“I was born May 8, 1985 … The only thing I know about my mother is she was 18 years old. She’d just graduated from high school, and her last name is Kim.”

Chris Henman looks nervously into the camera and repeats his plea. Adopted by an American family at just four months of age, he’s searching for the woman who named him Kim Hyun Moo and then fell out of his life. He’s traveled halfway around the world and gone on Korean television to search for his roots; so he offers a tight little smile and tells the nation of his birth, how he came home to learn his language and to find his family.

The show is called “Every Morning,” and it’s a daily reminder of Korea’s history. The show is for finding lost loved ones, a desire that’s all too familiar in a land that spent 40 of the past hundred years either at war or under occupation. Adoptees from America and Europe appear on the show regularly to search for their birth mothers.  In the studio, Chris watches a roomful of middle-aged mothers and grandmothers dabbing at their eyes with handkerchiefs. A perfectly made-up host emits a theatrical gasp, then, allowing just a single tear to dribble from her eye, voice breaking; she entreats her viewers to call in if they know anything about this boy’s family. It’s a performance somewhere between an episode of Oprah and a Jerry Lewis telethon.

Chris is among more than 160,000 Korean children that have been adopted into American families since the first international adoptions during the Korean War. The search for omma, mother, has become so common that it is a cultural phenomenon.

The stories repeat like choruses — “she was only 18” … “they found me in a box on the orphanage steps” … “she was only 21” … “they found me in a basket at the police station” … “the note said she wanted me to have a better life.” Maybe they’re true. Maybe they’re fables, the sort of tales you tell a child when you don’t know all the twists and turns of the truth. Maybe they’re deliberate deception. Some critics of adoption accuse baby brokers of spinning these stories to ease the minds of adoptive parents.

But to a child who has been adopted by a family of another race and culture, the stories are a tantalizing link to their past, something to hold onto when it seems that they don’t belong in their all-white classrooms, something to repeat to themselves when they feel lost between two cultures.

“The note said that she loved me.”

***

South Korea has been at the core of international adoption for more than 50 years, since American families first brought soldiers’ wartime indiscretions into their homes. A handful of soldiers adopted orphaned or abandoned children in the early 1950s; then in 1956, an Oregon farmer named Harry Holt brought eight children, many of them mixed-race “GI babies,” home from Korea. Korean adoptions peaked in the 1980s, long after the war orphans were grown, and about 1,000 Korean children still come home to the United States each year.

At the beginning, there was little opposition to Americans taking care of the mixed-blood babies, known as tukki (literally, “foreign devil”). Korea was a traditional Confucian society in which bloodlines were paramount. An uncle or grandfather or cousin might take in an orphaned or abandoned child to preserve the family line, but adoptions of unrelated children were all but unheard of before American intervention. Living for generations on a small, fertile peninsula caught between three empires — Japan, China and Russia — Koreans developed a stubborn sense of racial and cultural pride that earned their country the name “the hermit kingdom.” During a thirty-year occupation by Japanese forces that ended with the Second World War, young Korean women were forced into service as “comfort women,” raped and forced to bear half-Japanese children. The Korean language was banned, and cultural traditions were forced underground. When United Nations soldiers arrived, giving orders and having affairs with Korean woman that produced red-haired or black-skinned babies, it just opened old wounds. Many believed it was best for the children to be sent to their fathers’ homelands.

No one expected them to want to come back.

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