The last memory Han Tae-soon has of her daughter as a child is in May 1975, at their home in Seoul.
“I was going to the market and asked Kyung-ha, ‘Aren’t you coming?’ But she told me, ‘No, I’m going to play with my friends’,” recalled Ms Han.
“When I came back, she was gone.”
Ms Han would not see her daughter again for more than four decades. When they reunited, Kyung-ha was almost unrecognisable as a middle-aged American woman named Laurie Bender.
Kyung-ha had been kidnapped near her home, brought to an orphanage, then sent illegally to the US to be raised by another family, alleges Ms Han, who is now suing the South Korean government for failing to prevent her daughter’s adoption.
She is among the hundreds of people who have come forward in recent years with damning allegations of fraud, illegal adoptions, kidnapping and human trafficking in South Korea’s controversial overseas adoption programme.
No other country has sent as many children abroad for adoption, and for so long, as South Korea. Since the programme began in the 1950s, about 170,000 to 200,000 children have been adopted overseas – most of them in the West.A breakthrough finally happened in 2019 when Ms Han signed up with 325 Kamra, a group that connects overseas Korean adoptees with their birth parents by matching their DNA.