Lies were told about who they were. Now these South Korean ‘orphans’ are reclaiming their truth
STOCKHOLM/DALLAS/SEOUL: A Korean children’s song plays — a little girl’s voice, recorded decades ago.
Anna Samuelsson does not recognise it. “It’s like another child,” she says. “It’s not me.”
But it is her voice, when she was five years old and newly arrived in Sweden from South Korea. Today, that child feels distant, her language gone, her memories out of reach.
Catherine Harned knows that feeling too. When she arrived in Texas at age seven, she spoke only Korean. “When I came to America, it was stressed to me — speak English,” she recalls.
Within years, she lost not only the Korean language but much of her early life.
Harned and Samuelsson are sisters by birth, adopted weeks apart in 1974 from different orphanages in Seoul. They grew up continents apart, unaware of each other’s existence.
They are among more than 200,000 South Korean children who, through the decades after the Korean War, were placed with families overseas. Many of them were conveniently labelled as “orphans”.
“The production of ‘orphans’ had everything to do (with) facilitating the movement of children and had very little to do with the actual circumstances of the child,” says Eleana Kim, a professor of anthropology and Asian American studies at the University of California, Irvine.
International adoption became a solution to social pressures, from stigma around mixed-race babies and unmarried mothers, to poverty and rapid modernisation. It was also driven by demand from the West, where fewer children were becoming available for adoption.
By the 1970s, transnational adoptees — most commonly from South Korea — made up the equivalent of 1 to 2 per cent of newborns in Sweden.
In the United States, evangelical Christians saw adoption as a way to “hasten the kingdom of God”, cites author and scholar Soojin Chung at the Princeton Theological Seminary.
Often, the children’s stories were simplified or rewritten as something more palatable: abandoned, rescued, given a better life.
But many adoptees have since uncovered records that did not add up, documents with missing details, repeated narratives and even the names of parents where none were supposed to exist.
Last year, South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that the decades-long adoption programme had been rife with fraud including falsified records and cases of children being mislabelled as orphans.
Months later, President Lee Jae Myung issued a public apology to adoptees and their families, acknowledging the country’s role in what he described as “unjust human rights violations”.
He said in a Facebook post that he felt “heavy-hearted” thinking about the “anxiety, pain and confusion” many had experienced and pledged support for adoptees attempting to trace their origins.
For many, that search is long overdue. Across continents, adoptees are trying to reclaim what was lost, seek their biological families and make sense of identities shaped by absence.
From Sweden to the US and back to South Korea, CNA’s One “Orphan” Every Hour follows their journeys as they piece together their past and confront the forces that took them from it.
THE LIES OF THE PAST
Mary Bowers had always believed she was an orphan. Her birth certificate says so, with no recorded birth parents. “When I left for college, I asked for my adoption papers,” she recalls.
That was the first time that I saw two people’s names, a mother and a father in my documents.”
The deeper she looked, the more uncertain her background story became. According to the records, Bowers’ mother realised she was pregnant only after her relationship had broken down, and she was too poor to raise a child.
But when Bowers compared her documents with those for other adoptees from the same agency, she found that account repeated “a dozen times over”.
“It was word (for) word the same,” she says. “So I don’t really know what the true story is.”
Then in 2024, she discovered she had a full-sibling: Chase Malmgren, adopted in Utah as an infant, 23 years after her. But her brother’s adoption record raised more questions.
His adoptive parents had been told his mother was married, that her husband had lost his trucking business and the family had fallen into financial hardship.
After a one-night stand with a businessman, she got pregnant and gave up the child to preserve her family’s reputation. It was a complete account. But it did not match Bowers’.
For others, the truth is more painful.
Madeleine Bjork grew up believing she had been given up owing to post-war hardship, even though she was born 30 years after the Korean War.
When she met her birth family, a different picture emerged. Her parents were unmarried, her abusive father left when she was two months old, and her mother struggled to raise her.
It was her grandmother who placed her in an orphanage without her mother’s consent. When her mother tried to get her back, it was “too late” as her adoption papers had been signed.
“I thought a lot about that, especially because I had my kids when I found out about this,” Bjork says, choking back a sob.
When I met her, it was so clear that this person had suffered. I think a lot of her struggles in life came from this.”
In more extreme cases, there was no consent at all. Han Tae-soon — the first biological mother to sue South Korea’s largest adoption agency, Holt Children’s Services, and the government — lost her daughter when the latter was four years old.
“They took her away while she was playing in front of the house. They kidnapped her,” Han says. “After seven months in the orphanage, she was adopted in the US.
“She used to live with the thought that I’d sold her.”
For all Philip Pellouchoud knows, his story may not be so different. Adopted in Colorado in 1971 through Holt, he has spent years trying to trace his origins.
The only record of his early life was a name in a ledger from the Centre for Lost Children, with no explanation for how he came to be there. “Was it an unwed mother? Was it a divorce?” he wonders.
Kim Do-hyun, the president of non-profit organisation KoRoot, which supports adoptees returning to South Korea to trace their origins, thinks it is unlikely that Pellouchoud will find clear answers as there is “no record, no clue”.
“We don’t believe that parents usually brought their child to (the Centre for Lost Children). Police could’ve taken … foundlings on the street (to the centre),” Kim says.
“The first action should’ve been (to look) for … the parents. But (at) that time, (it was) not done seriously.”
Instead, children could be declared adoptable with minimal investigation. Financial incentives may have played a role. “It wasn’t simply cynical (but) criminal,” Kim says. “The adoption agents could make money — one person’s yearly salary (from) one child.”
The result was a system where records were often incomplete, incorrect or missing altogether.
THE FAIRY TALE THAT WASN’T THEIRS
Whatever the system was trying to solve, there was often no fairy-tale ending after these children were sent to the West. “Almost every day you’d be reminded that you’re different,” Samuelsson says.
People would … say (things) like, ‘You should be so thankful. You’re so lucky to be in Sweden.’”
Being different “didn’t make a difference”, Bjork was told. But for her, it did. “Until I was maybe 13, I just wanted to be like everyone else,” she says. “My biggest wish was to be blonde and have blue eyes.”
Others faced overt racial stereotypes. Malmgren recalls being called “snake eyes” as a child, while Harned remembers her adoptive mother calling her long, jet-black hair “a rat’s nest”.
Joel Peterson, who is mixed, faced stigma on both sides. In his early childhood in South Korea, people would “pull their children away” and call his mother a prostitute, he remembers. He was also bullied and beaten by other children.
The prejudice did not end after he was adopted in Minnesota at age seven in 1970.
“I was ostracised and made fun of and picked on and bullied for being Korean, for being Asian, so I worked consciously at not having an accent,” he recounts.
Many adoptees internalised harmful narratives about why they had been given up. “Your mother was probably a prostitute” was something Bowers also heard — a stigma that Korean adoptees carried well into the 1980s.
Then there was the loss of a shared childhood that can never be recovered.
Bowers once flew all the way to South Korea to find her brother. Their eventual reunion in 2024 came with a quiet awareness of what had been missed.
“Even in this great scenario that Chase and I are in, … we don’t have that connection any more.
“There’s a sense of guilt because with the lost time,” she says through her tears, “I won’t get to teach him to ride a bike or see him in the school play.”
As they rebuild their relationship, Bowers describes a need — shaped by a lingering fear — to prove her worth to her brother.
“There’s almost like a trauma response in all (my) talking and outgoingness,” she says. “Some of it comes from (hoping that) if I prove that I’m good enough, then I won’t be abandoned. Like you can’t leave me.”
In 2022, she filed a case with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ticking seven out of more than 50 categories of human rights violations, including the right to identity, family, country and access to information.
Whereas adoption is often framed as a happy ever after, many Korean adoptees may have had a different lived experience. “You’re like the fairy tale for everybody,” Samuelsson says, “except for yourself.”
RETRACING THEIR ROOTS
In the search for answers, Pellouchoud recently travelled to South Korea to visit adoption agencies, community centres and even police stations.
“I’ve taken every DNA test that you can,” he says. “Now I want to do this one last thing, and then I’m going to be done. And whatever happens happens.”
With help from CNA, he met Bu Chung-ha, who led Holt Children’s Services in the 1970s and may have personally processed his case, along with thousands more.
Pellouchoud was told, however, that these adoption decisions were not made in South Korea but in offices in the US or France, where the children were matched with families there.
KoRoot also helped him obtain a document showing his birth name, Park Won-il, and that he was only three days old when a shop clerk brought him to the Centre for Lost Children.
When he took the document to a government agency, however, he was told it belonged to someone else with the same name, with no further explanation given. There is no other record of his first two years and a half.
For now, he is not continuing his search, unless a future DNA match offers new leads.
As for Samuelsson, she is looking for her birth family, but her search has stalled. Her sister, having built a life in the US, has not lent a hand yet and sees no reason to look back.
“I have no desire to pursue it, I really don’t,” Harned says contentedly. “This is my home.”
Malmgren is hesitant too, but for a different reason. He worries about “what happens if we do find our parents”. Asked if he fears finding that they might have truly abandoned him, he replies: “Yeah, that’s one fear.”
Last year, a Swedish commission recommended ending international adoptions after its investigation uncovered decades of fraud, abuse and illegal practices.
In the same year, South Korea finally banned private agency adoptions. The country now plans to end overseas adoptions by 2029.
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