In this series, we meet adoptees from around the world who have returned to live in Korea. We want to discover how adoption has shaped their life and what their experience in Korea has been like.
Lee Koo-hong’s story began in 1985 when he was found on train 115 in Busan station. He knew his name and that he was 3 years old, but nothing else. One year later, he was sent on a transcontinental flight to France. His journey ended in Brittany, France, where his new guardians, Patrick and Marielle Duret, christened him Guillaume. “My parents couldn’t naturally have kids,” he explains, identifying a common reason behind many adoption stories. Even still, they wanted to have a family. “I don’t know if it was trendy or the only way at the time, but they chose Korea.”
With no memories of Korea, Guillaume found it easy to adjust to life in France. “I felt French, except when I saw myself in the mirror,” he muses, thinking back on his childhood. He compared this early life to a small river, gently carrying him along.
His initial disregard for his heritage was not by design. Guillaume has fond memories of his father, a professional chef, cooking a myriad of Korean recipes at home. Perhaps this was done as much to combat his disinterest in Korea as it was to ease his brother’s integration. Adopted at 7 years old, his brother Manuel had strong memories of Korea. Once in France, Manuel struggled with the cultural differences and language barrier. In addition to Korean cuisine, his parents tried to expose their boys to Korean culture through books and the latest editions of a newspaper made by the French Korean adoptee organization, Racines coréennes. “Obviously, they can’t hide it or lie [about adoption]. They were always fair with me. They shared all the information they had.”
This fairness with their sons seems to have done the trick. Manuel is now a manager in a company in Northern France, a place he comfortably and happily calls home. Eight time zones away, Guillaume is thriving in his position as Secretary General of the cultural arm of the French Embassy, the Institut français de Corée de Sud. It took time, though. When asked about his parents’ persistent efforts to share his heritage with him, “I will not say I rejected it, but I was just not interested.”
It was 27 years before he felt the call of his homeland, and even then, it was little more than a whisper. “When you are no longer 20, you begin to feel the concept of time passing… And the more you become conscious about your life, the more you want to know about your roots.” He reiterates that, at least initially, there was not a strong emotional magnetism to Korea. “I had the opportunity to quit my job and still have payment for 2 years,” he says, explaining a major reason he was motivated to come here.
And so it was, in September of 2011, that Guillaume and Manuel boarded a plane to Korea for the first time since they left for their new life in France. “The plan was not to settle down here forever, it was just to discover [the country] on vacation,” he laughs. There was certainly no indication at the time that he was even interested in staying long-term. “I didn’t even know how to say ‘bonjour’ in Korean,” reminiscing about how he had to ask the flight attendant how to greet people in Korean. For a whirlwind of a month, Guillaume and Manuel established a basecamp at a guesthouse in Sinchon, getting to know returned adoptees and (trying to) meet Korean girls, as well as attempting to delve deeper into what it meant to be Korean.
While one month was enough for Manuel, this small taste of adoptee expat life ignited something in Guillaume, and he extended his stay. “When you look at Korea from the outside, it seems easy; going to barbecue, going clubbing, sightseeing… But I became more curious about the society, the culture.” He enrolled in the Korean language program at Sogang University and studied up to level 3 (out of 6). He continued to make friends and explore the city. One night he found himself in Itaewon with a group of friends. At another table, a Korean woman caught his eye. “We ended up sitting next to each other and started a discussion. Day after day, we messaged with Kakao Talk and would meet again.”
After he finished his third semester at Sogang, he suddenly found himself with no job, shrinking savings, and a new reason to stay. “I got lucky” is his standard response when asked how he landed his job. “I just found a posting on the website of the French Chamber of Commerce. There was this little announcement that they were trying to find a secretary general [for the Culture Institute].” What made him qualified? “Actually nothing,” he says with a laugh. Nonetheless, he applied. In his interview, he explained that with his master’s degree in industrial process engineering, he had extensive experience solving problems, and from his role at a pharmaceutical production company back in France, he also knew how to manage a budget.
What he believes sealed it, though, was when he explained how he can operate comfortably in new situations. The proof, he said, was his unplanned long-term relocation to Korea. He put in the effort to learn Korean and adjust to the society and culture. With this, he was appointed Secretary General of the French Culture Institute. As the right hand to the director of the diplomatic extension, he found himself in charge of human resources, hiring, and budgeting.
With a job settled, Guillaume began to build a life in earnest. He continued to date Eunmi, though they had moved on from nights out in Itaewon, now taking trips all around Korea, hiking mountains, going fishing, dating like a regular Korean couple. Almost. “Even though she speaks English [and was] an English teacher, there were cultural problems.”
He discusses how he had difficulty with the expectations in a Korean relationship. “In France when you date someone, you are also able to have your own boundary and private [life]. In Korea, that is not possible. When you date, you have to be one hundred percent dedicated to your [partner].” The biggest shock to his system, he says, was that in Korea, “Men have to pay for everything!” That wasn’t enough to stop him, though, and they began to think about a future together.
Guillaume talks about how difficult it was when they began to consider getting married. He mentions that in most western countries, it’s quite common for people in a serious relationship to live together, “but [with Eunmi] we had trouble at the beginning because for Koreans, it’s not in their culture that you can live together before marriage.” He says she was initially worried about what her family and friends might think.
Not that they didn’t like her dating Guillaume. “They were very good with me. They accepted me but they were very curious. My wife told me 3 or 4 months later, ‘you know, if you were 100% foreigner, they would have acted differently.’ Because my face and blood are Korean, it made things easier.” Their curiosity, he elaborates, stems from the discomfort many Koreans feel when the subject of adoption comes up. “They feel sorry for me but don’t want to tell me. I told them, ‘I had a very good life in France so I have no anger or anything; I can speak freely about this,’ but my wife told me they [still] feel uncomfortable.” Now, Guillaume says, he isn’t even comfortable spending a month away from Korea, so he understands their pity and even guilt about sending children away to grow up in foreign countries.
It did take him a while, however, for him to understand how serious the subject of adoption is, both for Koreans and adoptees. Shortly after he came to Korea, he went to Holt to review his file. “It was empty,” he says nonchalantly. Sometime later, Eunmi told him about a TV show that featured adoptees, helping them spread their stories to more Koreans than ever before. This was meant to be an emotional program, so much so that they even hired an “audience” to cry off camera, hoping to evoke emotion from the participants. For most participants, it was genuinely emotional, but for Guillaume? “I was smiling the whole time because they wanted it to be dramatic, but for me, I was clear in my [introduction] that I’m okay with my life. I’m just here to do a search and erase the question mark in my life.”
The timing of his wedding a couple of years after that experience coincided with a change in his mind and heart as he began to consider Seoul as his hometown. “For the first 2 to 3 years, I felt like France was my home and it was a bit hard to say goodbye and come back to Korea [after vacation] but then, step by step, it changed. I don’t feel like France is my home anymore. When I come back here to Incheon airport, I feel safe.” Of course, he concurs, that in many ways it’s just a matter of time, but he also believes that adoptees change.
“At first when you arrive in Korea it’s a culture shock and you say, ‘Oh, they’re [messed] up,’ but the more you stay here, the more you get [messed] up and the more you like it.” The turning point was on one of his visits back to France. “I was blind to it, the safety of life. Here, it’s so convenient and so safe,” echoing a common cliché about Korea. His evidence: “in France when you take the subway, you have to take care of your bag,” he says while he simulates hugging a backpack tightly. Thus far, he’s never felt similar danger in Seoul.
That’s not to say he isn’t without complaint. “Koreans are too [about] the rules… They are very square.” One morning a year and a half after he first arrived, he recalls, he was running late. He ran to the bus stop, where he found his bus had pulled away from the bus stop but had only moved one meter forward before a red light halted its journey. “I knocked on the door and the [bus driver] didn’t even look at me, he just…” Guillaume reenacts the dismissive wave of the driver. “I still had a foot on the bus stop and I [called out] more and more, getting louder,” but to no avail. In frustration, he kicked the door of the bus strongly enough to damage it. “This made him open the door,” Guillaume quips, finding humor in the situation now. After a failed attempt to run away, he was hauled off to the police station. It ended up being simple enough to remedy (paying the bus driver enough to have the door fixed), and, he remembers, “the policemen, they were laughing about this. They told the driver, ‘[you should have] just let him in.’” This was the only time, he says, he really hated Korean society and culture.
Luckily, he’s been (relatively) incident-free since then. Luckily for him, for his wife, and now for his daughter Lucie, who turned four this year. Inching closer to 40, he’s settling into the next chapter of his life in Korea. He does the usual Korean things; barbecue and soju, chicken and beer, and football with his friends (sometimes). He takes family vacations and loves spending time with his daughter. “It’s just life,” he says.
He says that now, as a father, he could never imagine abandoning his own child, no matter the circumstances. “It seems unhuman” to do so, he states, but, “what is done is done, [it is up to us to] move on and build with a different culture and tools” that give adoptees a unique cultural perspective in our motherland.
When asked if adoption played a supporting role in his story in Korea, he says emphatically, “No! There is no [positive] to being adopted here. It’s about how you fit yourself into society, because [Korea] will never adopt you back.”
He highlights the fact that he has never had a male Korean friend. “They live in a kind of brotherhood of military service for 2 years, which gives them a club that we will never [enter] because we didn’t participate in building this country.”
To explain why he was totally disengaged from the adoptee community for years, he declares, “Before, [I made it] a point not to hang out with adoptees. I met some and it was not a happy experience. They were always angry… I just wanted to enjoy [being here].”
He feels there’s a kind of natural selection in Korea; adoptees that really want to stay here find a way. He describes the story of a fellow adoptee from Europe, for whom the dime-a-dozen English teaching jobs (and the relatively comfortable income they offer) is unobtainable. “Even though he says money is a big struggle because of his low-level job, he is not grumpy. For me, these kinds of people deserve respect because they assume what they do. If they want to stay in Korea, okay, they find a way to stay here.”
A couple of years ago, he slowly returned to the adoptee community when he joined the adoptee football club and took charge of the finances. He admits that the community fills a void. “With being adopted, there are a lot of stories and [it takes] understanding, so when we speak about adoption, we understand; we don’t need to explain.”
That question mark about his adoption he mentioned on the TV show? It’s still there, but he’s okay with it. When it comes to his French parents, “I consider them my parents… They feel pain [because I live so far] but they are happy for me.” Even if he found his biological parents, “it’s not going to be a game changer… Even if we have a good connection, I will never feel the same [way about them] as I do for my parents in France.” He smiles brightly as he plays the movie of his childhood in his head. “For me, adoption was not a pain in the ass. It was just the story of my life.”
It’s a story that isn’t over yet.
