Peter Moller, 48, who was adopted to Denmark from South Korea in 1974, reached out to Korean adoption agency Holt International for the first time in 2011 to search for his roots. Holt initially told the Danish adoptee that he was born in Seoul. But in subsequent letters, the adoption agency said he was actually born in Daejeon. Moller was then told that his biological mother gave birth to him in Nonsan, South Chungcheong Province on March 16, 1974, which happened to be the same day she brought him to the adoption agency in Seoul.
For 40 years, Louise Kwang thought she was an orphan baby found on the streets of the South Korean port city of Busan before her adoption to Danish parents in 1976. She felt her entire sense of identity collapse in 2016 when her South Korean agency matter-of-factly acknowledged that her origin story was fiction aimed…
Their effort underscores a rift between the world’s largest diaspora of adoptees and their birth nation decades after scores of Korean children were removed from their families