Olympians, sisters, rivals
While growing up, Marissa Brandt rarely thought about her biological South Korean mother.
She was adopted when she was 4 months old by an American couple living in a predominantly white suburb of St. Paul, Minn. Brandt, 24, says her Korean ethnicity wasn’t something that she dwelled on.
“I felt like I didn’t look different. I wasn’t in any way, shape or form, different. I felt like everybody else,” Brandt says, at her childhood home.
Now, after more than two decades since leaving Korea, it’s the connection to her roots that is sending Brandt to the 2018 Winter Olympics. In 2015, following Brandt’s time as a Division III women’s ice hockey player for Gustavus Adolphus College, she received an offer to try out for the South Korean team.
“I didn’t know what to say right away. It was out of the blue. I remember it was finals weeks of my senior year of college. And this was the last thing on my mind, you know?” Brandt remembers.
As host of the Pyeongchang 2018 Olympic Games, South Korea will be able to participate in sports such as ice hockey, despite not qualifying. So, it’s not unprecedented that the country would shop for overseas talent or “imports” to help boost its chances of performing. When recruiting, players from Canada and the U.S. — where teams routinely dominate in the sport — are a logical target.
Specifically, Brandt says scouts for the women’s team were interested in players with Korean ethnicity.
At least four players, two from Canada and one other American besides Brandt, have some Korean blood. Brandt, however, is the only overseas recruit on the team who was born in Korea.
Brandt originally lost her Korean citizenship as one of more than 160,000 native-born Koreans who were adopted internationally as children since the 1950s. Brandt’s adoptive parents, Greg and Robin, finalized her U.S. citizenship before she started grade school. She became a naturalized American, in the only country she knew.
Brandt says when she was around 10, her mother sent her and her younger sister, Hannah (who is not adopted), to a Korean cultural camp to help her connect to her heritage.
“I remember I did not like going,” Brandt says. “But my sister loved it. So we kept going back for her because my mom thought it would be funny to just send her to Korean camp without me.”
Hannah, who is white like their parents, says she liked the spicy food and the taekwondo. “I really enjoyed going,” recalls Hannah Brandt, 23. The two sisters would go on to share hobbies and interests, including figure skating and eventually hockey. And they will soon add an Olympics to the list.
Hannah, a Big Ten collegiate standout player, will also head to Pyeongchang, but for top-ranked Team U.S.A.
“Now we get to experience (this) together and it’s the first one for both of us. You just can’t write a story like that,” Hannah says.