A South Korean woman adopted by an American couple is searching for answers after finding her biological brother — and shocked to learn she was part of a devastating government-backed adoption and kidnapping scheme.
Mary Bowers (Korean name: Jung Nayoung), a competitive eater, told the Korea Times that she was raised in Colorado after being adopted in 1982. She spent most of her life believing she was an orphan. “During the Covid-19 pandemic, I had extra time on my hands due to social distancing regulations, so I started looking into some old records and started finding some interesting conflicts,” she said. Her adoption had been arranged by the Seoul-based Eastern Welfare Society, and in her adoption papers, she was listed under three different Korean surnames: Jung, Chung, and Baik.
Bowers then discovered the shady story of Brothers Home, a state-run welfare facility in Busan that had been accused of kidnapping and mistreating hundreds of children and disabled individuals from the 1960s to the 1980s before ultimately closing. Brothers Home was said to have acted as a “supply chain” for private adoption agencies outside of South Korea.
“It just happened to be towards the end of the article [that] I recognised familiar names who signed off my adoption documents. Initially, I thought I was imagining things, so I had to go back and check my documents,” Bowers said. “But unfortunately, I was not.”
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Bowers is not the first adoptee to speak out about realizing she had likely been torn from her family. South Korean adoptee Tara Graves said she had been selected from a catalog by American parents following the Korean War. Graves’ adoptive mother helped her track down her biological family, and she had an emotional reunion with some of her siblings. She had been placed for adoption for several reasons — including poverty, and a cultural preference for a son, not a daughter.
After the Korean War, American adoptions of Korean children became incredibly common, and it was extremely lucrative for the South Korean government, which through this scheme, didn’t have to pay for the care of the children, while also bringing in an estimated $15-$20 million per year in profit.
Many of the women who surrendered their children didn’t want to, but were grappling with extreme poverty, and were often pressured and convinced to place their children for adoption by local orphanages. Afterward, birth mothers who were surveyed said they felt extreme guilt.
Bowers — along with almost 400 other Korean adoptees living in 11 countries, including Denmark, Norway, the U.S. and Australia — has filed a case with Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigates historical human rights abuses. Together, they argue that the government helped to falsify documents, allowing children to be stolen from their families and sold to foreign families.
“We’re seeing similar patterns of children being declared as orphans when they still had living parents, and adoptees being sent [abroad] under false identities,” Bowers said. “Some of them are old enough to remember all this. You see these very similar patterns, which is why we submitted these claims together.”
Thanks to DNA testing, Bowers has been able to find her biological brother, 19-year-old Chase Malmgren (Korean name: Baik In-soo). Though DNA testing confirmed they were a 100% sibling match, their respective adoption agencies gave conflicting information. Eastern Welfare Society said that Bowers’ parents were married, while Holt International, Malmgren’s agency, said his mother did not even know who his father was.
“But Chase and I have a 100 per cent DNA match, which means we have the same mother and same father. Now we know by our existence that those things are false. Then the question becomes, what else did the agency lie to us about?” Bowers asked.
