South Korea admits to widespread adoption fraud. Here's one story

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🗓️ 31 March 2025

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

Last week, South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that Korean adoption agencies were responsible for widespread fraud, malpractice and even human rights violations.

More than 140,000 South Korean children were adopted by families living abroad in the decades after the Korean war. The report documented cases in which agencies fabricated records and others in which abandoned children were sent abroad after only perfunctory efforts to find living guardians.

Documentarian Deann Borshay Liem was an adult when she first learned the story she'd been told about her identity was a lie. She was adopted by an American family from California in 1966, when she was eight years old. Her adoption records said she was an orphan, but she eventually discovered her birth mother was alive, and she had a large extended family in South Korea.

She shares her adoption story, her reaction to the commission's report, and her thoughts on what justice looks like for adoptees.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Deanne Borshé Lehm started having these flashbacks when she was in college.
0:06.0	These brief images of a little home in the hills, scenes from an orphanage, children running around shoes on a rack.
0:15.9	At first, she thought that they were dreams. But then she realized maybe these were memories. You see,
0:23.4	Leam is an adoptee. She grew up with an American family in Fremont, California, who adopted her in
0:29.2	1966 when she was eight years old. These flashbacks, she thought, must be snippets from her
0:36.3	childhood in South Korea. And they made her want to
0:40.5	dig more deeply into her past. I asked my adoptive mother if I could have my adoption records,
0:47.4	and as I looked through them, I discovered that there were two pictures, one that was of me,
0:55.9	and one that was of another girl.
1:02.9	And yet on the back of both pictures was the same name, the name that I was adopted with, which was Cha Zhang He.
1:08.0	In that moment, Leam realized she had been switched with another child.
1:13.0	She wasn't an orphan named Cha Zhanghi, like her adoption document said.
1:19.0	She was a girl named Kang Ok Jin, whose mother, she soon learned, was very much still alive.
1:26.2	It was just a transformative moment in my life to know that I had been switched with another child.
1:28.7	My adoptive parents knew nothing about it,
1:33.2	and that it took all these years to kind of come to terms with the truth. In the decades after the Korean War, more than 140,000 South Korean children were adopted
1:39.9	by families living abroad. Last week, the South Korean government admitted that there are many
1:45.9	stories like Dianne Borset Leems. A years-long investigation by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission
1:52.0	found that the country's adoption agencies were responsible for widespread fraud, malpractice, and even
1:59.5	human rights violations.
2:01.5	Who are our parents? Where were we born? We have a right to our identities.
2:08.5	Consider this. What does justice look like for the Korean adoptees who were robbed of their
	...

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