He knows he was adopted. The rest is a mystery

SOUTH KOREA'S ADOPTION SHAME

- KELLY KASULIS CHO

FOR most of his life, Aaron Grzegorczyk believed that his birth name was Cho Yong-kee. He believed he was born on April 28, 1988, in a clinic in Anyang, South Korea, about 18km south of Seoul. He was told that his mother, a 19-year-old unwed woman, had abandoned him a day after giving birth to him. In an initial physical exam, he was recorded as “cute and alert”.

Less than five months later, he arrived into the arms of his adoptive Polish-American parents in Bay City, Michigan. He was their first child, sensitive and artistic and his birth mother had surrendered him so that he could have, as his adoption papers put it, “an optimum future”.

Grzegorczyk never questioned this story until this past March. That’s when his friend sent him an article detailing the South Korean government's admission to five decades of adoption fraud.

“I was reading it and I was just like, jaw open,” Grzegorczyk said. “I had absolutely no idea about any of this.”

Immediately, he started digging into his past.

Adoption ‘industry’

Earlier this year, a South Korean government-appointed, independent investigative commission released a damning report that for the first time admitted the country had allowed human rights abuses to occur in what it criticised as a decades-long “profit-driven” adoption “industry”.

An examination of dozens of cases between 1964 and 1999 found that some children were taken without their biological parents’ consent, while others were given false birth names and fake background stories before being sent abroad for steep adoption fees. Some were sent without legally valid documents or with little to no screening of the adoptive family, and agencies often scurried to fulfill orders or quotas in what the report called the “mass exportation of children to meet demand”.