Who am I? A South Korean adoptee finds solutions concerning the previous — simply not those she needs

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Rebecca Kimmel sat in a small room, surprised and speechless, staring on the child photograph 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 concerning the photograph — 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 photograph meant that the tales she had been informed about herself have been a lie. So who was she? Who IS she?

Thousands of South Korean adoptees need to fulfill a uncooked, compelling urge that a lot of the world takes with no consideration: the seek for id. 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 id she desperately needs to search out.

These adoptees stay with the implications of a tacit partnership by the South Korean government, Western nations and adoption agencies that has equipped some 200,000 youngsters to oldsters abroad, regardless of warnings of widespread fraud.

For many years, South Korea tried to do away with youngsters from biracial mother and father, poor households, orphanages and unwed moms, ignoring illicit practices. Western families in turn were eager to adopt from overseas, after entry to contraception and abortion crushed the availability of home infants. Whereas many adoptions ended fortunately, the wishes of either side additionally resulted within the pointless removing of generations of youngsters 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 needed.

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Kimmel, an artist, thinks she is about 49; her precise age is among the many issues about herself she doesn’t know. She throws herself with depth into nearly the whole lot she does, notably her all-consuming quest for her roots.

It wasn’t all the time that approach. 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 informed her the origin story they’d gotten from the adoption company: She had been deserted as an toddler on a avenue 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 title 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 have a good time “Arrival Day,” a form 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 photograph that her mother and father confirmed from South Korea didn’t look very similar to these of her in america. When she requested why, her mother and father simply informed her that infants change.

“I feel my mother and father have been simply joyful to have gotten a baby,” she says, describing them as an idealistic couple who couldn’t have comprehended the deeper issues surrounding adoptions from South Korea.

In 1986, the household traveled to South Korea, the place adoption employees informed them to go to a special orphanage than the one they’d thought Kimmel was from. It was known as Namkwang, in Busan. They discovered no file of Kimmel.

Kimmel didn’t assume 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. Once in a while, the thought occurred to her: Was she only a woman from Maryland? Was that each one?

“It didn’t appear very thrilling,” she says. “It simply appeared sort of like a clean slate.”

Kimmel marks 2017 because the 12 months when the fog started to clear. Someday, 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 a whole bunch of Korean adoptees. The brand new concepts and friendships prompted a deep sense of urgency.

She realized she was operating out of time. If she was 42, how previous would a beginning father or mother be?

How late was too late to search out your roots?

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The Korean adoptee diaspora is considered the most important on the earth, with 1000’s 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, information present. A giant downside is that paperwork have been typically left imprecise or outright falsified to make youngsters look “deserted” even once they had identified mother and father.

In 2018, Kimmel shut down her artwork lessons and made a visit to South Korea that so many had completed 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.

Nevertheless 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 12 months of her adoption.

Might she get a duplicate of her file? No.

Might she {photograph} her file? No.

Might the social employee {photograph} or photocopy her file for Kimmel? No.

Kimmel realized the company didn’t see her id as hers.

“By no means in my life have I been extra indignant,” she says. “There’s all the time this typical argument between adoptee and a social employee in Korea the place the adoptee says, ‘That’s my info.’ And the social employee says, ‘That’s our info. 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 much like the one she had questioned together with her mother and father, however shot from a special angle. And this photograph made it clear: The woman 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 woman in her adoption file and of herself when she first arrived in america, asking in the event that they seemed like the identical particular person.

Some stated 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 id with one other woman?

It had occurred earlier than. Throughout a keep in Europe, Kimmel had been startled to fulfill a number of adoptees in Denmark who on the final minute got the paperwork of different youngsters.

Kimmel had her adoption photographs cross-checked by a dysmorphologist, a medical knowledgeable educated to establish beginning defects in youngsters, 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 totally different ladies.

“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 baby isn’t me; the id isn’t mine.”

So who was Kimmel? And who was the opposite woman?

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In 2019, she returned to KSS in South Korea. This time, the identical social employee allowed Kimmel to go looking 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 woman and a slide damaging. She was struck by the similarities to early photographs of herself in america.

“I felt like I used to be trying into my very own soul,” she says.

Finally, a breakthrough. But the main points have been perplexing.

The paperwork stated the woman had critical leg deformities that made her unable to sit down. However the medical notes written simply days earlier described a wholesome woman with nothing greater than a cough and diarrhea. Had the company one way or the other blended info from two totally different ladies?

She once more consulted the dysmorphologist, this time to check the photographs she had simply discovered to these of herself in america. She anticipated a match. However as soon as once more, he concluded that they have been totally different ladies.

Kimmel was shaken.

She felt such a reference to this woman. Might she be a sibling? Perhaps even a twin?

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Kimmel threw herself into inspecting the complicated numerical system KSS used to log adoption circumstances, based mostly on a whole bunch of case numbers she collected from different KSS adoptees. In 2021, she revisited the company with a protracted want checklist 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 comprise her fury, waving her fingers in disgust.

“You lied,” she fumed.

Visibly irritated, the social employee shuttled backwards and forwards from the room to a doc storage space. However every of the recordsdata she introduced out had no info on Kimmel.

The social employee seemed drained. She denied that the company was withholding info. However she had no rationalization for why it couldn’t current a single doc with Kimmel’s info. Or why the photograph in her file was of a special woman. Or why KSS had informed her adoptive mother and father she was from the Namkwang orphanage in Busan.

The stress grew till the social employee acknowledged a startling follow: Switching youngsters’s identities was widespread amongst South Korean businesses through the adoption rush of the Seventies and Eighties.

When youngsters died, grew to become too sick or have been retaken by beginning households, the businesses merely swapped in different youngsters. Western businesses or adopters have been keen to take any baby of the identical intercourse or related age, as a result of “it might take an excessive amount of time to begin over once more,” the KSS social employee stated.

Might Kimmel have been a type of youngsters?

“I can’t say with confidence that there’s completely no risk {that a} totally different baby was despatched from right here,” the employee confessed.

The employee has retired, and AP has been unable to succeed in her since. KSS didn’t reply to requests for remark.

Switched paperwork could also be one motive businesses are so reluctant to totally 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 businesses can’t inform which information are actual. Some adoptees the AP talked with spent years attending to know folks they have been informed have been organic mother and father, solely to have DNA assessments present they weren’t associated.

“It might be much less about hiding information,” Lee says, “and extra about not having a lot to offer.”

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Kimmel was exhausted. However she refused to simply 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 searching for their beginning mother and father, or beginning mother and father searching for twin ladies. Now she had one clue left: A message written by an previous man named Park Jong-kyun, searching for twin ladies relinquished for adoption someday between 1973 and 1976.

Park had left detailed details about his full title, 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 form 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 ladies to alleviate the monetary burden and toll on his spouse’s well being, Park says. He named his ladies after the Korean phrases for rose and chrysanthemum.

He wrote the twins’ birthdate – Might 11, 1973 – on two items of paper and put them of their clothes, hoping to search out them sometime.

Park looked for the ladies for many years, placing in requests with the federal government and Holt Kids’s Companies, South Korea’s greatest adoption company. Authorities officers informed him his twins have been probably adopted to america 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 containers of Jeju tangerines, hoping they might bear in mind him and search for his daughters.

When Kimmel got here to Jeju in 2021, Park was excited and really shocked. 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 residence.

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 earth.

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 totally different.

Webster, a nanny with a son in faculty, is whimsical, chatty and easygoing. Iraca, who works as a chef and dietitian, is meticulous, critical and all the time 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 needed to substantiate 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. “If you’re informed a story that you just’ve been deserted, left as a child, the place are you going to go along 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 informed 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 identified 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 mentioning that the DNA website additionally registered a person known as “Mr. P” as their father.

They have been surprised. They requested the DNA firm if this was a rip-off. It wasn’t.

The stranger turned out to be Kimmel. She informed them that their father had been searching 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 eager to know,” Webster says. “It was about slicing that emotion off as a result of we didn’t assume we had a selection.”

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 certain to offer the appropriate bouquet to the appropriate daughter.

He hugged them. “Thanks for ready for me,” he stated.

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 residence, he stated, “No, no, no, no”; they hadn’t adopted the Korean follow of taking off their footwear.

However for all of the variations, the twins felt an instantaneous 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 occasion. These strangers who have been one way or the other nonetheless household touched the sisters’ faces and speculated on who seemed like whom.

Park gave every of them a hanbok, a conventional Korean garment. They wore them to a Buddhist temple the place there’s a memorial photograph 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 search 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 Okay-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 any case, they ended up joyful in America. But their happiness was constructed on an injustice that harm 1000’s, together with their beginning father. They resent that they discovered of their id from a stranger, and that they have been too late to fulfill their mom.

“We’ve each constructed such unbelievable lives that it’s arduous to have a look at that and something damaging 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 anyplace.

It was painful for him to see his daughters depart. 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 a protracted 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 known as Paperslip, named after the phrase that steadily — and typically falsely — seems within the recordsdata of KSS adoptees described as deserted.

Her adoptive mother and father, who couldn’t have beginning youngsters, have struggled with their unintended function 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 of worldwide adoption “had I identified of the deception and what it has completed to so many adoptees of their seek for their id.”

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 previous, 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 photograph of the woman she nonetheless believes is her twin.

Like Kimmel herself — like 1000’s of others — her story 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 staff at Investigative@ap.org.