Chasing Glimpses of a Past

KUNSAN, South Korea —  The clerk in the police station gives a quizzical look to the young woman in the short green sundress. She has Korean features, but something about her manner and even the sweep of her ponytail is distinctly American.

He then looks down at the small black-and-white photograph of a baby who was found abandoned in 1975 in front of a nearby bank.

“It’s very difficult. There are no records going back that far,” the clerk says. “Nobody will remember you from that long ago.”

Amanda Lowrey Silva isn’t discouraged. The 29-year-old graduate student from Chicago already knows from the cautionary tales of other adoptees and a previous trip here that the search for the missing pieces of her life will be frustrating -- and probably fruitless.

Silva has precious few scraps of information. She knows the date she was found, but she doesn’t know her birthday. She doesn’t know her original name, although the orphanage named her Kim Eun Ja.

Her memories are as precarious as dreams, or perhaps they are dreams after all -- she can’t be sure. She thinks she remembers a man who wore white-collared shirts and was frequently angry. A mother who comforted her after the fights and held her up cheek to cheek as they gazed at their images in the mirror.

“I miss my birth mother. I’ve always missed her,” she says. “My adoptive mother, too, would hold my face up to hers in the mirror, but it was weird how different she looked from me.... When I was older, I would look in the mirror myself and say, ‘God, do I look so Asian?’ It was strange.”

Since the 1950s, more than 150,000 South Korean children have been sent abroad for adoption, about 100,000 of them to the United States. Long before children began arriving in the U.S. from China and Russia -- the two leading countries today for foreign adoptions -- there were the Korean babies. Although the number of new arrivals has trailed off since the 1980s, they still make up the largest foreign adoptee population in the United States.

Increasingly, they’re returning to their homeland as adults. Especially during summer holidays, the adoptees come by the thousands, often equipped with little more than phrasebooks and printouts from MapQuest showing the locations of towns with unpronounceable names where they might have been born.

Hwang Seung Yeon, a sociologist with Kyung Hee University in Seoul, estimates that about 20% of adoptees have visited South Korea in search of their roots and that eventually as many as 80% will.

There is deep shame about adoption in South Korea, where the subject carries connotations of poverty and extramarital sex. The first generation of adoptees in the years after the 1950-53 Korean War were sent abroad because their families couldn’t afford to feed them properly, whereas recent adoptees are more likely to be children born out of wedlock, according to South Korean government statistics.

Last year, the number of babies born in South Korea reached a record low, but the country still sent 2,287 children abroad for adoption. One reason for this statistical oddity is the strong stigma in the country against unmarried mothers.

Adoption agencies here do not release names or addresses of birth parents but will forward letters to them.

“If the mother was unmarried at the time, in about half the cases they’ll deny being the birth mother and say you’ve contacted the wrong person,” says Seong Kyong Hee, who works with adult adoptees for Holt International Children’s Services Inc., the largest agency handling South Korean adoptions.

At the same time, there has been an outpouring of public sympathy for the adoptees. In the last few years, a number of organizations have begun offering adoptees assistance, including accommodations and even instruction in making kimchi.

The returnees have become darlings of South Korean television. Numerous shows have been aired about their searches and even a few reunions, scripted with the same pathos of the reunions between separated North and South Korean families.

A database set up by the government in 1999 to help track missing children was quickly swamped by adoptees seeking birth parents and birth parents seeking adoptees. (“JiYeoung had beautiful ears,” one birth mother wrote of a daughter who had been adopted 28 years earlier. “She was beautiful and voluminous,” wrote another. )

This month, the first international conference of Korean adoptees to take place in the country was held in Seoul, attracting about 450 adoptees.

The government agency that oversees the missing-children effort began soliciting DNA samples from adoptees this month for a databank to be used in matching them up with their birth parents.

Eileen Thompson Isaacs, a social worker and adoptee, says that adoptees only recently have realized they have the right and ability to search for their birth parents.

“For us in the older generation, we were told there was no way we would ever see our biological parents again and don’t bother,” says Isaacs, who was adopted as a 2-year-old in 1959. “Now that we realize that we can, how can we not?”

For Silva, the trip to this small city 100 miles south of Seoul was a long journey, not just geographically, but also psychologically.

When she started the search last year, she had recently married and was working toward a doctorate in viral biology at Northwestern University. She and her husband were trying to decide where to move next, but somehow Silva’s past seemed to hold her back from going forward. She became active in an association of South Korean adoptees in Chicago and started to think about her birth parents.

“You come to a point where you think about searching,” she says. “You talk about it with your parents. You make the first call to the adoption agency. Each of these little steps takes a while, and there is a whole emotional cycle connected with each one.”

Silva first contacted her agency in May 2003 and traveled to South Korea in December. At first, it was overwhelming to be around people with faces like her own, she says.

“On the train, I saw a woman and I thought, ‘She really looks like me, she’s the right age, could she be [my mother]?’ ” Silva recalls.

More frustrating was a nagging sense of deja vu that might have been her imagination. Or was it real?

“I had a sensation that I was here before in infancy and I recognized things. But how much of that is genuine and how much is synthetic, I don’t know,” Silva says. “I don’t know which memories are real. That is one thing about being an adoptee -- your past can be anything you imagine. It’s like you are writing your own personal history.”

That first trip left Silva feeling more confused than ever. So she recently came back, on an oppressive August day, accompanied by fellow adoptee Cori McMillan, who was also looking for information about her parents.

Her first stop was the Ilmaekwon Children’s Home, a threadbare but scrupulously clean establishment surrounded by lush gardens. There was a maddening din of cicadas and a pungent aroma of dirty diapers.

Silva knelt on the linoleum floor of the nursery to play with some of the toddlers. She cooed annyeong, or “hello,” one of the few Korean words she knows.

Silva lived for about a year at this orphanage, where she was brought July 9, 1975, a summer day perhaps much like this one. She was about 6 months old.

A black-and-white photo still pasted in the orphanage’s scrapbook shows a baby with skinny legs wearing the flowered dress she is believed to have been wearing the day she was found. Another from the garden of the orphanage shows her dressed like a boy in a white shirt and trousers.

Then come more photos -- these in color -- showing her at about 18 months in a typically suburban American living room with a man and two slightly older blond boys. Those would be her new brothers and father, a nuclear physicist. The photos were taken in 1976 shortly after Silva’s arrival in the United States and mailed by her parents to the adoption agency.

As Silva pores over the album, orphanage director Kim Kuk Jin serves glasses of ice water. He is friendly, eager to be of service, but he doesn’t know much. His parents established this orphanage in the 1960s, but he has worked here just three years. Nobody here now has any memory of this particular baby.

Kim looks crestfallen when asked whether he thinks Silva has a chance of finding her birth parents.

“There was another young woman here, not long ago. She met her mother. It was a wonderful thing,” he says gently. “But Amanda’s case is different. She was abandoned. There are no records.”

Kim pulls out a single sheet of paper that sums up Silva’s life history until the time she came to the orphanage. Among the scant details: “Found on road in front of Seoul Bank in Kunsan City.” “Abandoned.” “Condition: weak.”

He makes a photocopy and gives it to Silva.

Silva realizes that she has come to a dead end at the orphanage.

“You learn to be suspicious,” she says. “Practically all the Korean adoptees find misinformation in their files. They’re often told that they were abandoned when they were not or that the records were destroyed because your orphanage burned down. That’s a common line.”

She moves on to the Kunsan police station. At first, it doesn’t seem very promising. The place is painted the pea green that was popular in American elementary schools in the 1970s. The files aren’t computerized. The older male clerk, Kim Yeon Sul, who happens to be a retired detective, tries to cheer up Silva by telling her, “You must have been a very beautiful baby with no deformities or distinguishing marks that anyone would remember.”

But then one of the clerks, reading through the photocopied sheet from the orphanage, recognizes the name of the woman who is listed as having found the baby: Moon Jeong Hee. A woman who used to work for the Police Department had the same name.

There is a flurry of activity as the retired detective tries to find out where she’s living. He rifles through the telephone book. Unlisted.

They start calling around trying to find someone who they think is the brother of the woman’s husband. No luck.

By now jet lag and exhaustion are clearly setting in for Silva. Just in time, her cellphone brings a respite. It is a reporter for a local newspaper, the Jeonbuk Ilbo, which Silva had contacted about the cost of running an advertisement for anyone with information about her case.

The reporter says the newspaper will run a story along with any baby pictures for free, another of the many random acts of kindness encountered by adoptees here.

She rushes over to the office in a taxi.

“I think about my mother all the time. I hope she thinks about me,” Silva is telling the reporter when the phone rings again. This time, it is the retired detective from the police station. He’s found the cellphone number for Moon Jeong Hee. The interview stops as an interpreter dials the telephone number.

No sooner has she started to explain who Silva is than the call is cut off. Everybody exchanges curious glances. Has she hung up?

But then the phone rings again as Moon calls back, apologizing that the battery on her phone ran out.

Yes, indeed, she is most likely the right person. In the 1970s, she worked in the police division responsible for lost and abandoned children. If there was nowhere else, she would often keep the children overnight in her home until the parent was found, and if that didn’t happen, it would be her job to take them to the orphanage.

But no, she doesn’t have any memory of this particular baby.

“You must have been very special to have been chosen to be adopted to the United States,” Moon tells Silva through the interpreter.

As the day drags on, Silva’s expectations are clearly lowering. There are no more leads. The trail is cold. She has a flight out in less than 48 hours. She knows that when she gets home to Chicago, her friends and family will ask her whether she found her South Korean family, and she will have to explain.

Silva visits the bank where she was found -- more out of a sense of pilgrimage than hope. It is 5 p.m., and the entrance is covered by metal gates. She and McMillan, her friend, look around to see whether there is anybody who might remember a baby abandoned 29 years ago. Hardly. Everything looks like it was built in the last decade. There’s a Baskin-Robbins, a Nike store. The name and ownership of the bank changed long ago.

“So this is the famous bank, huh?” McMillan asks.

“Yup,” Silva says before posing for a couple of souvenir snapshots. “And it’s probably as close as I’m going to get.”

This time. She knows she’ll be back.

“All I’m really looking for is closure. What is the story? I want to close that chapter of my life and move on,” she says. “If I just knew my mother’s name. My whole life history hinges on one name.”

Jinna Park of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.