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This excerpt is from the chapter
on the Korean War:
By the end of 1950, South Korean refugees had
fled their homes and headed south to Pusan and outer islands. Nearly half
of Seoul’s population (one million) had left by the end of December. We
were next. This was to be my second evacuation.
In early January 1951, the Communists
recaptured Seoul and we were forced to leave our home. The company my
father and uncle worked for was evacuating its workers and ordered my
father and uncle to leave Seoul. All of us should have left together, but
my mother had just given birth to my baby sister and was too weak for such
a journey. Grandma had also become half-paralyzed by this time (as well as
hard of hearing) and could not use her right arm or hand. I was twelve (in
Korean age); my younger sister was six or seven, our younger brother was
five and the next youngest sister was three. We could not leave home, so
father stocked up on food and firewood for us before he and Uncle left.
“They will not kill women and children,” he told us. “Stay here and wait
for me to return.”
On January 4, 1951, an officer of the army
and a policeman came to every house and told everyone to get out. He said
we would all be killed if we stayed. The oldest child of the family, I
realized that I was the one left in charge. I argued, “We must wait for
our father to return, sir.” The soldier wouldn’t listen; he insisted that
we leave. Now. So I strapped my young sister on my back and put the
newborn baby on Grandma’s back, and we left home.
There was no time to pack (again), so we left
with what we were wearing and that was our heavy winter traditional Korean
clothing, which meant no pants, not even a more maneuverable skirt. With
the heavy blanket used to secure my sister to me, I was so bundled up I
could barely hold my arms down at my sides. Winter in Korea is like winter
in Minnesota, and we fought cold and snow as we walked south, out of
Seoul. As we walked, my sister kept sliding off my back and I had to
refasten her repeatedly until I grew so weary and burdened by the extra
uncomfortable weight that I imagined letting her slide off my back and
leaving her behind in the deep snow.
We were the last of the refugees to evacuate
Seoul that cold, snowy January day, and I remember it well because that
day, and many more days to come, carved scars forever into my memory.
The next day my newborn baby sister died. The
elements were too harsh for such a fragile human being, and all I could
feel was relief. She was one less body to feed, one less load to carry,
and in my joy at this realization, I wished that my other sister, the one
I carried on my back, would die as well. Is that hard to believe, that I
felt no guilt over the death of one sister and the wish for the death of
another? I don’t think it’s unbelievable; I think it’s understandable.
Under that kind of stress, in the midst of such strange trauma, a person
thinks unbelievable thoughts. A young girl in charge of her weak mother,
sick grandma, and too-young siblings wishes for death, because in death
one no longer cares. Love is not a factor in the equation of war. No way.
Had I allowed myself to feel I would have died too, and no one would have
died, too, and no one would be able to care for my family. That’s why I
understood all those parents who had abandoned their small children in the
night and didn’t seem to care. There was no time; the slightest bit of
remorse would have killed them all. They had to go on, just as I had
to—without regret, without tears, without looking back. There would be
plenty of time for all that later. In those days, we simply had to
survive.
The American soldiers were evacuating
alongside us. Down the road we went: white American soldiers next to South
Koreans. Those soldiers seemed so big to me because I was so little, just
a child. Our own Korean army didn’t have any trucks then, so the American
troops were the only ones to be carried on wheels. The ones who walked
moved much faster than the rest of us. To amuse myself, I tried to walk in
the snow prints of a soldier. For every one of his strides, I had to take
five. All day long, we moved, pushing and shoving our way through the
crowds of other refugees, heading further south to what we hoped was
safety. Every night I was so sleepy, but I could not sleep more than two
or three minutes at a time. Our bed was the snow, and we huddled together,
trying to sleep while sitting up. Overhead, U.S. airplanes dropped bombs
on us by mistake, because we were so near the enemy. By morning, the snow
had been steeped in a deep, deep red.
We hurried ahead again, snow bank to snow
bank. There were thousands of us, but we seemed to be millions, millions
marching in the deep red snow. I saw young children and toddlers and
infants sitting in those snow banks, crying for their mamas and daddies
and sisters and brothers. Try as I might, I couldn’t tune them out. The
crowds were so thick, some had gotten separated from their parents while
others had been abandoned as they slept through the night. Their cries
chilled the air and their faces broke my heart. I could not look at them.
Hurriedly, like the others, I passed them by, trying hard not to look, not
to hear their frustrated pleas. Every so often, in my own frustration,
hunger and pain, I slid my own sister off my back and laid her down in a
snow bank, then walked away. But I always came back. As much as I could
not bear to carry her much longer, I knew I could not bear the heavier
burden of my heart if I abandoned her. So I pushed forward and whispered a
promise to the children crying out around me: I will come back to help
you. I was twelve years old. How was I to know that all these children
would be gone or dead by the time I returned?
Each night during the evacuation it was my
responsibility to find a straw mat for my family to sleep on, and that was
a difficult task as there were so few. I had to scrounge, just as I
scrounged for water to make rice. I don’t know how I provided for my
family. At that time, I didn’t even know how to make rice yet, but there I
was, retrieving water or fresh snow to melt into water for rice. We were
better off than some, though. Sewn in our clothing and blankets was money;
we were able to buy some of the things we needed from others. Our distant
relatives also helped us, like the night my brother almost froze to death.
They put him on their backpack, out of the snow, and saved him that way.
From them we also had six spoons and a small pot for rice. Our problem was
finding rice to make in our small pot. As we passed towns and villages, we
begged at every house. If the house was empty, we tore down the frame for
firewood. No one felt bad; we did it as a group to survive. There were no
shops with goods for sale; everyone had to make do with what was available
to them. When we finally returned to our own home later, the same fate had
visited us; our house had been torn down for firewood.
Finally, we settled in a town known for its
hot springs. In fact, it had once been a popular honeymoon place. When the
war began the American troops set up camp there, and when Seoul was
recaptured the town was again transformed into our new home: the hot
springs refugee camp.
There were so many refugees, each family had
a very tiny space to call its own. We had to sleep on top of each other to
conserve space. My youngest sister suffered the most because she slept on
the bottom and couldn’t even cry out in pain or discomfort; she couldn’t
move, and was unable to stand up or walk. No matter how careful we were,
she woke up every morning with swollen legs.
My life became even harder at the refugee
camp. My mother fell into a sort of depression and sat immobile all day
long. She had lost her baby and was without her husband; I think she lost
her will to live. So it was my responsibility to care for her, Grandma and
all of my siblings. Finding water with several thousand refugees
congregated in one area was nearly impossible. We were given rice by the
American troops, but they gave us American rice: the long-grain kind. I
didn’t know how to cook it at first and had to learn. Eventually, I
figured out that I had to add more water.
The most difficult job I had was to find
firewood. Because everyone was in such a concentrated area, all of the
natural resources in the immediate vicinity were used up right away. Some
days I had to walk as far as six miles to find a few sticks of wood. There
were large trees closer to the camp but I had no tools to cut them down,
so I had to pick up whatever I could find on the ground. I remember that
there was a shortcut to one of the places that had some wood, but I had to
cross a river. Afraid of heights, I couldn’t bear to cross that bridge for
wood that was probably rotten, as much of it was then. So I was always
last back to the camp because I had to take the long way to find my wood.
Sometimes on my way back I would nearly faint, because my hemoglobin was
so low. To this day, because of my malnourishment then, I still have to
watch my hemoglobin levels or I might faint.
Grandma knew of my fainting spells and that
they were due to malnourishment. She loved me and probably understood that
I needed to stay healthy so that I could continue to provide for the
family until we found my father. One day, she and I went to the open
market near the camp, and do you know what? We used some of our money to
buy me sweet rice cakes. I don’t know how many I ate; I didn’t care. I was
starving and greedily shoved rice cake after rice cake into my mouth, and
felt it warm my starving, bloated belly. Grandma didn’t eat any, and when
I had eaten enough, I asked her if she wanted to get something. I didn’t
know we had used up a lot of our money. Grandma only said, “No, I am
full.” Happy, I returned to the camp, only feeling a pinch of guilt over
the fact that we did not bring back anything for my sisters or brother or
mother.
Life continued like this for the next eight
or nine months, until we finally found Father. I had sent out messages and
asked all over about Father. Where was he? He too sent message after
message inquiring about his wife and children, and one day he simply
showed up at the refugee camp.
“Hyun Sook?” father cried out.
I didn’t move; I couldn’t. All I did was
stare at him, my mouth wide and opened in the shape of an “o.” Mother and
Grandma stared, too. No one said a word, no one cracked a smile. We
couldn’t even cry. Up until that moment, I had not realized that I was
terribly tired. After that, my life became better; I was once again a
child.
Moving around so much, displaced from my home
as a child, I grew up having difficulty trusting people and letting them
get close to me. That’s why I understand adoptees. Most American grown-ups
do not understand what happens to a child psychologically when she is
moved around a lot, with no place to call home. Of course the child
develops attachment problems and has nightmares or worries about a variety
of things. Look at me. I’m sixty-five and still have fears of water and
bridges and hunger and lost children. Such bad experiences sap one’s
strength. A person does not leave that behind without scars.
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This excerpt is
from the chapter
on social work in Korea:
When I first
started at CAPOK, they were renting a few office rooms in the Old
Severance Hospital near the Seoul train station. The building was old and
dark and made of brick. Few people knew the hospital was there, and other
companies rented office space in that building as well, so CAPOK was not
very visible. In those days, the social workers often sat idly with no
work to do. There were no phones to make calls, and no one came in to
inquire about adopting a baby. Finally, after about a month of waiting,
they began to receive a few applications for baby boys.
Those were also
the days when agencies had no hard-and-fast rules to guide them through
the tangled web that was in-country adoptions. Every case presented a new
and challenging problem. Oftentimes, Korean wives came to us alone,
without their husbands, and asked for a newborn baby. They did not want
their husbands to know of the adoption; these women tried to pass off
these babies as their own. Back then, husbands did not go to the hospital
delivery room with the expectant mothers, so the fathers never witnessed
their child’s birth. This was one way women could “trick” their husbands.
Another way was to fake pregnancy. The wife would tell her husband she was
pregnant and they must sleep in separate rooms because if they slept
together, she might miscarry. This was especially effective if there had
already been a miscarriage. The husbands didn’t know any better so they
agreed; they never saw or touched their wives’ stomachs. Also, most Korean
houses did not have indoor plumbing during this time so people went to the
public bath houses to bathe, and this meant that a husband never saw his
wife’s bare stomach¾and never
knew that the bulge underneath her clothing was simply extra padding. For
wives who could not become pregnant¾or
had not given birth to a son¾this
was a necessary deception. Remember, bloodlines were very important to
Koreans, so the wives had to make their husbands believe that the newborn
baby was their birth child.
Early on, we
allowed this practice to take place but later, we changed it and required
that adopting parents must come together and both must agree to the
adoption. Part of our reason for this demand was to gather some proof that
the adopting couple was legally married. Back then, there was no Korean
law that required adopting couples to prove that they were married. Those
who lived in the countryside often had no such proof. They didn’t think it
mattered to register their marriage legally, because there was no
practical reason to do so until they had a baby to register. (Actually, my
husband and I did the same thing with our legal paperwork: our wedding
date and my daughter’s birth date were registered on the same day.)
In that
way, our agency’s rule helped legal marriage, and by 1970, the government
officially announced that adopting parents must be legally married and
show a marriage license as proof in order to adopt. You see, a common
problem was that the men who lived in the countryside would frequently
visit the city and legally marry a young city girl, despite having a
“wife” in the countryside. We did not want couples like this adopting.
Following the legalization of marriages, we began requiring medical
records from both adoptive parents. There were many cases of tuberculosis
(TB) back then so couples brought in x-rays to show that they did not have
the disease. Unfortunately, x-rays were all we had to go on for proof of
health, and the clinics that provided this service only did x-rays and
blood tests of the men. For many years, we already had complete physicals
for foster mothers, and many years later we checked on the whole adoptive
family, but at that time we only asked adoptive parents for some basic
information.
So in those
early days of in-country adoptions, we encountered all kinds of strange
situations and we had to make decisions based on individual cases. For
instance, once we had a college-educated woman and her husband come to our
agency and ask to adopt a baby girl. Then, most couples wanted to adopt a
baby boy. Because they had made such an unusual request¾and
we were happy to see a couple want a baby girl¾we
picked the prettiest baby for them to adopt. She had big, big eyes. A few
hours later the wife returned. She had a terror-struck look on her face
and asked if she could exchange the baby for one with smaller more slanted
eyes. She explained that as soon as her mother-in-law saw the baby with
big eyes, the older woman exclaimed, “Yah! How in the world can this baby
have such big eyes when you both have such small eyes? Koreans are not
supposed to have such big eyes. You must return this baby or people will
think this is a Korean-Caucasian baby, and that would be impossible!” That
was the only time we exchanged a baby. You see, we messed up in giving
them a child that did not share their physical traits. Koreans adopting
back then wanted a child they could pass as their birth child because
society would not have been equally accepting of an adopted child.
Another time a
woman came to us and said she needed a baby right away. She had announced
her delivery date as the following week and now she needed to deliver. We
hurried to find an infant but there weren’t many newborns, and she wanted
a boy, which made our search more difficult. Everyone wanted a baby boy.
Luckily, someone had called us earlier and asked us to come by and pick up
an abandoned child. The infant was a boy and we told the woman that we
needed to do a medical exam first. She was in a hurry and said not to
worry; she would take full responsibility if the baby was not healthy. We
gave her the baby and two days later she was back in our office with the
child. During those two days, she had taken the baby to her doctor and
found out that he was not expected to live much longer. All of his
internal organs were in all the wrong places. I think the baby did die and
the woman had to tell everyone that her son had died of internal
complications. She and her husband had to wait another year to adopt
because she had to fake her pregnancy all over again. If only she had
waited just one more day so we could have done a full medical exam, she
would have been saved all that heart ache. After that, we learned our
lesson and never placed a baby without a complete medical exam, no matter
what the situation.
Have you ever
heard of “doggy-hole” adoptions? That may not be the best translation into
English, but this was a common practice in those early days of in-country
adoptions. You see, the old-time traditional belief was that if you wanted
a baby, you announced whether you wanted a baby girl or boy out loud so
the neighbors could hear you, and once you made the announcement, poof!
There was a baby at your door within a short time. In reality, someone
left the couple a baby she might otherwise have abandoned. Of course, the
person did not walk up to a stranger’s door and place the baby on the
doorstep. Back then, people had fences around their houses, and in the
fence, there was usually a hole big enough for a dog to crawl through.
Hence the name “doggy-hole.” People abandoned their babies that way, by
placing through the hole in the fence and into the yard of a stranger,
where the baby would be safe until the resident discovered him.
When a baby was
abandoned this way and the couple decided to keep the child, this was
considered a “doggy-hole” adoption and the child was recognized as that
family’s “real” child. That meant that the parents could give that child
their family name, and the child could inherit his parents’ material
wealth after they died. Remember that this was a time when adopted
children were not considered a couple’s real children by certain laws, and
so adopted children could not inherit an adoptive parent’s estate. The
logic behind this law was to protect the rights of the birth parents. If
the birth parents ever came back and claimed an adopted child, the law
back then favored the birth parents instead of the adoptive parents, so
for many couples who adopted in those early days, there was always the
fear that the birth parents might come back and reclaim the child.
Nowadays the laws protect the adoptive parents and let them pass on their
family name to their adopted child, but that wasn’t the case in those
days. In fact, around 1972 or 1973, I had to go to court to argue a case
in which the birth mother wanted to reclaim her child, who had been
adopted. I tried to explain to the court that in-country adoptions were
just as important to develop as international adoptions, but the agencies
could not do this if the courts allowed birth parents to reclaim their
birth children at any time, even when the child had been legally adopted.
We lost that case; back then the court favored the birth parent. After
that, we sent lawyers instead of social workers to argue cases.
After the war,
doggy-hole adoptions were considered an old tradition, and adoption
agencies became the path to adoption. So many people were abandoning
babies and children at any door that no one knew if someone had asked for
such a child. However, there was one mother-in-law who believed that
doggy-hole adoptions were the best way to have a family; she distrusted
adoption agencies and orphanages. Her son and his wife came to us, behind
the mother-in-law’s back, and explained the situation. They did not
believe in doggy-hole adoptions but their mother did not want them to
adopt from an agency, so they asked us to help them. That way, both sides
could be happy. They gave us a specific date to let a child be abandoned
on their doorstep, based on what the fortune teller told them. (Koreans
consult fortune tellers to find out the best date for important events
such as marriage, moving and so on.)
The social
worker handling the case asked me if this was something we could do. I
asked our American supervisor and she said absolutely not; that was
abandonment. We could not participate in such a thing, she said. I
explained to the supervisor that it would be okay in this case, because it
was important to understand the Korean custom and respect it. In the end,
that child would be adopted into a family that would love him, I said.
Finally, our supervisor agreed, and the social worker in charge of the
case dressed in plain, old clothing on the designated night. She wrapped
the baby in a blanket and pinned his birth date and time of birth to the
blanket then went out to the couple’s house. Rather than take the agency
car, she took a taxi to make sure that the mother would not see her and
become suspicious. When she arrived at the house, she snuck up to the
house and put the baby at the door, and then ran and hid. She tried to
listen for some sign that someone had discovered the baby but heard
nothing. No one stirred. The social worker knew that this was the night
the couple told her to come and didn’t understand why they did not come
out to the door. Meanwhile, the couple was talking to the mother and knew
that the baby was being dropped off at that time. The problem was that
they could not get up and go outside for no reason; they had no excuse for
checking the yard. Finally, the social worker understood what the problem
was and came out from her hiding place. She went back to the house, opened
the blanket, and pinched the baby to make him cry. Then she ran away again
to hide. This time, she heard a loud voice: “There’s a baby crying outside
the house!” It was the mother-in-law; she believed the tradition had come
true.
The family was
very happy, and when their baby son’s first birthday came, the wife had a
celebration and invited the social worker who had helped them adopt the
baby. Of course, the social worker could not reveal her true identity, so
she and the wife, both of the same age, pretended to be old school
friends. The baby’s grandmother never knew what her son and
daughter-in-law had done; she happily believed that her family was blessed
with good luck.
Another strange
request happened in the early seventies. A mother-in-law and her son came
running into our agency asking for a newborn baby boy¾that
day. They explained that the man’s wife had fainted in the delivery room
when she learned that she had given birth to her third daughter; she
wanted so badly to have a boy that she told her husband she wanted to die.
They wanted to adopt a newborn baby boy that afternoon and return to the
hospital before the wife gained consciousness. We asked them how they
would explain such a thing to the wife, and they told us that they would
the wife she had given birth to twins but had fainted before anyone could
tell her that the other child was a boy. Luckily, we had a healthy newborn
baby boy and the mother-in-law and her son rushed back to the hospital
with our social worker. The wife was lying on her hospital bed with eyes
closed but she was conscious; she just didn’t want to open her eyes and
deal with her disappointment. So the mother-in-law shouted: “Open your
eyes! Don’t be disappointed! See? You gave birth to a baby boy. You had
twins!” The wife opened her eyes. “What?” she said, in disbelief. “Here is
your baby boy,” the husband said and presented his wife with their son.
The woman was so happy.
We kept that
family’s secret but insisted that the social worker who helped them
check-up on the child on his first birthday. The family agreed and invited
her to their home. During the visit, the social worker saw that the mother
gave the little girl (the “twin”) powdered milk but fed her “twin” brother
breast milk. The mother ignored the girl and showered attention and praise
on the boy¾even though he was the
one who was adopted, which, of course, the mother didn’t know. Back at the
agency, the social worker reported what she saw to our director, and the
director told her to go back and tell the mother-in-law that the mother
must give both of her “twin” children equal treatment or the secret would
be revealed. From then on, the grandmother made sure the mother followed
our advice.
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