Book: ‘Mixed Korean: Our Stories’ and 325Kamra

“Growing up in Berkeley, Bella Siegel-Dalton had only faint memories of her brief time in Korea — a goat, tied to the fence at the orphanage, and then her flight in 1966 to Oakland International Airport, where she met her adoptive family, who were of European descent.

In a new anthology, “Mixed Korean: Our Stories,” she poignantly writes about the brightness and the pain of her upbringing. The biological daughter of a white U.S. serviceman and a Korean mother, she was the only mixed-Asian person in school, and she and her family struggled. When her adoptive father, who suffered from untreated, undiagnosed bipolar disorder, tried to beat her, Siegel-Dalton left. At 13, she began living in group homes and foster care. Eventually, she joined the U.S. Coast Guard, married, and started a family.

After she was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease, she wondered whether a DNA test could enable her to find her birth family and see if and how the genetically inherited disease had progressed in her blood relatives.

Several years would pass before commercial DNA kits became available. Through social media and Korean adoptee friends, she found information about her birth mother, Lee Chung Hee. Through DNA testing, she found her father’s side of the family, which hailed from Kentucky. By the time she spoke with them in September 2015, it was too late to meet him, because he’d already died.

Within days of that discovery, she also attended a conference in Berkeley, where Siegel-Dalton, Kathy Augenstein, Katherine Kim, Sarah Savidakis, Tammy Wooldridge — all Korean adoptees of mixed heritage — hit upon the idea of using DNA as a birth searching tool. They founded 325KAMRA, which aims to reunite families by testing Korean adoptees, military personnel who served in Korea and anyone of Korean descent (some can qualify for free kits). The group tries to provide adoptees with their biological stories and family medical histories.

“There’s so many issues: closed records, lost records, mismanaged records, falsified records. A lightbulb went off — DNA would eliminate that,” said Siegel-Dalton, data director of 325KAMRA, whose name is an acronym for Korean American Mixed Race Adoptees, combined with the hotel room number, 325, the founders shared at the conference. (Note: Its services are not exclusively for adoptees of mixed heritage.)

At her reunion with her father’s family, they told Siegel-Dalton how her parents met. When her father was stationed in South Korea, he fell in love with her mother. At the end of his tour, she discovered she was pregnant. After his request to stay was denied, he went AWOL looking for her, ended up jailed in the brig, and was later told by her family that she and the baby had died.

“When I found out I had a sister, I felt like I belonged to somebody again,” said Siegel-Dalton’s sister Kathleen Westmoreland, getting choked up. Westmoreland admitted she was still grieving the passing of their father, and had hit a rocky patch with her siblings and mother.

“I wish we could have grown up knowing each other,” Westmoreland said. “We’re almost like twins. We have the same personality, the same quirks. We even write exactly alike, my s’s and her s’s.”

But Siegel-Dalton’s arrival helped the family come back together again, Westmoreland said.

At the start of this year, more than 26 million consumers had added their DNA to commercial ancestry and health databases, according to the MIT Review. At this pace, within two years, the databases could swell to more than 100 million people.

But the services haven’t worked as well for nonwhite customers, who purportedly have received less granular, more broadly geographical reports. (For example, someone of Korean ancestry was told that he is from Asia.) To improve results, more people of color are needed to join a company’s genetic database, which, along with public databases, is used to compare one person’s DNA with another’s.

Not every biological family wants to reconcile, Bella-Siegel said, cautioning adoptees. “It’s a hard pill to swallow, but at least you have answers.”

Digging through family trees can unravel other secrets too: other children put up for adoption, unbeknownst to the rest of the family, or different fathers than noted on the birth certificate.

With the help of researchers at 325KAMRA, Gloria Johnson tracked down her siblings from her paternal family. It was a complicated search because her father, Raleigh David Stark, had also been adopted.

Memorial Day weekend, Johnson hosted a reunion in San Jose of 75 relatives hailing from as far as Alaska and Oklahoma. Over the summer, she attended her brother’s funeral service in Portland, Ore., and visited the graves of her biological father and grandmother for the first time, where she left photos from the reunion of “the family going forward,” as she so beautifully puts it. She recently discovered a niece, too.

“The love expands to become more love,” Johnson said.”

Korean adoptees using DNA in search of their roots

[Datebook 8/29/19 by Vanessa Hua]

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