Beyond the papers: Korean adoptees and the search for truth

By Alessandra Bonanomi

ROME: A few days ago, I stumbled upon a YouTube video by Al Jazeera that told the story of Simon Hokwerda, a man born in 1966 who was adopted by a Dutch family at the age of four.

Simon, whose Korean name is Kim Kwon-si, is one of the biracial babies born to U.S. soldiers and Korean women. “In 1970, I was adopted to the Netherlands because I was a ‘hapa’ (multiracial Asian).

I had no chance of going to school, and the safety of our family wasn’t guaranteed by anyone in Korea,” Kim Kwon-si shared in an interview with Hankyoreh. His adoption story is a reflection of a broader trend in South Korea’s post-war history.

According to the Al Jazeera video, to rebuild the war-torn country, South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee—an authoritarian leader installed by the U.S.—enacted a xenophobic policy that embraced the idea of “one state for one ethnic people”

This policy saw foreign adoption as a means of purifying the nation, aligning with a vision of ethnic homogeneity. In Kwon-si’s adoption papers, he is listed as an orphan without parents, but that is not the truth.

Watching this video made me reflect on some of the interviews I conducted in 2018 for an article I was writing on the concept of identity. I had spoken with several Korean adoptees, and one conversation, in particular, stood out.

A Korean adoptee, who preferred to remain anonymous, told me that there were many doubts surrounding the stories given by adoption agencies to adoptees.

These agencies often said that children were orphans, abandoned by their parents, or that the parents had given their consent for adoption. But when some adoptees managed to reunite with their biological families, the truth often did not match what was written in the official documents.

Since then, stories like these have only increased in number. For example, on Instagram, the story of Yooree Kim, interviewed by AP News, went viral. Yooree Kim was adopted by a French family at the age of 11, along with her brother.

Years later, when she reunited with her biological mother, she discovered that her mother had left them in an orphanage temporarily, just to ensure they would be fed—a common practice at the time. When she returned to retrieve them, they were gone, having been sent abroad for adoption without her knowledge or consent.

More than 200,000 South Korean children have been adopted overseas since the 1950s, following World War II and the Korean War, according to authorities.

The vast majority of these children were sent to families in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Many of these adoptees, now adults, are seeking answers to fill the gaps in their personal histories and understand their identities.

They often begin their journeys of self-discovery with nothing more than vague adoption records, some of which were falsified or incomplete.

The stories of Korean adoptees share common threads: a desire to uncover the truth about their origins, a struggle with identity, and a need to reconcile their lives in the countries where they were raised with their roots in South Korea.

Many adoptees are now calling for greater transparency in adoption processes and for the South Korean government to provide more assistance in helping them reconnect with their biological families. In some cases, adoptees have returned to South Korea to live and work, drawn by a desire to reconnect with their cultural heritage.

Others have embarked on personal journeys to locate their birth parents, often encountering bureaucratic obstacles and incomplete records.

The least that can be done is to support these individuals in their quest for truth, rather than hinder their efforts. For many adoptees, the search for their past is not just about finding their biological parents—it is about reclaiming a part of themselves that was lost in the process of adoption.

As awareness grows about the complexities and challenges these individuals face, there is hope that future generations will be spared the pain of forced separations, and that those searching for answers will finally uncover the truth they deserve.