Trying to fill in holes, adopted Koreans find hope in cotton swab

DNA testing used in search for family connections

The New York Times

SEOUL, South Korea — Five years ago, Sun Mi Stapel, a claims handler at a Dutch insurance company, began searching for her South Korean birth family.

Ms. Stapel first turned to the Dutch adoption agency that had placed her with her adoptive parents in Krommenie, the Netherlands, where she grew up. Then she tried Korea Social Service, which had handled the Korean side of her adoption. Last year, she finally obtained her adoption files, but they were missing vital information.

She traveled to Seoul, appearing on a morning television show with her baby photos and asking viewers to call a hotline with any information. She registered for a national database for missing people. She distributed fliers in the neighborhood around her orphanage in Incheon, where she was born, and visited nursing homes and community centers there in hopes of finding someone who knew her parents. No one did. So on a recent Tuesday afternoon, Ms. Stapel, 46, went to a guesthouse for adoptees in Seoul, where a volunteer rubbed the inside of her cheek with a cotton swab, dropped the swab in a tube and shipped it to a lab in Texas, where her DNA will be analyzed and uploaded to a website that scans submitted samples for genetic matches.

The result could link her to her birth family and fill in some of the blanks of her personal history.

“I want to know the simple things,” she said. “When is my real date of birth? Who is my father? Who is my mother? Do I have siblings? Do I look like somebody?”

Many South Korean adoptees who have the same questions are turning to DNA testing to circumvent what has long been a tortuous and often fruitless process.

For years, South Korea was the world’s leading baby exporter. Since the 1950s, it has sent about 200,000 children abroad for adoption, including about 150,000 to the United States.

Every year adoptees return, looking for information about their past. But South Korean laws block them from obtaining their full birth records without their birth parents’ consent. And government adoption files are often falsified, incomplete or missing, making birth parents impossible to track down.

From 2012-15, fewer than 15 percent of adoptees who asked to reunite with their birth parents were able to do so, according to Korean government figures.

For many, DNA testing offers a way around the bureaucratic hurdles and flawed records.

Ms. Stapel was one of a few dozen adoptees who took free DNA tests made available in Seoul this month during the International Korean Adoptee Associations Gathering, which meets every three years.

Monica Toudahl Knudsen, 33, who grew up in the Jutland peninsula, in Denmark, also took the test. She has been searching for her birth family since 2012.

According to her adoption file, her parents were teenage sweethearts who could not afford to raise her. On a previous trip to Seoul, she had visited the site of the midwife clinic where she was born. It now houses a cafe and fried chicken restaurant.

She feels grateful for her life in Denmark, where she is a chef. If she is ever able to meet her birth parents, she said, “I just want to thank them for letting me go.”

The DNA testing movement has been largely financed by Thomas Park Clement, a Korean adoptee who now lives in New York City and in Bloomington, Indiana. A scientist who founded Mectra Labs, a medical manufacturing company, he has pledged to spend $1 million on DNA kits to give away.

“I have throughout the years experienced so many of my fellow Korean adoptees’ frustrations with birth relative searches,” he said in a recent interview. “DNA is shortcutting the search process and bringing all parties in direct communication with each other.”

He has donated 2,550 kits to Korean adoptees and Korean War veterans in the United States. Some of the veterans are the fathers of the first wave of South Korea’s international adoptees. He has also given 450 test kits to 325Kamra, a volunteer organization started last year, to distribute in South Korea.

When testing works, it is remarkably efficient.

This month, 325Kamra announced its first match between a Korean birth mother and an American adoptee. Within 48 hours, the adoptee, Kyung Eun Davidson, 33, of Everett, Washington, was speaking to her mother for the first time in 30 years.

“It’s been an amazing, crazy and wonderful experience,” Ms. Davidson told The Korea Herald.