Alternate lives, identical struggles
For S. Korean orphans, self-identity remains elusive
SEOUL: On a summer’s day in 1985 a seven-year-old boy sat alone at a crowded bus station in Seoul, sobbing as he waited desperately for his mother to return.
Jo Youn-hwan was wearing a baseball uniform that his mother had bought him a few days before – the only gift she had ever given him.
She told him to wait for her before leaving him at the terminal. So he did, increasingly terrified as day turned to dusk.
“I’ll be a really good kid if only she chooses to return,” he promised himself over and over again. She never did.
Jo was taken into South Korea’s orphanage system, but even though the country was for decades one of the world’s biggest exporters of children, he was already too old for most adoptive parents’ preferences.
He spent the rest of his childhood in what he describes as a vicious and rigidly hierarchical institution, before “aging out” at 20.
Children died of curable illnesses and older ones abused younger ones on a daily basis, he said.
Rooms and clothes were filthy,
the food often rotten and inedible.
He often wondered what life would be like if he had been adopted.
“My life wouldn’t have been so full of han,” he said – a Korean word describing unresolved sadness and resentment.
International adoption from South Korea began after the Korean War as a way to remove mixed-race
children, born to local mothers and US military fathers, from a country emphasising ethnic homogeneity.
More recently the main driver has been babies born to unmarried women, who still face ostracism in a patriarchal society.
Most children remain institutionalised till adulthood as many South Koreans are reluctant to adopt. The country has sent 180,000 children abroad, mostly to the United States.
The idea of rescue “erased the consumerism” of international adoption, providing justification for taking children from their country of birth, said Arissa Oh, who studies race, family and migration at the US-based Boston College.
Born in Seoul in 1960, filmmaker Glenn Morey was abandoned as a newborn and adopted at six months by a white American couple.
Growing up in Denver, Colorado, he was the only non-white student at school and struggled to fit in.
“When you experience difficulties growing up daily, you wonder what it would’ve been like in South Korea, where you would’ve looked at least like everyone else,” he said.
A part of his latest project, Side by Side, is an attempt to answer that question, interviewing 12 Koreans who “aged out”.
Two of them told him of life on the streets without a steady job, their next meal always in question and regularly encountering violence.
Abandoned children can face lifelong stigma in the South, where known family lineage is vital. They face discrimination when applying for jobs and in relationships, Jo said.
Jo’s case is, by his own admission, unusual. He did well academically and his orphanage director offered to pay for his university tuition.
He is now a taxi driver, married with children of his own, and has set up the South’s first-ever rights group for aged-out Koreans. A survey found that 93% of members were convicted criminals, had been homeless or worked in illicit industries.
Last year Jo found his mother, but it didn’t bring him peace.
He was told that his father was an abusive gambling addict and his mother sought to escape by marrying another man, deciding that to do so, she needed to hide her past.
Jo said: “Why didn’t she at least let me live with my father or grandmother? Why did she lie and tell my father I was dead?
“I’m still struggling to digest this. It’s been very, very hard.”