A South Korean adoptee’s journey to uncover her identity

In a small room in Seoul, South Korea, Rebecca Kimmel sat in disbelief, staring at a baby photo she had just unearthed from her adoption file. The black-and-white image was of an infant, supposedly her, abandoned as a baby in Gwangju. But something deep inside told her this baby was not her.

The photo confirmed what she had long suspected: her adoption story, the one she had been told her entire life, was a lie. And so began Kimmel’s intense search for her true identity, a quest that many South Korean adoptees have undertaken as they seek answers about their origins.

Thousands of South Korean adoptees have been caught in a web of falsified documents, switched identities, and fabricated stories, a result of a system that prioritized international adoption over the rights and identities of the children involved. For Kimmel, this search would bring answers, but not the ones she hoped for.

The fog of childhood

Kimmel, an artist, believes she is about 49, though she is unsure of her exact age. Her search for her roots has consumed much of her life, though it wasn’t always this way. Growing up, Kimmel, like many adoptees, experienced what she calls “the fog”—a period of ignorance when she did not question her adoption story.

Her American adoptive parents were told that she was found abandoned on a street in Gwangju, with a birth date of August 4, 1975, listed on a slip of paper attached to her clothing. Her birth name was unclear due to the writing on her paperwork, and there was no information about her biological parents.

Adopted six months later, Kimmel grew up on the East Coast of the U.S., where each January 21st, her family celebrated her “Arrival Day”—the day she arrived from South Korea. Yet, something nagged at her: one photo from her South Korean documents didn’t resemble the pictures of her as a baby in the U.S. When she asked her parents about it, they brushed it off, saying that babies change.

It wasn’t until adulthood that Kimmel started questioning these discrepancies, as a sense of loneliness and a desire for identity began creeping in.

Clearing the fog

In 2017, Kimmel’s journey toward discovering her past began when she Googled “Korean adoptions” and came across a community of adoptees sharing their stories. She soon realized time was running out—her birth parents, if still alive, would likely be elderly.

In 2018, she shut down her art classes and traveled to South Korea, hoping to trace her roots. It was a trip filled with false starts and dead ends. The clinic where she was supposedly found was closed, and the orphanage records were nonexistent.

Kimmel’s visit to Korea Social Service (KSS), the agency that facilitated her adoption, ended in frustration. The agency refused to let her photograph her file and denied her requests for more information. When she finally accessed her file, she found a photograph that only confirmed her worst fears: the child in the photo was not her.

A web of deception

Kimmel’s story is not unique. The Korean adoptee diaspora is thought to be the largest in the world, with thousands returning to South Korea in recent years to search for their birth families. Fewer than a fifth of those who seek help from the government succeed, due to the vague or falsified records used to make children appear abandoned, even when they had known parents.

Kimmel’s file seemed to contain more questions than answers. She consulted a dysmorphologist, a specialist in identifying children through facial features. His analysis revealed that the baby in her adoption file was likely not the same person as Kimmel, further deepening the mystery.

This revelation led her to believe that KSS had switched her identity with another girl. She had seen similar cases during her travels, where adoptees were given the paperwork of other children at the last moment. Could this have happened to her too?

The complexities of adoption records

In 2019, Kimmel returned to KSS and, after a tense back-and-forth with the agency’s social worker, was allowed to search the agency’s file room herself. There, she found what she believed to be her “real file.” Yet the details didn’t quite add up. The documents said the girl in the photos had leg deformities, while medical notes written just days before described a healthy child.

Once again, the dysmorphologist concluded that the photos in the file were not of the same child as Kimmel, leaving her more confused than ever. She wondered if the girl in the photos could be her sibling or perhaps even a twin.

By 2021, Kimmel was deeply invested in her quest, examining KSS’s complex numerical system for logging adoption cases. She visited the agency again, accompanied by Associated Press reporters, only to be met with more roadblocks and evasions.

It was during this visit that a social worker made a shocking admission: switching children’s identities was a common practice during the adoption rush of the 1970s and 1980s. If a child died, became sick, or was taken back by their birth family, another child would often be substituted, and Western adopters would accept the replacement without question.

This left Kimmel grappling with the possibility that she might have been one of those children.

The twins’ story

Amid the chaos of her search, Kimmel came across an old man named Park Jong-kyun, who was searching for his twin daughters, born between 1973 and 1976. Kimmel tracked Park down to Jeju Island and, though DNA testing ultimately revealed that she was not his daughter, she helped reunite him with his long-lost twins, Becca Webster and Dee Iraca, who had been adopted to the United States.

Webster and Iraca grew up with the understanding that they had been abandoned in front of a hospital in South Korea. Though they occasionally wondered about their birth parents, the thought of searching seemed overwhelming, and they had little to go on.

Dee Iraca and Becca Webster, twins who were adopted out of South Korea to a family in the United States

It wasn’t until a DNA test connected them with Kimmel, and she informed them about their father’s search, that they learned the truth. In 2022, the twins traveled to South Korea to meet their birth father, who had been searching for them for decades.

Though the language barrier and cultural differences were significant, they felt an immediate connection. For Park, the reunion was bittersweet, as he had lost decades of time with his daughters and had been unable to reunite with them sooner due to systemic failures within the adoption agencies.

A bittersweet ending

For Kimmel, the reunion of the twins with their father provided some comfort, though it left her own search unresolved. She continues to help other adoptees through a website called Paperslip, which focuses on the many errors and fabrications in adoption files.

Though she has yet to uncover the full truth of her own identity, Kimmel is determined not to give up. The system may have failed her and countless others, but the desire to know who she truly is still drives her.

“I’m almost 50 years old, and I still don’t know when I was born, or what city I was born in,” she says. “I don’t know my birth parents. There’s nothing that I know about myself as real.”

Her journey, like that of so many adoptees, is a story still waiting for an ending.

[Abridged]

KIM TONG-HYUNG, FOSTER KLUG & CLAIRE GALOFARO, MDT/AP