftah contributed to this report.
This story is a part of an ongoing investigation led by The Related Press in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS). The investigation consists of an interactive and documentary, South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning.
Contact AP’s world investigative crew at Investigative@ap.org.