https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/01/asia/south-korean-adoptees-reuniting-families-reconnecting-harder-hnk?Date=20250802&Profile=CNN+International&utm_content=1754116201&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwY2xjawMVcH5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHgV0MT1NhJZ33LnR0o2N9nJZxAsrdKmAPk96WBbaCC3OXms7XltAcTaqwDc4_aem_gwatN_9uiferkDXBz6inrQKorean adoptees in the US and Europe are finding their families. Reconnecting is much harder
By Yoonjung Seo, Hanna Park and Hilary Whiteman, CNN
Updated 7:36 PM EDT, Sat August 2, 2025
Seoul CNN
Marianne Ok Nielsen never wanted children, or a family of her own. She used to tell friends she didn’t feel worthy of that kind of life. For most of her 52 years, she believed she’d been abandoned by her parents as a baby; found on the street in 1973 by police in Daejeon, South Korea, a city about 90 miles south of the capital Seoul. “I was discarded like garbage. Nobody wanted me. That’s what I was,” said Nielsen, who grew up in Denmark, the home of her adoptive parents. “When your mom doesn’t even want you, who would want you? Can you then be loved by anyone?”
Her Danish mother, who passed away last year, once told Nielsen that her birth mother had probably “given her up out of love” because she couldn’t afford to raise her. It was a story likely told to console a child, but one that provided cover to a lucrative business built on the “mass exportation” of babies some with fake names and birth dates to foreign parents in at least 11 countries, South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported this year, in the first official recognition of the scale of the injustice. The commission found more than 141,000 Korean children were sent abroad between the 1950s and 1990s, primarily to the United States and Europe. In a society that shunned unwed mothers, some women were pressured to give up their infants soon after giving birth. Others grieved stolen children. Han Tae-soon, 73, still recalls the sound of her 4-year-old daughter’s laughter as she skipped off to play with friends outside their home in Cheongju, South Korea, a provincial city about 70 miles south of Seoul, in 1975. “I was heading to the market and left Kyung-ha with a couple of her friends,” Han told CNN. “When I returned, my daughter was gone.”
Han, then 22, would not see Kyung-ha again until decades had weathered them both. Nielsen, seeking her own family in circumstances similar to Han’s, also finally met the mother she thought had dumped her like trash. After a lifetime of separation, the cruelty of South Korea’s foreign adoptions is only now becoming clear as reunited children and mothers struggle to communicate through different languages and cultures. Han’s baby now has a life of her own in America. And in Nielsen’s case, time and old age have robbed her mother of most memories she ever existed.
A fake abandonment
Growing up in the small Danish town of Gedved, Nielsen said she longed to be “more Danish than the Danes.”
“I would avoid looking myself in the mirror because I was trying so desperately to be White trying so desperately to convince everybody else that I was White,” she said. If her parents didn’t want her, she didn’t want anything to do with them or Korea.
Nielsen said she didn’t question her origins until, when she was an adult, a four-year-old boy the son of a man she was dating asked where her birth mother was. When she explained that she couldn’t find her because no records remained, the boy said, “If somebody had done that to me, I would cry all the time!”
In that moment, Nielsen realized she’d suppressed her feelings her entire life. “Maybe a small baby inside of me has also been crying all the time,” she said.
In 2016, she took a DNA test through 325Kamra, a US-based non-profit organization helping Korean adoptees to reunite with families. For years, there were no results. But last May, everything changed. She received a text message: “A possible family match has been found.”
Her older brother had registered his DNA with Korean police, hoping to locate his missing sister. Nielsen had finally found her family. “For 51 years, I believed I was abandoned in the street, that I was an orphan. I never imagined in a million years that I had a family, and that they had been searching for me,” she said.
An alleged abduction
When Han’s daughter Kyung-ha went missing, the family combed watermelon fields near their home, fearing she may have wandered off and drowned in a waste tank. Han visited police stations daily, begging for help to find her missing child. But when pressed for information, authorities suggested she consult fortune tellers for answers, she said. In 1981, she opened a hair salon in Anyang, southwest of the capital, and hung an old photo of Kyung-ha in the mirror for customers to see. She visited radio stations, distributed flyers, and appeared on a television program in 1990 that led to a tip and a painful deception. A 20-year-old woman came forward to claim she was Kyung-ha, and when questioned by Han, seemed to give enough answers to confirm her identity. “I asked, ‘What does your dad do?’ and she said, ‘He drives a taxi.’ So, I brought her back with me,” Han said.
Han’s husband, however, was unconvinced. “That’s not Kyung-ha,” he told her as she stepped through the gate of their home.
Still, Han, desperate for closure, opened her home to the stranger. Han would not learn the truth until two years later, when the young woman prepared for her wedding. “The moment I saw you, I thought, ‘I wish that woman were my mom,’ so I lied,” she admitted, Han said.
The woman, who had been abandoned at an orphanage by her own mother, packed her belongings and left town. So, like Nielsen, Han turned to DNA testing through 325Kamra for proof of a genetic link. Like Nielsen, Han found a match. Her missing daughter Kyung-ha was now living in the United States under the name given to her by her adoptive parents, Laurie Bender. Bender’s child had submitted her mother’s DNA to the same agency nearly a decade ago in search of answers, Han said. In all the years Han searched for her child, she said she never thought to look beyond South Korea. “I thought she might have been taken in by a childless couple within Korea or, if she was alive, living somewhere in the country,” Han said. “The idea of adoption especially international adoption never crossed my mind.”
Bender did not respond to CNN’s interview request, but in 2019 she told South Korean television network MBC that on May 9, 1975, she’d “followed a lady onto a train.”
“I ended up going to the end of the line at the train station. I went to the police station that was right there, and they put me in a Jeep and took me to the orphanage,” she said.
Han alleges the woman lured 4-year-old Kyung-ha to a train station in Jecheon, roughly 40 miles from their home, and abandoned her. “Even now, I don’t know who that lady was,” Han said.
Han says the police drove Kyung-ha to Jecheon Infant Home, then headed by director Jane White, an American missionary. Records show that in February 1976, nine months after her disappearance, the child was sent to the US. The travel document issued by South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which authorizes international travel for adoption, replaced her last name, in Korean, with that of White, and listed the address of Holt Children’s Services as her own. Jecheon Infant Home told CNN in a statement that White, now 89, is unable to move or communicate after suffering a “sudden illness” in April 2020. “Since no one other than Jane White can accurately confirm the details of that period, we ask for your understanding that we are unable to respond to Ms. Han Tae-soon’s allegations,” the statement said.
CNN has reached out to Holt Children’s Services for comment.
Identities lost, falsified and fabricated
Holt International was founded in the 1950s by American couple Harry and Bertha Holt, Christians who adopted eight Korean children after the Korean War and set out to replicate their experience for other families.
At the time, South Korea was recovering from grinding post-war poverty, and records show a notable increase in international adoptions as the country’s authoritarian rulers pushed for rapid economic growth in the 1970s and ’80s.
In 1977, Holt International separated from its Korean entity, Holt Children’s Services. Last October, Holt International said in a statement it was one of many private agencies facilitating “adoptions from Korea during the 1980s.”
“Reports of unethical or illegal adoption practices” were “alarming,” the statement said, but added that many news reports omit the social pressures on unwed mothers to give up their babies.
“We remain committed to assisting Korean adoptees and adoptive parents with their questions and concerns,” Holt International told CNN in a statement.
The commission found that Korea’s Special Adoption Act for Orphans in 1961 expedited international adoptions after the Korean War and later included the babies of unwed mothers, abandoned infants and children deemed to need “protection.” All adoption-related processes were entrusted to private adoption agencies which lost, falsified or fabricated the identities and family information of many children, the commission’s report said. Large numbers of children endured long flights without proper care, according to the report, which included a black-and-white image of infants strapped into airline seats on a flight out of South Korea to Denmark in 1984. Yooree Kim, now 52, remembers being on a similar flight to France, and trying to comfort the crying babies strapped into seats next to her by stroking their faces and letting her hair brush against their skin. Then 11, Kim was much older than the babies around her. She and her younger brother had a happy early childhood in Korea, but after their parents divorced, they moved in with their grandparents. When their grandmother was diagnosed with tuberculosis, they went back to their mother, but money was tight, so she placed them in a private childcare facility in May 1983. The move was supposed to be temporary, but by that Christmas, Kim and her brother would be sent to France. Kim said she was told their parents had “abandoned” them. She said she was abused by her adoptive father in France, allegations he denied before his death in 2022, according to Kim. Ten years after her adoption, Kim returned to Seoul in 1994 and discovered the truth. “When I first met my mother, she cried and told me she had nothing to do with my adoption. My father got down on his knees and apologized. He told me he had nothing to do with it either,” she said.
Kim said her mother told her she used to work at an orphanage and trusted the facility to take care of her children, but when she went back to retrieve them, they had gone. For Kim, finding her family wasn’t enough. She wants full transparency from everyone involved in what she calls a traumatic and deeply flawed process. While the commission does not have mandating powers, it recommended that the government and private adoption agencies apologize for their role in violating children’s rights. South Korean adoptions are now subject to stronger oversight. Under a law passed in 2023, private agencies must transfer all remaining records of international adoptions to the National Center for the Rights of the Child, a government agency, this month. And from October, South Korea will be bound by the Hague Intercountry Adoption Convention that sets international standards to protect children against abduction, trafficking or sale. But families torn apart by forced adoptions say that’s not enough. “I want an apology and compensation,” Kim told CNN.
The reunions
After several phone calls with Han, Bender flew to Seoul in 2019, where the pair reunited at the airport. Han had held on to the image of her daughter as the lively 4-year-old clinging to her skirt. But she was faced with a woman shaped by 44 years of separation. “The first thing I asked her was, ‘Why did you go to America?’ I had never imagined she could be there,” Han said.
Her hands, trained by three decades of hairdressing, sought proof of her daughter’s identity that her eyes couldn’t provide. Stroking her daughter’s head, tracing her scalp and even feeling the shape of her ears, Han was certain. “This time, it was really my child. The texture of her hair can’t be stolen.”
A pair of shoes further confirmed Bender was Kyung-ha. She’d kept the shoes she wore on the day she went missing. “The rubber had deteriorated after 44 years. They had crumbled and flattened, but the shape was still there. She had kept the shoes all this time,” Han said. “Can you imagine how much she must have wanted to find her parents?”
Han, who carries herself with unabashed resolve, speaks with a feisty candor after years spent grappling with grief. She is angered by the lost time and the language barrier that now stands between her and her American daughter. “If we hadn’t been separated back then, I would be able to say everything I want to her now,” Han said. “But now, even when I try to talk to her, there’s so much misunderstanding. Even after reuniting, we feel like strangers because we can’t truly communicate.”
Han still resides in Anyang, tending to a life shaped by loss. Her spotless three-bedroom apartment, tucked in a quiet complex, is filled with photos of Bender’s younger brother and sister. Bender’s photos are there, too, but a gap exists between images of her as a baby and the adult she is today. Last October, Han was among the first known Korean birth parents to sue the government, the orphanage and Holt Children’s Services the country’s largest adoption agency for damages over wrongful adoption. Her case is due to return to court in September. For Han, the fight is not just a way to reckon with her loss it’s about accountability. She’s seeking monetary damages but says no amount of compensation will make up for what was taken from her. “I want to reveal the truth. Why? Because the government stole children and sold them,” she claims. “They didn’t choose to go adoption was forced upon them by the government.”
“Still, if I win the lawsuit, it might bring me a little bit of comfort a small sense of relief,” Han said. “The government needs to acknowledge its wrongdoing and apologize properly.”
Han says Bender supports her fight but doesn’t understand Korean and doesn’t know the culture or laws of her former home. “She welcomes what I’m doing. She doesn’t oppose it,” Han said.
Nielsen also struggles to communicate with the mother she believed had abandoned her. Her 93-year-old mother has dementia and does not remember the baby she once lost. Over time, Nielsen has pieced together more about her background. In August 1973, her mother fell ill with an infectious disease and, fearing for her newborn’s safety, temporarily entrusted her to social services. By December of the same year, the child was sent to Denmark, according to Nielsen. Just weeks later, her frantic mother filed a missing persons report with police. Nielsen’s name and date of birth had been changed on the government-issued travel certificate. As in Bender’s case, the travel document listed her address as the location of Holt Children’s Services. CNN has also asked Holt Children’s Services for further information about Nielsen’s case. Nielsen is back in Daejeon, to be closer to her mother and to let her know that she holds no anger or blame over the past. But she’s frustrated by the language barrier between them, leaving them unable to understand each other. “The theft of the language is so profound because the language is a door into the culture,” she said. “The intimacy of being able to speak to my mom is completely gone. So that is what is a big, big loss for me. My human rights have been completely violated.”
Nielsen is learning Korean, attending weekly classes with a study group, so she can find the few words of comfort for her ailing mother. Sometimes, no words are needed. Nielsen still remembers the first night she slept next to her birth mother. “I didn’t sleep much. I just watched (her) I could look at her and feel, ‘That’s my mom.’ There was no doubt about it,” she said.
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