On a summer's day
in 1985 a seven-year-old boy sat alone at a crowded bus station in Seoul,
sobbing as he waited desperately for his mother to return. Jo Youn-hwan was
wearing a baseball uniform that his mother had bought him a few days before-the
only gift she had ever given him. She told him to wait for her before leaving
him at the terminal. So he did, increasingly terrified as day turned to dusk.
"I'll be a really good kid if only she chooses to return," he
promised himself, over and over again. "I'll be a really, really good
kid."

She never did. Jo
was taken into South Korea's orphanage system, but even though the country was
for decades one of the world's biggest exporters of children, he was already
too old for most adoptive parents' preferences. Never chosen by a new family,
he spent the rest of his childhood in what he describes as a vicious and
rigidly hierarchical institution, before "aging out" at 20. Children
died of curable illnesses and older ones abused younger ones on a daily basis,
he said.  "When a new kid arrived
and cried because he was scared, the ritual was to cover his body with a
blanket and beat him with a bat until he stopped," he told AFP. Rooms and
clothes were filthy, the food often rotten and inedible.

For years, he
wondered what would have happened if he had been adopted.  "My life wouldn't have been so full of
'han'," he said-a Korean word describing unresolved sadness and
resentment. But many of those who were picked ask themselves similar questions.

Better life?

International
adoption from South Korea began after the Korean War as a way to remove
mixed-race children, born to local mothers and American GI fathers, from a
country that emphasized ethnic homogeneity. 
More recently the main driver has been babies born to unmarried women,
who still face ostracism in a patriarchal society, and according to historians,
are often forced to give up their children. Most children remain
institutionalized till adulthood as many South Koreans are reluctant to adopt.
The country has sent some 180,000 children overseas over the years, mostly to
the US.

"This logic
of rescue remained strong in the minds of Americans and Koreans alike: rich
Americans could give a Korean child a better life than they could ever have in
Korea with poor parents or a single mother," said Arissa Oh, who
researches race, family and migration at Boston College in the US. Among
children placed in orphanages, the youngest, "most attractive and healthiest"
were selected for overseas adoption, Oh told AFP.

The idea of
rescue "erased the consumerism" of international adoption, providing
justification for taking children from their country of birth, she added. For
many adoptees, that narrative has often led to a sense of alienation in their
new lives. "My whole life I have been told-by adopters, colleagues and at
school-I should be grateful, and had I not been adopted I would've had to live
in the streets as a prostitute," Hanna Johansson, a Korean adoptee in
Sweden, explained.

'That could've
been me'

Born in Seoul in
1960, Korean-American filmmaker Glenn Morey was abandoned as a newborn, and
adopted at six months by a white American couple. Growing up in Denver,
Colorado, he was the only non-white student at any of his schools and struggled
to fit in. "Being Asian made me different, and it made me the subject of
name-calling, bullying, and social exclusion," he said. "When you are
experiencing difficulties growing up on an everyday basis, ... you begin to
wonder what things would've been like in Korea where you would've looked at
least like everyone else."

A part of his
latest project, Side by Side, is an attempt to answer that question,
interviewing 12 Koreans who "aged out". Two of them were in the same
orphanage where he stayed before being sent to the US. Both disabled, they told
him of life on the streets, without a steady job, their next meal always in
question and regularly encountering violence. 
One told him: "I just want to have a normal life." "Every
time we played it just ripped my heart," said Morey, who hasn't been able
to track down his birth parents. "By the same token that could've been me,
and those struggles could've been mine."

'Why did she
lie?'

Abandoned
children can face lifelong stigma in the South where known family lineage is
important. They face discrimination when applying for jobs and in
relationships, Jo said, some keeping their years in orphanages a secret from
in-laws, spouses and employers. Jo's case is, by his own admission, unusual. He
did well academically and his orphanage director offered to pay for his
university tuition.

He is now a taxi
driver, married with children of his own, and has set up the South's first-ever
rights group for aged-out Koreans. A survey found that 93 percent of members
were either convicted criminals, had been homeless or worked in illicit
industries. "This is our reality," he said.  Last year he finally found his mother, but it
didn't bring him resolution.

He was told that
his father was an abusive gambling addict, and his mother sought to escape by
marrying another man, deciding that to do so she needed to hide her past. Jo
said: "Why didn't she at least let me live with my father or grandmother?
Why did she lie and tell my father I was dead?" "I'm still struggling
to digest this. It's been very, very hard."-AFP