Korean adoptees in U.S. feel used and abandoned by the system

By Randall Yip, Executive Editor

A recent report from South Korean authorities acknowledging abuse and fraud in the country’s adoption system confirmed what Alice Stephens has known firsthand.

The Korean adoptee now in her late 50s came to the US with official paperwork that declared her an abandoned orphan. It’s a story that was repeated to her adoptive mother by a representative from the adoption agency visiting the US, and was passed on down to her.

However, Stephens told AsAmNews that the paperwork and the adoption agency representative lied. She wasn’t an orphan but had two living parents at the time.”

Her experience reinforces a recent report released by South Korea. It’s a report of significance in the U.S. because more adopted Korean babies ended up in the United States than any other country.

An investigation by a government commission found babies were often marketed as orphans as a way to make them more adoptable.

“By putting in place this system that claims I’m an orphan when I was not an orphan, the Korean government was basically manufacturing a lie in order to facilitate the exploitation of children,” she said.

She believes it’s a lie that prevented her from ever identifying her birth mother. It’s a fabrication she says made more tragic by her strong suspicion that her mother is already dead from old age.

As with Stephens, a Korean adoption agency also labeled Stephanie Drenka an orphan, in her opinion, to make her adoptable.

It wasn’t until she reconnected with her adoption agency that a social worker in 2013 “violated protocol and sent a telegram to one of my sisters,” she told AsAmNews.

That telegram led her eventually to her mother. Drenka admits the reunions have not been how she dreamed it might be.

Drenka anticipated her mother being overjoyed about how well she was doing and hearing that she held no resentment towards her.

“She could barely look at me in the eyes. She just kept putting her eyes down and saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ My sister would help translate and she would just say that my birth mother was so guilty for giving up her baby, as she said. She called herself a badly born person.”

More than 12 years later, she says her mother’s feelings of guilt have not eased.

For Drenka, the South Korean commission’s report is a step toward accountability, but it doesn’t go far enough. She wants a formal apology.

“I think the apology has to admit the wrongdoing of an entire government structure. There definitely needs to be assistance in getting our dual citizenship and reclaiming some of the parts of our culture and identity that legally has been stripped from us.”

Knowing what happened hasn’t eased the pain for Stephens either. She has gone back to South Korea to search for her mother without success. She has done media interviews there, taken out ads in a newspaper and even gone door to door in the neighborhood where she was born.

She eventually tracked down her father’s family by submitting a saliva sample to Ancestry. She learned from his family that her father had died and that he was in a common law marriage for 13 months before abandoning her mother.

He was a soldier in the U.S. Army and left Stephen’s mother when she was six months pregnant- never to return.

“Not every adoptee was an orphan, but that was the system that they put into place. By making fraudulent paperwork that separates me from my origins. Making it impossible for me to find my birth family. That is a violation of my human rights. It should be my right to know who my parents are. It should be my right to know who my ancestors are, what my medical history is. But by putting in place this system with a fraudulent document that claims I’m an orphan when I was not an orphan, the Korean government was basically manufacturing a lie in order to facilitate the exportation of children.”

(This story has been updated to include more details of Stephens story)