[music playing] I still love Korea. I miss it a lot. I miss my birth family a lot. You know, and I think, for me, it feels like a kind of sadness that I’ve learned to live with, I guess. I think I was in denial for 50 years. It’s a painful thing to have to look at. And the first thing that any of us looks at, as an adoptee, is the fact that we lost something. The moment that I kind of knew something was going to happen was the time my grandmother took me to the train station with my brother, and there was a stranger there. She handed us off to him. And it’s interesting because it was just my grandmother. It wasn’t my father. It wasn’t my mother. And we went off on the train with this stranger. And at the time, I wouldn’t say I said, ‘O.K., I’m being given away. Somehow, my grandmother’s giving me away to this stranger, and I’m going somewhere.’ Of course I was scared. We were both crying. And one of the last things that my grandmother said was, ‘Hey, you know, when you grow up, come visit me.’ My twin brother and I were adopted to Milwaukee, Wis. We grew up there our entire childhood. Our adoptive father was Norwegian-American, and our adoptive mother was German-American. Of course, this was in the 1960s and early 1970s in Milwaukee. So it was a long time ago. There was virtually no consciousness around race. The way I like to describe it is that, basically, I grew up feeling like a Martian who had arrived from outer space in a spaceship. And years later, when I met other adoptees, it was like happening upon a convention of Martians in spaceships. I feel that that’s the main thing from my childhood — just being very self-conscious, and hating mirrors, and hating the way I looked. I have this memory of staring in front of the mirror at home in the bathroom. I would have only been about 4 or 5. And I was trying to pinpoint — like, trying to kind of intellectually figure out exactly what features made me look different. I didn’t realize it’s kind of just a combination of all my features. And I was also experimenting with putting talcum powder on my face, which is like pure white, because I thought that maybe it was my skin color that made me different. Now I think back and feel sad about that little girl that was doing that and struggling with her appearance in such a way. Part of the reason I searched, it wasn’t necessarily to have a relationship with a Korean family or a Korean person. It was just my desire to have a picture of my birth mother to know what she looked like, because I think as adoptees, we all want to know who we look like. Where did our nose come from, or our cheekbones, or our hair? And these are questions that non-adoptees never have to think of. But it’s something, as adoptees, we always wonder about. We always wonder what our biological parents look like. I very strongly urge any Korean adoptee who is interested to go visit, but I also immediately advise them that if they think that it’s going to be an easily integrated experience, they should think again. In the Holt records, it says that I was left on the doorstep of a man’s house in Wonju, South Korea. And his name is Kim Jong-kwan. And there was an address given, but the address had a missing piece to it. But he said that it was my great-uncle that actually drove me to the agency to relinquish me and that my great-uncle still remembers that day. And I said to him [speaking in Korean], ‘Don’t leave me here, I’ll be a good girl.’ And that was quite a shock to hear that I was kind of conscious, on some level, at least, of what was happening. Because I think I’d assumed, because I guess I didn’t have any memories of that period, that — I don’t know what I’d assumed, but it was really surprising for me to hear that and think about how scary that would have been for a 3-year-old girl. When you’re abandoned in a public place and there’s no record, there’s no identifying information — my birth mother or father, nobody left a note. Or some mothers would pin their child’s birth date to their coat or something and try to just leave a little crumb. So I had no crumbs. So when you have no crumbs, I think I’ve always had very low expectations in thinking that I could find any biological family. My mother, who would have been a kijich’on, which is essentially a military prostitute — there were thousands of them in Korea. This is postwar Korea. And it was essentially if women didn’t work on the base, they worked on their backs. And my mom did the latter kind of work. And my understanding is within that military camptown culture, you had women who served either white soldiers or black soldiers. Clearly, my G.I. dad was white. I was told that he had rotated back to the U.S. before I was born, probably had no interest in me. I mean, that was the case with thousands of us mixed-race children who were born in Korea. And there were indeed thousands of us. In fact, we are the reason international adoption from Korea started. It was basically to purge the country of its human refuse, us, the mixed-race kids that were born to the kijich-on and the G.I.s that were there at the time. We were walking there, and my heart is pounding. And I’m thinking, ‘This is it, this is the thing I’ve always wanted. I’ve always wanted to find the place where I was found. Here we are.’ And the camera’s rolling, and we’re walking there. And in the single most unexpected emotional experience of my life, I had the rug pulled out from underneath me. Because in my mind, when I find that place where I was left as a newborn on Jan. 5, 1974, it’s going to be like this triumphant moment, this revelatory moment. I’m going to feel so satisfied, so happy I finally found the place, the place that I was left at. This is what I’ve always wanted. My bar was so low. Most people want to meet their biological family. I just want to stand at that spot and have a moment to myself, that this is where it all started. And that will be good enough for me. And I thought I would feel so triumphant and like I had reached my goal. And I got there, and I just broke into tears. I was a mess. And I was just — it was devastating. It was not a celebratory moment. It was not a triumphant moment. Any satisfaction about having found the place was completely usurped by this tidal wave of grief and pain and one of the most profoundly lonely moments I’ve ever had in my entire life. And in my mind’s eye, as we’re standing in front of this man’s house, what I saw was a little baby 3 days old in cold weather on a winter’s day sitting on that doorstep by herself. And for me, it was so hard, and so lonely, and sad. And even though I have — [cries] Even though I have so much to show for myself now and many things in my life that I feel very proud of and grateful for, none of that mattered in that moment. None of it. It didn’t matter that I grew up to be a healthy person with a loving family and a good education and a good job. None of that mattered. All that mattered in that moment was that this is how my life started — alone on this doorstep at 3 days old. I think those early life losses always stay with you. I think that’s always been inside of me. And as an adult, you know, I can look back on it and say that I think the way I internalized that experience was, I was bad, I was defective, there was something wrong with me. So I sort of grew up with that self-concept. I’m sitting there, and the two women are sitting there looking at me. And the one woman says, ‘Does she have any scars on her body?’ And I said, ‘Well, I have one on my leg.’ And they said — that’s the only one that I remembered pre-coming to America. And I said, ‘I remember getting burned by an iron.’ And she started crying once that got translated. And she said, ‘It was all my fault, I had just ironed my husband’s shirt, and I told you not to go near the iron! But you did anyway! And you burned yourself, but then you knew you were going to get in trouble, so you didn’t say anything. You didn’t cry. You just sat there.’ And I had stockings on, so she immediately came over and wanted to lift up my skirt and look for the scar. And I was like, ‘Why would I make this up? How would I know this story?’ And so I’m thinking this woman is my birth mother. It turns out it was my aunt. The woman sitting next to her was my birth mother. And she came over, and she sat next to me, and she just kind of did the full body scan from head to toe. And she took my hand, and she gave me a ring she was wearing, and she said, ‘We have the same hands.’ And then I finally looked at her, and I said, ‘We do.’ We have the same ears, we have the same size feet. I didn’t have a lot of emotions. I think I was just stunned that there was a real human being sitting next to me who was my birth mother. And we went to a restaurant, and we sat across from each other. And I don’t think I ever looked at her. And I just started talking. They asked a lot of questions about being raised in America and my adoptive family. And then we agreed to meet again a couple of days later, and I spent a weekend with her. Getting to know her has been really hard. The weekend that I spent with her, she barely looked at me and I barely looked at her. And at one point, she was in the room, and she said, ‘I know you’re my daughter, but the last time I saw you, you were 3 and now you’re this grown woman. I don’t know who you are.’ I was so desperate for her to know that I was happy and that I was O.K. And that’s all I could say — I’m happy, I’m O.K., don’t worry about me. We ended up meeting in a restaurant with a translator, and with my grandmother there. And I told her I remember what she said. And that was the grandmother that led me to the train. And I told her, ‘I’m back, I’m here, and everything is fine. Everything worked out.’ And from talking to, I guess, the siblings, I have a brother and sister on my father’s side, I have one brother and one half sister that — he never forgot about us. He actually tried to come back and get us a month later. He changed his mind. And to live with that guilt your whole entire life, what had to have been very difficult — and my siblings would say, ‘Yeah, every time he gets drunk, he would say your names and he would yell out for you guys. And that’s how we knew that you guys existed.’ I have a couple of kids, and I could imagine how difficult that would have been. But at the end of the day, I appreciate what he did. [pensive music playing]