A South Korean woman adopted by an American couple is searching for answers after finding her biological brother — and shocked to learn she was part of a devastating government-backed adoption and kidnapping scheme.
Mary Bowers (Korean name: Jung Nayoung), a competitive eater, told the Korea Times that she was raised in Colorado after being adopted in 1982. She spent most of her life believing she was an orphan. “During the Covid-19 pandemic, I had extra time on my hands due to social distancing regulations, so I started looking into some old records and started finding some interesting conflicts,” she said. Her adoption had been arranged by the Seoul-based Eastern Welfare Society, and in her adoption papers, she was listed under three different Korean surnames: Jung, Chung, and Baik.
Bowers then discovered the shady story of Brothers Home, a state-run welfare facility in Busan that had been accused of kidnapping and mistreating hundreds of children and disabled individuals from the 1960s to the 1980s before ultimately closing. Brothers Home was said to have acted as a “supply chain” for private adoption agencies outside of South Korea.
“It just happened to be towards the end of the article [that] I recognised familiar names who signed off my adoption documents. Initially, I thought I was imagining things, so I had to go back and check my documents,” Bowers said. “But unfortunately, I was not.”
Bowers is not the first adoptee to speak out about realizing she had likely been torn from her family. South Korean adoptee Tara Graves said she had been selected from a catalog by American parents following the Korean War. Graves’ adoptive mother helped her track down her biological family, and she had an emotional reunion with some of her siblings. She had been placed for adoption for several reasons — including poverty, and a cultural preference for a son, not a daughter.
