I don’t know if it’s the numbing lies and inconsistencies of the Trump administration, still feeling the raw trauma after Operation Metro Surge, or learning more over time about the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) investigation of Korean adoptee records in South Korea. But I feel more than ever, the annoyance of small acts of injustice that are temporary, and also the crushing load of global injustices that seem to have no remedies.

There was one tiny bright spot recently.

One woman, Alison Hoagland, is named as the plaintiff in a lawsuit against Donald Trump, along with a whole lot of federal departments including the National Park Service.  She is on the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a non-profit organization that guides decisions on changes to national landmark buildings.

The building in question is, of course, the White House. A judge issued a preliminary injunction on March 31 ordering construction to stop on the new White House ballroom, a Trump pet project. Carol Quillen, the president of the National Trust, issued a statement in response to the injunction, stating “This is a win for the American people on a project that forever impacts one of the most beloved and iconic places in our nation.”

At first, I thought, “Well, that’s good at least.”  My second thought was “Is it, though?”

The National Trust guides the conservation of buildings that are historic and irreplaceable.  The White House East Wing was demolished way back in October, 2025. Apparently, nobody could stop it.  Trump ignored all the laws and policies concerning historic structures, and took a wrecking ball to it. What can the National Trust do at this point?  What is the win?

The original colonnades (covered walkways) to the east and west wings were designed in 1805 by the architect who designed the Capitol and other famous Washington, D.C. buildings. There is (or was) a classical symmetry to both identical wings. The East Wing building was designed in 1902, and redesigned in the ‘40s under Franklin Roosevelt to include an underground bunker.  The East Wing demolition also destroyed the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden.

After the demolition began, many news organizations put together nostalgic photo collections of historical events that happened in the East Wing. There are many moments.

The footprint of the new building will be three times that of the White House. The finished ballroom could make the White House look like a fancy middle school that needed a new wing for the gym.

The preliminary injunction is not useless.  It gives the granting authorities some time to figure out whether the new ballroom building can be modified in size or style or both, to match with the rest of the historical building. Or, perhaps, whether it should not be built at all. 

However, is hardly “a win” for the American people.  It is undoubtedly a tragic loss, from a historical perspective.

So much has been happening, from October 2025 to the present, that the fiasco of the illegal East Wing demolition has been barely a blip on the radar of the pointless waste of money, time and human capital visited on our country by the Trump administration.

Personally, I only had a few passing thoughts about the stupidity of it, until reading the slightly good news about the temporary injunction today.

It stands out though – if only as symbolic of how the Trump administration operates. It’s a representation of the general overall disaster that we can barely imagine.  It is physical proof of the vacuum – or hole in the ground – where the role of Congress used to be.

The injunction shows us that the judiciary is at least still operating.  But it has a small part in preventing lawless action; the court system’s job mainly kicks into gear after the fact. 

The East Wing demolition is particularly insulting because of its permanence.  No court case can undo it. The ugly scar on the landscape is an example of how attempts at reparations, even sincere ones, usually fail.

Another recent event was a lawsuit by six Twin Citians, all people of color, who charged that household members were arrested and detained after illegal warrantless home searches by ICE. It’s a pleading of  “can’t someone at least enforce the existing laws?”  ICE broke down the front door of one couple’s house with a battering ram and took away the man in front of his school-age daughter and niece. Two of the men who were detained after the warrantless search were sent to detention centers. One of them, detained for 17 days, was denied access to his medication.

None of the plaintiffs were wanted for a crime. An administrative warrant was used as a pretense for entering the homes by force.

Tiny law lesson – In case you missed it, or like me, have trouble remember the normal days any more – in the scenario of normal police procedures under normal laws, an administrative warrant is legally insufficient for police to enter a home to search for a person without the resident’s permission. Only a judge can sign off on a judicial warrant, and the law enforcement branch requesting the search has to show a cause for the home search.

Like the East Wing example – except more serious –  this suit may accomplish something, but not a lot.  It would uphold current law and potentially stop DHS from violating people’s Fourth Amendment (protection from illegal search and seizure) rights in the future.  But it will not restore justice to those who were held at gunpoint, kidnapped by masked thugs, thrown into vans, subjected to the uncertainty and trauma of detention, missed work, were denied their medicine, etc.   

But will it elicit a public heartfelt apology and anything like reparations from the federal government for the disruption, terror, stress and pain?  Again, probably not. Governments generally do not apologize. Even when they do, they do it so poorly.

Case in point, back in South Korea, an official government investigation commission, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), started its third consecutive investigation of fraud and mismanagement of Korean adoptees’ adoption records; this phase could be going on for two or three years.

In a public demonstration in Seoul on February 26, including a colorful display of signs and flags from many nations, Korean adoptees brought 311 voluntarily-submitted files to the TRC on the first day of its third investigation.

This official inquiry into human rights violations by the government began with a group of Korean adoptees from Denmark, the Danish Korean Rights Group (DKRG), whose human rights complaint against the South Korean government was then referred to the TRC in 2022. Adoptees from other countries also submitted their files to the TRC for investigation. The TRC’s (second) investigation ended with a published report in March 2025, concluding that there is enough proof of fraud to be considered a human rights crime under South Korean law.

A large group of adoptees have been harmed by struggling with fraudulent adoption records that make it difficult or impossible to find birth family. There is evidence that some adoptees were placed for adoption without permission of their families. There are allegations of human trafficking, particularly during the era of speeded-up adoption processing in the 1970s and ‘80s.

It is unlikely that this reality can be remedied in a way that can repair the essential problem, but Korean adoptee leaders have some ideas for policies that would approach reparations.  In a letter to the new president, the U.S. Korean Rights Group (USKRG), one of the newer, country-specific groups formed to represent Americans in this ongoing dialogue, made various suggestions on specific reparations that would help Korean adoptees. So far, the letter has not been formally answered.

Many of the suggestions relate to records access, for example, giving Korean adoptees free access to their records through South Korea’s National Archives portal database. Another request was to expand access to adoptee records to other birth family members of the adoptee (siblings, cousins, and birth descendants of adoptees) instead of limiting searching to the birth parents and birth child. A related suggestion was to promote the DNA database with a national campaign so that Korean parents who once placed a child for adoption would be encouraged to register, and could find their adult child through a DNA match.

Other suggestions have to do with staffing of a government office to help Korean adoptees with their birth searches. One of the logistical problems right now is the lack of staffing to handle the inquiries of adoptees asking to access their own records (last count was that six staff have been assigned to bring order to the records, and assist adoptee applicants. There are 170,000 or more records). The USKRG asked specifically about “services such as translation, transportation guidance within Korea, procedural assistance, and explanation of information contained in adoption records.”  They also asked about language help, that all staff should be English speakers and that there also be some workers who are fluent in French and German.

Columnist Anders Riel Mueller, in his opinion piece Adoption as banishment, was one of 56 adoptees whose cases were reviewed and found to be human rights violations in the 2025 TRC report.  The issues of the last TRC investigation, Mueller said, makes him cautious about the capacity of the TRC to deliver meaningful reconciliation to Korean adoptees. 

During that almost three-year period of investigation, rife with prevarications and delays by the TRC, which was under the now-indicted and convicted former president Yoon-Seok Yeol, Mueller got an up-close and personal look at the inadequacy of any law-based organization to deliver something like a reparation.

Korean adoptees have tried various legal paths – lawsuits, and financial compensation claims – in their quest to create something fair, Mueller writes. “We are still waiting for the decisions on these claims. This uncertainty around the consequences of the TRC decision shows the limitations of its recommendations,” he pointed out.

Laws and policies versus justice and reconciliation – they are just two different concepts although they are often passed off as the same.

We can all feel what Mueller writes so incisively and says out loud, that “legal action or financial compensation do not equal justice.”  We all know this, but we cannot resist hoping for the opposite.  It’s kind of like hoping for the East Wing to reappear.

We cannot “restore the years lost to disorientation, cultural isolation and the expenditure of labor spent on reconstructing a history that the state itself worked to erase. They are tiny bandages on thousands of gaping wounds,” Mueller wrote. 

All our legalistic and policy-tweaking methods can only do some things – just as a court order to stop the new Capitol ballroom can only bring attention to it, and possibly prevent future damage to the White House or other national historic buildings – but it can’t bring back the East Wing.

There will just have to be a gaping wound in the ground for awhile, and everyone at the White House will have to look at it.  But that’s OK.

Even though real justice often seems to be a thing of our imaginations, or something sort of real, but just out of reach, we can find a lot of like-minded people thinking the same thoughts, like the eight million or more folks who went one of more than 3,000 locations for the third No Kings demonstration last week, as writer Brook Mallak pointed out in her personal essay The quiet strength of community.

I felt it too. Immersed in that community, practically squished flat against the Transportation Building at the Capitol Mall on March 28, there was a roar beginning to build from the bottom up that assured me that seeking justice is very popular right now.  There is safety in numbers. We can follow, we can lead, we can rest in the middle, sitting in a lawn chair with our little sign. We can feel like we might be able to go on for awhile.  Even if we have been intimidated, we can find the courage to speak out. Even if we have been discouraged, we can begin to take heart.

The post Reparations appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

Six films made by Korean and Korean American directors will be part of the more than 200 recent films to be screened as part of the 45^th annual Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF), to be held April 9 through 18, with five locations in the Twin Cities, and two in Rochester.  

The Korean Institute of Minnesota is partnering with the MSPIFF to offer new films from a Korean perspective. One of the six films is a full-length feature What Does That Nature Say to You, by director Sangsoo Han, to be screened Wednesday, April 15, as part of the Asian Frontiers program.

What Does that Nature Say to You is a comedy drama by a famous and prolific South Korean director about a poet/photographer, Dong-hwa, who goes with his girlfriend Jun-hee to meet her parents. He is enraptured by the family home in a beautiful mountain setting, and Jun-hee’s father and Dong-hwa seem to bond.  The situation begins to unravel when Dong-hwa is outed by Jun-hee’ sister as a spoiled and pompous poser with a privileged background, not the impoverished but principled artist he presents himself to be.

A new film short by (Korean American adoptee) director Dahee Kim, Rehearsal for an Encounter, depicts a young man getting ready to meet his birth mother for the first time in Korea.  It is one of five shorts to be shown in a short film collection Oh, the Places We Will Go, to be shown Saturday, April 11 at the Main Cinema in Minneapolis

Other shorts by Korean/Korean American directors to be shown during the festival include : Follower, directed by Ryan Park (Tuesday, April 14 , as part of the Shorts 5: Chills program); Allergy, directed by Seyoung Kim (Sunday, April 19, as part of the Shorts 10: Meeting in the Middle program); Tiny Little Journey, directed by Jinwoo Lee (Saturday, April 18, as part of the Shorts 8: Animation Roundup program);  and Sun and Wind, directed by Soyeon Kim and Todd Hemker, (Saturday, April 18, also part of the Shorts 8: Animation Roundup program).

Tickets for any of the MSPIFF films can be purchased here.

The post Shorts, features and animations by Korean directors appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

While the national headlines debated the logistics of policy, my reality had become a fractured existence. I found myself living simultaneously in two conflicting worlds. In one camp, I was a “U.S. citizen with nothing to fear” — a person with no criminal history and a deep respect for the institutions I serve as an attorney. In the other camp, I was a “U.S. citizen with everything to fear,” watching a growing movement aimed at racially and ethnically cleansing the country I call home.

I began staying home more, the walls of my house becoming both a sanctuary and a cage. I watched the news of Alex Pretti’s murder and felt the shadow of the ICE Goon Squad lengthening over my own neighborhood. I wondered if the administration’s mission to overturn birthright citizenship would eventually come for my naturalized status.

This wasn’t just political theory anymore. It was personal. It was physical. And then, the hypothetical threat finally sat down at the end of my driveway.

The trip to the store was only a mile, but by the time I pulled back into my driveway on the morning of January 24, the world had shifted. A running SUV sat idling just around the corner, one house away. To anyone else, it was a neighbor waiting for a friend or a delivery driver checking a map. To me, a Korean-born U.S. citizen in the era of Operation Metro Surge, it was a predator. 

I scurried inside, my heart hammering a rhythm I can only describe as anxiety terror. I am an attorney; I have spent my career navigating the intricacies of the law, believing in the structural integrity of citizenship. But as I drew the shades and retreated to my basement to watch my security cameras on the television, that professional shield felt like wet paper. 

I sat in the dark, mentally triaging all the if/then scenarios. If they kick down the front door, do I go willingly? Do I trust the protections my citizenship is supposed to provide?  The bitter truth hit me then: While the law says I am a citizen, the rhetoric of the day says I am an enemy. I am a fighter by nature, but that morning, the only plan I could formulate was to flee.

The fear I felt in that basement wasn’t born in a vacuum; it was the culmination of a lifetime of what I call “quiet exclusions.” Growing up as a Korean adoptee in greater Minnesota, my citizenship was a fact, but my belonging was always a question.

I have spent decades navigating the derogatory aggressions that define the life of any person who, for reason of race, religion or ethnicity, feels like an outsider in their own home. It is the blunt trauma of slurs like “chink” or “gook,” but more often, it is the death by a thousand cuts found in the overtly polite curiosity of my neighbors.

“Where are you from?” “No, where are you really from?” “Your English is so good.”

These comments are usually wrapped in insulating layers of language like “I didn’t mean it that way,” but the subtext is always the same: You are something else. You are a guest whose stay is conditional. When people tell me I shouldn’t be offended because their intent wasn’t malicious, they strip away my agency. They are saying that because I am not Caucasian, I don’t have the right to define my own pain.

For years, I used my citizenship as a shield against those stares and whispers. I told myself I was a “Real American,” with the papers to prove it. But when the rhetoric of the current administration changed its immigration policy to what amounts to ethnic cleansing, that shield shattered. The “Where are you from?” of my childhood has evolved into the “Why are you still here?” of my adulthood.

By January 29, the fighter in me had been temporarily silenced by the refugee. I boarded a plane with a one-way ticket to Maui to stay with my sister, carrying a heavy shroud of guilt. As a lawyer, I felt I should be staying to fight for my fellow victims; as a human, I just wanted to breathe without checking a security feed.

But as the Pacific stretched out beneath me, a new kind of feeling, what I call “anxiety terror,” took root. I began to wonder: Should I ever return? Should I become an ex-pat?

The realization was a cold one. I felt “not American enough” for the current administration, but not nearly “Korean enough” to find a home in my country of birth. To be a transracial adoptee in this moment is to live in a permanent state of mid-air exile. You are a person without a port, watching the country that raised you — the only home you’ve ever known — treat you like a foreign contagion.

I looked at the blue water and realized the true cost of the rhetoric back home. It doesn’t just threaten your physical safety; it robs you of your sense of place. If I returned to Minnesota, would my neighbors turn me in? Would my presence put my friends at risk? When you aren’t truly accepted anywhere, trust becomes a luxury you can no longer afford.

I returned to Minnesota on February 21, trying to acclimate to a “normal” that no longer existed. As the March 28 No Kings protest approached, I hesitated. My family was facing health crises, and I had already marched in last year’s (June 2025) No Kings protest. But the “anxiety terror” was still there, a low hum in the back of my mind that wouldn’t quiet down.

Ultimately, a friend and I joined the 100,000 people (editor’s note: actual attendance numbers, at time of publication are estimated to be closer to 200,000) at the State Capitol. As a lawyer, I am supposed to be a master of language, but standing in that crowd, words failed me.

It felt like the best hug I’ve ever had — the kind full of love, understanding, and a peace that passes understanding. We were there for reasons of grave seriousness, but the flames of my internal rage were quelled by a sudden, overwhelming sense of solidarity.

I knew, logically, that 100,000 people weren’t there specifically for me. But as a Korean-born citizen who has spent a lifetime trying to assimilate, it felt like they were. For the first time in weeks, the “duct tape” the administration tried to use to silence me was peeled away. In its place was the roar of a country refusing to let its neighbors be turned into enemies.

As a former distance runner, I used to rely on the cheers of strangers along the race route to keep me moving when I wanted to quit. The St. Paul protesters were those strangers. They reminded me that while the toddler tantrums and lies of the current leadership are loud, the quiet strength of community is louder.

I am an attorney. I am a runner. I am a Korean-born American. And after that day at the Capitol, I am no longer hiding in the basement. I am here, I survived the tyranny of the moment, and I am ready for the future.

More images from the March 28 rally in St. Paul (photos by Stephen Wunrow):

The post The quiet strength of community appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

Two Korean Americans from the Midwest, one from Minnesota and one from Chicago, are leading up a small organization with a big job.  The newly-formed U.S. Korean Rights Group (USKRG) is a group of Korean American adoptees who will dialogue with South Korean government as part of a global coalition of Korean adoptees from many countries.

The coalition has a common goal, to seek reconciliation and restitution from the South Korean government for widespread international adoption records fraud, and to change policies and laws in both the U.S. and South Korea that will streamline Korean adoptees’ access to their own adoption records in the future. 

A formal statement about South Korean records fraud was contained in a report of an official government investigation, published March 2025.  It stated that the level of fraud discovered in (voluntarily submitted) Korean adoptees’ records constitutes a human rights crime under South Korean law.

The official investigatory body, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), published the March 2025 report after a second investigation into allegations of adoption fraud (known as TRC2) through the adoption files of individuals who submitted them.  It began its third consecutive investigation (known as TRC3)  into the records issue on February 26. On that day, 311 more Korean adoptees submitted their adoption files for investigation.  Some showed up to submit their requests for file investigation in person, and the enthusiastic response hit the headlines.  

The systemic fraud potentially affects tens of thousands of Korean adoptees in several European countries, Canada, Australia, and especially the U.S., where the largest population of Korean adoptees live.  Fraud has been detected primarily in the files of a large group of adoptees who were placed for adoption in the 1970s and ‘80s.

In recent years, Korean adoptees have formed their own country-specific groups to ensure all Korean adoptees, no matter where they live, will be represented by fellow adoptees from their own country.  

USKRG leadership

The new USKRG’s president is Yuh Koppel, from Chicago. The vice-president is Rob Anderson, a  Twin Cities resident.

Koppel said that, in 2024, the USKRG formed and its members were able to attend meetings of the second TRC investigation (TRC2). The group also held open Zoom meetings in 2024 and 2025 to inform Korean adoptees in the U.S. about the investigation progress and how they can participate.

Koppel was adopted to a family in Denmark. She has also lived “all over Europe” as a kid, she said, and went to boarding school in England. Her step-father is from Canada and he now lives in Canada. She has lived in the U.S. for 23 years, and is now a U.S. citizen, married with adult children. When in the U.S., she lives in Chicago but also spends the cold months in Panama.

In terms of working with the other country-specific groups, Yuh said “I do have the advantage that I speak Danish, so that means I can read the documents and can understand the [Danish] leadership group.” The leaders of the various country groups are working together and participating with one another’s groups, she said. The groups want to deliver a unified message to the South Korean government about what Korean adoptees are asking for.  

Korean adoptees’ experiences and context differ according to their country of residence, Koppel said.  Each country-specific organization wants to build community and support around their own members’ needs. They also want to reach out through their own newsletters and virtual or in-person events.  It is particularly important to hold Zoom seminars in local time zones about the progress of the ongoing investigation, Yuh said.  

Vice-president Rob Anderson said that on February 26, the number of Korean American adoptees submitting their files for investigation increased greatly compared to the number in 2022. He believes this is largely due to the outreach work by the USKRG, that he has been concentrating on.  Another opportunity for Korean adoptees to submit their files will be May 11, which is National Adoption Day in South Korea, he said.

Anderson was adopted as a two-year-old to a couple in Thief River Falls in northwestern Minnesota, and went to college in both Michigan and in Duluth, Minnesota. As a young adult he assisted in leading two groups of Korean adoptee children on trips to Korea with the Institute of Light Finders’ program called Kids to Korea.

In 2000, he lived in South Korea for a year as an adult. While there, he was exposed to the adoption records falsification issue while volunteering with the newly-formed Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (GOA’L), founded by fellow Minnesotan Ami Nafzger.  After that experience, he lived and worked in the United Kingdom for 20 years before returning to live in Minnesota. Back in the Twin Cities in recent years, he has volunteered as a board member for the Twin Cities service and advocacy organization Adoptee Hub. He submitted his adoption file as one of the initial 367 handed over to the TRC in 2022.

Anderson has been working on increasing outreach and education, including running the Zoom meetings to inform adoptees about TRC and how to submit their own adoption information for investigation. An informational Zoom session was recently held on March 19 concerning the start of the TRC3. In addition to Anderson and Koppel, there are three other Korean American adoptees on the core team.

USKRG, the new kid

Until 2024, the U.S. did not have an official group to represent Korean American adoptees, who comprise more than half of all the 170,000 (or more) Korean adoptees globally.  In the past, Korean adoptees’ representation has come heavily from Scandinavian countries, particularly Denmark, which brought a human rights violation complaint against the South Korean government several years ago. The claims were eventually referred to the TRC for investigation.

The new USKRG is still in the process of getting its U.S. non-profit status. Its leadership is now managing a process that is like flying the plane while building it. They first organized in September 2024, Koppel said, and are still in the process of forming their U.S. group, which was recently approved for non-profit 501c3 status, and completing other start-up tasks. 

While following the TRC3 investigation, the group is doing internal coordination to decide on group priorities and goals, and external coordination in coalition with the other country-specific groups. It is also concentrating on providing resources on its website, and doing outreach, education, and disseminating investigation progress information through its email newsletter.

In 2026, Koppel said, USKRG, in coalition with the country-specific rights groups, will lobby for a dialogue with the South Korean government about how it can support Korean adoptees’ rights in the future, particularly in making access their own adoption files easier. They are advocating for law and policy changes that will streamline the process adoptees undertake to research their own birth families and potentially reunite with them.  They also want to make an easier path for adoptees who want to return to Korea to live and work.

The Path Toward Healing letter to President Lee

As an attempt to start a dialogue with the new South Korean leadership, in December, the USKRG and the Canadian KRG in coalition, sent an open letter to the new South Korean President Jae Myung Lee entitled The Path Toward Healing.

The letter proposes a list of new policies to help Korean adoptees with birth family searches and reunions in Korea.  The Path Toward Healing letter also articulates the expectations of the Korean rights groups for the TRC3 process. It goes into other law and policy recommendations to help Korean adoptees in Korea, including an easier path to obtaining Korean citizenship.

The letter was in response to the October public apology by the newly-elected President Jae Myung Lee for the nation’s failure to protect its international adoptees’ human rights in the adoption process.

In addition to going to the President’s office, The Path Toward Healing statement has also been circulated broadly. No official reply has been received yet, according to Koppel.

Adoptees refuse new president’s general meeting

The Path Toward Healing letter was prompted because two Korean adoptee groups who were invitees to an official general meeting about the TRC2 report announced they would not participate in the meeting with President Lee and other officials.  The meeting was a general one, with adoption agencies, and other non-profit and for-profit organizations and businesses also invited.

There is a strategic reason that the two invited adoptee groups (the Danish Korean Rights Group (DKRG)  and the non-profit adoptee human rights organization KoRoot) declined the meeting, Koppel explained. The two organizations “decided not to participate because some of the invitees have directly worked against the TRC.  They said they don’t want to be in a room with people working directly against adoptees’ rights,” Koppel said. “We [the USKRG]  very much agree with that stance,” but it meant that a meeting took place with no Korean rights groups present, she observed. 

Some of the invitees to the general meeting were for-profit businesses and non-profit groups “who were asking us not to go forward with a human rights case with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and were saying that we did not even have a human rights case,” she added.  That these groups would get a seat at the table while other adoptee groups were excluded was not right, she explained. “We feel that [the government] should sit and listen to us, the people who brought this case forward, first and foremost,” she said.

The Korean Rights groups are asserting that adoptees are the actual injured parties in this proven human rights offense, Koppel explained, and should be the only official negotiators with the South Korean government concerning their own civil rights. They want a meeting that will include only the government officials with Korean adoptee representatives from the various country-specific groups.

Koppel qualified her statement, adding “He [President Lee] has the right to listen to anybody, and we really believe he has very good intentions, and we have seen very good communication coming out of the president’s office. And we are not angry with him, but we do think there should be space for the Korean rights movement as well.”

Changes in adoption records storage and preservation

There is concern among Korean adoptees about how, in 2025, the South Korean government, through its National Center for the Rights of the Child, changed how adoption records of transnational adoptees are to be stored and preserved for the future.  Combined with that, there is concern about how adoptees’ rights to those records will be secured.

Until recently, adoptees’ records were the responsibility of the individual agencies. This policy led to individual agencies being the gatekeepers to all the information. There were inconsistent rules among the agencies about how adoptees could access and use their own records. There was little or no assurance that adoptee records would be preserved. Some adoptees have charged that, when adoptees were told that records had been accidentally destroyed or lost, it may have been that they were routinely destroyed by agencies.  

During the past two years, the South Korean government directed that all adoption records be collected and consolidated into a national repository.

The South Korean government’s effort to reform records access and preservation is consistent with rules set by Hague Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Hague Convention is an international treaty among countries that protects the human rights of children (including the rights of adults who were adopted as children). South Korea is a signatory of this agreement, along with about 120 other nations. The South Korean government wishes to finalize its signatory status with the Hague Convention, and was on a 2025 deadline to meet certain requirements, including government control of the records.

Part of the concern among adoptees about the change in record-keeping is the lack of funding and staff support to administer the new system.  Adoptee groups have expressed concern that the paper records of all Korean adoptees were transferred to a storage facility that is a former refrigerated storage building, not a secure archival facility.  There has been concern that number of staff is inadequate to deal with the huge quantity of records, and that there is no apparent funding or plan in place for digitizing the records, some of which are very old and deteriorating.

In late 2024, the National Center on the Rights of the Child (NCRC) which is responsible for the data consolidation and digitization, reported there had been a data breach and that a large quantity of records have been compromised or lost. Since then, Koppel reported, the Korean rights groups coalition has filed complaints to through law enforcement and has been advocating for the government to investigate and resolve the issue. A notification of the data breach appears on the front page of the NCRC website.

A series of news reports by Associated Press investigative reporters Claire Garofalo and Tong-hyung Kim and a film documentary created from their research  (as part of the PBS news TV show Frontline, titled South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning) in 2024 broke the adoption fraud story ahead of the TRC2 report, and recorded former staff saying they did not know how the huge records project could be accomplished with the meager resources available.

The Korean adoptees rights groups from all the receiving countries are now positioned to dialogue with the South Korean government about stepping up the effort to preserve the records, and ensure that adoptees will be able to use them for their own birth family searches in the future. So far, there has been no official dialogue with the new government.

Knowledge of fraud goes back many years

Suspicion about falsification of adoption records goes back many years. Anecdotally, Korean adoptees have found, by comparing birth search discoveries with one another, that records often contained false information. The March 2025 TRC report supported this suspicion.  

The TRC2  investigation turned up falsified information in the majority of adoptees’ files under review, including their names, place of birth, date of birth, birth family information and other key details adoptees need to track down their birth families. There is evidence that some children who were placed for adoption had living families who did not give permission for their child to be adopted.

The TRC, which has investigated a wide range of past government-involved human rights violations, works by being assigned a project by the South Korean government, researching that topic with an appropriate team, and completing each assignment during a specific time period with a deadline for reporting out.  That is why the investigations are divided into phases, such as TRC2 and TRC3.  

The TRC2 and the former President Yoon

The TRC2 investigation was a slow process, according to Koppel.  Only 56 of the files voluntarily submitted to the TRC were thoroughly reviewed, and the group ran out of time for the 311 other files submitted in 2022.

The last session of the TRC was politically charged, according to an NPR news feature. The president of the TRC2 investigation was Sun Young Park, who was appointed by the former President Suk Yeol Yoon, just days after he declared martial law, which led to the president’s impeachment. Yoon was recently handed a life sentence for his attempted military takeover of the government.

The political nature of the TRC2 may explain why there were committee delays, cancelled meetings, and other ways the work seemed to have been held up.  Many Korean adoptees who have submitted their files are now in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, and are worried about the pace, Koppel said. “Fifty-six cases in two or three years’ time is too few. At that rate, most Korean adoptees are not going to be heard.” 

Time is running out for many adoptees

Many applicants are feeling like “’we don’t want our files to be in that pile again. We don’t want it to be like TRC2.’  Because a lot of us adoptees – we are getting older,” Koppel said.  “Our parents are dying. We risk it getting too late by the time they [the TRC] can come to its conclusions. We hope to be alive when they come to conclusion in all the cases, but to give us a fair chance that everybody can get their cases heard before we are all dead, they need to ramp up TRC and they need to have a mandate to do that, and to ensure they are all working effectively.”

Another idea for birth search policy reform is to “extend the mandate to allow Korean adoptees to search for their siblings so we have a chance of finding the truth,” rather than only being allowed to search for birth mother and birth father, she said. In DNA databases, nieces and nephews will also cross-match with Korean adoptees, she said. “There should be an effort to promote that this is a way for families to reunite.”

 Signing up allies from families of Korean adoptees

The burden of grief over adoption fraud is shared by many, not only adoptees, and parents, children, siblings and other allies.  The affected population is hundreds of thousands of people globally. 

Adoptees are capable of speaking up for themselves, and want to do so, Koppel said.  But allies can key in helping to demand a timely and honest response from governments to Korean adoptees who are stymied by fraudulent files.  

One of the groups is the birth families, most of whom are still invisible, due to societal pressures.  “We know now that many people who were listed as orphans, they have families who have been searching for them for 30 or 40 years. That’s huge – as a mother, I cannot imagine how, if one of my children were lost like that  – I cannot imagine the burden of that grief of not know what happened to your child,” Koppel said.

Similarly, adoptive parents can be powerful allies as a stakeholder population.  “What they saw in Denmark was that things really started moving when 200 adoptive parents showed up [at a public event] in Denmark to say ‘our kids need to know,’” Koppel recalled.  

Because of the actions of governments and agencies “a lot of agencies have made millions in assets because of adoptive parents who wanted to do the right thing, and who wanted children,” she said.

“The adoptive parents have been misled,” Koppel said. “And the same with our children and descendants.”  Other affected populations include the spouses, siblings and other family members of adoptees.

Allies in the cause are growing due to many loved ones turning their grief into action in support of the adoptees’ cause for justice. That is why the USKRG’s outreach, including the informational zoom meetings, are open to allies as well as affected adoptees, Koppel said.

Keeping up with TRC3

Koppel said her group is looking at the TRC3 as a chance for a fresh start, and they are hoping the pace of investigation will be faster, and the dialogue will be more transparent during this third investigation.  The USKRG is keeping track of TRC3 through its website and email newsletter.  More information is available at the USKRG website:   https://www.uskrg.org.  The email newsletter is available by request:  info@USKRG.org.

Editor’s note:  Link to A Path Toward Healing letter from North American Coalition to President Jae Myung Lee.

2025 report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Human Rights Violation in Intercountry Adoption

The post Small organization, big job appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

BTS at Gwanghwamun isn’t a logistics problem. It’s a spatial argument.

I’ll admit — I was one of the grumpy ones. Until the morning of the concert, when I went to Gwanghwamun on a pre-scouting mission, felt 흥 (heung) anticipation in the air, and realized that later today this will be the most watched spot on the planet. That changed my mind.

Because Gwanghwamun is a consecrated space. Not metaphorically — structurally. Korea’s most symbolically charged piece of public ground, where collective desire, political will, and raw heung have repeatedly erupted and changed things. Heung resists clean translation — collective euphoric energy, joy with momentum behind it. It’s why K-pop and popular protest have never been entirely separate in Korea: Same fuel, both engines. Like the 2002 World Cup. Or the candlelight protests that toppled a president. That December 2024 and sudden martial law — people traveled from Paju at midnight to go to the capital because they couldn’t stay home.

Every time, the same space. Every time, the same logic.

Ethnomusicologist Donna Kwon’s work on Korean spatial participation theory traces the madang — the traditional courtyard — as collective performance space. The madang isn’t a fixed location. It’s a cultural condition. But some spaces accumulate so much social memory that the consecration is already there, waiting. Gwanghwamun is that space.

Cultural anthropologist Hae-joang Cho documented what happened in 2002 with the bluntness it deserved. Korea had spent decades treating its citizens as laboring subjects — any collective pleasure was denigrated as hedonism. What the World Cup cracked open wasn’t sports fandom. It was Koreans discovering themselves as homo ludens — beings with a right to collective joy. Men in their 30s crying. Strangers embracing. Cho called it an exorcism: Driving out prohibition, replacing it with recovered humanity. What coalesced at Gwanghwamun was a permanent recalibration of what public space was for.

You don’t unfeel that.

That spatial memory doesn’t disappear. It accumulates.

Gwanghwamun is the madang of the nation.

As a place to release Korea’s global heung — and the heung of globality itself — it is the perfect spot.

BTS is the most globally recognized cultural product Korea has ever produced — bigger than Samsung, bigger than any film, athlete, or previous hallyu wave. Tonight’s homecoming concert, their first full Seoul show since completing military service, is not a logistical choice. It’s a return to consecrated ground.

The people filling those streets tonight aren’t mostly from Seoul. They’re from São Paulo, Manila, Paris, Lagos. Bodies from dozens of countries on the same consecrated square, moving together. Not a traffic inconvenience. Cultural reach no urban planner could manufacture.

Gwanghwamun has hosted Korea’s defining collective moments for centuries. Tonight adds another layer.

The grumpy Seoulites will have their streets back tomorrow. This additional consecration ceremony will add another considerably strong impression into popular memory.

POSTSCRIPT

The concert happened. The streets filled. The grumpy Seoulites were briefly outnumbered by people from across the planet who had traveled to stand on ground they’d never stood on before — but somehow already knew.

That’s the thing about consecrated space. It doesn’t require explanation. It transmits.

Gwanghwamun has one more layer now. It will hold it the way it holds all the others — not as an archive, but as an accumulation. The next timeheung erupts on that square, and it will, the bodies filling it will be standing on top of tonight without knowing it.

That’s how madang works. That’s always been how madang works.

The post The “madang” of the nation appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

As the U.S. public reels from Trump’s illegal military strikes in Iran, communities across the globe are feeling heightened fear, insecurity, and destabilization. This war has already proven particularly devastating for women and girls. In the first wave of joint U.S.-Israeli strikes, one missile struck a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran, killing at least 175 people including children. An estimated 170 children were in class at the time.

This devastating news was yet another reminder that in wars and conflicts, women and girls suffer disproportionately. In honor of International Women’s Day, we must amplify the call to challenge wars and militarism.

Even before Trump’s strikes on Iran, women and girls were experiencing historic levels of insecurity due to wars and militarism. The United Nations has warned that women are living at the highest risk, based on proximity to deadly conflict since the 1990s. In the past two years, civilian casualties among women and children have quadrupled, and conflict-related sexual violence increased by 87 percent.

In the coming weeks, if the U.S. shows no sign of de-escalating in Iran, the impact on women in Iran will be ever more disastrous. Meanwhile, women in Gaza continue to suffer from mass starvation, violence, and abuse, women in Sudan suffer from ongoing sexual violence, displacement, and starvation, and women in Cuba struggle to procure resources for pre-natal health due to escalating U.S. blockades.

As a Korea peace activist, I have seen how the history of the U.S. forever war in Korea has laid the blueprint for wars waged globally and how women’s resistance to war has shaped the International Women’s Day we celebrate today.

In 1950, President Truman bypassed Congress to begin what he then called a “police action” in Korea, marking the first time a U.S. president authorized large-scale overseas combat without congressional approval and setting a precedent. The State Department also published what would become a foundational document, NSC-68, justifying massive military buildup for aggressive containment of communism and Soviet influence.

All subsequent U.S. presidents inherited this legacy: Lyndon B. Johnson in Vietnam, Richard Nixon in Cambodia, Ronald Reagan in Libya, Bill Clinton in Yugoslavia, Barack Obama in Libya, and the list goes on. Trump’s actions in Venezuela and Iran — while an escalation — are enabled by this long legacy of overseas U.S. interventions without congressional oversight or approval.

The costs of these decisions are catastrophic and have made all women across the world less secure. In the case of Korea, women are still bearing the immense costs of war. Landmines and unexploded ordnance remnants in the Demilitarized Zone continue to harm women in particular, who are often responsible for agricultural labor in the affected areas. An estimated million Korean women have also suffered harm from decades of militarized sex trade orchestrated by the U.S. military and the South Korean government. And finally, women in North Korea face the  impacts of ongoing sanctions that exacerbate women’s economic vulnerabilities and deny women access to critical supplies for maternal health.

These histories feature many atrocities, but they also showcase important examples of resistance. In the 1950s, global women peace leaders proved instrumental in exposing the horrific experiences of Korean women due to the ongoing war. Due to their reporting, international awareness of the atrocities in Korea rose.

These women leaders went on to spearhead the UN Initiative to mark International Women’s Day and to designate 1975 as International Women’s Year. Inspired by this activism, women can and must continue to take stands against wars. For this year’s International Women’s Day, over 100 global women leaders and organizations demanded that the U.S. take accountability for the decades of its military’s harm and abuse of women and girls in Korea. In drawing attention to this legacy, these activists show that no wars — even those deemed successful by U.S. policymakers — make women or girls safer or more secure.

Women are facing an increasingly dire future. The U.S. has systematically divested from aid and social services as well as diplomacy efforts globally. As social services are cut in the U.S., military spending is skyrocketing. The U.S. military budget has reach $1 trillion, with likely increases for continued strikes on Iran.

This madness must end. Trump’s latest actions in Iran should be a wake-up call for the public about the larger issues that have long plagued U.S. democracy at the expense of women and girls both at home and abroad. On International Women’s Day, let’s follow the example of the generations of women past who have boldly and courageously called for an end to wars, and fight for a better world for ourselves and future generations.

The post On International Women’s Day, let’s renew the call to end wars appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

Every year on January 13, the U.S. observes Korean American Day, a day that celebrates those from the Korean American community “who have made immeasurable contributions as small business owners, military service members, faith leaders, doctors, artists, and elected officials,” according to one webpage describing national holidays.

Officially established in 2005, Korean American Day commemorates the first arrival of Joseon citizens to the U.S. in 1903. Back then, there was one Korea; North and South Korea did not exist. Joseon was already weakened after Queen Min was assassinated. King Gojong attempted to maneuver between Russia and Japan, and an imperial dispute over the peninsula was underway. Japan’s victory over Russia soon sealed Korea’s fate. Joseon people survived by being flexible.

Like poor European migrants seeking the American Dream, Joseon immigrants were not diplomats or elites but peasants entering a racialized labor regime. Many sought better livelihoods through American missionary networks that operated within the broader framework of Japanese imperial expansion. The diplomatic alignment between the U.S. and Japan at the turn of the century remains a source of grievance in Korea, particularly President Theodore Roosevelt’s endorsement of Japanese control over the peninsula, negotiated alongside U.S. interests in the Philippines.  Roosevelt would later receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

As I write about the migration history of my ancestors, I sit here in Germany as an immigrant whose existence is no longer defined by a single crossing. I write from Berlin, a city shaped by its own reckoning with state violence and ideological extremism, and I am aware of the privileged distance I enjoy.

The images of ICE targeting the immigrant communities in Minneapolis feels both surreal and unbearably familiar to me in a city that has memorialized the dead who were brutally persecuted and murdered for being different.

Across the U.S., communities are organizing volunteer patrols, food distribution networks, and mutual aid systems in response to heightened immigration enforcement. The fear is real. In Minneapolis and other cities like Chicago, Denver, Seattle, volunteers stand outside schools and courthouses, whistles in hand, watching for ICE officers and vehicles. Compassionate folks are delivering food to vulnerable families who must remain indoors, afraid to be seen. But it is not new. And it is not unique.

Conditional citizens

For some, this moment feels unprecedented. For others, including many Korean adoptees, the conditionality of belonging has always been a reality. Political theorist Claire Jean Kim has described Asian Americans as “conditional citizens,” people who may hold legal status yet remain symbolically outside the state because of narratives that cast them as perpetual foreigners.  Many BIPoC adoptees experience this layered conditionality, accepted in some circles and questioned in others, because belonging in America or within an ethnic enclave diaspora is constantly interpreted rather than assumed.

With that in mind, what does it mean that the first large-scale Korean migration to the U.S. began under imperial pressure, facilitated by U.S. missionaries, and involved vulnerable rural laborers seeking survival? And what does it mean that decades later, another mass movement of Koreans across the Pacific was also organized through the same missionary networks and geopolitical alignment?

For over 70 years, 200,000 Korean “orphans” crossed borders with South Korean state encouragement, through foreign religious and humanitarian frameworks, that ultimately spoke for us and our families. Those of us who were forcibly relocated to the U.S. make up 10 percent of the Korean diaspora.  In Korea historian/author Bruce Cumings’s glowing chapter America’s Koreans (in his historical account Korea’s Place in the Sun, the 2005 reprint) which frames the achievements of Korean Americans, adopted Korean Americans do not appear even as a footnote.

“We saved you. You are so lucky to be adopted to America!” That is the shortcut narrative Korean adoptees often hear.

If rescue becomes a moral and political necessity, it also becomes intimate. This is what sentimental kinship sounds like.

An uneasy alliance and the rescue narrative

Nigerian American writer, Teju Cole, once described a “White Savior Industrial Complex,” a system that “supports brutal projects in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.” He goes on to argue that certain rescue narratives offer emotional satisfaction without dismantling the structures that produce the suffering.

Transnational adoption operates within that terrain, where vulnerability and altruism are emotionally linked and hard to untangle. South Korean overseas adoption practices, often described as an “adoption industrial complex,” emerged from that same historical constellation, shaped by Cold War alliances, missionary networks, and a shared investment in rescue as moral narrative.

Korea became a central site through which the U.S. could consolidate its postwar identity as both military power and humanitarian guardian, with the cooperation of successive South Korean regimes.

The modern transnational adoption system was constructed in South Korea with the support of Americans, but was not about love or rescue. It relied on the unpaid labor and sacrifice of countless Korean mothers for political and moral optics. It was about transforming two nations at once, economically, morally, and symbolically. Our mothers, many of whom were separated from us under conditions that undermine the meaning of consent, were placed on a state-funded assembly line they never agreed to, producing what I have elsewhere described as “K-Orphans” that made the story work.

For decades, our bodies were quietly conscripted into a national project. We were framed as humanitarian success stories, exported to help rebuild postwar South Korea and to “complete” American families into something called multicultural. We were welcomed into a narrative that secured the U.S.’s moral high ground, even as we were deployed as instruments in the fight against communism.

Remembering adoptees in Korean American history

Korean American belonging is forged not only through labor or migration, but also through what I describe as sentimental kinships: Bonds that transformed geopolitical entanglement into intimate narratives of rescue and the idea that “every child deserves a loving (American) home.” These kinships complicate how adoptees are seen within Korean American history. While many immigrants crossed the Pacific in search of work, education, or mobility, we arrived through a different apparatus. It cast us as dependents rather than migrants, not as children of immigrants raised within ethnic enclaves.

We arrived as symbols of alliance, of rescue, of Cold War benevolence. That difference in origin continues to structure our (mis)recognition, rendering it ambiguous and shadowed by shame.

For some first-, 1.5-, and second-generation Korean Americans, the founding narrative centers migration, sacrifice, and community-building under prejudice. The presence of adoptees introduces an uncomfortable truth: That U.S. imperialism and South Korea’s complicity are also embedded in Korean American formation.

However, Korean adoptees belong in this history too. But not as footnotes. Not as grateful orphans. Over the past 70 years, we have become generations of Korean Americans shaped by forced family separation, systemic silence, and extraordinary resilience. We are the forgotten 0.5 generation, who migrated without our Korean families to be given to strangers in a foreign land.

When adoptees began warning that immigration enforcement could affect those of us without secure citizenship status, the response was often disbelief. Adoption, it was assumed, had erased vulnerability. For many raised in white families, proximity to whiteness has long been equated with protection and belonging. But that proximity has always been conditional. Legal status can be questioned. Citizenship can be scrutinized.

Opacity and the Politics of Recognition

And other international adoptees have found themselves subject to the authority of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), even when presenting documentation of legal status and citizenship.  Korean American adoptees are still waiting to be fully acknowledged as belonging somewhere. We arrived in the U.S. classified as war refugees and later as “orphans.”

Recent findings by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission have documented systemic irregularities in overseas adoption practices, including falsified records and cases in which parental consent was misrepresented or absent.  For many of us, the paperwork that defined our identities was not merely incomplete, but structurally compromised.

In 2010, under the Obama administration, I was detained for hours in a DHS office inside U.S. Customs and Border Protection at JFK Airport in New York. Officials did not believe the passport belonged to me: An East Asian face paired with a Western name. I had gained some weight, and my face was rounder than in the photograph taken a decade earlier.

When they insisted on calling my adoptive parents to confirm my story, I felt reduced, as though my citizenship were provisional. I was no longer an independent adult voicing my own story but a humanitarian gesture expected to perform gratitude, subjected to insistent questions about my identity and entitled demands for transparency.

Political philosopher Édouard Glissant described the “right to opacity” as the refusal of such demands. In colonial systems of power, people are required to make themselves fully legible, to explain and categorize themselves in order to be accepted as legitimate. Opacity asserts a different principle: individuals and cultures do not owe complete transparency in order to exist and be recognized.

But in America, recognition often depends on whether our bodies tell a story that comforts those in power.

Editor’s note: A version of this essay with full citations and references is available at the following Substack link.

The post Sentimental Kinships appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

The eerie opening scene of the Guthrie Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth sets the tone for the rest of the play: The three witches, or Weird Sisters, enter with smoke rising around the edges of the Guthrie’s thrust stage. Their movements are slow and deliberate, like a carefully-coordinated modern dance piece, as they utter the famous lines, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair; hover through the fog and filthy air.”

Even if your knowledge and understanding of Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy is not college-level, this production does an excellent job of highlighting the central themes at the heart of the story; ambition, manipulation, and moral unraveling. Former Guthrie Artistic Director Joe Dowling returned to direct this powerful staging of this iconic play, which premiered January 31 and runs until March 22. It’s clear that this is not his first rodeo.  Dowling approaches the material with a confident hand, making bold artistic choices in how scenes are staged and selected.

After a victorious battle, Macbeth is praised as a war hero and rewarded with a new title. He is already contemplating the Weird Sisters’ prophecy that he will become king when Lady Macbeth makes her entrance and begins her sly scheming.

As Lady Macbeth, actor Meghan Kreidler is a commanding physical and emotional presence, and she effectively conveys the hold she has over her husband. Her wide, expressive eyes show her initial excitement at the prospect of becoming queen, and her later unraveling into madness.

Macbeth (Daniel José Molina) seems a bit young in this production compared to other iterations of his character depicted on stage and screen. But Molina’s fresh face underscores his character’s initial sincerity and genuine desire to please, and makes his later descent into tyranny feel like a sharper, more startling transformation.

Dowling (and Shakespeare) also inject humor into several tense scenes. In his Guthrie debut as the Sergeant/Seyton, newcomer David Michaeli is a master of physical comedy, wobbling drunkenly in celebration in one scene, and in another, his knees literally knock in fear of Macbeths’ violent temper. In contrast, Guthrie veterans Sun Mee Chomet and Regina Marie Williams add gravitas as the iconic Weird Sisters and other supporting roles, grounding the production with their assured demeanors and voices.

As the premier theater in the Twin Cities, the Guthrie has considerable resources to devote to lighting, set design, and staging, and they are put to excellent use here. Macbeth may be a small man in terms of his moral character, but his presence looms larger than life in shadow, projected on a huge banner behind him. At one point, a beautifully set dinner table rises gracefully on a hidden stage lift, and in another scene, large menacing trees ominously drop from the ceiling. Costume designer Judith Dolan dresses her characters in stunning costumes – from the Weird Sisters’ tattered, flowing garments to Banquo’s ghostly appearance at the formal dinner and Lady Macbeth’s dramatic transformation from plain nightclothes to regal, gorgeous gowns.

All of these elements come together to create a production that is visually striking and emotionally grounded, even for viewers who come in without a deep familiarity of the play. This Macbeth makes Shakespeare feel accessible, urgent, and worth seeing twice.

Macbeth runs at the Guthrie through March 22, 2026.

The post Embrace the foreboding appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

South Korean documentary filmmaker Seyoung Jo told a packed room at the University of Minnesota, after a recent showing of her new film K-Number, that when planning for screenings of her film in the U.S., she specifically asked to show her film in Minnesota.

The reason?  She had met a lot of Minnesotan Korean adoptees in researching and filming two films about transnational adoption in South Korea, and knew there were a high concentration of Korean adoptees here, many of whom have lived and worked in South Korea, and have belonged to or led adoptee organizations there.

K-Number digs deep into a timely topic – how the recent revelation about fraud and mismanagement of adoption has its roots in South Korean history, and how that history reverberates into the lives of adult Korean adoptees today.

The title, K-Number, comes from a numbering system that ostensibly kept track of a majority (but not all) Korean children adopted internationally. The film describes the numbering of human beings for export, which is one piece of the narrative; it refers to the administrative structures, policies, and official records that the film attempts to explain.  

The term also represents the individuality of hundreds of thousands, scattered to many places, who built lives elsewhere, and have regrouped as a social force in recent years, in a campaign to reclaim their human dignity on a world stage. While the term “K-Number” refers to a dehumanizing system, it also symbolizes the unity and resilience of a group of people.  

Mioka Kim Miller, in a scene from K-Number, views photos she has collected of herself as a child at various ages.

South Korean international adoption in the headlines

A recent admission by the South Korean government concerning international adoption history made headlines globally – that the degree of fraud found in the adoption records of transnational adoptees constitutes a human rights crime under South Korean law.  The new president of South Korea, Jae Myung Lee, formalized this revelation in an official apology to Korean adoptees, delivered in a speech on October 2025. The emerging revelations about the adoption system in South Korea have made Jo’s research and her recent documentary film a hot topic in both South Korea and the U.S.

Jo did an interview on February 10, the day of her film event in Minneapolis, halfway through a month-long U.S. tour with her film.  She was assisted by translator Deborah Yoon, a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Psychology.

During the recent tour in the U.S., K-Number was screened in Boston and at a venue near Washington, D.C., prior to the Minneapolis showing. The filmmaker traveled with her film to do interviews and audience Q and As after each showing.  After the Minneapolis event, she showed the film at Northwestern University (in partnership with Korean Adoptees of Chicago) and then to California for a screening for the Association of Korean Adoptees of San Francisco (AKASF).

A career of human rights filmmaking

Jo had an intense interest in film starting around 2001 while in college. She calls herself a “bad student” for her disinterest in anything beyond making films with her fellow film club members. The first film she partticipated in making was Words Kept in a Stone. It looked at the faulty 1987 presidential election, when military dictator Do-Hwan Chun lost to Tae-woo Noh in 1987, just before South Korea hosted the Olympics in 1988.  

After college, in 2024, Jo directed her first film about Korean adoptees who were returning to Korea at that time to live and work. It was the beginning of an interest in Korean adoptees and international adoption that now spans 20 years. Her film Made in Korean (now listed in English as Made in Korea (no “n”)) in most filmographies) also delves into the suspicion of corruption in the process. No one was aware of widespread records fraud at that time, she said, however, the film does document examples of how adoptees searching for birth family were denied access to their own records by their adoption agencies.

She also directed Variety Survival Talk Show (2009), on the stories of sexual assault survivors. Her second feature-length documentary, Let’s Dance (2013), focuses on abortion in South Korea.  

Decades of frustration

There is an oblique reference to Made in Korean in the beginning scene of K-Number, during which the viewer hears a conversation, which becomes more heated, between a Korean adoptee man and a woman who is an adoption agency staff member. During the conversation, the woman is apparently paging through the man’s file, and refusing to show it to him or let him have copies of certain pages he asks about. 

Jo explained that the (audio only) conversation was from the 2004 Made in Korean. Its inclusion hints at the frustration of adoptees who have pled for records access for decades. That kind of scenario, with agencies holding onto records and citing confidentiality, and adoptees pleading for access to their own information, happened in 2004 and was still happening in 2022 when Jo was filming for K-Number.

One adoptee’s story, and a dose of history

At the beginning of K-Number, the viewer has an up-close introduction to Mioka Kim Miller, a U.S. Korean adoptee who is doing a birth search in Seoul. The viewer soon learns that this is only the most recent of several trips Miller has taken to South Korea for the same purpose – the first one was in 2009.

Mioka recounts her memory of leaving her home to search for her mother. She has only a hazy recollection of her mother leaving their home, and does not remember the reason she left.  She can vaguely remember a few details of her home – a place with a courtyard and a closed entrance with a security guard.   At one point in visiting neighborhoods she thinks she may have lived, she takes a photo of a place like that.  She does not remember the city she lived in. She relates that she blames herself for getting lost, even though she was so young she can barely remember what she was doing, or why.

Her search for birth family has been impeded many times by authorities denying her access to her files. She tracks down a children’s home where she was first placed, and visits it, obtaining a redacted record, but the record does not reveal the city where she was found, only a neighborhood name. She believes the record could be missing key information, due to the many redactions.  She is assisted in her search by a Korean women’s group, Banet, whose director is interviewed on her knowledge of the search process.

She eventually obtains the same record, unredacted, toward the end of the story, with no explanation for the prior redactions. She gets the record apparently only because of her persistence and the intervention of the experts helping her.  

Mioka also describes leaving her adoptive parents’ home as a teenager for good after being “kicked out” by adoptive parents who never loved her. She also describes how, in her papers and mementos of her adoption, she found a filled-out application form for U.S. citizenship, apparently completed by her adoptive parents but never sent.  On her own as an older teen, she finished high school, worked and attended beauty college part time, and eventually established her own business. As an adult, she hired an immigration attorney to assist her in obtaining her U.S. citizenship.

Mioka’s story was helpful for the film narrative in many ways, Jo explained.  Her repeat visits to Korea showed how missing and inaccurate records can make a birth search tedious and nearly impossible, even with the expert help from the Banet organization.  That she discovered as an adult that she was never made a citizen brings the U.S. bureaucratic failures into focus.  Mioka’s demeanor was also a factor in advancing the story, Jo said. Diplomatic and polite at all times, her friendliness, persistence and focus on her search highlights the illogic of the system she is trying to work with.

A continuum of life experiences

Jo said that meeting many adoptees has taught her that “everyone’s experience is so different.” She shows that in the stories of other Korean adoptees she follows in K-Number, including Dana and Mary Schlafman, a married American couple, both Korean adoptees. They both come up empty in their search for birth parents.

The Schlafmans’ musing on a way of reclaiming and honoring their fellow Korean adoptees was the inspiration for the film title.  Mary explains that earlier adoptees were numbered differently, and that there are an unknown number of people who were adopted informally in the early days of international adoption. However, she believes the K-numbers, used to number most Korean adoptees, could still be a key.  Dana shows a photo of the 9/11 memorial, and explains that nearly 3,000 people’s names depicted around the huge steel and granite pools at its base are findable by a digital numbering system linked to a grid. He imagines a similar memorial that would honor all Korean adoptees with their K-numbers.

A reunion and a second abandonment

The story of Kaylin Bower describes another kind of birth parent reunion. Kaylin successfully locates her birth mother (with the help of the Banet group) and meets her a few times with a translator. However, Kaylin’s birth mother, whose face is never shown, tells Kaylin to go back to her adoptive family, and to not visit her again. During the uncomfortable meetings, the viewer hears what the translator is telling Kaylin, — a softer version of the translation seen on the screen in subtitles.

In the end, Kaylin agrees not to pursue the relationship, telling her birth mother “I understand,” but the subtext is more like “I don’t understand.”  Back at her hotel, Kaylin talks to her little son on a video call – he is in a silly mood. His bright voice comes through on the speaker, and Kaylin tries to match his enthusiasm. “Maybe you can come with me next time,” she tells him.

Linking past and present

K-Number is more comprehensive than the adoptees’ stories. It takes on a wide spectrum or legal, governmental, moral and emotional issues wrapped into South Korea’s international adoption system.  It reports in some depth on the adoption bureaucracy, which necessitates explanations of some key points in Korean history, with contemporaneous documents, photos and film footage.  

One of the film’s strengths is in the linking of events in South Korean modern history to the present predicament of adoptees.  In telling the stories of Mioka and several other adoptees, it digs into how records access problems and the puzzling bureaucracy of international adoption affect adoptees today – in money, time and much misery.

An unlikely champion for adoptee human rights

Despite some enthusiastic advocacy in South Korea between 2004 and 2017 for greater records access for Korean adoptees, Jo said, there was very little movement on the issue.  What changed in 2017 was U.S. adoptee Adam Crapser’s human rights lawsuit against the Holt Agency and the South Korean government for his deportation from the U.S. to South Korea. (see 2016 feature story in the KQ archive section)

During the era of the late ‘90s to early 2000s, deported adoptees were in the news in South Korea because many were in crisis there, experiencing poverty along with cultural and social isolation.  In that era, Jo said “there was reporting of deported adoptees dying on the streets.”  One adoptee, Phillip Clay, died by suicide in South Korea in 2017.  In Korea, it brought the plight of deportees into sharp relief.  In the U.S., Clay’s death prompted some nationwide pro-citizenship advocacy, including a bill (which still has not been voted into law) to ensure automatic citizenship for adoptees.

Jo said she was initially interested in the question of U.S. Korean adoptees and their citizenship issues, but that question prompted the research that eventually became the K-Number film. The film briefly describes Crapser’s lawsuit, which he initially partially won.  In an interview, Crapser plainly expresses his disgust for both the U.S. and South Korean governments.  After the initial court case, the Holt agency was ordered to pay him 100 million won (around $75,000) for damages.  However, Holt  never paid.  Instead, it appealed;  the Associated Press reported in January (2026) that Holt and the South Korean government won the appeal.

The appeals court ruled that neither Holt nor the government were responsible for Crapser’s lack of citizenship. On appeal, Holt cited a 1970s law, passed during military dictatorship and intended to speed up international adoptions, which declared that the government was not responsible for ensuring adoptees were made citizens of their new country.  

While Crapser lost his case, that he was able to bring the case at all was significant, Jo explained. It highlighted the injustice, and paved the way for further action by adoptees, which the  K-Number film links together.

Significantly, a group of Danish adoptees, the Danish Korean Rights Group (DKRG) filed a suit in 2022, claiming that the government abused overseas adoptees’ human rights in the way it mishandled their adoptions.  The South Korean government turned it over to its own human rights investigatory body, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a kind of national grand jury tasked with determining if a case against the government rises to the level of a human rights abuse. K-Number includes some footage of TRC hearings.

However, the film was completed long before the TRC published bombshell findings in March 2025 that the historic treatment of Korean adoptees constitutes a human rights abuse under South Korean law.  The South Korean government in 2025 charged the TRC with administering a third round of investigation. That investigation formally began on February 26.

The seven-year project

At the beginning of her work, Jo dug deep into the history, financing, and politics of Korean international adoption, and met many experts. Wading through the facts and history for nearly four years, she could include only a small percent of what she learned in the film.  “The information was scattered,” she said, “and it took a long time to put the pieces together.” Finding funding for her independent production was also challenging, and stretched out the timeline.

Jo started filming in 2019. She followed and filmed adoptees doing birth searches in Korea for about two years. The editing process took about 10 months, but the film was ready in time for the Busan Film Festival in 2024, where it won an audience popularity award.  In 2025, the film was distributed to about 150 movie theaters nationwide. “The whole process was about seven years of work,” she said.

Targeting her work, busting some assumptions

The target viewership “is Korean people who are not really familiar with Korean adoption and do not see it in their everyday lives,” Jo explained, “it was important to figure out how to remove the most complex stories, but give enough information so that they can understand.”

Jo showed the final cut of the film to six different levels of focus groups, she said – from the most informed experts on Korean adoption to groups of ordinary Koreans who knew next to nothing about the topic.  Then she edited again, with the goal of making the film understandable to all the groups, and believes it was worth the time.

Jo also wanted the film to offer facts to counter the stereotypical view of international adoption. “The shortcut narrative among Koreans is that ‘the mother threw away the child, so the child got adopted,’’” she said.  That story is told commonly about Korean single moms in the 1980s and ‘90s, she added. In understanding overseas adoptions prior to the ‘80s, she added, people believe the motivation for adoption to be post-war poverty.

Jo believes that the common point of view was dished out to the general public by “the government, the adoption agencies and at that time, the churches that were involved.”  People from other countries think similarly about international adoption also, she believes.  

Additionally, while a majority of South Koreans believe international adoption happened mainly in the ‘60s, when poverty was widespread, in reality “much of the adoption was happening in the ‘80s up to the time of the [1988] Olympics, when economy was strong,” Jo pointed out.

According to statistics she has read, Jo said, among Korean adoptees who begin a birth search, less than one percent find a birth parent. “But because what they show on TV is successful reunions, people believe many searches are successful – that the rates [of success] are much higher,” she added.  Most successful reunions are accomplished through a DNA match, or because adoptees use the media, she said, while few are accomplished by relyiing on adoption records.

In the standard film or TV depiction of an adoptee and birth parent meeting, a reunion is a beautiful thing, Jo said, “with lots of hugging and crying and happiness that we are all together.” The viewer rarely sees the negatives of the process; the searches that turn up nothing, or the search followed by a reunion with a negative outcome of some kind, like Kaylin’s experience.  There are many successful reunions after which a family relationship fails to develop.  “Time separates them, and trying to build relationship results in conflict,” she observed.

Korean adoptees also go to Korea for many reasons other than birth searches, which many Korean nationals do not understand, she commented.  “In most cases, it is not about just finding their mom. It’s about learning the language, the culture, things they don’t know or can’t remember, learning what it’s like to live in Korea, how people live and express themselves, and so many multiple factors,” she said.

A couple hundred children in Korea are still placed for international adoption annually, Jo added.  “In the present day, although the economy will certainly support a couple hundred kids per year, they are still adopted internationally. Like, because they created the system, they are stuck,” she said. “They do say lately that they will stop international adoption in 2029, but others ask ‘why are we waiting?’”

Reconciliation on a global scale

After many years of puzzling out its intricacies, Jo has learned that Korea’s huge system of international adoption, which operated for many decades, went largely unchallenged. Receiving nations failed to scrutinize the system, even looking the other way.  The results affected hundreds of thousands of people globally.  As a matter of restoring justice, it will not be resolved quickly.  

Among the societies involved in international adoption, Jo suggested, it will take time to work together on a path toward reconciliation. The human rights harms affected many who were unaware – not only adoptees, but birth parents, adoptive parents, and the partners, children and other loved ones of Korean adoptees. “People need to think this through, and not continue to make the assumption that these were certain individual cases,” she said. “We have to look at this as a bigger picture.”

Editor’s note: Filmmaker Seyoung Jo told the audience during the Q and A after the screening that she hopes her month-long February trip will be an impetus for the film to be screened elsewhere in the U.S.  The distribution company Sunbo Film reported that the film is available for community screenings (contact sunbofilm2022@gmail.com for further information). Any additional U.S. screening dates will be announced through the official K-Number Instagram account.

The post Unpacking international adoption appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

Spectrum Planet is a comic from the Philly based Korean Adoptee cartoonist and animator Meaghan Dunn. Dunn has been publishing in Korean Quarterly since the very first issue with her comic Kimchi Girl. Meaghan is a multimedia developer, creating instructional design & VR training for international brands, and teaches animation at various Philadelphia universities. She runs a student focused animation incubator in Philadelphia with former TV executive producer from Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, Linda Simensky, known for Rugrats, Ren & Stimpy, Powerpuff Girls, and many other shows. The studio is currently developing an original new series pilot that is very much focused on a Korean adoptee and her daughter. Dunn says the animated series is about the spectrum of experiences among Korean adoptees and various artists she knows and has interviewed.

Dunn is a doctoral student with one daughter in college.

The post Spectrum Planet appeared first on Korean Quarterly.