"Welcome to your motherland": an adoptee's journey to Korea

Koreans speak of Samcheonpo like Westerners once spoke of Timbuktu: the end of the road, the edge of the world. When someone drops out of sight, they say she must have gone to Samcheonpo.

We don't know why Choi Soon Hyea ended up in this small port city whose name is synonymous with remoteness and obscurity nearly 17 years ago. The adoption file says only that she was 33, poor, single, a native of Seoul who "became pregnant while wandering from place to place, living alone."

She gave birth to a boy on Feb. 28, 1989, and signed him over to the adoption agency that same day. Five months later, when he arrived in Seattle, his adoptive parents named him Kai. Ten years after that I became his stepfather.

This summer, 16 years after Kai Berkedal left Korea, he went back for the first time with his mother, Carla, his 15-year-old brother, Bjorn, and me. We discovered a country of green mountains, vibrant cities and people eager to welcome us because we were bringing back one of their own.

We connected with them in ways we could never have foreseen.

On our fifth day in Korea we took a four-hour taxi ride from our hotel in the ancient capital of Gyeongju to the end of the road, to Samcheonpo. While our driver asked passers-by directions to the hospital where Kai had been born, I gazed out the cab window and saw the planet through a different prism.

Every face on the street could have been one of Kai's relatives, every school we passed one he might have attended. Every teenage boy, under different circumstances, could have been my stepson.

After a journey to a country that has given you a child to love, the global village looks more like a global family.

Vacation and pilgrimage

Tim and Kim Holm of Mill Creek have been leading Korean adoptees and their families on two-week tours of Korea every summer for 14 years. They took 25 of us this August, including 11 adoptees ranging in age from 9 to 25.

It was both a vacation and a pilgrimage. We visited 1,300-year-old temples and palaces. We swam in warm waters off white-sand beaches. We chewed stringy, stinky dried squid — a ballpark delicacy — at a raucous Korean baseball game.

We also toured the offices of the agency in Seoul that had handled Kai's adoption. We saw 38 newborns, wrapped in blue and pink blankets, in the same nursery where Kai had once slept.

We met the foster mother who had loved Kai before Carla had. We learned that, during his first months, he had been part of a foster family that had grieved his departure and never forgotten him.

For the Holms, these trips are missionary work. Tim, 48, a Seattle accountant, is an adoptee himself. He's a leader of local and international organizations that work to connect Korean adoptees, support them as they seek answers and create the kind of community that didn't exist when he was young.

Kim, a Korean native who once worked for an adoption agency in Seoul, moved to the U.S. when she married Tim. When a problem or challenge arose on our journey, her haggling or berating or cajoling almost always made it go away.

The Holms arranged the visits to the agencies and meetings with foster mothers. It was Kim who found an English-speaking cab driver to take us to Samcheonpo and negotiated the fare.

We spent our first two nights in Seoul, then four in historic Gyeongju and three on the tropical vacation island of Jeju before returning to Seoul for our final four days. It's an itinerary the Holms have fine-tuned over the years to balance sightseeing tours and other group fun with opportunities for each adoptee and adoptive family to explore its Korean story on its own.

The Holms wisely gave us and the other families several days to bond before these emotionally intense solo forays began, to form a support group of sorts. When Kai, Carla, Bjorn and I returned to the hotel in Gyeongju after our long, richly rewarding trip to Samcheonpo, new friends were there to greet us, eager to hear our stories and share their own.

Treated like a celebrity

Aging Hanmaeum Hospital, six stories tall, towered over fields at the edge of Samcheonpo. Inside, they told us no one was working that day who had been at the hospital in 1989. They told us there were no babies now: The obstetrics unit had closed seven years ago.

Mr. Kim, our avuncular driver/interpreter, found out where the nursery had been and led us up several ramps. When he put his arm around Kai's shoulder and explained to the nurses why we had come, their eyes widened and their reserve dissolved.

They treated Kai like a minor celebrity. They wanted their pictures taken with him. One nurse led us into a back room and served us chilled barley tea. She told us no child born in this hospital and adopted overseas had ever returned before.

Hanmaeum Hospital wasn't the only place where we received such an enthusiastic welcome because of Kai.

Over the past 50 years, at least 150,000 Korean children have been sent to adoptive families overseas — more than 100,000 of them to the U.S. — because their homeland had no place for them. Traditional Korean culture emphasizes family bloodlines; domestic adoption has been rare.

During our two weeks in Korea, we learned that Koreans recently have begun to talk more openly about this diaspora, which many consider a national tragedy, and to seek to make amends. One Korean university offers adoptees a four-month "immersion program" for $600 plus airfare. One Korean nonprofit organization offers adult adoptees heavily subsidized, weeklong summer cultural programs.

After our visit to the hospital, we ate two heaping platters of sashimi at a restaurant in Samcheonpo's fish market. Mr. Kim told the proprietor our story. She gazed fondly at Kai each time she came back to our table, as if he were her child.

Samcheonpo is on Korea's south coast, a labyrinth of bays, straits, rocks, islands and forested mountains that rise straight from the sea. It reminded us of the San Juans; Kai's birthplace looked a lot like the place he has grown up.

After lunch, we took a two-hour sightseeing cruise on a boat packed with vacationing Koreans. Carla, Bjorn and I were oddities here, the only white faces.

Down in the cabin, deafening Korean pop blared over the loudspeakers between the long gaps in the captain's narration. Partying tourists, middle-age and older, jammed the tiny dance floor near the bow. Carla and I stepped onto a corner of it, thinking we might not attract too much attention.

We were wrong. A swarm of smiling, laughing, bumping, grinding Koreans engulfed us in seconds, all wanting to dance with us. We took them on, one at a time, as the others stepped back and hooted. Carla and I had a great time. Kai and Bjorn looked on in adolescent horror.

One beefy, perspiring 40-something belly-bumped me, then pulled me aside, fetched a green bottle and poured me a shot of soju, the firewater Koreans distill from sweet potatoes. Three more followed.

Later, out on the deck, Mr. Kim again put his arm around Kai's shoulder and told Mr. Soju and his companions why we had come to Samcheonpo. They listened attentively, then gave us thumbs up, pumped our hands, slapped our backs. They told us through Mr. Kim what a good thing we had done in bringing this boy back to Korea, how honored they were to meet us.

When the boat docked and we walked ashore, Mr. Soju gave me a bearhug. There was more behind it than the booze.

The Fifth Commandment

Newborn Kai didn't spend long in Samcheonpo. The day he was born he was whisked to Jinju, the nearest large city. Two days later he was delivered to the Seoul headquarters of the Eastern Social Welfare Society, the agency that would handle his adoption. A week later it entrusted him to the care of his foster mother.

Eastern still occupies the same brick building in Seoul. When Kai, Carla, Bjorn and I stepped out of the van the agency had sent for us, a banner strung across the façade greeted us. "Welcome to your motherland, Korea," it read.

Inside, we watched a video of the Christian agency's work, not just with adoptees, but with single mothers, orphans and disabled children. We held babies who soon would take the same life-altering journey Kai had taken.

We were ushered into the office of Dr. Kim Duk Whang, 91, Eastern's founder. "You have made me very happy today," the courtly man in the gray suit told us in English.

He asked Kai if he drank or smoked or "touched the drugs." He asked him if he remembered the Fifth Commandment, and Kai, a beneficiary of two years of Lutheran confirmation classes, guessed right: Honor your father and mother.

Later we examined Kai's file, one of 40,000 the agency maintains on the children whose adoptions it has handled. We had been told that sometimes adoptees find new information on their birth parents in these files, sometimes even letters from them.

There was nothing in Kai's file from Choi Soon Hyea. Perhaps she's still wandering from place to place, living alone. We found family that afternoon at Eastern anyway.

From Seoul to Bellingham

Moon Myung Soon, Kai's foster mother, was waiting for us after lunch at the agency, in a conference room lined with cardboard storage boxes. She and Carla wept as they embraced, two mothers connected by their love for the same boy.

Mrs. Moon took Kai's hand and looked intently into his chiseled face, as if she was trying to record all his features and reconcile them with her memories of the chubby baby she had cared for. She told us through an interpreter that she had been foster mother to three babies; Kai had been the first and the only boy. She told us that, when he left for the U.S., she had assumed she would never see him again.

She told us what an outgoing baby Kai had been. We told her what a fine young man he is becoming.

Mrs. Moon's granddaughter, Lee Mi Ji, a 23-year-old graduate student, had come with her to the agency. They showed us an old family photo, taken on a hike in the mountains before Kai left.

Mrs. Moon, seated, holds Kai on her lap, surrounded by her husband, daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren. All face the camera except Mi Ji, then about 7. She peers down protectively at Kai, just as a big sister might.

Mi Ji told us she had always been the baby of the family, and she had enjoyed the attention. The only time she had relinquished that status, she said, was when Kai was with them. She said they all had cried when Kai left. She told us she still treasured a necklace, engraved with Kai's name, that his adoptive father had mailed to Mrs. Moon shortly after Kai came to Seattle.

Carla told Mi Ji and Mrs. Moon that someday we'd like to meet the other four people in the old family photo. The invitation came the next day.

On our last full day in Korea we visited Mrs. Moon's home and saw the room that had been Kai's nursery. We sat for portraits in the studio of her son-in-law, Lee Dong Hee, a professional photographer. Kai's foster family presented the boys and Carla with hanboks, the colorful traditional garments Koreans still wear on special occasions.

They prepared a feast for us in Dong Hee's apartment. We ate at a low table, seated Korean style on the floor. When an uncomfortable Bjorn unfolded his legs stiffly, Dong Hee reached over and massaged them.

We toasted one another and laughed, our conversation translated by Mi Ji and her older brother, Ji Hyeong, who both had studied English in school. When it was time to go, Mi Ji took Kai's hand as they walked us to the car.

I looked forward to returning their hospitality.

On the afternoon we first met Mrs. Moon and Mi Ji at the agency, Kai presented his foster mother with a thick album filled with photos documenting his American life. Through the interpreter, he told her the story behind each picture: Halloween costumes. Dance performances. School concerts. Backpacking trips.

On the inside of the back cover, Kai had pasted a small map of the U.S., with Seattle and Washington highlighted. As the interpreter explained this was where we lived, Mi Ji began to speak to her excitedly in Korean. I caught three English words: "Western Washington University."

We learned she already had made plans to enroll in January at that school, 90 minutes from our home, to study English. Until she had seen the map in the photo album, she'd had no idea we lived so close. She had thought we lived in Chicago.

Mi Ji arrives Monday. She'll stay in our home and at the boys' father's house for a week. We'll show her Seattle, help her adjust to this strange land, then get her settled at Western. We hope she will consider our homes her American base.

Just as we now have family in Korea, she now has family here.

Eric Pryne is a Seattle Times staff reporter.