Jocelyn's Family: A Journey

SHE WAS DIFFERENT from the other children. From the time Jocelyn arrived, she had tremendously greater physical strength, and a tremendously greater will to use it. As toddlers, her two older sisters, Erin and Caitlin, liked to play House; Jocelyn's favorite game was a wrestling exercise we dubbed "Violence in the Home," her eager invitations - "Let's play Violence in the Home, Daddy!" - a constant source of family mirth. Her nickname in babyhood was "Jaws." The adjective we most often applied to her was "fierce."

It was only as we grew more familiar with her culture of origin that we began to wonder whether the proper adjective for someone of her temperament and predilections might not be "Korean." As newly adoptive parents we were told time and again by Koreans we met that "We are the Irish of the Orient!" - meaning, they explained, that Koreans generally regarded themselves as uncommonly passionate and emotionally expressive. And the more we explored local Korean culture, the more we met people who were indeed Jocelynesque: engaging, outgoing and passionate about whatever they were doing or believing. We also came to learn that the Korean people, perched precariously between Japan and China, take great pride in the epic determination with which they have fought off invasions from those two powers over several millennia.

I realize, of course, that humans are more than the sum of their helixes, and that talk of this sort is widely considered to be stereotyping. But I can't help it - it has been impossible not to view Jocelyn, with this marvelous genetic makeup and cultural tradition, as an all-American teenager who also is packed with traits I have admired in so many Koreans. She is indomitable, smart, adaptable, emotional, intensely loyal, and ferocious.

From the day little Korean orphan Huh Ok-Kyung was delivered to us as a 3-month-old, we've been having a great time watching her grow up as our American Jocelyn, in part because so much about her was so new to us. She had, after all, been made of different raw material, and she has always had this special dimension that the rest of us don't have - this set of components that came from a source utterly unknown to our family, and a dramatic birth-and-delivery story that was largely a mystery to us.

(It has always been more dramatic to us, though, than to her. Jocelyn as a little girl regarded hers as the ordinary life story, and the stories of people who have not been adopted as the oddity. When she was 4, she said one day in astonishment, "Erin and Caitlin's mommy and birth mommy are the same person. Isn't that weird?")

After 13 years of wondering where Jocelyn got the strength to kick soccer balls through walls, we decided to dive into her gene pool. A generous friend, Mike Almquist, bought the five of us a trip to Jocelyn's birthland. We signed up with a remarkable couple, Tim and Kim Holm, to tour Korea under their auspices, visit the agency there that had arranged our adoption, and learn as much as we could about Jocelyn's origins.

The Holms - he is a phlegmatic Korean/Caucasian adoptee and she a fiery Korean who immigrated here 12 years ago - volunteer their time each year to take groups of adoptive families back to Korea. The tours combine cultural exploration and education with an examination of each child's particular roots. The Holms arrange meetings with the social-service agency in Korea that handled your child's adoption, visits to the clinic or hospital where the child was born, and examination of the files on the child the agency has on hand. Sometime these explorations can unearth surprises - the existence, for example, of birth siblings, an extended birth family that is searching for the child it lost, a dramatic birth-family story, or the discovery of a genetic predisposition to a particular disease. So every family embarking on one of these journeys does so with a certain combination of high excitement and jangled nerves.

Or, in Jocelyn's words a week before we left: "This creeps me out."

During the weeks leading up to our departure, she was fairly bouncing off the walls, yammering constantly at a rate of speech that approached the speed of light, and often breaking into a broad, beatific grin for no apparent reason. Every few days, she asked me to get out her airline ticket so she could look at it (and, truth be told, make sure I hadn't misplaced it). And on the appointed day, she was the first one at the door with her bags packed, waiting for our cab to arrive, standing there twitching like a poodle.

Even in an airport as chaotic and crowded as Sea-Tac, it was easy to spot the rest of our group, made up as it was of families that looked just like ours. All these Caucasian parents with Korean kids were clustered opposite the Asiana Airlines counter, standing around swapping adoption stories while Tim Holm got our baggage checked and our tickets processed. We talked with Mike and Susan Jorden, from Vancouver, B.C., who told us about getting a telephone call at 6 a.m. one day, announcing that they had been assigned a baby - and, by the way, she's arriving at Sea-Tac in three hours. We met 19-year-old Sue Anne Guild, who was adopted at age 4 and was going back to Korea for the second time, this time without her parents. We chatted with Elaine Strang, who had spent her evenings during the three months between the time she received a picture of her baby-to-be-named Julia and the baby's arrival dancing with the picture to the song "Somewhere Out There."

Adoption stories are inherently moving, and often dramatic. Yet you gradually forget over the years how intensely emotional your own adoption experience was. You just go about the business of building and maintaining your family and never really think much about the adoption itself anymore. But now, reliving our adoption of Jocelyn with these families who all had adopted at more or less the same time we had, it occurred to me that all of us were entering the same phase in the natural life of an adoption: that time when you feel compelled to revisit the experience, and learn what that incredible blessed event was like for the baby and for the mothers and families - and country - forced by unimaginable misfortune to relinquish their marvelous children to us. It's not only that you want to learn more about your child's roots; you also want to find out how her engenderers and first caretakers are, and to let them know how well their child has thrived in your care.

So off we went, through the 14-hour gauntlet of trans-Pacific flight, International Dateline crossing, the formality that is Korean customs, and the bus ride into Seoul, to be deposited in our hotel, according to the clock, 30 hours after we had boarded our plane.

KOREA IS EMERGING enthusiastically into an era of unprecedented economic expansion and modernity. Seoul is like a cleaner, more optimistic Manhattan, adorned with a far cooler alphabet. It is positively packed with people - half of South Korea's 43 million citizens live in Seoul and its surrounding area -and the flow of people through the streets and subways, while surprisingly orderly, is overwhelming. Broad streets intersect with narrow, labyrinthine alleys that lead to mazes of tiny apartments. Old buildings are being torn down and new ones built at such a frantic pace that you feel the city must be replacing itself entirely every two years or so.

We were to spend two days there, then four days in Kyong-ju, a 5,000-year-old city to the south that sits in the middle of Korea's agricultural belt, then three days on Cheju Island, Korea's Hawaii, then four more days in Seoul.

I wondered once we were there if suddenly being plunked down in Korea would awaken some long-dormant Korean soul in Jocelyn. I imagined her finding the language somehow familiar, as if it spoke to some Korean inner ear in her subconscious, and I pictured her taking to the food with tremendous enthusiasm.

Then we went to a Korean restaurant.

Korean food comes in three varieties: hot, really hot, and nuclear. It consists mostly of rice served in a bowl that is surrounded by 10 or 12 little bowls containing kimchi - cabbage pickled in garlic and red peppers - and lots and lots of green and red peppers, garlic, exotic dried and cooked and raw seafoods, and various seaweeds. You pick and choose things to eat with your rice from among the side dishes. A typical Korean morsel at these meals is a raw octopus tentacle wrapped around a green chili and smeared with hot red-pepper paste.

Jocelyn was not amused - in this, she proved to be the most determinedly American of all of us - and she almost immediately began begging to be taken to the Burger King near one of our hotels. It was to become, for her, a haven - the one place in Korea where she wasn't afraid to eat - and she took most of her other meals from the "Western menu" in our hotel restaurants.

I regard this as proof positive of the primacy of nurture over nature.

AS OUR GROUP of 16 families made its way through our two weeks in Korea (looking almost constantly for faces that looked like our children's), a theme, of sorts, emerged: The more emotional and sentimental the parents grew, the less moved the children seemed to be. To judge from their outward demeanors, the kids were on a lark, their parents on a crusade. On our bus, the kids would sit in the back listening to music and chattering while the parents would be staring lugubriously out the window, memorizing the environment that had yielded their children.

We were driving, at one point, through the outskirts of Taegu, birthplace of Jocelyn and three other kids in our group, and I was lost in trying to imagine the lives and struggles of the people there when I heard a boy's voice from the back of the bus say brightly, "I'm really into Wu-Tang . . . hey - there's the bridge I was abandoned under . . . I'm really into Wu-Tang because . . .." I heard a dad trying futilely to sell his daughter, who wanted to stay in Kyong-ju and spend a day shopping, on the worth of a day trip to the city of her birth: "After all, we came here to see your birthplace . . .." On several evenings, our families gathered in the hotel bar in Kyong-ju to take in a lounge act - two Asian singers singing American country and pop standards in English - and on one of those nights the kids were all clustered around the stage, horsing around, while the parents sat at tables talking among themselves. Thirteen-year-old Julia Strang went up to the singers, requested a song, and rejoined the kids' party. No sooner did "Somewhere Out There" begin than her parents, Elaine and Bryce, and all the parents around them burst into tears as Julia resumed cavorting with her coevals. Sue Anne Guild got the news one day that birth relatives had been looking for her. She learned that she had a brother who had been adopted by a Korean family; that her birth father had died when she was 4 and her mother had been unable to support her children; that she had been the favorite niece of her uncle on her father's side; that he and three of her aunts were desperately hoping to meet her - and that she was 21, not 19.

Rattled, I asked her how she was handling all this. "I can't believe I'm 21," she said.

It seemed that the Koreans we encountered often were as emotional as we adoptive parents were. Many of us were approached by Koreans asking us to tell the stories of our families, and explain why we had come to Korea. The story of Korean adoption is widely known - and widely debated - in Korea, largely viewed there as a national tragedy, part of the misfortune that unfolded after the nation's division in 1953. Those in Korea who believe that a stable, loving home, no matter where it is, is the most important thing you can give a child view Korean adoption as enlightened social policy; others in Korea view it as a shameful loss, akin to the forced separation of families in the wake of the Korean War. We were walking through an open-air market in Cheju City one afternoon when a woman with a little shoe stall looked at us, then turned to my wife, Anne, and asked, pointing at Jocelyn, "Daughter?" When my wife nodded, the woman ran over to Jocelyn, hugged her, and said in English, "Welcome back!"

By coincidence, we had arrived in Korea two days before 100 people from South Korea, and 100 from North Korea, were allowed to fly over the Demilitarized Zone and meet with family members from whom they had been separated since 1953, the year the Korean War ended and the border between the two halves of Korea was irrevocably sealed. Now, amid signs that reunification of Korea might actually be possible, this carefully controlled series of family reunions was about to take place. And the country was transfixed.

For the next three days, Korean television broadcast reunion footage around the clock. It reminded me of the United States in the wake of the Kennedy assassination - every television everywhere was tuned into the reunion. We stopped at a rest stop on a highway and walked into a restaurant where everyone in the place was clustered around a TV mounted on a chair in one corner. Little stalls in open-air markets had televisions hooked up in them, turned on all day long. It was a powerful context in which to be staging our reunions with Jocelyn's roots; we felt as if we were part of the same national story. And indeed, we were to find out later, we were: Calls to our adoption agency from birth parents seeking information on the children they had relinquished over the years increased by several hundredfold during the reunion days.

IT WAS WITH considerably higher than expected emotion, then, that we boarded a bus one day for Taegu to meet a social worker from Holt Children's Services, the agency that had arranged Huh Ok-Kyung's adoption. Our guide was scheduled to take us to the clinic where Jocelyn had been born. She met us at the Taegu bus station, introduced herself as "Mrs. Kim," loaded us into a waiting taxi van, and took us on a long drive through the city that culminated in a district called Bong Buk Dong. It is a broad, busy street lined with little shops and sidewalk vendors, with a cavelike labyrinth of an open-air market.

Mrs. Kim led us into a narrow alley and past a tiny restaurant, a tailor's, a beauty parlor, a dry cleaners and some other little shops, and brought us to a halt outside a tiny temple with a little metal gate. Here, she said, is the site of what had been a small obstetrics/gynecology clinic in 1986. It was here that little Huh Ok-Kyung had been brought into the world. I stared at the gate, then looked up and down the alley, videotaping, photographing, memorizing the sights, and trying to conjure the sounds of the clinic 13 years ago, when the noises of traffic and marketing and bustling had been suddenly punctuated by our new baby's louder-than-life cry. I stood there stupidly, almost numb, not sure what it was I was feeling. Then I turned and looked at Jocelyn; she was blushing deeply and sporting a massive, hilariously outsized grin. It's the look she gets only when she is tremendously moved: a smile so much bigger than her face that it looks like something she's trying to hide behind.

She wasn't one to shed tears, though. We went from Bong Buk Dong to Holt's Taegu office, and met with the staff there in a little room with a little crib and a tiny scale and ruler for weighing and measuring newborn babies. One of the staff mentioned that this was the room new babies first come to for entry into Holt's records before being sent on to the main office in Seoul, where they are placed in a foster home until their adoption is processed. "Did Jocelyn lie in that little crib?" my wife asked. "Yes, she did," came the answer. "Come on, Mom!" Jocelyn said indulgently. "You don't have to cry about that."

Two days later, back in Seoul, I fell prey to one of those frequent moments of high emotion I kept having there, finding myself looking at Jocelyn, asking, "What if?" and trying to picture her as a Korean Korean. I was regarding her one evening, packed in with all these other Korean faces in the subway car we were riding, struck by how remarkably different she looked from them - her skin was far darker, pallor being de rigeur in Seoul, and her eyes were immeasurably more mischievous - and I asked her, "What's the coolest thing you've found in Korea so far?"

"The Burger King!"

BY THE TIME the day came for us to visit Holt's Seoul office and view Jocelyn's files, we all started coming down with the jitters. Not only had Sue Anne Guild found her birth family, but another in our group had learned of two birth siblings living in Korea. Sue Anne had called her mother and asked her to fly over in time to meet her birth relatives, and the reunion had been intense, to say the least. We were starting to wonder if all of us were in for similar shockers.

So we set off for the Holt office in something of a state - exacerbated along the way when our bus executed an abrupt U-turn in the middle of traffic. (Korean drivers can be adventurous improvisers.) We walked into Holt's offices and were ushered into a little room where we looked through Jocelyn's files, which turned out to contain nothing we hadn't already known. We added an album of pictures of Jocelyn and a letter for the birth mother to the file, in the hopes that someday she would be able to learn what had happened to her daughter, and might be reassured at finding what a happy and healthy girl she had grown up to be.

Then it came time to meet Jocelyn's foster mother, Shin Hae Soon, who had cared for her in her home for the first three months of Jocelyn's life. Huh Ok-Kyung had arrived in Seattle a clearly healthy and well-loved baby, and we had been anxious to meet Hae Soon ever since we first laid eyes on our new little girl. When she walked into the room, Hae Soon proved to be a tiny, shy woman who was clearly excited and moved at the prospect of seeing our Jocelyn. We noticed that she was carrying baby pictures that we had sent 11 years ago, and that she had kept them in pristine condition, like treasured relics. She came in and sat down, hugged Jocelyn, and began babbling and stroking and studying her hand as if it were the most amazing thing she had ever seen. Jocelyn had weighed only 5 pounds at birth, and now towered over her foster mother.

As she sat there fondling Jocelyn's hand and wiping away tears, we were told that only 2 percent of Korean adoptees ever return to Korea, and only 1 percent of them while still children. And Hae Soon told us that Jocelyn was only the second to return among the scores of babies she had nurtured over 17 years. And when we gave her a photo album of Jocelyn's life, she hugged it as if it were Jocelyn herself.

Note to American adoptive parents of Korean children: Write to your foster mothers!

We were to spend the afternoon with Hae Soon, first at the Holt offices, then during lunch at a nearby restaurant, then visiting her and her family in her home, where Jocelyn had spent her first three months. Jocelyn and Hae Soon kept looking at one another and smiling fondly as if they'd spent the better part of Jocelyn's life pining away for one another.

The day proved to be an amazing, moving climax not only to our trip but to the journey we all had commenced the day Jocelyn was delivered to our home.

BACK HOME a few days later, I found myself wondering what would stand out enough in Jocelyn's memory to bear recounting to her friends. So I eavesdropped as discreetly as possible whenever she was on the phone or had friends over to our house. And one day I heard her saying to her friend Leah, talking about Bong Buk Dong, "We walked through this market, and they had all these, like, lungs hanging there. And then we saw all these pig's heads lined up on this table . . .." It reminded me of her friend and fellow adoptee Alex, who had gone on the same tour the year before and come back talking about nothing but how horrible the toilets in Korea were.

But watching video of the trip that evening, we viewed again the face of the foster mom, Jocelyn's mother and sisters in tears, and Jocelyn with that massive double-decker grin. I looked over at her, covertly watching her watch the tape, and saw that same grin again. And I saw it then not only as an appropriately grandiose expression of her emotions about the trip and its revelations, but as a symbol as well: She is an American adolescent, rife with outsized emotions that she won't be able to articulate until she grows into them. Her heart and soul, like that great grand grin, are simply too big, at the moment, for the rest of her.

Fred Moody, the author of books on the Seattle Seahawks, Microsoft and virtual reality, wrote about his daughter's adoption in a story in Pacific Northwest magazine in February 1988. Benjamin Benschneider is staff photographer for the magazine.