Identity crisis

Decades after becoming an Italian-American Korean, I learn the truth and wonder: Why was I abandoned on the street, a note pinned to my shirt, at the age of 3?

By Theresa Pinto Sherer

Nov. 29, 2001 | Memory is so indelibly bound up in words, the symbols that stand for the objects that make up remembrance. Twenty-five years ago, I spoke a different language in a different country and lived a different life. Yet I have no memory of it. I was just 3 and by the time I was 4, I had been adopted by an Italian-American family living in South Florida, I spoke flawless English and I had neatly forgotten my past. I began rebuilding my identity from scratch.

Twenty-two years later, my mother revealed to me that just before I was adopted, I had been found on the streets, wandering alone with a note pinned to my shirt that read, "Kim, Won-Hee. August 20, 1972." It was handwritten, not in the letters of the English alphabet, but in the calligraphy of Korea, the country where I was born.

Upon hearing this news, the writer in me immediately snatched it up as something to develop and spread around like so much confessional compost. But the little girl in me was scared and a bit sad. Up until the age of 3, I lived with someone -- a guardian? a parent? -- who cared for me. Then, for some reason, I was abandoned.

I could refashion the story to my liking, giving it elements of adventurousness and tragedy, claiming ownership of an exotic past that would never settle into a neat little pile of events and facts. But in reality, my past became an even bigger black box than it had been, for I had always been told that my parents were dead, and now that story was a symbol of mendacity.

One of my adoptive mother's habits is to spring news like this on me, but in a guileless manner, as if she assumed I already knew what she was about to tell me, her mind forgetting that she once colluded to keep certain things a secret. On this occasion, she responded with astonishment when I appeared shocked at her admission. Perhaps as a gesture of consolation, she proceeded to give me a box of official papers, aging documents with seals, stamps and signatures on them. They are all I have to tie me to my Korean past.

All my life I have fought against what I perceive to be normal and conventional, because I have feared that if I did not struggle, my true self, which would undoubtedly be average and nothing special, would begin to show. I was afraid that I would be what novelist Frederick Exley was afraid of being and what drove him to alcoholic insanity -- a fan, someone to sit on the sidelines and cheer for those who take the center stage in life. After my mother told me about my inauspicious beginnings, I clung to the scant details and added them to my ever-changing identity; it was a way of knowing that I, too, had an extraordinary story to tell.

Then I learned, after some journalistic digging, that my situation was not peculiar for the time or place; most children who were orphaned in Korea were orphaned in much the same way I was, since it was essentially illegal to give away children who had existing relatives. The thousands of children who were eventually adopted usually had been left covertly on street corners and in alleyways.

Korean intercountry adoption by Americans and Europeans came into existence because of the Korean war, which also is nothing unusual. In numerous and obvious ways, war makes orphans of many. But Korean adoption was the second and largest wave of intercountry adoption since German and Greek children came after World War II. It was also the most noticeable wave (which I experienced through the racist taunting of my primary school years); the European kids, for apparent reasons, were less conspicuous.

It was almost fashionable to adopt Koreans after the war, much the way adopting young girls from China or children from Eastern Europe is in vogue today, and more than 100,000 kids -- the majority of them female -- are estimated to have made the trek from Korea to the United States or Europe since 1954.

If you visit one of the many Web sites devoted to tracking down and reuniting Korean families with the children they once gave up, you see the emotional damage laid bare. Women who do not remember the exact year they gave birth plead for help in locating their child who may be 26 or 27 and may or may not be living in the Netherlands. Young adults seek out details of their heritage in desperate hope of enlightening themselves about themselves.

Next page: My sister was left to survive on her own, long enough to bow her legs from malnutrition