Korean Adoptee Files Paternity Lawsuit in Korea UPDATED
“On Nov. 18, 1983, a little girl in a red silk coat was found crying in a parking lot of a market in Goesan, in central South Korea. The girl was clever enough to tell officials that she was 2 years old and that her name was Kang Mee-sook, according to her adoption papers.
Ten months later, the girl was flown to Michigan, one of the 7,900 children South Korea shipped out in 1984 for overseas adoption, mostly to the United States.
Today, that girl, renamed Kara Bos, an American citizen and mother of two, wants some answers. Armed with DNA test results, she is asking a South Korean court to rule that an 85-year-old man in Seoul is her biological father as part of her quest to meet him and ask why she was abandoned and who her mother was.
Hers is the first paternity lawsuit filed in South Korea by an overseas adoptee. A ruling in the case by the Seoul Family Court, scheduled for June 12, could set an important precedent worldwide for adoptees who are taken from their home countries, especially for the thousands of Korean adoptees abroad who have recently started returning to their birth country in search of their biological parents.
“He was and still is the only link to my mother, which was the purpose of my search,” said Ms. Bos, speaking from Amsterdam, where she has been living with her Dutch husband since 2009. “Only by filing this lawsuit could I prove he was my father and then possibly get the meeting I’d been trying to achieve for over a year.”
South Korea had never imagined lawsuits like Ms. Bos’s when it shipped out thousands of babies and toddlers annually in the 1970s and ’80s, earning the country the dubious distinction as the world’s top “baby exporter.” Hundreds of South Korean babies are still sent abroad each year. In total, more than 167,000 South Korean babies have been sent overseas for adoption since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
In recent years, many of those children, now grown-ups, have returned to their birth country, including some who have been deported from the United States because their adoptive parents failed to get them American citizenship.
They campaigned for more domestic adoptions in South Korea and better protection for single mothers, many of whom face pressure to give up their babies because of deep social prejudices against out-of-wedlock children.
But the adoptees’ search for their roots here has never been easy. It can be stymied by poorly kept or falsified adoption papers and the fear of scandal and shame that keeps biological parents from acknowledging that they once had out-of-wedlock babies who were given away for adoption.
Local privacy laws let adoptees gain information they need to reach their biological parents, like their addresses and telephone numbers, only when the parents agree.
“We have just as much right as our parents to know the truth about our past, especially as we are adults now,” Ms. Bos said.
The paternity lawsuit Ms. Bos filed “will be an important precedent not only for Korean adoptees abroad but also for international adoptees from other countries,” said Simone Eun Mi, a Korean adoptee who campaigns for the rights of adoptees to connect with their birth parents. “Korean adoptees are the oldest inter-country adoptees, and our accomplishments and our failures can be set as an example by adoptee communities worldwide.”
Ms. Bos was adopted by Russell and Mariann Bedell in Sheridan, Mich., in 1984. It was not until she had her own daughter five years ago that she began thinking about the excruciating pain her Korean mother must have gone through in abandoning her, and realized how badly she wanted to reconnect with her mother.
“Two years of intensively taking care of my daughter, who was a very demanding baby in every sense of the word, brought me to the realization of what kind of bond is created in this time,” she said.
She traveled to South Korea in 2017, and visited the market where she had been abandoned in 1983, distributing leaflets in the neighborhood seeking information from anyone who might remember her. Her story has since appeared in the South Korean media, but her search went nowhere.
Then came an unexpected breakthrough.
In 2016, Ms. Bos uploaded her DNA data onto MyHeritage, an online genealogy platform. In January last year, after hearing about two long-lost sisters who had found each other through MyHeritage, she checked back into her account and learned that she had a match: a 22-year-old South Korean student at Oxford University.
When she tracked him down, he introduced Ms. Bos to one of his cousins. By then, it became apparent that the two were Ms. Bos’s nephew and niece, and that their mothers, who were in their 50s, shared the same father as Ms. Bos.
Then, she hit the wall again.
The two Koreans cut communications with Ms. Bos, as their mothers, Ms. Bos’s assumed half sisters, blocked her from contacting their father, who was identified in the South Korean court only by his last name, Oh.
Ms. Bos could not get Mr. Oh’s address. When she went to the home of one of her assumed half sisters, even pleading on her knees to let her meet their father, the family called security.
On Nov. 18, exactly 36 years after she was abandoned, Ms. Bos filed her paternity lawsuit.
The filing of the lawsuit allowed her to legally get Mr. Oh’s address, and in March, she rang the bell at his expensive apartment in Seoul. His wife answered the door. In rudimentary Korean, Ms. Bos told the woman why she was there. After a while, Mr. Oh stepped out.
“I then confronted him and asked, ‘Do you know my face?’ and asked if he knew my name, Kang Mee-sook,” she said.
The man was stoic, but “didn’t reply and just waved me away,” she said.
With that, the door was closed.
When she visited again, one of the half sisters came to the door and told her that she was trespassing and that she was not family.
But Ms. Bos convinced the court to order Mr. Oh to take a DNA test. The result came in April: It found a 99.9981 percent probability that Mr. Oh and Ms. Bos were father and daughter.
Mr. Oh could not be reached for comment. He did not have a lawyer, nor did his family represent itself during court hearings, including one held on Friday.
If Ms. Bos wins her lawsuit next week, her assumed half sisters can no longer stop her from meeting her father. But the man still cannot be forced to meet her, said her lawyer, Yang Jeong-eun.
Ms. Bos said her lawsuit would still have been worth it because it highlighted the pain and rejection Korean adoptees faced in their birth country when searching for their roots.
“Even if my father is now 85 and even because he is 85, he too should still be held accountable and provide answers to why I was abandoned and who my mother is,” she said.
Ms. Bos has also considered the possibility that her birth mother might also want to keep their past a secret.
“But to be honest, as I feel it’s a fundamental right for us as abandoned children to know our pasts, this too has to be done,” she said. “More and more of us are coming back for answers, and Korean society needs to change and allow this shame to be turned into reconciliation and forgiveness.””
‘Tell Me Who My Mother Is’: A Korean Adoptee Seeks Her Roots
[NY Times 6/2/2020 by ]
REFORM Puzzle Piece
Update: “Decades after she was sent for adoption in the United States, Kara Bos’ quest to find her birth parents in South Korea moved a step closer on Friday when a Seoul court ruled that a South Korean man was her biological father.
The ruling is the first of its kind in South Korea, which Amnesty International once dubbed the “longest and largest supplier of international adoptees”.
It sets the stage for potentially thousands of other adoptees to be officially registered as children of their birth parents, with implications for inheritance and citizenship laws.
While laws vary widely from country to country, many jurisdictions are providing more information to adopted children about their biological parents. Advocates say South Korea’s policies remain relatively restrictive.
Bos, whose birth name is Kang Mee-sook, broke into tears as she left the courtroom. Removing a medical mask, she said in Korean: “Mom. Can you recognise my face? Please come to me.”
Bos is one of more than 200,000 Korean children adopted overseas in the past 60 years, and her struggle to identify her parents highlights the challenges for many adoptees, said Rev. Do-hyun Kim, who heads KoRoot, a charity that works with adoptees.
“I think Kara’s journey, Kara’s fight, is meaningful because it reminds us that parents, society, and the state itself has public responsibility to clearly inform a child born in South Korean society about their roots,” he said.
The ruling officially registers Bos as the child of a man who, according to a DNA test ordered by the court earlier this year, is 99.9981% likely her biological father.
That designation could entitle Bos to inheritance. The ruling could also lead to more adoptees with limited or no records to apply for South Korea citizenship, according to the Justice Ministry.
The man was identified only by his surname, with no contact details and Bos said the family wished to remain anonymous.
Bos said with the positive paternity test and the court ruling, the family finally agreed she could meet her father as soon as next week.
LONG SEARCH FOR ANSWERS
In 1983, a two-year-old Bos was found abandoned in a market south of Seoul. Less than a year later, she was adopted by an American family.
Bos, who now lives in the Netherlands with her Dutch husband, knew from childhood she was adopted. Her search for her biological parents only began after the birth of her own daughter, who made Bos realize what it would mean to abandon a child at that age.
“At that point I realized that there is trauma involved in adoption, and it is much more complex than the saviour story,” Bos said.
After several years of searching archives in South Korea, a break came in 2016 when a genealogy website matched her to a young South Korean man, whose grandfather was found to be Bos’ biological father.
Bos said she took the case to court after exhausting all other ways of trying to speak to him and his family to find out about her mother.
“I even went to one of their houses and begged, literally, on my knees. And they called the police on me.”
Bos said she would not sign away any rights to inheritance but her primary goal was to speak to her father and eventually identify her mother.
“Without that legal help, I would still be in the dark,” Bos said. “I would still have no options.””
Woman’s search for birth parents leads to landmark South Korea adoption ruling
[NBC NEWS 6/12/2020 by Reuters]
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