Adoptees Search the World for Their Roots

Wayne Berry thought the chances of finding his birth parents were just about zero. The adopted son of Minnesota dairy farmers, Berry, 26, was looking for two people among 45 million in South Korea. He didn’t know their names and he didn’t even speak Korean.

After sending out 100 letters, the elementary school coach employed a translator, made a two-minute video and sent it with his baby picture to three TV stations in Seoul. As luck had it, his aunt was watching the one station that aired the tape--and she recognized him.

Last year, Berry flew to Korea and met his parents, even though he learned he had been conceived during an illicit affair and they were now married to other people. Again, luck was on his side and they were overjoyed, not ashamed, to see him. “I think they wanted to make up for lost time,” he said.

What’s more, Berry said he received “the red carpet treatment” from about 30 other relatives he never knew he had. He is planning to stay in touch with his parents. And now, he said, his aunt is seeking a son she gave up for adoption in the United States.

For decades, children adopted from foreign countries pretty much have been expected, like domestic adoptees, to form new roots, forget the past and get on with life. But, like their counterparts, many are initiating far-flung searches to answer the particularly complex and poignant questions about their murky roots.

Interest has grown as the adoptees, often children of U.S. servicemen around the world, have matured and become aware that reunions are possible. Experts predict that more foreign adoptees--including the estimated 150,000 brought to the U.S. over the past 20 years--will be following Berry’s example as they come of age in an era of ethnic pride, the Internet and an ever-shrinking global village.

Few searches end happily, experts caution. In other countries, as in the United States, birth records typically are closed and sometimes nonexistent; birth families also can be uncooperative and cool if cultural traditions denigrate female, mixed-race or illegitimate children.

Considering the barriers of distance, language and culture, the difficulties of searching for birth parents are “exaggerated a million times by an international adoption,” said Susan Cox, director of development for Holt International Children’s Services, an adoption agency, in Eugene, Ore. Besides private investigators, there are few avenues for help. Berry has started a Korean birth registry that will use computer databases to help match adoptees and biological families who want to find each other for a $30 fee.

Others are using their ingenuity and their connections or are networking for information and support through the Internet. In the last two years, a worldwide Adoptees Internet Mailing List has grown to 1,000 members, said Vicki Rummig of Tacoma, Wash., co-owner of the list. By asking for help in Germany, Rummig said, she was able to find the orphanage from which her husband had been adopted. He hasn’t pursued the lead because “he’s not that ready yet,” she said.

Overwhelming Emotions

Undaunted by potential problems, searchers are making their presence felt in some countries. In South Korea, where embarrassment over record numbers of exported orphans has caused a decline in international adoptions, “post-adoption services” are offered free to returning adoptees. They flock to the country each summer. If their birth parents are not interested in meeting them, an official driver will show them personal landmarks--the police station where they were found or the orphanage where they stayed.

In Ireland, officials and adoption agencies have been coping with a flurry of requests since March, when records were discovered in the national archives showing that nearly 2,000 illegitimate children were sent to the United States from 1948 to 1961.

The searchers have been so persistent that, according to the Irish Times, one church-run adoption agency would not help them unless they signed a statement promising to “accept unconditionally” what they were told and not make “unfair demands.”

Some adoptees are driven to search because “it feels like a part of you is missing,” Rummig said. “They say they feel hatched, not born.”

The emotions can become overwhelming for those raised in largely white neighborhoods who realize as youngsters that they don’t look like their adoptive parents and that they know nothing about their birth parents, said Dana Johnson, co-director of the International Adoption Clinic at the University of Minnesota.

Others start searching when they have a health crisis and need medical information or seek donors who are related to them. And some want to pass on whatever heritage they can to their own children.

In some cases, concerned parents are leading the search on behalf of their adopted children. Marilyn Lammert, a therapist from Maryland, said that when she adopted an infant from Korea 14 years ago, she never imagined he would grow up haunted by the blanks in his past. But schoolmates’ painful racial taunts and normal adolescent turmoil fueled his yearning to know about his birth family.

“I didn’t get it,” Lammert said. “I get it now.”

Last month, after eight years of using specialists and personal connections, she made her second trip to Korea, this time to meet her son’s birth parents and his brothers.

“They were very astonished they would ever meet [me],” Lammert said. She brought a photo album her son had made and videotaped her conversations--through an interpreter--with his birth father, a 64-year-old day laborer, and birth mother, a fruit vendor.

Now, at least, she said, her son will not be walking blindly into a future reunion with his birth family. He knows who and where they are. He knows they share traits, including a matter-of-fact demeanor, and yet are separated by vastly different cultures. Most important, she said, he has the control he never had before. “He can go whenever he wants,” she said. “It’s up to him.”

Others are not as enthusiastic.

Cox said the decision to search for foreign birth parents should be made only by adults, with the support of their adoptive parents and, if possible, the guidance of a therapist. For younger adoptees, discovering they have another family while they are coping with the usual adolescent need to separate from their parents presents too many complications, she said. In addition, some children feel guilt and confusion when faced with the discrepancy between their own middle-class circumstances and those of their birth families, some of whom are poor villagers who could not afford to raise them.

Even for adults such as Cox, 42, an adoptee who searched for her Korean birth family three years ago, the result can be painful and confusing.

Unlike most adoptees, she knew her birth name and town, and was able to locate family members, including two half brothers, after advertising in a newspaper in Inchon, South Korea. She learned her birth mother had died and had told only one other child that he had a sister who lived in America and was the daughter of a British soldier.

“The whole thing was very surreal,” she said. “They’re very proud of me and they care deeply for me, that’s clear. But we’re separated by so much time and culture and language. The greatest problem was that I was half Korean. She married the father of my two half brothers. . . . I was her secret.”

Cox has no regrets. But she said, “It was like lifting up a rock. You can’t put it back exactly the way it was before. . . .”

She now realizes that some questions may better be left unanswered. “One of the things about adoption I always have believed is that you have a lot of questions for which there are no answers,” she said. “What I realized is you are used to that. You are used to not having answers, so if you want to, you can make up your own story, even unconsciously.”

On the other hand, Thomas Rice, 22, a recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said that after he reunited with his birth family in Korea, he felt a new sense of peace. “A part of me felt unsettled as long as I can remember,” he said. The reunion “was very reassuring.”

Rice said he had never felt an urge to find his birth parents because he harbored mildly hateful feelings toward them during his youth. A friend pushed him into making a search after his adoptive parents died. “All the way there, I was fine with it. As soon as we started to land, I was really nervous. I started to shake uncontrollably,” he said.

As he left customs in Korea, he saw two people with a sign that said, “Hi, Tommy.” With a rush, he realized he was looking at his mother and his grandmother. “My mother hugged me. She cooed and cried and held on to me while Grandmother went to look for my uncle and my younger brother.”

Even though they could barely communicate, they insisted he live with them while he studied during his junior year abroad in Seoul. Sometimes, he said, his mother overcompensated for having missed his childhood, buying him sweets and once helping him put on his shirt. Now back home, he plans to keep in touch, but is still “processing” his experience.

Parents’ Culture

South Korea is perhaps the most cooperative country in helping searchers, said Pat Rutherford, founder of the Dallas-based Worldwide Tracers, a third of whose clients are adoptees doing international searches. Russia, China and Middle Eastern countries have been unhelpful, he said. In Russia, he said, many officials want payment; in the Middle East, he found them protective of birth fathers’ identities. “The men are the kings there,” he said.

Some adoptive children will never find their birth parents, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to connect to their parents’ culture. Some adoptive parents are trying to head off identity problems. They are sending their children to summer “culture camps,” finding support groups or friends in the local ethnic community or embarking on “heritage tours” back to the country of the adoptees’ birth. A highlight of the Korea tour is a trip to an unwed mothers home, said Becca Piper, director of Korean Ties, a 3-year-old adoptee tour group based in Milwaukee.

Some adoptees, having grown up around unwed mothers in the United States, do not believe explanations that social stigmas forced their mothers to give them up, said Piper. When they hear the stories of the women in the home, she said, “they develop a whole different relationship with their parents at that point. The tears are just rampant.”

Piper said there is so much interest that she is planning to open a Chilean Ties and Peruvian Ties next year.

Maintaining Close Ties

A few adoptive parents, such as Sue Douglass, a teacher in Castro Valley, Calif., try to establish contact with foreign birth parents from the beginning. She keeps up a sporadic correspondence with the birth families of both her adopted daughters, a 13-year-old from Guatemala and a 16-year-old from Honduras. One mother wanted to make sure her daughter was not being stolen to be used as an organ donor. Both families have asked for her support in bringing them to the U.S.

It’s hard, Douglass said, when the birth families forget the girls’ birthdays, as they did this year: “They feel kind of abandoned already. This exacerbates it.”

Three years ago, they returned to Central America for a visit.

The older girl was impressed with the closeness of her large family--one sister left her home at 4 a.m. carrying her baby to come see her in the hillside village of sugar-cane farmers. Many of them cried at the reunion with the girl who had been relinquished because her father, a remarried widower, could not afford to raise 10 children.

“I was curious about how my father was,” said the older girl. “They were very shy and very conservative. They were uncomfortable with my presence. You always see reunions on TV and how they’re going to be so warm and stuff. It wasn’t at all like it was supposed to be.”

Even though she understands that her father wanted her to have a better life, she said she is still angry that she was the one who had to go. But she also is philosophical. “Here, you can’t be guaranteed a comfortable life. But at least you have an opportunity to be somebody. There, you have your family, and your family will help you no matter how poor you are. You always have your blood.”

Nan Shen, owner of the Portland, Ore.-based China Adoption Service, said the bond between birth children and parents can remain strong contrary to the plans of some adoptive couples she’s seen who want to get in then get out of China with their child as quickly as possible. ‘You can’t just bring a child home, feed her hamburgers and turn her into an American,” she said.

Shen, who herself was an abandoned child in China, said that when Chinese parents and children are forced to separate, it is traditional for each to carry half of a keepsake in hopes they will be reunited. With infants, she said, the parents often place an indelible mark on the baby.

About half the infants put up for adoption with her agency carry such a mark, she said.

Reunions now are extremely rare in China because it is against the law to abandon a baby. But she said, “There are photos and files. Every child’s record is permanently stored in the province.”

If trends continue, things will probably change there too, so she tells her clients to start preparing themselves for nagging questions their children will raise one day.