Oliver Brown Seoul sister act in the spotlight
Two siblings are hogging the headlines at the Winter Olympics in South Korea for a most unusual reason – one is donning the colours of the US and the other is flying the flag for South Korea. The ice hockey poster girls representing rival countries talk t
THE “Seoul sisters”, as they are dubbed in South Korea, have inadvertently become the poster girls that the Winter Olympics craved.
The Brandts are siblings united by a love of one sport, but they find themselves competing under two different flags: where Hannah is a stalwart of US women’s ice hockey, Marissa lined up for a team representing a unified Korea, designed as a stirring symbol of solidarity for a divided peninsula.
For Marissa, who was adopted by a Minnesotan family when she was four months old, there was a choice of whether to emblazon her jersey with “Brandt” or her original South Korean name, Park Yoon-jung. Despite her limitations in the language, she opted to go native.
“I realised,” says the effervescent 25-year-old, who still harbours hope of tracking down her biological mother, “that it was really my only link back to Korea.”
It is, as US hockey coach Reagan Carey acknowledges, a “unique and incredible tale” – one which began in 1993 when Greg and Robin Brandt, a couple from suburban Minneapolis, embarked on an adoption process after years of trying to conceive. Into their lives came Marissa, brought by a chaperone to the local airport, where she would start her new life as a proud Midwestern girl. Three months prior to this auspicious event, Robin had fallen pregnant.
So it is, then, that the family find themselves unwitting emblems for international diplomacy, establishing a bond between the US and the notion of a united Korea, which sits at odds with Donald Trump’s rhetoric.
As US vice-president Mike Pence flew in for Friday’s opening ceremony in Pyeongchang, promising a round of the most savage sanctions yet against Kim Jong-un’s regime, Marissa was finishing up a training session surrounded by her Korean team mates.
Dressing-room dialogue can be difficult. Marissa’s Korean is so rudimentary that she does not comprehend more than a few Hangul characters, while players from the North, as befitting a closed society, insist on arriving on separate buses and sleeping in separate dormitories.
But this, she says, should not be construed as hostility.
“They are very friendly, and they fit in well. They’re hardworking, very disciplined,” she says, though the language barrier does make it “hard to have a conversation”.
Not that such hindrances bother Marissa, who has fulfilled a lifetime’s quest by reaching an Olympic Games alongside her sister. At first, the pair shared ambitions of a career in figure skating.
But Hannah gave it up during secondary school, and Marissa followed suit.
“She got sick of watching me play ice hockey,” says Hannah, 24. “Neither of us could have imagined this happening at the Olympics, ever.”
The spectacle of siblings drawn against each other on the grandest stage is not without precedent.
Endurance athletes Bernard and Viola Lagat both lined up at the Rio Olympics in 2016. But the timing of the Brandts’ arrival in Pyeongchang, at this moment of tinderbox tension between the US and North Korea, propels their dynamic into a different dimension.
Marissa’s relationship with her Korean heritage is complex.
Initially she disavowed her roots, but she has since come to embrace her ancestry as a mark of distinction.
“I was so shy about it, but the fact that I have been able to come here and dive into this culture has been life-changing.
“It feels weird to say this, but being here, I would definitely describe myself as Korean-American now.
“I would never have called myself that before.”
Their parents are in South Korea to watch the poignant theatre of their tournament unfold.
Their mother, Robin, describes the experience of watching both daughters in the same contest as “overwhelming”.
“Hannah always wanted to be better than the boys, and Marissa had the tenacity to go in the same direction,” she says.
“I never foresaw either of them ending up here.”
Marissa’s thoughts are already turning to the next chapter in her life – she married last June, and has indicated an intention to retire once the competition is over. But if her great Pyeongchang adventure yields a medal or, even better, aids the search for her birth mother, that would, she smiles, be the “cherry on top”. —