Who am I? A South Korean adoptee finds answers about the past — just not the ones she wants

[October 15, 2024]  By KIM TONG-HYUNG, FOSTER KLUG and CLAIRE GALOFARO

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Rebecca Kimmel sat in a small room, stunned and speechless, staring at the baby photo she had just unearthed from her adoption file.

It was a black-and-white shot of an infant, possibly taken at an orphanage in Gwangju, the South Korean city where Kimmel had heard all her life that she’d been abandoned. But something about the photo — the eyes, the ears, an uneasy feeling deep in her gut — confirmed what she’d long suspected: This baby was not her.

Overcome, she started howling like a strange, wounded animal. This photo meant that the stories she had been told about herself were a lie. So who was she? Who IS she?

Thousands of South Korean adoptees are looking to satisfy a raw, compelling urge that much of the world takes for granted: the search for identity. Like many of them, Kimmel has stumbled into a web of switched photos, made-up stories and false documents, all designed to erase the very identity she desperately wants to find.

These adoptees live with the consequences of a tacit partnership by the South Korean government, Western nations and adoption agencies that has supplied some 200,000 children to parents overseas, despite warnings of widespread fraud.

For decades, South Korea tried to get rid of children from biracial parents, poor families, orphanages and unwed mothers, ignoring illicit practices. Western families in turn were eager to adopt from abroad, after access to birth control and abortion crushed the supply of domestic babies. While many adoptions ended happily, the desires of both sides also resulted in the unnecessary removal of generations of children from their families based on fake paperwork.

As Kimmel sat weeping in that room in the Seoul adoption agency, she knew little of this background. All she knew was that she needed answers.

She would find them — just not the ones she wanted.

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Kimmel, an artist, thinks she is about 49; her exact age is one of the many things about herself she does not know. She throws herself with intensity into almost everything she does, particularly her all-consuming quest for her roots.

It wasn’t always that way. Kimmel spent much of her childhood in what many adoptees call “the fog” — a time of happy ignorance when they are oblivious to questions about their adoption.

Her parents told her the origin story they’d gotten from the adoption agency: She had been abandoned as an infant on a street in Gwangju and sent to an orphanage by police. A slip of paper on her clothing listed her birth date as the day before: Aug. 4, 1975.

There was no information about her biological mother or father. Her birth name was either Chung Jo Hee or Chung So Hee — the writing on the original paperwork was unclear.

She was adopted six months later by a family on the U.S. East Coast. Each Jan. 21, her parents would celebrate “Arrival Day,” a sort of second birthday that she saw as slightly embarrassing but sweet. They would display her documents and baby pictures.

But a small detail nagged at her: One photo that her parents showed from South Korea didn’t look much like those of her in the United States. When she asked why, her parents just told her that babies change.

“I think my parents were just happy to have got a child,” she says, describing them as an idealistic couple who couldn’t have comprehended the deeper problems surrounding adoptions from South Korea.

In 1986, the family traveled to South Korea, where adoption workers told them to visit a different orphanage than the one they’d thought Kimmel was from. It was called Namkwang, in Busan. They found no record of Kimmel.

Kimmel didn’t think much of it. Back in Maryland, she was living a suburban American childhood of Michael Jackson and Madonna and malls. She went to college, moved to Los Angeles, taught and ran an art school.

But a sense of loneliness crept in and became increasingly harder to ignore. Every now and then, the thought occurred to her: Was she just a girl from Maryland? Was that all?

“It didn’t seem very exciting,” she says. “It just seemed kind of like a blank slate.”

Kimmel marks 2017 as the year when the fog began to clear. One day, while searching the web for Korean makeup tutorials, she Googled “Korean adoptions,” and fell into a whole new world.

In 2017, she went to a three-day event in San Francisco with hundreds of Korean adoptees. The new ideas and friendships prompted a deep sense of urgency.

She realized she was running out of time. If she was 42, how old would a birth parent be?

How late was too late to find your roots?

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The Korean adoptee diaspora is thought to be the largest in the world, with thousands returning to South Korea in recent years to look for their birth families. Fewer than a fifth of those who asked the South Korean government for help with their search were successful, records show. A big problem is that documents were often left vague or outright falsified to make children look “abandoned” even when they had known parents.

In 2018, Kimmel shut down her art classes and made a trip to South Korea that so many had done before her. She was brimming with excitement.

The clinic where Kimmel was supposedly dropped off was closed, but a former doctor who had worked there recalled an orphan who had been found in front of it.

“Oh God, this is me,” Kimmel thought, tears welling in her eyes.

But it was the first of many false starts. Unlike Kimmel, that orphan had been looked after by a grandmother for a while.

Kimmel next visited Korea Social Service in Seoul, her adoption agency. There, she argued heatedly with a social worker who had started working at KSS in 1976, the year of her adoption.

Could she get a copy of her file? No.

Could she photograph her file? No.

Could the social worker photograph or photocopy her file for Kimmel? No.

Kimmel realized the agency did not see her identity as hers.

“Never in my life have I been more angry,” she says. “There’s always this typical argument between adoptee and a social worker in Korea where the adoptee says, ‘That’s my information.’ And the social worker says, ‘That’s our information. It doesn’t belong to you.’”

Kimmel fought until she was allowed to see her file. In the very back, she discovered a small square paper envelope with a photograph.

It was similar to the one she had questioned with her parents, but shot from a different angle. And this photo made it clear: The girl was not her.

“I’d opened this Pandora’s box,” she says. “And I didn’t feel like I could close it."

She joined multiple online forums where adoptees shared stories about their lives, their birth searches, their grievances. She posted photos of the girl in her adoption file and of herself when she first arrived in the United States, asking if they looked like the same person.

Some said no. Others, including parents of adoptees, reacted as Kimmel’s parents had, saying “babies change.” A new hunch began to emerge: Had KSS switched her identity with another girl?

It had happened before. During a stay in Europe, Kimmel had been startled to meet several adoptees in Denmark who at the last minute were given the paperwork of other children.

Kimmel had her adoption photos cross-checked by a dysmorphologist, a medical expert trained to identify birth defects in children, mainly from facial features. He saw distinctive differences in the ears and the area between the nose and upper lip. His conclusion: These were likely different girls.

“At that point I realized, oh my God, I went through all of this trial and trepidation to photograph a file that’s not really mine,” Kimmel says. “It has my adoptive parents’ names; it’s a file that’s related to me. But the actual physical child is not me; the identity is not mine.”

So who was Kimmel? And who was the other girl?

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In 2019, she returned to KSS in South Korea. This time, the same social worker allowed Kimmel to search the agency’s file room herself.

In the paperwork for 1976, Kimmel found what she believed was her “real file,” with five identical black-and-white photos of a girl and a slide negative. She was struck by the similarities to early photos of herself in the United States.

“I felt like I was looking into my own soul,” she says.

At last, a breakthrough. Yet the details were perplexing.

The documents said the girl had serious leg deformities that made her unable to sit. But the medical notes written just days earlier described a healthy girl with nothing more than a cough and diarrhea. Had the agency somehow blended information from two different girls?

She again consulted the dysmorphologist, this time to compare the photos she had just found to those of herself in the United States. She expected a match. But once again, he concluded that they were different girls.

Kimmel was shaken.

She felt such a connection with this girl. Could she be a sibling? Maybe even a twin?
 

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Kimmel threw herself into examining the complex numerical system KSS used to log adoption cases, based on hundreds of case numbers she collected from other KSS adoptees. In 2021, she revisited the agency with a long wish list of files.

The meeting, which the AP attended, resulted in a tense back-and-forth for hours with the same long-time social worker. Kimmel struggled to contain her fury, waving her hands in disgust.

“You lied,” she fumed.

Visibly irritated, the social worker shuttled back and forth from the room to a document storage area. But each of the files she brought out had no information on Kimmel.

The social worker looked drained. She denied that the agency was withholding information. But she had no explanation for why it couldn’t present a single document with Kimmel’s information. Or why the photo in her file was of a different girl. Or why KSS had told her adoptive parents she was from the Namkwang orphanage in Busan.

The pressure grew until the social worker acknowledged a startling practice: Switching children’s identities was common among South Korean agencies during the adoption rush of the 1970s and 1980s.

Rebecca Kimmel, center, eats with fellow Korean adoptees, Jenny Kelly, left, and Michelle Leco, right, at Yetgol Old Village Korean BBQ Sunday, Jan. 28, 2024, in Seattle. Kimmel still does not know, and may never know, who she is. All she knows is who she's not. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

When children died, became too sick or were retaken by birth families, the agencies simply swapped in other children. Western agencies or adopters were willing to take any child of the same sex or similar age, because “it would take too much time to start over again,” the KSS social worker said.

Could Kimmel have been one of those children?

“I can’t say with confidence that there’s absolutely no possibility that a different child was sent from here,” the worker confessed.

The worker has retired, and AP has been unable to reach her since. KSS did not respond to requests for comment.

Switched documents may be one reason agencies are so reluctant to fully open their files to adoptees, says Lee Kyung-eun, a former director of childcare policy at South Korea’s Health and Welfare Ministry. Even the agencies can’t tell which records are real. Some adoptees the AP talked with spent years getting to know people they were told were biological parents, only to have DNA tests show they weren’t related.

“It could be less about hiding records," Lee says, "and more about not having much to give.”

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Kimmel was exhausted. But she refused to accept that this was all she was going to get.

Still thinking she was a twin, she had been scouring message boards for twin sisters looking for their birth parents, or birth parents looking for twin girls. Now she had one clue left: A message written by an old man named Park Jong-kyun, looking for twin girls relinquished for adoption sometime between 1973 and 1976.

Park had left detailed information about his full name, his wife’s names, their sons’ names, their birth dates. He described a small village, which Kimmel tracked down on the southern South Korean resort island of Jeju.

Kimmel went. Within hours, with the help of local police, she met Park.

Park is a slight man with kind eyes, who lives in a small, weathered house surrounded by tangerine bushes and flowers that remind him of his daughters. His twins were born at a time when he and his late wife were struggling financially to raise three sons. His wife needed an emergency C-section, which the couple couldn’t afford.

The hospital persuaded them to give away the twin girls to relieve the financial burden and toll on his wife’s health, Park says. He named his girls after the Korean words for rose and chrysanthemum.

He wrote the twins’ birthdate – May 11, 1973 – on two pieces of paper and put them in their clothing, hoping to find them someday.

Park searched for the girls for decades, putting in requests with the government and Holt Children’s Services, South Korea’s biggest adoption agency. Government officials told him his twins were likely adopted to the United States through Holt, based on their birthdate and hospital.

In 2018, he visited Holt and the government agency that helped with adoption searches. He sent them boxes of Jeju tangerines, hoping they would remember him and look for his daughters.

When Kimmel came to Jeju in 2021, Park was excited and very surprised. They spent days together, eating in restaurants, talking and laughing as they communicated with translation apps. Park taped Kimmel’s U.S. baby photos on a wall of his small home.

Yet he felt instinctively that she was not his daughter. His doubts were confirmed when a DNA test showed no relation.

Kimmel was devastated. But in the wake of her grief, she realized that his twins could still be somewhere out in the world.

Kimmel arranged to have kits from an American DNA testing firm sent to South Korea. She traveled back to Jeju to test Park and a nearby island to test his son.

It took just three weeks for the company to locate Park’s daughters — Becca Webster and Dee Iraca.

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The twins are very different.

Webster, a nanny with a son in college, is whimsical, chatty and easygoing. Iraca, who works as a chef and dietitian, is meticulous, serious and always on the go. Her nickname is Speedy Dee-Dee.

Those differences are what prompted them to take a DNA test in the first place; they wanted to confirm for themselves that they are biological sisters.

Adopted by the same American family, their files described them as abandoned in front of a hospital. Anytime they thought about searching for their birth parents, they felt overwhelmed.

“Abandoned is such a hard word….It feels so hollow,” Webster says. “When you’re told a narrative that you’ve been abandoned, left as a baby, where are you going to go with that?”

They traveled to South Korea for the 2018 Winter Olympics and visited Holt’s office in Seoul, just months after Park went there. A social worker for Holt told the twins that the agency had no further documents for them.

Which led them to wonder: If they’d just been left on a doorstep, how could anyone have really known they were twins?

The results were reassuring; they were indeed sisters. But the test led to a baffling turn: A stranger sent them a note pointing out that the DNA site also registered a man called “Mr. P” as their father.

They were stunned. They asked the DNA company if this was a scam. It wasn’t.

The stranger turned out to be Kimmel. She told them that their father had been looking for them for decades.

“Even now sometimes, it feels like a dream,” Iraca says.

They felt guilty that so many adoptees, including Kimmel, had been desperately searching for their families, and their father had been searching for them. But they hadn’t been searching.

“It wasn’t about not wanting to know,” Webster says. “It was about cutting that emotion off because we didn’t think we had a choice.”

In October 2022, the twins went to South Korea. Park waited for them anxiously at the airport, holding up a handwritten English sign that read “Dee, Becca, welcome to Korea.”

He brought two bouquets of flowers: one roses and the other chrysanthemums. He made sure to give the right bouquet to the right daughter.

He hugged them. “Thank you for waiting for me,” he said.

He spoke only Korean. They spoke only English and came across as unmistakably American. At one point, as they tried to walk inside his home, he said, “No, no, no, no”; they hadn’t followed the Korean practice of taking off their shoes.

But for all the differences, the twins felt an instant connection. Park showed them photos on his wall of his own father and mother. They met their Korean brother and their uncles and aunts, who hosted a welcome party. These strangers who were somehow still family touched the sisters’ faces and speculated on who looked like whom.

Park gave each of them a hanbok, a traditional Korean garment. They wore them to a Buddhist temple where there’s a memorial photo of their mother.

Back in North Carolina, the sisters are now taking care of their adoptive mother, who has health challenges, and it’s difficult to find the time and money to visit South Korea. But they want to make the effort to get to know their father..

They call him K-Dad, to differentiate from their adoptive father, who died more than a decade ago. He sends them packages of seaweed and green tea.

They are left with mixed feelings. After all, they ended up happy in America. Yet their happiness was built on an injustice that hurt thousands, including their birth father. They resent that they learned of their identity from a stranger, and that they were too late to meet their mother.

“We have both built such incredible lives that it’s hard to look at that and anything negative about it,” Webster says. “(Yet) there’s a part of it that we feel sad.”

Park, too, has mixed feelings. He wears a huge smile when he talks about meeting his daughters again. Their pictures cover his walls, along with taped memos of English words and expressions. Eager to talk with them, he has bought several English books, but says he isn’t getting anywhere.

It was painful for him to see his daughters leave. He’s frustrated that Holt, which didn’t respond to AP’s request for comment, missed an opportunity to reunite them as early as 2018. In his mid-80s and still struggling financially, Park can’t afford a long and expensive trip to America.

“It’s sad,” Park says. “There’s so little time left for me.”

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That still leaves Kimmel.

She feels a bittersweet thrill that she managed to reunite the twins with their father. They joke that they are triplets — two Beccas and a Dee.

Kimmel also spends hours helping and advising other adoptees. She is a key contributor to an adoption-focused website called Paperslip, named after the word that frequently — and sometimes falsely — appears in the files of KSS adoptees described as abandoned.

Her adoptive parents, who could not have birth children, have struggled with their unintended role in a deeply flawed system. Her mother is afraid that Kimmel’s obsession with her past has taken a toll on her well-being. Her father says he would not have considered international adoption “had I known of the deception and what it has done to so many adoptees in their search for their identity.”

Kimmel still does not know — and may never know — who she is. All she knows is who she’s not. And that leaves her in limbo, torn between a mind that sees no point in searching further and a heart that can’t seem to give up.

“I’m almost 50 years old, and I still don’t know when I was born, or what city I was born in,” she says. “I don’t know my birth parents. There’s nothing that I know about myself as real.”

She often looks at the photo of the girl she still believes is her twin.

Like Kimmel herself — like thousands of others — her story remains a mystery.

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PBS Frontline’s Lora Moftah contributed to this report.

This story is part of an ongoing investigation led by The Associated Press in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS). The investigation includes an interactive and documentary, South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning.

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