Paper orphans

A lot of South Koreans adopted by Western families in the postwar years grew up believing they were orphans. In many cases, it was a lie.

By Priscilla Ki Sun HwangSep. 27, 2023

Father: No record.

Mother: No record.

Place of birth: Unknown.

Kelly Foston always thought she was an orphan.

That’s because her adoption paperwork, riddled with “no record” and “unknown” and signed by Korean authorities, declared her to be one.

As she understood it, she was just shy of four when she left South Korea in 1978, and was adopted by a couple in White Rock, B.C., a coastal community minutes away from the U.S. border. She grew up in a quaint, suburban neighbourhood with two older brothers and partook in traditional North American activities — camping and going to Disneyland, “eating potatoes and pasta.”

“I’m a Western girl. I had a happy adoption, I had a good family,” said Foston, now 48, who works as a recreational therapist in Vancouver.

Foston’s birth name was Yoon Soo Joon, according to Social Welfare Society (SWS), the Korean adoption agency that facilitated most adoptions to Canada. (The agency is now called KWS.) The paperwork she arrived with says she was “found abandoned” in front of a Seoul orphanage on March 7, 1978, with only a slip of paper denoting her birthdate: Dec. 23. 1974.

This is one of the documents that Kelly Foston arrived with in Canada in 1978. It shows no record of her birth parents. (Albert Leung/CBC)

But a few months ago, Foston learned her adoption story may be a lie.

After one of her adoptee friends found his biological family earlier this year, Foston pushed KWS for additional records on her case. The agency said none exist. But then in May, KWS sent Foston a copy of a weathered document that contradicted many of the unknowns in her original papers.

It was an application form filled out on March 7, 1978 — the day she was allegedly “found abandoned.” It suggests someone had deliberately put her up for adoption.

“Just whoa,” Foston said. “Like, that is such a huge piece of [information]. Wow.”

People played God. I’d like to think it was in our best interest — but was it?

As it turns out, the agency had intimate details about her parents, including their ages, occupations and education, as well as a summary of how Foston was relinquished. Her birth mother was a seamstress from a rural village and her father worked at a photography studio, which is where the two met. Upon conceiving Foston, the couple wanted to marry, but faced opposition from the paternal grandmother. The document also revealed Foston was born in Okcheon, her mother’s hometown.

Though the name is blacked out, it appears a family member with close knowledge of the situation applied to give Foston up on that day in 1978. To Foston’s shock, KWS also said her father appears to still be alive — living at the same address listed on that piece of paper.

An email to Foston from a KWS social worker said the reason none of these details were in the original paperwork given to her Canadian parents is because “this document was not forwarded to us at the time of adoption.”

Now, Foston believes her records may have been manipulated by Korean authorities.

“I question all of it,” she said. “Is it the truth? I don’t know. Will I ever know?”

A photo of Kelly Foston in the Korean passport she arrived with in 1978. (Albert Leung/CBC)

Before long, Foston uncovered another truth: she wasn’t the only Korean adoptee in this situation.

CBC News spoke to more than 20 adoptees in Canada and around the world who question the accuracy of their adoption paperwork from South Korea. Like Foston’s, many of the records state the children were found abandoned and omit key details of family history.

While they were all given certificates designating them legal orphans, some are learning they may in fact have been stolen from their biological parents. Others discovered their parents were still alive and searching for them.

South Korea is having a reckoning about its legacy of exporting children for seven decades. Last year, the Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) launched a comprehensive investigation into the cases of hundreds of adoptees who suspect their records were falsified to facilitate adoptions to Europe and North America.

A CBC investigation is exploring to what extent this was going on in Canada. Foston and other Canadians adopted from South Korea from the 1960s onward say they’re heartbroken to learn they were “paper orphans” — falsely registered as orphans in order to be fast-tracked to this country.

“People played God,” Foston said. “I’d like to think it was in our best interest — but was it?”

The Current

They were adopted as orphans. It was a lie

19:34

II.

The devastation of the Korean War in the early 1950s — a war that some 26,000 Canadians fought in — led to overseas adoption programs for biracial Korean babies fathered by Western soldiers. This quickly grew to “exporting the full-Korean infants” that were in “abundant supply,” according to internal Canadian government correspondence obtained by CBC.

“The number of full-Korean babies needing homes is limitless,” reads a 1963 letter from Gardner W. Munro, a director of the International Social Service (ISS), the agency that facilitated Korean adoptions on the Canadian side.

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Munro writes that the more orphanages that are built in Korea, “the more the population abandons their babies,” saying that close to 60,000 orphans had been put up for adoption in postwar Korea by that point. Most of them came from unwed mothers or divorced parents, circumstances that were widely considered unacceptable in patriarchal South Korean society.

“I am delighted in measures taken to open up Canada as a potential source of adoptive families,” Munro wrote.

The South Korean Ministry of Health told CBC News about 169,000 South Korean children were sent out for adoption across Europe and North America between 1958 and 2022. But experts estimate that number could be more than 200,000, in what some researchers believe to be the largest adoption exodus from one country.

In one case, an infant girl was kidnapped from her Korean parents and later adopted by a couple in British Columbia in 1974.

About 3,000 of those children were sent to Canada. And some of those cases involved criminal activity.

CBC News uncovered a dossier on the matter at Library and Archives Canada. In one case, an infant girl was kidnapped from her Korean parents and later adopted by a couple in British Columbia in 1974. According to press clippings from that time, when the B.C. government heard about the circumstances, it urged all prospective parents to halt adoptions from South Korea, and called on the federal government and its embassy in Seoul to launch a full-scale inquiry into the country’s adoption processes.

An internal 1975 letter from ISS tried to reassure child welfare directors across the country. “This case is an isolated incident. This is the first time ISS Canada has experienced a case of this nature,” it reads.

This internal 1975 letter from International Social Service, the agency that facilitated most Korean adoptions on the Canadian side, tried to assure child welfare directors across the country that children were not being kidnapped en masse in South Korea and adopted abroad. (Albert Leung/CBC)

Despite obtaining a number of files declassified under access to information laws, CBC News has yet to find evidence of a federal investigation of Korea’s adoption process in the thousands of pages of archival documents it reviewed. Decades have passed and some of the government branches involved at the time — such as External Affairs, National Health and Welfare, and Immigration and Manpower — either no longer exist or have been subsumed into bigger ministries.

When CBC asked Global Affairs Canada and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada if the government ever responded to the direct calls for a full-scale inquiry, the departments did not answer that question.

Meanwhile, waves of Korean children continued to flow into Canada. Four years after those calls for action, Kelly Foston arrived on a plane with her adoptive mother.

III.

Growing up in Vancouver, Kim McKay says his adoptive parents didn’t tell him where he came from. He said he had no idea he was even Korean until he got a hold of his adoption paperwork as a teen.

“I held on to it for a long time,” said McKay, now 50. “It was my whole life.”

Those records told McKay that he was found abandoned on a street in Daegu, south of Seoul, in March 1975. His place of birth and natural parents were “both unknown.” His orphan registry also states “no record” for father, mother and family relationship. He, too, was designated an orphan.

“It was just so vague,” McKay said.

Kim McKay, who was raised in Vancouver, grew up believing he had originally been abandoned on the street in Daegu, South Korea. (Submitted by Kim McKay)

After an unsuccessful search for biological family members in his 20s, McKay left his contact information with a KWS social worker. About seven years later, in 2005, he got an email that changed his life.

The social worker “had my sister and my mom in her office, and I was like, what? … This couldn’t be true,” he said.

It was nothing short of a miracle, McKay says. By chance, his biological mother and sister connected with the same social worker, who remembered McKay’s case file from years before. Within days, their DNA test came back a match.

Shortly after, McKay flew to South Korea with his wife and kids, and described an emotional reunion at the adoption agency. “This woman walks in. She pretty much knocked my kids to the side and grabbed me and she started screaming and crying,” McKay recalled. That woman was his mother.

“Everybody was just crying,” he said.

It was then that McKay discovered the real story behind his adoption.

Going through his original adoption papers on his dining room table in Port Moody, B.C., McKay says he now realizes how little of it may actually be true. His actual name wasn’t Zung Soo, as it said in the initial documents; it was Jung Soo. His birth year wasn’t 1972; it was a year later.

I just felt like I’d die if he wasn’t with me.

But the biggest revelation was that his own grandmothers had set him up for adoption, without his mother and father’s consent or knowledge. As he later found out, his parents were devastated to learn of his adoption overseas.

Sitting in a park near her home in Seoul in August, McKay’s birth mother, Suh Dong Rim, remembers the horrific day in 1975 she discovered her son was gone.

“I was wailing hysterically, so that’s when my mom told me that this is what happened,” said Suh, 70, in Korean. She was told her mother-in-law planned McKay’s adoption after Suh divorced her ex-husband. When her ex-husband went to search for their son at several adoption agencies, he was told he’d have to pay an exorbitant amount of money to even attempt finding McKay, who they said had already been sent overseas.

“I was completely stunned. I was just shocked, and I didn’t eat for weeks. I didn’t sleep, and the image of my son was flickering before my eyes,” Suh said. “I just felt like I’d die if he wasn’t with me.”

A mother's agony

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She said it became an “unwritten law” among her family members to never speak of Jung Soo again. “But I wondered, where is my child? Which country did he go to? What happened to him? Is he dead? Is he alive? That feeling never left my heart.”

Remembering that time, Suh cupped her face in her hands and broke down in sobs, as a chorus of cicadas cried around her. Although she was reunited with McKay two decades ago, the pain lingers.

“My heart hurts so much. It hurts even more than when I first met him,” she said.

McKay feels like his life “had been kind of a lie.”

“To find out that all these Koreans went through the same thing as I did — lied to the same way, you know, having these documents that we held on to so dearly, and they’re all false. That part’s very frustrating.”

Kim McKay at his home in Port Moody, B.C. He's holding his dojang, a seal used to represent one's signature in Korean culture. (Albert Leung/CBC)

A few years ago, with the help of his Korean parents, he had his orphan documents annulled in court and was added back to his birth parents’ original registry in Korea.

“I’m no longer an orphan,” McKay repeatedly said when CBC spoke to him. “I actually belong to a family now.”

IV.

Experts say declaring children orphans made them more adoptable abroad, allowing easier pathways to immigration.

In order to facilitate overseas adoptions, legal frameworks had to be put in place. According to Lee Kyung-Eun, an international law expert and director of Human Rights Beyond Borders (HRBB) in South Korea, orphan is an immigration term.

In 1961, the U.S. stipulated “orphan” as a immigration qualification to allow U.S. citizens to bring children into the country for adoption. Its definition of an eligible orphan, however, was broad — it included death or disappearance of both or one parent, abandonment, even cases where a parent was “incapable” of providing care.

Lee said that in turn, South Korea created a law called the Orphan Adoption Special Procedure Act, establishing the system to adopt out Korean children to foreigners. Canada, as well as European nations, created similar legislation in the years after.

Records show the first South Korean “orphans” arrived in Canada in 1968, though there are indications others may have come earlier through unofficial pathways. CBC found the federal government actually held onto templates of legal paperwork required to bring Korean children to Canada — the very documents now being questioned by adoptees and adoption advocates.

Some of those documents were nearly identical to Foston’s, including one “certifying” her as an orphan “without any relative according to her family register.” A document titled “Extract of Family Register” assigned Foston as the head of her own household, and was stamped with “no record” for her father, mother and family history.

Kelly Foston received this document from the Korean adoption agency KWS in May. It contradicts many of the unknowns in her original papers, while also redacting some details. (Albert Leung/CBC)

That controversial document is called an orphan family registry, or “orphan hojuk” in Korean. It’s a version of the typical family registry document that lists all family members’ vital statistics like births, deaths, marriages and divorces.

Those records are central to what Lee calls the “orphan-making process.”

Lee says that when adoption agencies made a request to send out an “abandoned child,” Korean authorities “rubber-stamped” the orphan family registry documents.

“The relevant authorities of [the] South Korean government worked as a factory of mass production of orphan documents,” said Lee, a former director of Amnesty International Korea. She says she couldn’t find any evidence each child’s case was properly assessed by authorities — “to figure out that those children were really orphans or not” — prior to the orphan designation.

Lee’s organization, which advocates for adoptees’ rights to their origins, partnered with lawyers to argue the legality of “orphan papers” before Korean courts over the last few years.

“We are saying that this orphan-making procedure was totally illegal,” Lee said.

Lee Kyung-Eun, an international law expert and director of Human Rights Beyond Borders in South Korea, says declaring children orphans made them more adoptable abroad. (CBC)

A KWS spokesperson told CBC that if parents failed to report their child’s birth under the registration system, “the adoption agency or a local government should do it,” and that it was legally sound.

With “orphan papers” in hand, Korean adoptees could get visas from other countries, Lee explained.

“A life of a human being was left in the hands of private agencies,” said Lee. “That was really a big tragedy in the history of this country.”

KWS is one of the four major adoption agencies that the South Korean TRC is currently scrutinizing for alleged human rights violations of adoptees. In a statement to CBC, KWS said that it is accredited by the South Korean government, and has worked “according to the relevant laws and regulations.”

The KWS spokesperson wrote CBC to say the agency has provided Canadian adoptees like Foston “with all the information we could find.”

V.

One reason these adoptions weren’t questioned sooner is that the Canadian government was playing “catch-up” in response to growing demand after the Second World War from Canadians who wished to save children from war-torn nations, says historian Tarah Brookfield.

Ottawa in the 1960s and ’70s was “always late to the game,” said Brookfield, an associate professor of history and children studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Archival government documents echo these observations. Politicians and bureaucrats were concerned about a “chaotic” adoption scene across the country. Both Ottawa and the provinces struggled to reel in the explosion of interest among Canadian parents and private agencies, some of whom began making their own adoption arrangements with foreign countries. It became “a real source of embarrassment,” according to a federal Welfare Department director in 1973.

Some warned officials that Canada could be “accused of child grabbing” and violating the rights of children.

Another report that same year says provinces were in a “race,” competing for children to “satisfy the needs of adoption applicants.” Some people in the sector warned officials that Canada could be “accused of child grabbing” and violating the rights of children.

In fact, it appears some officials were actually told of “lucrative” practices in Korea.

“The placement of unwanted children … is done by many individuals, including doctors, midwives, nurses, friends, relatives, private entrepreneurs, and agencies,” reads an archived report on Korean adoptions from the 1970s. “With no legal controls, the ‘buying and selling’ of children is a lucrative source of income.”

It wasn’t until the Federal Adoption Desk was created in the late ’70s that the government appeared to become more organized, said Brookfield. But international adoption was a “rogue movement” into the ’90s, says Brookfield, when Canada signed the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, which provided more oversight.

“There was not a lot of urgency to necessarily say, ‘Well, is this the best path for the child? Could there be relatives? Could there be local Korean families?’” said Brookfield.

Kelly Foston’s adoptive father, Jim, says he only found out recently — through his daughter — about the inconsistencies in her adoption paperwork. He says that had he known in the ’70s about the allegations of falsification of adoption documents by Korean agencies, he might have been in a position to help bring it to light. After all, he was working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Jim Foston, Kelly’s adoptive father, says he only recently learned of the inconsistencies in his daughter's adoption paperwork. (Albert Leung/CBC)

“If I had any wind of that type of thing being investigated, given the work I was doing … I would have put a stop to it right there,” Foston said. “Had I known about the illegality … I would have been pissed off. Livid.”

Foston said he had friends who had also adopted Korean children around the same time. They also had no inkling of possible misconduct by Korean authorities.

“There was never a discussion about this. Ever, ever, ever,” he said. “Nobody knew.”

In the past few years, several countries — including Sweden, Denmark, France, Belgium, Norway and the Netherlands — have investigated possible illicit activities in their international adoption practices. Some have published their findings or struck up independent bodies.

But Canada has yet to follow suit.

“Why isn’t Canada doing anything?” said Kelly Foston angrily. “How could Canada have gone into agreements? Did they know about this?... How could this have happened?”

A search for the truth

• 54 years ago
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Foston, who leads the Transracial Adoptee Community, recently started up the Canadian chapter of the global Korean Rights Group, first organized in Denmark to demand answers for adoptees. She’s calling on Canada to investigate not only her case, but that of every Canadian adoptee from South Korea.

CBC asked the government whether Canada plans on investigating its role in Korean adoptions, and to respond to the call from several adoptees to launch its own independent inquiry. In an email, a spokesperson for Global Affairs Canada wrote that the department is aware of the TRC investigations in Korea and says the Canadian embassy “will continue monitoring developments.”

It directed CBC’s other questions to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, which wrote that due to privacy legislations, it can’t comment on specific cases. It noted that Canada is part of the 1993 Hague Convention on adoption and that Canada “takes all necessary precautions” to follow Canadian and international laws involving international adoptions. But it didn’t address past deeds.

South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission says it plans to “actively investigate the truth about allegations of manipulation of various documents.” Of the 375 applications submitted to the TRC from adoptees in 11 countries — predominantly Denmark, U.S., and Sweden — there is one case from Canada, according to the commission’s latest statistics.

CBC spoke to the sole Canadian applicant, but they wished to maintain their privacy at this time.

IV.

Leah Kim Brighton’s papers say she arrived in Canada in 1987. They paint a picture of an orphan named “Chung Ah Kee” who grew up in an orphanage in Gwangju until the age of four. Her first name on her paperwork literally means “baby” in Korean — incidentally, a name given to another Canada-bound child from SWS, CBC found in archival records.

The papers say her parents are “unknown” and there’s “no record” for her family history, but Brighton said “my birth parents were not only very much known, they were both alive and they were [still] married.”

Brighton says her adoptive parents from White Rock, B.C., had been in touch with SWS multiple times since she was a child, asking for more records on her file, to no avail. Brighton says SWS withheld information from her until she was in her 20s, when a friend in Korea called the agency on her behalf. SWS suddenly shared they had detailed information on her biological parents, and that her family wanted to meet her.

“It was shocking,” she said.

WATCH | Leah Kim Brighton talks about discovering the truth:

Watch

'I was not an orphan'

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In 2007, Brighton reunited in South Korea with her umma and appa (Korean for mother and father). Brighton describes sleeping next to her parents and eating her umma’s delicious kimchi. Her mom gave her a Korean name: Kim Hee Su. “Hee” is the same syllable in her six older sisters’ names and “Su’’ refers to the ocean that kept them apart.

Brighton’s mom died five years later, leaving her to grieve not only her passing, but all that lost time. “My time with her was cut so short, and in part because … my adoption agency said that there was nothing that they could do [to find her].”

In 2021, Brighton, who lives in Toronto, founded the Asian Adoptees of Canada, a community for others like her. She’s been helping people with their birth searches and says truth and preservation of records is vital for adoptees.

“I was not an orphan,” she emphasized. “For myself and my peers, [it’s] not an accurate description of who we actually are and the family that we actually have — and sometimes, the family that is very much looking for us today.”

Despite knowing more about her family history, Kelly Foston says she still feels an unexplainable sorrow. She wonders if it’s the Korean sentiment known as han — a deeply rooted ancestral feeling of resentment, grief, regret and rage that comes from suffering and trauma.

“It’s not that I don’t have a good life here — it’s nothing to do with that,” Foston explained. “My heart aches wanting to know something that I feel is so close in reach.”

Foston’s biological father has yet to make contact with KWS in agreeing to reconnect with his daughter, despite the three registered letters sent to him this year. Citing strict privacy laws in South Korea, KWS is withholding his address and first name from Foston.

In the meantime, Foston has written him a letter, which she shared with CBC.

“‘As per their records, they believe you may be my biological father. If that is true, I want to share with you that I have a good life,’” she read aloud while sitting on a jagged rock on the shores of White Rock. The waves crashed around her.

“‘At the very least, would you please send a letter to me?’” Foston read, choking back tears.

The letter says it would mean the world to her to have any detail about her mother. Foston wants to try to find her before she dies. It would be a great gift.

“‘This is sent with all my love, and hopes you find the strength to move forward with me,’” she read while gazing across the Pacific Ocean, which separates her from her motherland.

“‘Kelly Foston. Yoon Soo Joon.’”