He held out an envelope. He patted Janine’s shoulder and began speaking rapidly in Korean. Up close, she could see deep wrinkles around his eyes, and his gaze looked sorrowful. Before she could react, he pressed the envelope into her hands. All she could understand was “Thank you,” but it seemed like he wanted her to deliver it to someone from Holt.

Inside the envelope was a letter written in broken English, the handwriting pressed hard into the paper:

I want to learn English! Because I want to talk with my son.
My son was adopted to America from Seoul in 2003.
I have waited a long time to meet my son.
Please help me.
2004.08.

A parent looking for their child?

Janine turned the thought over in her mind. In that dark alley, standing before a father wandering and searching, everything she had believed all her life began to crumble. American adoption agencies had taught them that Korean parents abandoned their children.

Janine and her twin sister, Jenette, had grown up believing they were ‘abandoned orphans.’

That belief was so deep-rooted that they had never even tried to search for their biological family. Something similar happened at the event. A mother appeared, saying she was looking for her lost daughter. Among the 400 adoptees gathered from 15 different countries, gasps of shock rippled through the room. She said her daughter had a birthmark on her shoulder, and everyone began pulling down their collars, glancing at each other’s shoulders. When she added that her daughter had been born in 1982, the crowd buzzed even louder. But after a few tense minutes, no one stepped forward.

The mother left the event in disappointment.

Parents in Korea were searching for their children. Some even claimed they had never consented to the adoption. Whispers began to spread among the adoptees:

“Was our adoption also done without our parents’ consent?”

Kyung-sook, who grew up in Norway, began to have doubts much earlier. She was “Number 6076” from Holt. Her adoption papers, which she always kept with her, stated that she had a biological father — yet they also included an “orphan registration.”

The adoption story was fabricated. Kyung-sook needed to uncover the truth.

As soon as she turned eighteen, Kyung-sook contacted Holt. To her disbelief, she found her family almost immediately — far too easily to make sense. At the time, in 1986, Holt explained that one of their staff members had “happened to find” her family while searching the streets.

It was an unbelievable story.

It wasn’t until 2017 that a Holt social worker, during Kyung-sook’s first visit to Korea in years, casually let slip that Holt had her family’s contact information from the very beginning. Why had they torn the family apart in the first place?

She could never forget the moment in 1986 when she met her older sister and relatives, and they embraced each other, crying. Just as she finally felt she had come home, she learned that the father she had longed for had already passed away. After losing his wife to illness, her father had temporarily placed his children in foster care and an orphanage.

He soon brought the others back — but the youngest, Kyung-sook, was never found.

Until his death, her father had desperately searched through orphanages across Korea, chasing false leads and hitting dead ends. No one in the family had known that one-year-old Kyung-sook had been sent to Norway by Holt.

Her sister told her their father’s dying wish: Find Kyung-sook.

It was a kind of love she had never even known existed. The burial site of her parents, in Anseong, Gyeonggi Province, became the closest place she could ever be to them. She might have lived as the beloved daughter of an ordinary farming family in the Korean countryside — but instead, she was sold to a place that was nothing short of hell.

Kyung-sook wasn’t the only child who disappeared without her parents’ knowledge.

The problems within the adoption system went far beyond simply taking children away.
Even after sending them overseas, the agencies failed to take responsibility for their existence.

There had already been warning signs that something was wrong with international adoptions — even for the twins.

They didn’t discover that they were stateless until age twenty-five, after their adoptive mother died.
In a box she left behind, they found their baby photos and a document that should have granted them permanent residency — but instead, it was stamped with the word “Alien. For twenty-five years, the twins had lived without citizenship.

They grew up in America, but they weren’t American. They were born in Korea, but they weren’t Korean either.

Although their adoptions had been approved by both courts and government agencies, more than half of the 200,000 children sent to the United States through international adoption were not automatically granted U.S. citizenship until after the year 2000.

Under the neglect and bureaucratic convenience of both countries, many children’s nationalities simply vanished.

The National Council for Adoption in the U.S. still estimates that between 15,000 and 18,000 adoptees continue to live in America without citizenship.

During all those years, Kyung-sook and Janine did not yet know each other — but both kept writing. Janine used writing to release what she had always bottled up inside, while Kyung-sook began writing because she had nowhere else to unload her pain. They both needed to create their own narratives — to define what adoption had truly meant in their lives.

The global myth of adoption — the one the world believed — didn’t match their reality.

Though born in the same country and scattered across continents without knowing each other’s faces, they shared the same realization:

“Adoption may unite one family, but it destroys another.”

That was the truth about adoption, they both came to face. Their friendship began thirteen years ago when Kyung-sook joined an online forum for international adoptees founded by the twins, Janine and Jenette. The twins encouraged Kyung-sook and other adoptees they met through the forum to rewrite the story of adoption together.

The story Kyung-sook shared confirmed what the twins had long suspected — the illegal practices within the adoption industry. Her father, who searched every corner of the country for his missing daughter until his final days, mirrored the father Janine had seen wandering the alleys searching for his lost son.

Janine’s writing evolved into books, such as “Adoption: What You Should Know,” and from there, into activism and solidarity. When the adoptees’ stories were woven together into a single book, their voices became stronger.
The collaboration flowed easily, built on mutual trust and shared pain.

Each person’s suffering became a pillar of the book — a structure that held their experiences together so that no one’s pain would feel isolated.

They began calling themselves the Seoul Sisters.

They were born in the same country, shared the same critical view of the adoption industry, and fought side by side to end it for the next generation. Part of their mission was also to dismantle the myth of Harry Holt — the man adoptees had been taught to revere. As they connected with more people and pieced their stories together, the larger picture began to emerge.

At first, the loudest voices came from adoptees like themselves — people who shared their position.
But now, the voices of the parents who had lost their children to adoption are being heard as well.
One mother’s words have stayed with them:

“We are getting old. We fear we’ll die without the crimes committed against us ever being acknowledged. What this industry fears most is that people will finally hear our voices. We don’t want this to happen again to the next generation.”

To Jenette, who has become an activist, certain adoptions are indistinguishable from human trafficking — the transfer of children from poor nations to wealthy ones. Something similar happened after the 2010 Haiti earthquake: Instead of helping vulnerable parents care for their children, adoption agencies encouraged them to give their children up and send them to the West.

It was no different from child deportation — or family destruction.

The essence of South Korea’s seventy-year-long adoption industry lies within this same vast context.